I was a bit slow getting my camera out, but there he is. (Well, the rear of him anyway.) Just about to turn the corner…

Guess it’s not an average day in Bangkok till you’ve bumped into at least one elephant walking down the street.

P.S. It’s hot here.

This is why you don’t go outside and wander around before checking the weather.

Yesterday I was flying to Bangkok (where the picture was taken) when, just as our flight path was about to cross Afghanistan, I watched The Kite Runner. Great film. (Mind you, this is the sentiment of someone watching on a noisy 747 at two in the morning, but still.)

Having read the book, what surprised me was how closely the film followed the original story and, even more, how well it worked. The gist of both is that Amir, a young boy growing up in 1970s Afghanistan, betrays his best friend, only to be given a chance at redemption years later when he receives a phone call asking him to return to his homeland to rescue his friend’s son. (The fact that the Taliban is wreaking havoc at the time tends to complicate things.)

The cirumstances of Amir’s opportunity for redemption bear striking parallels to the circumstances of his earlier betrayal. The big choice the movie presents — the one Amir must make, not once but twice — is between standing up for the oppressed and looking the other way to save our own skin.

I don’t recall exactly what my mental picture of Afghanistan was before the book and the film. Still, both seem to capture really well the country that was zooming past 30,000 feet below. (Not much of a surprise, I suppose, since the author was born in Kabul.)

Also saw another film worth watching, called Lars and the Real Girl. It’s about how a tight-knit, mostly Christian community responds when Lars, who develops a crippling shyness after the death of his parents, begins introducing everyone to his girlfriend Bianca, who in reality is a life-sized doll. The town’s reaction is ultimately shaped by a simple question that can easily sound like a worn-out cliche (especially when it’s turned into a fashion commodity): “What would Jesus do?” The question is asked by the pastor of the tiny Methodist church that Lars attends (with Bianca, obviously). And it’s the community’s response that shapes the trajectory of Lars’ growth or healing or whatever you want to call it.

So… two films and 12 hours later, I was in Bangkok. Haven’t seen too much of the city yet. One of my few ventures outside the hotel was cut short by a storm that led me to spend most of the time under a shelter in a nearby park, standing next to a very bored looking security guard.

Some of the sights here can be disturbing… like pot-bellied, middle-aged Western men everywhere you look, arms draped around Thai girls barely in their twenties (if that). Or the homeless boy taking shelter from the rain, curled up on a sidewalk. He couldn’t have been more than twelve.

Maybe the most jarring thing is seeing it in a towering city that, if it weren’t for the obvious language barrier, could just as easily be Houston or LA. There’s never a shortage of good reasons to fight for a better world. (Assuming we choose not to look the other way, that is. Hang on, I think I watched a movie about that somewhere.)

On a semi-related note, I discovered the perfect antedote to jet lag. It’s called staying awake on the plane and sleeping for 15 hours the next day. Side effects include being awake at 12:30 the following morning and typing out random thoughts on your blog because you’re not the least bit tired.

People in this country (the UK, where we live at the moment) waste more than a third of the food we buy. That’s like coming home from the grocery store and throwing one bag of food straight in the garbage for every two that go in our refrigerators and cupboards.

Meanwhile, we’ve got ourselves a global food crisis. Everyone’s feeling the effects. Prices on basic staples like wheat, rice, and corn are way up. In some cases, more than double what they used to be.

There’s this thing called the Food Price Index, published by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, which measures the global price of food. By their estimation, food prices are more than 50 percent higher than they were this time a year ago.

For me, the rising cost of food is a royal pain. For someone living on less than $1 a day in a country like Bangladesh — someone who already spends the majority of their income on food — it could mean the difference between eating and… not eating.

Understandably, people here are grumbling with every trip to the store — and many are having to make painful cutbacks in other areas to offset the increasing cost of eating.

People in Haiti and Egypt are rioting.

Rioting because they can’t afford to eat.

Here in the UK, the rising cost of oil has a lot of people talking about “fuel poverty.” I wonder how much longer before we start talking about “food poverty” as well.

People are looking for a culprit, and there are plenty of contenders. You have speculative investors doing to the food market what they once did to the housing market. Buying massive quantities of food. Not to eat but to turn around and sell at artificially inflated prices.

They get rich; 840 million malnourished people get a little hungrier as even the most basic food items get pushed further out of reach.

Then there’s the increasing frequency and severity of droughts in many parts of the world, particularly some regions of Africa, making life harder — especially for subsistence farmers.

Not to mention the growing demand for meat and dairy in developing (and increasingly wealthy) countries like China and India. They see how we eat — including the 200 pounds of meat the average American consumes every year (myself included, probably). More than half a pound of chicken/beef/pork/fish per person, per day. And — can you blame them? — they want to eat like that too.

But skyrocketing demand for meat takes a heavy toll on the planet’s farmland. Raising livestock is one of the least efficient and least sustainable uses of agricultural land, and the 1.5 billion cows already roaming the earth contribute 20 percent of the world’s carbon emissions as is. But the prospect of a $1 cheeseburger beckons…

And of course, ethanol, the corn-based biofuel that was supposed to break our addiction to increasingly expensive oil (which, yes, is yet another factor in the rising cost of food).

A few months ago, my wife and I drove through Nebraska and, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, I couldn’t help but notice how many cornfields were displaying great big signs announcing they had switched from growing corn that was meant to be eaten to growing corn that would be turned into biofuel.

Which, of course, raises the question: The number of people who need to eat hasn’t gone down, so who’s feeding them now?

And what would Jesus have to say about the situation?

Maybe something along the lines of, “Give us today our daily bread.”

When we say this prayer, we have a tendency to spiritualize it. Give us today the strength we need to make it through the day. Give us today our spiritual sustenance. Give us today a word from you. Give us today the guidance and direction only you can give.

All good things. All of them completely valid things to pray for.

But Jesus was speaking mainly to Galilean peasants. People who knew what it was like to live hand-to-mouth. To eat without knowing where your next meal might come from. Or when.

He was speaking to people who were completely dependent on the rain and the sun and the crops to grow as they ought. People who worried some pestilence might come and destroy their harvest.

And even if their crops managed to grow, there was almost always a foreign oppressor like Rome lurking around the corner, ready to pillage, tax, and confiscate.

In light of this context, two things strike me about Jesus’ prayer. One is that it is rooted in the awareness that all of us depend on God for everything — even the food we eat. It’s easy to forget, when all I have to do is take a five-minute walk out my door and step into a brightly lit, climate-controlled supermarket in order to buy milk.

But even if we can’t always see it, we’re really not that different from those Galilean peasants. We are just as dependent on the earth — and, by extension, the God who made the earth — to produce enough food to keep us alive. We are more vulnerable, more fragile, than we realize.

Second, the fact that Jesus said “today.”

Not “give us a week’s worth of groceries in the cupboards,” but give us enough food for today.

After the Exodus, the Torah says God gave the Israelites thin flakes of bread called manna. Every morning they went out to gather the mysterious food, but they were only supposed to gather “as much as they needed.” Enough for one day. Those who kept some for the next day awoke to an unpleasant surprise the following morning: the hoarded manna had gone rotten.

The message was clear. No one was to take more than they needed. And no one was to forget who fed them in the first place.

So how would Jesus respond to a global food crisis? Maybe, for starters, by reminding us that whether we get our food by shopping at a store or by pulling it out of the earth, we all depend on God for what we eat.

And maybe he would remind us that he once taught us to pray, “give us today.” And that Moses taught us to gather only as much as we need. Maybe Jesus would tell us that when some of us gather well beyond what we need, there’s less to go around for everyone. Maybe he would tell us that what we eat — and how much of it — is not just a health issue. It’s a spiritual issue.

Maybe.

the peak district

bailey in all his leash-free glory

olney at sunset

Several prominent evangelicals released a statement today called The Evangelical Manifesto. Definitely worth reading.

The statement and its signers seek to define evangelicalism in a way that, after 30+ years of Dobson/Falwell/Robertson holding the megaphone, may sound a lot like someone trying to put new spin on an old idea. But what this manifesto proposes is nothing more (or less) than a return to evangelicalism in its most classical, authentic sense.

This is evangelicalism as John Newton and William Wilberforce knew it.

Not surprisingly, James Dobson declined to sign it, citing a mostly unspecified “myriad of concerns.”

What I love most about this manifesto is its humility. The signers distance themselves from some of the more extreme expressions of evangelicalism in recent history—without becoming strident or self-righteous… or falling into the trap of making little more than a desperate appeal for acceptance.

Here are some of my favorite bits. But really, you should skip this part and download the whole thing…

As followers of “the narrow way,” our concern is not for approval and popular esteem. Nor do we regard it as accurate or faithful to pose as victims, or to protest at discrimination. We certainly do not face persecution like our fellow-believers elsewhere in the world. Too many of the problems we face as Evangelicals in the United States are those of our own making. If we protest, our protest has to begin with ourselves….

As the universal popularity of such hymns and songs as “Amazing Grace” attests, our great hymn writers stand alongside our great theologians, and often our commitment can be seen better in our giving and our caring than in official statements. What we are about is captured not only in books or declarations, but in our care for the poor, the homeless, and the orphaned; our outreach to those in prison; our compassion for the hungry and the victims of disaster; and our fight for justice for those oppressed by such evils as slavery and human trafficking….

Above all else, [evangelicalism] is a commitment and devotion to the person and work of Jesus Christ, his teaching and way of life, and an enduring dedication to his lordship above all other earthly powers, allegiances and loyalties. As such, it should not be limited to tribal or national boundaries, or be confused with, or reduced to political categories such as “conservative” and “liberal”….

First and foremost we Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything. The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism. It is a colossal YES to life and human aspirations, and an emphatic NO only to what contradicts our true destiny as human beings made in the image of God….

We call for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life. Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman, we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness, by promoting reconciliation, encouraging ethical servant leadership, assisting the poor, caring for the sick, and educating the next generation. We believe it is our calling to be good stewards of all God has entrusted to our care so that it may be passed on to generations yet to be born….

The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become “useful idiots” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests. Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith; and it would be no improvement to respond to a weakening of the religious right with a rejuvenation of the religious left. Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church—and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons….

We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. While some of us are pacifists and others are advocates of just war, we all believe that Jesus’ Good News of justice for the whole world was promoted, not by a conqueror’s power and sword, but by a suffering servant emptied of power and ready to die for the ends he came to achieve. Unlike some other religious believers, we do not see insults and attacks on our faith as “offensive” and “blasphemous” in a manner to be defended by law, but as part of the cost of our discipleship that we are to bear without complaint or victim-playing….

On another note, today’s SojoMail, a weekly update from Sojourners (which included a feature on the Evangelical Manifesto) had what might be one of the more ironic pairing of banner ads I’ve seen…

Awesome. (I know… Rebecca St. James hardly qualifies as “rock star” material, but still… it’s a LITTLE funny…)

CNN: Stinky manure smell engulfs London

Today was “drive to a sketchy warehouse on the east side of London and pick up our stuff” day. This involved sitting for two hours on the parking lot otherwise known as the London Orbital (aka the M25—not nearly as cool or spacey as it sounds), driving round and round an industrial complex looking for the only business not bothering to put its name on the front, and asking for directions at a place called the Rumbling Belly Cafe. (I didn’t eat there.)

But I drove away with 16 boxes of pots, pans, books, clothes, etc., so all turned out well. Who knew a few pieces of silverware and some familiar decorations could make a place feel more like home.

One more photo for now . . . and no, this is not a repeat from the last post. This is yesterday. What is going on??

I don’t think Easter is normally supposed to look like this here (this is our backyard—I mean, garden) . . .

And this is the church we went to on Easter Sunday (it was once pastored by John Newton) . . .

And this is one of the sights we saw in London over the weekend (a pub—still in operation—once frequented by the likes of William Shakespeare and, later, Charles Dickens).

We are a long way from home . . .

Tomorrow we move into a house in Olney. About a five-minute walk from our front door is the church John Newton served at when he wrote the song “Amazing Grace.” Not to mention a couple really good fish and chip shops . . .

Gone a long time without posting anything, but I figure gearing up for a transatlantic move is as good an excuse as any. As of this month, our new address ends with “UK” instead of “USA.”

Suffice it to say it’s been an eventful few weeks, starting with a cross-country drive from Seattle to Michigan before flying across the pond . . .

They like snow in Snoqualmie . . .

Snake River in Idaho

One hundred miles of ice in Wyoming . . .

Then there were Nebraska and Iowa, but there’s not much to take a picture of there (unless you like corn).