Faith Venture

John, the Baptizer and Jesus’ cousin, asked Jesus through his disciples:

Are you the Messiah, the Anointed One?

Jesus replied:

• The blind see,
• The lame walk,
• Lepers are cleansed,
• The deaf hear,
• The dead are raised,
• The wretched of the earth learn that God is on their side.

Is this what you were expecting? Then count yourselves most blessed.

Jesus didn’t say, “Yes, and believe in me and you will be saved.”

He reported what was happening in the land. This also referred back to old prophecy about the coming of the anointed one of the Lord.

Those words should be a challenge and guidance to us. Are we just dashing into a life, telling them to believe, then dashing out?

Or, are we helping the blind to see, the lame to walk, those with disease to be cleansed, the deaf to hear, to raise the dead, and teach the most wretched of the earth that God is on their side?

Is it time to get off our chairs and out from behind our lecterns and go to work?

Alexis de Tocqueville travelled from France to the United States in the 1830s to find an answer to what to him and his European contemporaries was a perplexing question–How could the US operate with separation of church and state?

When I came to enquire into the prevailing spirit of the clergy, I found that most of its members seemed to retire of their own accord from the exercise of power and they made it the pride of their profession to abstain from politics. (When he asked them why, they answered) Because politics is intrinsically divisive. We want to be a unifying rather than a divisive force.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Here were some key goals they held:

• strengthen families
• building communities
• starting charities
• inspiring people to a sense of common good
• educating them in habits of the heart
• bequeathing them the art of association

Concluding, de Tocqueville wrote, “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”

How do observers around the world describe American Christians in 2021, some 190 years later?

More to the point, looking into the metaphorical mirror, how would each of us describe ourselves? Are we building, strengthening, inspiring, educating? Or, are we promoting divisiveness?

The philosopher Ken Wilber once wrote, “Civilization is a race to tame testosterone.”

Evidently the sex drive (metaphorically reduced to the hormone testosterone) of men in general knows few bounds. It exhibits itself in aggressiveness, abuse, and overly sexual behavior. I wrote yesterday about two TV series exploring the theme of men coming to an understanding of the changing role of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That struggle is not over. It’s even worse than the persistent belief among some that the woman’s place is in the kitchen and bedroom. Abuse is abundant in the USA, as well as throughout the world.

I knew about Bangkok, Thailand as a vacation destination for Japanese men seeking sexual pleasure many years ago. Probably men from many other countries, as well. It persists even today. Let me tell you the story of a coffee farmer in the highlands of Thailand named Abonzo. Like coffee farmers around the world, the family was unable to escape poverty and pay living wages to its employees given the economics of how coffee is purchased and distributed. The farm workers were so poor that many often sold daughters they could not afford to feed to brothels in Bangkok. Then a coffee roaster in Ohio learned about the family and purchased coffee from the Abonzo family farm directly paying a fair price. The last I had heard, they had brought 70 women back from Bangkok to work at the farm reunited with their families.

You can buy direct trade (direct from the farm) coffee from Hemisphere Coffee Roasters. I don’t see Thailand on the list right now. I buy Cafe Diego–I met Diego Chavarria from Nicaragua once and heard his story–plus we like the coffee. It is so much better than the usual stuff you get. And you support many people.

Another way you can help make a big difference in a person’s life is to support a women’s shelter. We send donations monthly to the Tijuana Christian Mission. The main mission supports two orphanages for children who often are the victims of neglect and abuse. There is also a shelter, Women With Purpose, you can reach out and donate at Women With Purpose, PO Box 85, National City, CA 91951. I’ve visited the shelter some years ago and done some painting to spruce it up. Tijuana is a sex destination for American men. I’ve also gone through that area of town. (Not as a “tourist”!) The shelter sometimes helps women who got out of that or most often are victims of abuse at home.

Only about 10 miles from where I lived in Ohio quietly existed a sex slave “business” serving long-haul truck drivers and others. You can support women in many ways. But we need to reach out to the men, too, and as Wilber put it–race to tame testosterone.

The Bible challenges us often in its pages to care for the widow and orphan. There are many ways to do it. You can help from wherever you are in the world.