On Suffering

I have been blessed to see many small miracles happening here as I attend to my elderly aunt and uncle.   They have made me see the tangible presence of God in all that is happening here.  One of these small miracles was receiving an email with the following message:

(Lourdes is a town in France that has a spring said to have healing power.
Many go there to try to find an answer to their suffering.)

Something is happening at  Lourdes.  And God wants to give us the eyes to see it and the ground to receive  it. What are all these crippled and handicapped people telling us? What is the  witness of all these nurses and life-bearers? It seems God wants us to live a  vulnerable life, a life dependent on other people, a life that is unafraid to  cry.

The little ones here are  unable to numb themselves. The numb do not notice. The sophisticated will not  suffer. The comfortable need not complain. But Jesus teaches us, in effect, how  to suffer graciously. He actually increases, it seems, our capacity for  holding sadness and pain. This might be the central message of the eight  Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12).

What kind of God is this?  Could it be a God who actually allows deformities, sickness, and handicaps so  we can all be bound together in a sisterhood of need and a brotherhood of  compassion? I do not know how else to understand it all and we surely see it  acted out right here. That is the primary miracle of Lourdes.

As I am walking this road with my aunt and uncle I am surrounded by the weakest, the most vulnerable.  I am glad for the compassion it is growing in my heart and mind.  I am glad for the bond it is growing in my relationships with others in need.

This is such a hard road...but it is not without blessing.

Bead for Life: Lesson 2

This week’s lesson for Bead for Life was another good one with lots of students joining us for lunch.  We were able to talk about what it is like to live in extreme poverty on about $1 a day, which about one out of four people on the planet live on.  Each of the students was given different amounts of money to spend at booths we had set up for purchases they could make.  Booths represented choices like food, water, health care, heating, education, and luxury items (one of the luxury items was a mattress). 

The majority of the students were very poor and only able to afford the poorest food and water, and maybe health care or education.  Not much.

The middle class students represented people like the ladies in the Bead for Life program, who have worked themselves out of poverty and are able to enjoy a better quality of life.

One of the things I got to emphasize was that often the choices people have to make are very difficult.  Some of the students chose some of the free things like water that had to be carried and was untreated.  We talked about the fact that although this didn’t cost any money, it did cost in other ways, including poor health, time, and energy.  We also talked about how having to take time to carry water or gather firewood kept people in poverty because they didn’t have time to go to school or look for work; they were too busy just trying to survive.

These lessons have been very impactful to my students who continue to have lots of meaningful and thoughtful things to say about what we are learning.

And we continued to talk about KONY 2012 and the controversy surrounding it. 

If you haven’t watched the video yet you might want to check it out here.

If you want to know more about the controversy, check out this here and these resources.

Bead For Life: Lesson 1

We had a very successful week with our Bead For Life lessons.  I taught the lessons to my small group of students, and we strategized together about what our lesson next week should look like.  These lessons have lead to some wonderful discussions with my students, including one student commenting, “Thinking about these people lets me know how good I really have it.  When I’m feeling down about something, my mom is always telling me it could be worse. She’s right.”  They also brought up the Kony 2012 film that came out this week, and that many of them watched.  This was great timing for me.

We had around 140 students join us for lunch to see what we were up to.  In each lunch session, some of my students took the lead to share the information we wanted to get across to the students.  They stepped up and really spoke with confidence. 

We divided the room up into different population areas in the world.  We marked the desks with colors that designated what people group they were a part of.  In each group we had 2 Americans, 3 Europeans, 4 Africans, 3 Latin Americans, and 18-19 Asians. 

Next we talked about poverty in American versus the extreme poverty that exists in Africa.  We talked about the causes of poverty in Uganda, including AIDS and civil war.

To bring it all home I had made a very large chocolate chip cookie for each group.  We divided up the cookie according to how wealth is distributed around the world.  It looked something like this.

We gave each group their share of the cookie and talked about how it was distributed.  Americans got one fourth of the cookie and Europeans got another fourth of the cookie.  Their pieces were huge and only shared by 2 or 3 kids.  The Asians got one third of the cookie but had to divide between a lot of kids.  Obviously, the Africans got the smallest piece and had to share it between 4 kids.

We talked about how it was just chance the way they got their piece of the cookie; just a matter of which seat they happened to sit in.  In the same way, we didn’t have any say about where we would be born.  Each group got to decide how to divide up the piece of the cookie they got.  They could keep it all, save it for later, share it with others…whatever they wanted to do.

It was such a good lesson.  It really made them think.  It made me think. 

I can’t wait for next week.

Blessings!

I am amazed!

I have seen God moving in such awesome ways in my life and the lives of those around me.  They are small things, but I know they are God working in my day-to-day circumstances.

Yesterday I was reading a book about teaching and how to be prepared for your lesson.  My thoughts turned to Camp of the Woods and stories we might teach this summer.  The theme for camp is the Olympics, and I knew that we had used some materials at church many years ago with the Olympics as a theme.  I had looked for these materials at church with no luck, and I even called the company to see if they were still in print but they were not.  Now as I was reading and thinking, I knew I had some books on my bookcase that might have some good ideas in them, so I got up right then to find them.  I pulled the 4 or 5 books that I was interested in off the shelf and when I sorted through them, what should be right in the middle of them, but one of the books about the Olympics I had been hunting.  From there I was able to go online and find 2 more used copies on Amazon.  I had been on this hunt for months, and there the book was, right on my shelf!

Will also went to the doctor yesterday to get his medical clearance for flying renewed.  It went smoothly, and he is good for a year now (Hallelujah!).  The amazing thing was that Daniel Davenport ended up at the same doctor at the same time, and they got to sit and talk about all things flying, and Will got some answers and good advice that he needed to hear.

Then this morning I was searching around on some sights that I like to listen to for devotional, spiritual insights.  I keep hearing people talk about living in community.  Many of the speakers I listen to share how they have opened their home to several people in order to live more like they did in the early church.  It’s such an interesting idea to me, but I thought, “That’s not happening at my house.  I don’t think everyone here is up for that.”  But then I thought,  “I’m going to Camp of the Woods, where I will get to do that all summer!”  One of the things I’ve loved about camp is the communal lifestyle that we enjoy there.  I’m telling you, just thinking about how God has allowed that to happen in my life, when I saw no way for it to happen made me do some shouting this morning. 

This afternoon we got the word from my friend Jane that she is in remission from her stage 4 lung cancer.  Another round of shouting!!

So I bless His name in these good times, these good moments.  Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Bead For Life

My students are once again all fired up about a project we’re working on.  Let me tell you about it.

I decided last year that I wanted to do a project on social activism with my eighth graders this year.  They are such a fun group (not that my other students aren’t), and I knew this would be something they could really run with. 

I wanted our project to be something that would make them take a look at a problem in our world, and then explore some way to solve the problem or make a difference for someone facing this problem.  I gave them some examples of people who had done this, like Blake McCoskie with TOMS ShoesTOMS or Edesia with PlumpyNut.  Another company I highlighted was Bead For Life.  I had received beads in my goodie bag at some of the social studies conferences I had attended, so I downloaded their curriculum in December so that I could make it one of the options for my students.

A couple of weeks ago, Bead For Life sent me an email saying that NBC news wanted to feature their company in a nightly segment they do called “Making a Difference.”  They went on to say that they would like to highlight this program being used in a school that has a low income population.  They wanted to know if we’d be interested in participating.

With that exciting news, the wheels starting turning.  I contacted some key people to get their input, and we started making some plans.  That’s when the connections started to grow.  The company has a plan for schools to use this as a fund raiser; so we would be able to keep a percentage of the money raised.  And with our principal just having been diagnosed with breast cancer, what better way could we show our support for her than by donating the funds to cancer research.

There are some other connections we are going to try to make, but I won’t go into them all right now.  We’ll see how things develop.

We filmed a couple of commercials to get the word out.  This one is on our FB page. 

Another one will run on the TVs that play in the halls at school to let all the students know what’s going on.

I don’t know if the connection with NBC news will ever come about, but I don’t care.  The kids are so excited about this project!  They can see that they can make a difference.  What I want them to take away from all of this is that it doesn’t matter how small you are or how far back in the hills you live, you can have an impact.  You can make life better for people in Africa.  You can make a difference in the lives of people battling cancer.  You can make the world a better place.

What better message can I teach them than that?