As most visitors here know, I take volunteers to serve and learn in Cambodia. We spend lots of our time at Wat Opot, an orphanage/loving community about 50km outside Phnom Penh. Most of the kids lost their parents to AIDS, and many of them have HIV themselves. Lots of orphanages make a substantial income by offering babies for adoption, but Wat Opot isn’t one of them. They take the kids with HIV, who will never be adopted, and rarely have a HIV-free baby in their midst. Baby Cheap was a recent exception. She came to Wat Opot after her mother died of AIDS, and she has been raised for the past year there.

Today I received an email saying she had been adopted. Read the story here. She’ll be missed, but I trust she’s with a loving family now that will raise her (and spoil her) in ways most Cambodian kids can’t even dream about (they really can’t imagine).

(True confessions: I posted photos of the wrong cute kid. Oops! I’ll leave them anyway, but just for the record, the girl in the photos is Baby Tee not Baby Cheap.)

It’s warm again so we’re at the river Saturday mornings. Reia is a second grader now. She graduated to a fiberglass slalom kayak passed down from student to student over the years. That’s Reia and her friend Yume (playing with a rubber toy that’s floating nearby). Mari and Maika aren’t participating in practices, but they’re getting some chances to paddle around. They got used wetsuits from a brother and sister (also twins) who grew out of them last year. We’re pretty proud of them.

In other news, we won’t be going to the USA this summer. We had hoped to take a group of Japanese for a homestay experience in Albuquerque, but we didn’t have enough people sign-up. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll try to do something creative in August, and we don’t have to worry about all the pressures of planning such a big event. Best of all, it looks like my parents will visit Japan in October since we can’t make it out there. The kids are excited already. My parents will get to see them at school, kayaking, etc.

Apparently, 45 percent of Cambodia is owned by foreigners. Speculators have rushed to buy cheap and “available” beach front and island property. The problem is the land really isn’t available, unless you pay no regard to the people living and doing business there. Whole villages have been cleared out and businesses forcibly closed with little or no warning to make room for new hotels and business catering to tourists.

Some may argue that poor Cambodians will be better off. But better off than when they had a place to live and their own businesses? Those who come to work in the new hotels and businesses catering to tourists may benefit, but it’s a mixed blessing if they and they children will be part of a permanent underclass. The losers will be forgotten, and the happy investors who “win” will see their mutual funds grow by a few dollars here and there.

That last part gets me. The article says the hasty land grab and free-for-all development is fueled by fund managers are looking for profits in Asia. I own mutual funds. I can’t help but wonder if this is my money at work? A product of my own desire for future security and wealth?

As far as that goes, besides investing money in mutual funds for myself, what else could I do with the money? What if my future was secure in God’s hands? What would I do if my future wealth was a lesser priority? Maybe I’d invest over at Kiva instead, or  go back to the old fashioned way of meeting people face-to-face and seeing them as partners rather than projects.

“i vividly remember the day i became nauseated by philosophizing, theologizing, and debating about “God.” it was like truth was a hobby…what grew instead was a great desire to simply live and be truth…and how i have come to understand my relationship with Jesus Christ. Christ’s life becomes my life…the two become one.”

- Jim Palmer, posted a few days ago

I quickly grabbed this quote because it resonates with what I’m learning and feeling. But the challenge is in whether or not it resonates with how I’m living. Judging by the past few days, it’s a mixed record. Regardless of what or who I want to be, what ultimately matters is the reality of who I am to the stranger, to my wife and kids, to the HIV infected child struggling to find a future in Africa or Cambodia, to my friends and neighbors in Japan.

The love of God may be reality, the greatest news and hope for everyone in the world, but there are countless lesser realities and small stories that are easier, more comfortable ways. It’s so easy to choose them and put aside the way of Jesus for a day and then another.

So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore

Wayne Jacobsen. Windblown Media 2006, Paperback, 191 pages, $11.99

A few years ago, a friend sent me an email with a couple of links to articles: “Why House Church Isn’t the Answer” and “Why I Don’t Go to Church Anymore” (along with a brief note saying he didn’t necessarily agree with everything the author had written, but…). I read both articles, and they didn’t seem extreme at all. I was challenged; and I filed it all away.

Not long after that I met John. The friend who introduced us thought I might be a good influence on him. You see John was a follower of Jesus who had stopped going to church. We started meeting regularly, because he lived close and we both needed an English speaking friend. It was more than that, of course, which became clear over time. Each time we met I’d steer the conversation toward our responsibility to help Japanese people come to know Jesus. I didn’t mind that he didn’t go to church, but I wanted him to be strategic (and to join in making my plans a reality if possible…). But he would never bite. Instead he just went on and on about Jesus. How frustrating. Eventually I began to wonder about why that frustrated me and whether maybe — possibly — I might have something to learn from John rather than a duty to “fix” him.

He loaned me a copy of Watchman Nee’s book, Christ the Sum of All Things, and he mentioned Wayne Jacobsen (the author of the articles mentioned above). Wayne and a friend were writing a book and publishing one chapter at a time online. One day I clearly remember stopping, putting a serious expression on my face, and telling my wife that I sensed a huge movement of people (Christians, that is) beginning to move away from “church” as we’d known it. House churches, the “emergent conversation,” and stray articles online were just the tip of the iceberg, I said — half speculating and half convinced.

That was about four years ago. Today we don’t go to church anymore in that old sense of the word. We haven’t for a long time, because church isn’t a place to go or a thing to do. We are the church and we participate in the life of Christ’s church every day as we follow Jesus in relationship with others who share the same relationship and calling.

About three years ago, as we started this journey (actually we’d started years before that but we didn’t realize it then), the first word that hit me was “reality.” I went away for a weekend and read most of The Sacred Romance, and somewhere in the middle I realized that if Jesus is real, then there is no mundane moment or place. If his love is real, then I can celebrate that on the dullest day and even my best shining achievements pale in comparison. I started talking about living in reality like something I’d discovered after years of something else. Honestly, I think people do a lot of pretending; I did.

I want to wrap this up. I just wanted to say that this week I sensed the movement (the iceberg of which I’d seen the tip) is very close to the surface. You can see it. Not that it needs to be seen or harnessed by anyone (which many will attempt and fail). I think God is doing something great, and all the ripples (with labels like emerging, missional, house church, etc) are just…well, ripples on the swell.

It’s hard to see a swell on the ocean (unless you’re a surfer and paying attention). I’m not much of a surfer (literally or figuratively), but here are a few things I see.

• The Shack is a runaway best seller. The book hardly speaks of church at all — it’s focused on the greater reality of God’s love. The Shack is riding on the swell.
• Wayne Jacobsen, who wrote the articles and book I linked to above, helped discover and publish The Shack. Now his influence and books sales are expanding. I don’t think he cares about all that, but he’s living in the reality of what Christ is doing. We’ll see what happens next. Maybe he’ll hang ten. (He wrote the book picture above with a co-author under a pseudonym (read it for free here).
• A very popular talk radio host says he follows Jesus but disdains religion. He has attracted a huge following of people who are following Jesus outside traditional church-clubs. Wayne was on his radio show last week (listen here).
• Even the rise of Barack Obama in the USA strikes me as a sign of these times. People are hungry for change and tired of systems that cynically manage and control. They want someone or something REAL — and I’m convinced they’re ultimately searching not for Barack (though he seems like a good guy to me) but for the God of Love revealed in Christ.

And there are many more small and large things and my intuition as well. I just wanted to note for the record we’re on the verge of something bigger than the sum of what we have called Christianity. And the reality of it will be known by people who are in the water (surfing in the reality and love of God that’s here now) and lastly by those talking about it on the beach.

I want to be in the water!