Blog

Last night my wife and I drove to Santa Fe and attended the public viewing of Review Santa Fe, a portfolio review featuring 100 up and coming photographers. It’s an international event, and I felt fortunate to be here for it.  We were able to visit one photographer, Jerry Redfern, who has lived in Cambodia and worked in Cambodia and the surrounding countries. I also met his wife, a journalist who has written the best introduction to Cambodia that I’ve read. It’s very readable book I’d recommend for anyone traveling or planning to live in Cambodia, called Cambodia Now.  She also writes an award winning food blog.

My wife came up to me midway through the event and invited me to see a picture that left her “breathless.” I followed immediately, wondering what kind of picture would have such an effect on her. She led me to Emily Shur’s table.  She is an accomplished photographer with some striking celebrity portraits on her website and a popular blog. Last night she was showing a portfolio of images from Japan, forsaking the stereotypical in favor of the every day, banal (her word) scenes that most Japanese people really see.

As she flipped through her stack of large prints, I suddenly stopped breathing and my head spontaneously pulled back. I was looking at a picture of the apartment building where we have lived for the past two years. Imagine the odds of that. Tokyo is one of the largest cities in the world. Our place was a five minute walk away a train station on the edge of the city. Emily Shur walked by and took a picture of our parking lot, and then we met on the other side of the world, singled her out among hundreds of photographers, and saw it!

UPDATE: Here’s the photo, and here’s a link to see it on her blog.

White Buildings, Takao, 2009 (by Emily Shur)

Comment »

I just read a chilling article in the New York Times about our prospects in the fight against HIV/AIDS.  They’re not good.

During the past 10 years we turned a corner. Cheap medications became widely available, and millions of people worldwide began receiving treatment. Before 2005, getting HIV was a death sentence for the majority worldwide, including more than 2 million children newly infected annually. Then there was hope. But will this hope be sustained, or are we turning a corner in the opposite direction?

…for most of Africa and scattered other countries like Haiti, Guyana and Cambodia, it seems inevitable that the 1990s will return: walking skeletons in the villages, stacks of bodies in morgues, mountains of newly turned earth in cemeteries.

What happened?

Simply put,  the number of newly infected people each year is exceeding the number we can treat. At the same time, funds for the fight are shrinking.  Besides the global economic crisis, donors have been redirecting funds to combat malaria and other preventable diseases that actually kill more people than HIV/AIDS.

It would be a terrible tragedy to return to the situation ten years ago when people were dying in such numbers and unimaginable conditions. I’ll be moving to Cambodia in two months, and I know children who are alive because they take ARV medications every day. When those programs started, promises were made that the plug would never be pulled.  You can’t give someone medicine and then take it away after a few years…can you?

The bitter truth is that we cannot save everyone. We’re slowly saving less and less. We must concentrate more on prevention, or the dam will break.

“You cannot mop the floor when the tap is still running on it,” said Dr. David Kihumuro Apuuli, director-general of the Uganda AIDS Commission.

There are no easy answers. Prevention versus treatment is more than just a debate to take sides in. Simply giving more money is not an answer. I recommend reading the full New York Times piece and Bill Easterly’s response for further perspective.

Living with HIV in Cambodia thanks to ARV medications provided by USAID funds

5 Comments »

For the past few years I’ve been mentored from afar by Wayne Jacobsen. He’s known by some for his work in getting The Shack published. If you flip to the back of that book you’ll probably find a couple of his books recommended. The phrase “Living loved and loving others” is how Wayne states his life’s desire. He’s always fleshing it out what that means, whether in a book, blog entry, podcast, or in person.  I trust Wayne to be real and to write or speak what’s on his mind without hidden expectations, and I feel very grateful for the couple of times we’ve met and the countless times I’ve benefited from his wisdom.

He hasn’t died or anything. I just thought I’d mention Wayne and post this short quote that caught my attention from his blog today:

Until you know you are loved you will be sucked into every religious activity and performance treadmill that exists, hoping against hope that you can do the right thing to merit that deep affection from the heart of the Father. But you already have his affection! The great lie of the universe is that you are not loved by the Creator of all. The question is only do you realize how loved you are?

If you’re interested in hearing more, Wayne has a wonderful series of audio teachings called Transitions. I’ve told several friends about this series lately, so I’ll go ahead and add some links here. You can get them from his website in the audio library section, or from iTunes, or I’ve uploaded them all in one zip file that you can download here.

I’m one of the very LAST people (trust me) to download anyone’s “audio series” and walk around listening to it. The very thought of downloading teachings or sermons makes me want to turn in another direction immediately. But this is my big exception. It’s just so good that I can’t help suggesting that others check it out. That goes for the podcasts, too.

For those who may worry I’ve fallen for some guru, Wayne is not a guru. He is a down to earth guy who knows and teaches from the Bible as well as anyone I’ve ever met, and he’s one of the most liberating, out-of-the-box thinkers I’ve ever learned from.

Comment »

Peter Rollins at Baylor University from Peter Rollins on Vimeo.

Peter Peter Rollins has been traveling around the USA sharing with gatherings in bars about life as a follower of Jesus. He’s a teacher with piercing insights, intellectual depth, and persistence in trying to expose delusions that fall short of what Jesus was all about. He provokes without condemning or following up with easy answers.

Our theology, if it isn’t lived, if it isn’t grounded in reality, in our day to day existence; it’s nothing. It’s just a lie. It’s something that makes us feel good about ourselves.

If we hinge our lives on a pretense, then we must believe it unblinkingly. Any doubts or wrong questions might open up cracks that might expose the delusion: that we use the idea of God to resolve the messiness of life.

How can I have faith to live in a reality that is messy, painful, contradictory, and hopeless. Or, to put it another way, how can I embrace perfect love and joy so great that moving toward them would put me on a perilous precipice from which I would never survive the fall?

UPDATE: In the past, I might have read this post and assumed Rollins wants me to perform better in my walk with Jesus. I don’t know exactly what Peter Rollins thinks, but I don’t think he’s calling us to a better religious performance. I think we can’t live this way apart from grace–not a concept of grace but the reality of it that can’t be faked or replaced with a concept.

Comment »

I’ve written at length about Andong Village and Abraham Hang’s work there. Today I was glad to find his story online told well and at length. You can read it here.

A tidbit from the past I didn’t know:

When I saw this take place, I began to help the poor who were being ripped off by the gang. I created my own gang and we had automatic weapons to fight the bandits as I had become a soldier as well during that time. It was now 1998. I ended up killing the leader of the bandits and gang dispersed and ceased to oppress the people. I am the only one left alive from our original group of modern day Robin Hoods, because, as I thought at the time, my good luck came from the magical powers of a Khmer Witch doctor bestowed upon me.

Abraham on the road from the school to Andong Village

Comment »