REASON - a new poem & my mate emma* and refugees in Lebanon

Last Easter time, my mate Emily filmed me doing this poem – it’s a story, not my own, probably a fictional story rather than a real life one, but the poem is my own retelling of it. And it’s called ‘Reason’ because I think it is a good reason. Have a watch…

I’ve been thinking for a while about what I should write about, to go with this video, and then today it was completely obvious.

The thing is, the beauty of that story is the idea of this man, this soldier, who despite all his strength and power, realized that what the hostage needed – the only way he could really be rescued – was for someone to join him in his weakness, his vulnerability, his pain. Only then could there be trust; only then could there be the rescue; only then could he set the captive free.

There are a thousand ideas, ideologies, ‘gods’ and gurus around that will stand there shouting at us. It might be legalistic ‘Christians’ shouting that we need to smarten up our moral and religious act – stop smoking, stop drinking, go to church – so that God will accept us. Or ‘self-help’ books shouting that we just need to believe in ourselves, that we need to stand in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are successful until we force it to be true. Or maybe just a dizzying array of bloggers and journalists insisting that we simultaneously refuse to force our opinions on others and stand up against injustice; pointing out to us a thousand good reasons to feel guilty before breakfast and offering us zero help to put things right. And I don’t know about you, but even if sometimes I really make an effort to obey whatever or whoever is shouting at me, in the end I revert to giving up and trying to screen it out. Whether you give me three simple steps or a hundred, I can’t find the energy, the passion, even the compassion to rescue myself for very long. I read a blog explaining very convincingly that I should be checking the ethical status of any shop I buy clothes in, or getting everything from charity shops, and I completely agree at the time but something in me knows that by myself, there’s no way this is going to stick. Because it’s hard. And tomorrow there will be another hard thing that I know I should do. And I might make some progress, I might make some changes, but I’m never going to be able to carry the full weight of everything I know I should be, everything I know I should do.

And this is just one of a thousand reasons that I am deeply glad that I’ve come across Jesus – or more accurately, I suppose, that Jesus has come across to me. God has every right to shout at me – to shout at all of us and tell us to get up and sort our lives out. We more than owe it to him. But he doesn’t just want to assert his rights, he wants us to be restored, transformed, put back together in the full beauty we were created for in the first place. And so instead of shouting down at us, he came in Jesus. He took off his helmet and laid down his gun, he laid bare his chest and lay down with us in the darkness. He lived as a human – with flesh and blood and skin just as thin as mine, just as easily broken, just as easily scarred. He got hungry and thirsty and so tired he could sleep in a fishing boat right through a storm. He felt anger. He felt fear. You know when you feel so frustrated you actually find yourself crying? He had that. He felt the uncontrollable pangs of grief that come from the loss of a close friend. He went through the bitterness of betrayal, and got horribly humiliated. He has lived everything that it is to be a human being – even the one part that all of us reading (or writing) this blog are ignorant of: death itself. God knows what it feels like to die. He knows more about the pain of being human than I do. He has come and laid down next to us in the dirt and dried blood of our broken world and broken lives, and he has curled himself around us. Because he cares about us, and he came to rescue us.

But it’s easy for that to sound like a lovely theory, that’s all very far away because it happened 2000 years ago. It’s easy for our modern chronological snobbery and our postmodern disregard for history to make it all feel somehow primitive and irrecoverably distant. I think both those feelings are culturally determined silliness, but we feel them powerfully nonetheless! So what occurred to me today as the obvious thing I should write about in this blog is my mate Emma.* [*That’s not her real name, I figure it’s best for me to write this somewhat anonymously]

My mate Emma is actually Rachael’s mate Emma, but she’s very friendly and she does spoken word so I feel involved too! She acted in the same theatre company as Rachael – she’s a beaming, passionate, naturally quite anxious woman from Essex, I think she’s in her late 20s, with brown hair and eyes. Just to give you some kind of mental picture. She’s super lovely. And she really loves Jesus. She used to be really paralyzed by anxiety and guilt, to the point that in her first year with the theatre company she had to stop performing she was so scared – but she says that gradually God has set her free from that anxiety and shown her more and more of his grace, his kindness and forgiveness which means she doesn’t need to be full of guilt!

And now, after a very long journey of praying and discovering and changing and scariness, she is going to move to Lebanon, to live and work there with a Christian theatre company, reaching out to the thousands upon thousands of Syrian refugees in the country. The plan is to move to an apartment in Beirut, and for the first year to spend 3 days a week learning Arabic, and hopefully also learning to drive in the crazy dangerous way required to get around on the streets of Beirut. Then she’s going to see where she can serve and what she can do – but her deep, deep passions are for a few simple but huge things. She wants to help bring people together across the huge divisions in Lebanese society – to help Sunni and Shia and Christian to meet each other, and learn to love each other and understand each other. She wants to do anything she can to care for the refugees, especially the children. The young children whose parents couldn’t afford the paperwork for visas and things are being born stateless, with no country they can officially call home or return to easily, living in makeshift camps with barely anything we would call ‘facilities’ and nowhere near enough schools. When she went to visit for 2 months, she went with the theatre company as they performed a hygiene play, after which World Vision gave out soap and flannels – trying to encourage the children to wash, even when it’s snowy in the Baka Valley and they don’t have hot water or proper houses to keep out the cold. And she wants to love and care for and pray with the refugees whose homes and lives have been and are being destroyed by ISIS. And in and through all of this, she hopes to see these Muslim refugees that she loves coming to know Jesus, and find freedom and hope in him.

Years ago, she prayed that God would really break her heart for the refugees like his heart is broken for them – and he has answered that prayer. Answered it so emphatically that she is actually willing to leave her family and her friends and her home (the organization she’s going with suggest you don’t come back to visit at all in the first two years), and to pour herself out, risking her actual life, to show them some of his love. The other night, as Emma shared her hopes and passions and dreams, and the story of how God had brought her to this point, both me and Rachael found ourselves with tears in our eyes. And in the car as we drove home we kept trying to express to each other how exciting and beautiful it was to hear what Emma was doing.

Because it is just so completely like Jesus!

This is what Jesus said he would do for the people who trusted and followed him – he said that he would live in us by his Spirit, and that he would transform us so that we would grow to actually be like him. To love like he loves, to live like he lives, to suffer like he suffered, maybe even to die like he died, and then to genuinely, literally, rise to new life like he rose to new life. And right now you don’t have to look very hard at Emma to see that he’s really doing that. She’s not just throwing money at the problem – neither did Jesus. She’s coming alongside real people in their pain and brokenness and joining in with their vulnerability, so that she can love them and help them – so does Jesus.

That’s all I have to say really! (But if you just from this short thing are feeling anywhere near as stirred up by it as me and Rachael are, and you think you’d like to support Emma by praying for her or in some other way, do drop me a message and I can put you in touch.) So yeah, I hope that helps put some flesh on the bones of that poem – do please feel free to share it and this with anyone and everyone who you think might appreciate it!