From Temporary to Permanent: Now What?

Well, I'm home. This afternoon I had bacon and fried eggs with fresh-ground coffee and biscuits baked from scratch for late lunch, then sat on my back porch in my pajamas, read the newspaper and stared out at Corpus Christi Bay. As A. E. Houseman so eloquently captured the moment,

Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.

All well and good, but now what? Yesterday afternoon I lay in my bed at our hotel in Chicago, flush with the whiteness of my sepulcher. I had completed my Temporary Carey adventure; my hand had been stamped so that I could enter the gates of Jesusland one day and hear my master say, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy lord with full access to all the rides." I had clearly secured my spot on the sheep-side of the last judgment and earned a good night's sleep in a real bed.

I decided to reward myself with an hour or so reading C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. This proved to be a bad idea, because I had no more begun than I hit a snag. In chapter thirteen the wily old demon discovers that his protege Wormwood has allowed the "patient," previously sunk in comfortable backsliding, to experience "a second conversion - probably on a deeper level than the first." As phase one of the plan for damage control, Screwtape advises that "the great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it doe not matter how much he thinks about his new repentance. Let the brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book (or perhaps a blog?) about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds the Enemy plants in a human soul."

Well darn!

So now comes the truly hard part of what has been a great experience. In one of my earliest blogs I quoted a recent article in The Christian Century. The author, Mark Radecke, outlines what he calls a list of "worst practices" for drive-by mission work such as I have been doing for the past few days. This clever approach could leave a casual observer with the feeling that Radecke is cynical about such endeavors. That would be incorrect. In his opening paragraph he states that "In leading such trips and researching their impact, I've found that they can have a profound effect on the faith and life of participants, and good work is often done: people living in poverty have their needs addressed by energetic and caring people." I have no doubt that we did some good work and did indeed address significant needs for some marginalized folks. But the profound effect portion of the beatitude will fail to materialize if I let myself be "Screwtaped" upon returning to civilian life.

Actually, I have a few ideas about possible long-term changes in my personal ministry, ideas not only birthed by my activities in Fort Wayne, but notions that now actually seem realistic and within my capabilities. That's important. I read the other day that former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich "wakes up with about five new ideas most days, many of which are instantly snuffed out by the cold reason of daylight." The concrete action of teaching ESL and playing with refugee children in a sweaty park may have overcome the vampire DNA of some of my former vague good intentions. I'm not going to speak of any of the specific projects I'm mulling because that seems frightfully close to praying on a cyber street-corner, but I would like to reflect in general terms on the basic concept.

There is a prayer I've prayed almost daily for a number of years now, mostly in English and recently in Spanish, and it contains the familiar petition, "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Theological disclaimer: I know that the Lord, just before giving the church this prayer, cautions against "vain repetition" and "thinking that (we) shall be heard for (our) much speaking." The odd thing is that, the more I have prayed this prayer, the more I myself have begun to feel it take hold of me, and Jesus didn't say there was anything wrong with discovering that we can finally hear ourselves as a result of steady meditation. My Father in heaven certainly knew before I asked that I needed some performance-enhancing drugs in the area of my missional muscles, but I had managed to remain marvelously unaware.

"Thy kingdom come" - take that in the Dallas Willard sense of meaning that the reign of God that permeates the very atmosphere around us finally becomes the basis for our everyday actions. What might that look like? The business section of last Sunday's New York Times contained an article about a company called Knights Apparel that makes college-logo clothing. This outfit pays its workers in the Dominican Republic a living wage and welcomes them to join a union. The company absorbs the additional cost, lowering its profit margin in order to remain competitive with sweatshop giants like Nike and Adidas. At the end of the piece, one worker explains that her previous wages left her constantly impoverished, sometimes going hungry because she could only feed her children, sometimes borrowing money for necessities, all the while living in a windowless shack with no indoor plumbing. Her bosses sometimes yelled at or slapped her and her colleagues, refused to allow them to go home if they were sick, and forced them to work past midnight on days that began at seven in the morning. Asked to compare her new job to her old, she said that "the difference is heaven and earth."

Now I don't want to go all social gospel here, but that last line gets my attention. This woman (who, by the way, is a sister in Christ who feels a call to the pastorate) has entered the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and has exited the Hell on earth she previously occupied. It is, I can't help thinking, a legitimate question after my Temporary Carey debauch to ask in what small ways I can engineer a similar change of address right here in my own zip code.

Now that's the sort of thing that can make your coffee suddenly bitter . . . and your walk with the Lord slowly sweeter.