Champion of the Poor

In verses 9 and 18 of Psalm 9, David reaffirms God's heart for the poor and disenfranchised: "The LORD is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble ... But the needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish."

In today's all-school chapel, a Major from the Salvation Army shared with us some of the overwhelming needs in Vancouver and across Canada. He reminded the kids that Christ rarely (if ever) judged the poor; that He was all about addressing their physical needs first, meeting them where they were.

It's a challenge to me, because quite frankly I'm usually low on the compassion meter when it comes to Vancouver's poor.

The Demise of the Factory Outlet

The new school year is approaching, and with it come certain annual expectations of fashion. Namely, students and teachers are expected to appear on the first days and weeks of school in the finest collections of apparel that they possess. The idea is to send a message of sorts; you are the real deal, you mean business, you will succeed ... reinforced because you dress for success.

These expectations are embraced and honoured with delight by the vast majority of those who frequent school halls, with few exceptions.

I, for better or for worse, consider myself an exception. Not that I dislike a sharp new shirt, or a spanky new pair of shoes; I simply regard the ordeal of The Shopping Trip to be mildly torturous - sometimes severely so.

So it was with some relief that I looked forward to my visit to Washington state's factory outlets, which spread northward from Seattle to Everett to Bellingham, with the odd Wal-Mart or Fred Meyers thrown into the mix for good measure. Surely, I thought, the factory outlets - most famously, the ones located at Tulalip - will greet me with quality merchandise and insanely low prices. I'll be able to find absolutely everything needed for the school year in one fell swoop, and The Shopping Trip will quickly fade into the oblivion of past memory.

I wasn't so lucky.

Together, my wife and I stopped at several factory outlets, most of them grouped in complexes of so-called big box stores. Seldom, if ever, were we greeted with low prices. Instead, we braved crowds of grumpy families and teeny boppers to explore all the well-known brand names: Old Navy, Banana Republic, Ambercrombie & Fitch, The Gap, etc. Failing at the well-known, we tried the low-profile stores. No luck there either.

You know you're in trouble when the prices on apparel look even higher than they would in Canada. And that's before the exchange.

That's when I realized it. 'Factory outlets' no longer exist. They've simply become extinct.

A little web research confirmed what I thought 'factory outlets' were supposed to be:

1. "A manufacturer-owned store selling that firm's closeouts, discontinued merchandise, irregulars, and canceled orders."

2. "A shopping center with factory outlets or close-out outlets selling discounted merchandise. Often located along the main freeway outside of a major metropolitan."

3. "Shops, often outside town centres, selling ‘seconds’ and end of line goods at discounted prices."

All of the definitions listed above rang familiar. At least, they jive with my vague (former) notions of factory outlets. Yet as I compare these definitions with my occasional run-ins with factory outlets over the last few years, it's easy to see the incongruity.

Here's the reality. Factory outlets were, I'm sure at one time, an efficient way for major brands to dump their 'end-of-line' and 'irregular' merchandise. Factories and retail outlets would ship off their ugly ducklings in bulk, thus dealing with embarrassing merchandise in a somewhat profitable way. The savvy bargain hunter would snatch these goods up, willing to buy a pair of shoe two sizes too big in exchange for steep discounts, etc. Call it a win-win situation.

It's my suspicion that over time, the major retailers started to notice the high traffic, attention, and (most importantly) dollars that these factory outlets were attracting. Perhaps subtly at first, and in small amounts, they began stocking high-end merchandise. The less savvy shoppers snapped up these items, encouraging the big brands to up the portion of high-end stock. Not to be outdone, their competitors did the same.

This spiral continued and continued until you have what we have today: 'factory outlets' that are really nothing of the kind. These stores are no more connected to their parent factories than mall retailers. Tulalip, by the way, is really just that: a large outdoor mall.

So it was with some sadness and irritation that I drove out of Washington. After half a dozen stops, I hadn't bought a thing. I felt humiliated and disappointed, like a high school senior stood up on prom night. I had high hopes for the factory outlets, and they hadn't delivered.

The bad taste is still in my mouth, but I feel enlightened. Factory outlets are simply a myth, and I won't be back.

Really Living

1 Thessalonians 3:8 (New International Version)
"For now we really live, since you are standing firm in the Lord."

I can't say for sure whether or not I've read this verse before ... but on Saturday, it really made an impression. These simple but profound words of Paul challenge me for the following reasons:

1. They reveal Paul's disregard for the pleasures of this world.
2. They reveal Paul's heart for other believers.
3. They reveal Paul's passion for the kingdom of God.

Two weeks ago, I joined my students in a poetry assignment. The task was to select a phrase that begins with the word 'I,' and then finish that phrase at least twenty different ways. I chose the phrase 'I feel alive when."

In light of Paul's words in the verse above, I'd like to critically revisit my work.

What are my highest priorities?
What am I passionate about?

Most importantly, do I feel "truly alive" when believers in my care are "standing firm in the Lord?"

Obama in Cairo

I was greatly encouraged to hear President Obama firmly oppose Israel’s reckless settlement expansion program. As settlement buildings, infrastructure, and residents continue to carve up the West Bank into an unintelligible patchwork of regions and municipalities, the prospects for peace in the region grow bleaker and bleaker. Any talk of a ‘two-state solution’ to the conflict – an eventual outcome rightly supported by the President – will require the allotment of sovereign territory to the Palestinians. Logically speaking, such a territory would include the West Bank, with Ramallah as its capital. The Israeli settlements, however, make such a realization well near impossible.

Counting Crows

We got a kick out of these crows this afternoon. Sha was impressed by how they all seemed to line up in order. The two on the outside seem to be listening to the one in the middle. Fun times in Horseshoe Bay!

Feeding Crocodiles

Tonight I found this thought-provoking article on the Oxford University Press Blog. The author, Stephen Spector, contrasts the worldviews of Bush against those of Obama, and discusses the role of the American Christian right in reference to American foreign policy in the Middle East.

"President Obama’s staff recently removed a stern-looking bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had kept in the Oval Office, replacing it with a bust of Lincoln. There could hardly have been a more compelling symbolic gesture to mark the change in presidential worldviews.

As Obama notes in The Audacity of Hope, Lincoln believed that there are times when we must pursue our own absolute truths, even if there is a terrible price to pay. But Obama also knows that Lincoln had a complicated view of world affairs: Lincoln knew that we must reach for common understandings and resist the temptation to demonize, since we’re all imperfect and can’t know with certainty that God is on our side.

Bush’s impulse, by contrast, is to value moral clarity. As a result, he took Churchill as his model in advocating an unambiguous and aggressive response to Iranian and Arab extremists. He did take pains to note that the battle is not with the “great religion” of Islam, which he called a religion of peace, but with terrorists. Yet in describing the goals of radical Islamists, Bush repeatedly evoked the fascist aggression in World War II. In 2005, for example, he warned that militants practicing a clear and focused ideology of Islamofascism seek to establish “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Today’s terrorists, he said in 2006, are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century.” They have a common ideology and vision for the world, Bush said, and against such an enemy the West can never accept anything less than complete victory. That echoed Churchill’s words rallying the British people against Hitler: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Religious and political conservatives who made up much of Bush’s electoral base often view the world as he does. They particularly admire Churchill’s dogged determination in warning of the approaching Nazi danger in the 1930s. Like him, they name what they see as the coming fascist threat and they disdain attempts at appeasement. Many of them warn, as Bush did, that World War III has already begun.

Discussing a foiled terrorist plot in 2006, Gary Bauer, a leading conservative Christian, quoted one of Churchill’s classic lines: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” (A few days later, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the same quip, which was surely more than a coincidence.) And Bauer is far from the only evangelical who reveres Churchill. The devotion of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is so great that the largest painting in his Colorado Springs office is not of Christ, but of Sir Winston. (According to Dan Gilgoff in The Jesus Machine, Dobson’s wife didn’t want him to buy it because she was afraid that he would put it in their bedroom!)

John Hagee, the founder of the pro-Zionist evangelical lobbying group Christians United for Israel, is one of those who considers the Islamist threat today to be equivalent to the danger posed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and equally impossible to appease through compromise. In 2007 he received standing ovations at AIPAC's annual policy conference in Washington when he said, “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.” Hagee warned that the “misguided souls of Europe…the political brothel that is now the United Nations, and sadly even our own State Department will try once again to turn Israel into crocodile food.”

Some Israeli and American officials and commentators also evoke the Nazi threat in describing the present conflict with Islamic radicals. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Israeli prime minister, says that, in Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel is confronted by an enemy of the sort that the Jewish people have not faced since Hitler. The conflict is not about territory, but about Islam’s goal of eradicating the Jewish state, Netanyahu says, a statement that agrees perfectly with the warnings of Michael Evans and other Christian Zionists.

Jihadist Muslims intend to perpetrate a second Holocaust, says Netanyahu. He adds that Ahmadinejad presents an even more serious threat than Hitler did: Hitler lost the war because he could not develop nuclear weapons, but Ahmadinejad is on the verge of accomplishing that. General Moshe Ya'alon, a former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, adds that when Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off of the map, he means to destroy the West, a charge that echoes those made by American Christian Zionists.

The Obama administration is hoping to achieve through diplomacy what confrontation against a supposed unified enemy did not. They’ve even dropped Bush’s signature phrase, the “War on Terror.” Meanwhile, Christian Zionist leaders are sending newsletters and prayer updates to hundreds of thousands of readers pointing out that Netanyahu called Iran’s leaders a messianic apocalyptic cult who must never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. For them and many other religious and political conservatives, negotiation with Islamic fundamentalists is nothing other than the folly of appeasement, the same catastrophic mistake that Neville Chamberlain made in 1938."

Original Source: http://blog.oup.com/2009/04/obama_bush/

Stephen Spector, chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook University, is the author of Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism which delves into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, publications, news reports, survey research, worship services, and interfaith conferences, to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelical support for Israel. In the original post above, Specter looks at the contrast between Bush and Obama’s views on Israel and Islamic extremists.

Camping in California

Camping ... an experience like no other. The trick, of course, is finding the time, energy, and will to actually get out of the city and make it happen. Once out there, however, the investment never fails to disappoint.

Here's a shot of our Jetta, cozy in our Crescent City, CA KOA site. It was a nice stay - the one night out of four that we didn't hotel it. The campground was very clean and accommodating, uncrowded, and offered great shower & laundry facilities. It won't be our last visit.

Change = Growth

"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security." - Gail Sheehy

I subscribe to an email service that sends me a quote each day. I find many of them bland and oversimplistic, but today's got my attention. I don't know the author, but I feel that I can attest to the comment.

Probably most of us look back on our years spent on this planet with a mixture of pride and revulsion. In our wakes we see great successes and crushing defeats, mountain-top experiences and deep emotional valleys. We also see seasons of stagnancy and seasons of growth.

Like the author of the quote, I think most growth occurs under change. Change, in turn, usually produces stress, and occasionally pain. But the end result is often positive growth.

This assessment seems counter-intuitive. Our typical response during stressful experiences is to look (sometimes frantically) for an avenue of escape. As Sheehy suggests, we scramble for security and ease. But sometimes it is precisely that lack of security that forces us to evolve and adapt, to strengthen and grow.

Think of it. Muscular growth occurs after the body has been pushed to or beyond its maximum capacity, and mental growth occurs much the same way. Any significant academic growth occurs only after effort and hard work have been invested; professional growth ranges from painful to enjoyable, but always costs something. Financial growth is rarely painless, and spiritual growth often takes place during or after periods of testing (requiring faith in the unseen). Social and relational growth is seldom automatic and usually entails some degree of risk.

In the context of my life, I’ve observed this principle at work over the last two years. In the spring of 2007, my wife and I decided to make a significant transition, moving from Winnipeg, MB to Vancouver, BC. Both of us were leaving behind the city of our birth and upbringing; properties; friends and family; jobs that we enjoyed; school and church communities that we loved dearly. We were moving to a city that was unfamiliar; to a home that we couldn’t call our own; to no friends and almost no family; to school and church communities that were essentially unknown.

It wasn’t an easy experience, but we both believed strongly that it was right. Throughout the transition, we trusted God for direction and confirmation. And now, two years after that fateful decision, I can see growth in almost every domain of our lives. It’s such a surging conviction that I shudder to think of where we would be, if two years ago we had simply ‘stuck with what worked’ for the sake of convenience, and once again, security.

It’s now the spring of 2009, and we can no longer describe ourselves as ‘in transition.’ Daily and imperceptibly, our roots in this community grow deeper. So where do we go from here? Only God knows. But if change can create growth, then needless continuity must tend to create stagnancy. And so we must continue to challenge ourselves, to stretch ourselves, to resist the urge to fortress our lives by all that is familiar and secure.