Well, I'm here at last, the kitchen of a Methodist church in Fort Wayne, Indiana where I'm bunking along with a colleague and two of our students as we carry out various mission activities here in the midwest. We're working with a team of four from the sending agency and two other students from Bowling Green State University.
Today I spent time with some very brave people - adults from Burma who, having landed in this country through various horror stories of war, flood, famine and political persecution, have now set themselves the task of learning English and becoming Americans. It was easy to catch myself slipping into a superiority complex as I waited, growing ever-more bored, for an eighty-six year old man to write out the alphabet. Then I asked him the Burmese words for some of the vocabulary we were working on and realized that, if the position were reversed, I would be seriously floundering. We spent a couple of hours this afternoon playing with Burmese children at a nearby park. When I'd ask a child for the tenth time (most of them speak fluent English already) to tell me his name or a simple phrase ("How are you?"), and he would roll his eyes, sigh, and run it by me again, I began to appreciate the courage it takes these people to do anything other than simply stay in their own neighborhoods where they can understand everyone.
But I've also had an interesting insight into why this work might be worth doing.
At the airport Sunday morning I discovered a new wrinkle in pre-flight security. I knew I had to shuck my shoes (wore my Crocks for just that occasion) and turn out my pockets like a schoolchild accused of theft. But then they made me stand in front of a big blue screen and raise my arms above my head, elbows bent so that I was just inches away from the classic thumbs-in-ears-tongue-out position of childhood mockery. Presumably an operative somewhere was seeing me in my full Adamic nature to make sure I didn't have any explosives stashed . . . well, I'd rather not consider the possibilities.
And this is my thought as I put Sunday and today together: those scanners can't make us safe. I'm not protesting their presence, and I certainly don't have any better ideas, but let's face it - if determined people want to kill us in large numbers and don't mind dying in the process, they're going to figure out a way to do it. The New York Times recently reported that the Group of 20 summit meeting in Toronto a few weeks back ran the Canadian government $897 million dollars American! That works out to $12 million per hour.
My point is that if it costs that much to keep us safe, then we've given someone far too good a reason to want to hurt us. Or at least, we've let someone else convince people that those reasons exist.
So what do English as a Second Language classes have to do with anything? Two things, perhaps. First of all, communication, understanding - those are better weapons against terror than naked screen scans and high-end SWAT teams. Second, we do this in the name of Jesus, even to people who would not tolerate the mention of that name.
I'm not completely delusional; I don't mean to suggest that the folks at the airport can stand now since Doug Jackson spent a few hours reviewing the alphabet with a Burmese refugee. But I also remember a famous preacher whom I once heard say, casually, in a throw-away line that he didn't bother to defend, "God only does big things." I don't know; I did a little thing today, and maybe God was in it. My friend and student Geoff Smith translates first beatitude as "Blessed are those who stink at religion." I might render the latter portion, "for their completely negligible actions bring in the Kingdom in ways too small for anyone to notice, let alone blow to smithereens."
There's a prayer in the morning office of the Book of Common Prayer which asks, in part, "Give peace, O Lord, in all the world; For only in you can we live in safety." And perhaps what I learned today is that our peace lies, not in full-body security scans or $12 million per hour safety patrols, but in small things that invite our supposed enemies into the Kingdom of Heaven.
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