Christ has no body but yours,
            No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
            Yours are the eyes with which he looks
            Compassion on this world,
            Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
            Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

With Christ’s hands, we pick up the shards one at a time; we do what God has called us to, in all that we do.

But if we are to effectively respond to God’s call on our lives in the vocations that are ours, there is something we must do first.  We must listen, and not only once, but continually.  God calls, and we must listen attentively to that call.  A world around us calls, and we must listen attentively if we are to be God’s hands and feet serving the world in its need.  This seems painfully obvious, but in our modern wired, technology saturated, media-glut age with our nanosecond attention spans, how often do we hear what we think we heard without listening to what was actually spoken?  For our day especially, listening is an under-practiced discipline, but one that is necessary if we are to be faithful and effective in our acts of service to the Kingdom and its King.

This month we focus on the daily work of healthcare providers.  Their work perhaps best exemplifies the importance of the practice of listening.  We can be grateful for the thoughtful, skillful, and compassionate care doctors, nurses, and technicians provide daily to the broad spectrum of men, women, and children in need.  Indeed, from a vocational perspective, having hands that bring healing and wholeness is tremendously honorable and redemptive work in God’s world.  Yet we can all think of instances, either from our own experiences or those of our family and friends, when it seemed that a healthcare provider just didn’t seem to be listening.  And when we find ourselves in these situations, frustration and anxiety enter in, and it seems that the healing of the world has abated if only slightly.

And so, The Washington Institute has asked four health professionals to reflect on the ways they think about listening as part of their daily work: Dr. Ryan Buchholz, Internist and Pediatrician; Dr. Curt Thompson, Psychiatrist; Eden Garber, Family Nurse Practitioner; and Dr. Larry Bergstrom, Internal Medicine Physician.  May they be an example and an encouragement to all of us as we diligently listen and respond to our own callings in our own lives.

-Jay Bilsborrow, Web Editor

Four Reflections

On the Auscultation of the Heart by Dr. Ryan Buchholz

Are You Listening by Dr. Curt Thompson

Listening Is Not Hearing by Eden Garber

Listening in Medicine by Dr. Larry Bergstrom

Something was terribly wrong, at the earliest possible moment in my medical career.  It was a moment of crisis for me on an otherwise ordinary weeknight more than a decade ago.  Just after I had begun medical school, the medical equipment salesman had brought his wares to our classroom one fall evening.  Every one of my medical school classmates was testing out otoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, and stethoscopes.  Here I was–the recipient of a new, highly starched white coat with my name embroidered on it–and I couldn’t hear my own heart beat!  There must have been a terrible mistake when they had admitted me to medical school, I felt certain.

Embarrassed and not a little insecure, I found a classmate nearby who pointed out that I had put in the stethoscope earpieces backwards.  I turned the stethoscope around, and to my great relief, there were my heart sounds.  At last I could hear the “lub-dub” that my professors told me to listen for.  Thus began my career in cardiac auscultation (from the Latin auscultare, meaning “to listen”)–rather inauspiciously.

A dozen years later at the Upper Cardozo Health Center in Washington, DC–where I practice primary care pediatrics and internal medicine–many of the families I care for are members of the working class, uninsured or underinsured, and are either immigrants or are the children of immigrants.  Their stories–indeed, their heart cries–have challenged my auscultation skills, and they expose some important shortcomings in my repertoire of diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

Laura is the Salvadoran mother of David, a five-year-old boy with severe asthma.  She cannot bear to tell her wheezing son that his Guatemalan father was detained two days ago and is scheduled to be deported soon.  So she confides in me, bursting into tears as soon as she steps into the exam room.  “What should I do?” she asks desperately.  “My son keeps asking, ‘Where is daddy?’  I cannot tell him what happened, but neither do I want to lie to him.”

How do I auscultate the sound of a heart that is breaking?  What diagnosis should I make?  This is no mere asthma exacerbation.  And what treatment should I recommend?  An inhaled bronchodilator medication is wholly insufficient.  The best I can come up with is to write a simple letter addressed “to whom it may concern,” outlining David’s health concerns and the potential impact of the loss of his father.

Santos is a 36-year-old married father of two who works in the kitchen of a local restaurant.  One day he tells me that he cannot cope with the fact that for the first time, he forgot to call his eight-year-old son back in El Salvador on his birthday.  In fact, the stress of being physically disconnected and apart from his children bothers him so much that he cannot sleep at night, and he suspects that it is straining his already fragile marriage.  A mere prescription for medication is unlikely to solve Santos’s problems.  Active listening, or reflecting back his concerns to him in his native Spanish, may be a helpful, if humble, start.  But it is incomplete.  My stethoscope is rendered nearly useless.

When patients approach me with psychosocial concerns, oftentimes I feel unprepared to evaluate and treat them in a manner that truly comprehends or attends to the cries of their hearts.  It is easier for me to latch on to my stethoscope than it is to hear out their concerns directly by being fully present, just as it is easier to define their problems in medical terms (palpitations, insomnia, asthma exacerbation, or adjustment disorder), than it is for me to put into practice the adage of the 19^th-century German physician Rudolf Virchow, who said that “physicians are the natural attorneys for the poor.”

In this era when as a clinician I tend to be driven to distraction (text and e-mail messages, phone calls, and pages abound; the electronic health record diverts my eyes from the patient and onto the screen), it is possible to hurriedly rush through dozens of patient encounters in a given day–yet still run late for almost every one of them!

Recently I found hopeful insight in the advice of the late Russian Orthodox archbishop and physician Anthony Bloom, from his 1970 book “Beginning to Pray.”  He writes of his work with patients on pp. 88-89:

You can simply be concerned with the person or task that is in front of you, and when you have finished, you will discover that you have spent half the time doing it, instead of all the time you took before; yet you have seen everything and heard everything…

Once you have learned not to fidget, then you can do anything, at any speed, with any amount of attention and briskness, without having the sense of time escaping you or catching up with you.  It is like the feeling…of…when you are on holiday, with all your holiday ahead of you.  You can be quick or slow, without any sense of time, because you are only doing what you are doing…

It is time to focus on the person in front of me.  I’m all ears.

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Dr. Ryan Buchholz practices primary care pediatrics and internal medicine at the Upper Cardozo Health Center in Washington D.C.

It’s never fun to be confronted with your own deafness.  Especially as a psychiatrist, whose work is allegedly grounded in listening.  But in that moment I was reminded—again—of my frailty, and the deep reality that listening to others begins with the hard work of listening to myself and to God, and of what happens when I don’t.  Listening to myself requires, first, the challenging effort of paying attention to what I am paying attention to—my sensations, feelings, images, and thoughts, even as they shift, blend, or collide at various paces throughout the day.  These activities of the mind are the ingredients out of which emerge memory, emotion, and perceptions that shape moment-to-moment choices, many of which are—albeit willful—non-conscious in nature.  When I ignore these features of my mind, I give my less mature brain more control of my behavior.  The part that tends to react to events of the day more impulsively and with a greater interest in its own comfort than that of those around it—as my patient helpfully revealed.  Thus, even when ostensibly listening to someone else, I can end up responding not to what they are really feeling and saying, but more so to what I am feeling, missing them altogether.

When I intentionally attune to the cacophony of voices vying for my attention, I become more consciously observant—without judgment—of their presence.  I am then more able to gently (and again, without judgment) allow those sensations to pass out of awareness, creating space for God’s voice to be heard more clearly.  The voice that reminds me that I am his child in whom he is pleased—as is the one to whom I am listening.  The voice that bids me to wait quietly and confidently for his Spirit to work, taking in not only what my patient, friend, wife, or child is saying, but sensing what they are sensing; feeling what they are feeling; even imagining what they are imagining.  And then bids me to respond from a place of restraint rather than impulsivity.  A place of invitation rather than demand.  A place of containment and safety rather than chaos and danger.  In so doing, God enlarges space for creativity both in me and in the one to whom I listen, creativity that eventually leads to justice, mercy, and peace.

Unlike hearing, which requires no conscious learning or practice to become proficient, listening takes hard work.  Hearing is effortless, requiring only the passive response of an intact auditory nerve to the stimulus of molecular movement.  Not so, listening.  But practices such as centering prayer, meditation on Scripture and beauty, and being part of a community of good listeners will lead not only to better listening.  It will lead to an integrated life.  A peaceful life.  A beautiful life.  Can you hear it?  Are you listening?

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Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist and author of Anatomy of the Soul.

Three years into being a family nurse practitioner, I have indeed sharpened the disciplines we practiced back in that art gallery.  I can remember many of my diagnostic victories: catching an ectopic pregnancy, discovering newborn cataracts, recognizing complex hormonal disorders.  Listening openly to a person’s story, looking at the body, and quickly focusing questions, can lead to a good diagnosis and a successful treatment.  This is exhilarating.

In my particular work setting, however, “family practice” is heavily weighted towards the older adult with many chronic diseases: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, lung disease and arthritis are my stock in trade.  I do very little “healing,” in the way that we remember Jesus healing paralytics or lepers.  For these people there is not much I can do to help their bodies; I can educate them about the pathologies and their treatment choices, and I can extend their lives through tailoring medications to slow the progression of their diseases.  But when they cannot quit smoking, eat well, or exercise their bodies, then I expect they will only continue to feel worse and worse, at least physically.  How do I help my patients to feel better, then, if I don’t expect them to get better?

If you leave your primary care provider’s office feeling that he or she has heard you and taken your concerns and anxieties seriously, then regardless of your physical prognosis, you will likely feel better.  As the care provider, my mind is buzzing with my own agenda for each visit—preventative care, like mammograms and tobacco cessation counseling, how to best address a slow rise in cholesterol or blood pressure, ranking my patient’s concerns in terms of actual risk and effects on daily living.  If I can show a person that I hear her though, through my demeanor, questions, and physical exam, then she will leave feeling comforted.

Listening and hearing are my most effective treatments.  I cannot fix low back pain brought on by a lifetime of obesity, nor the pest-infested apartment, the abusive relative, or the violent neighborhood.  I can try to show someone that she is worthy of attention, though, that someone else cares about her troubles, and that she is a valuable person.  In the long run, I don’t know if or how exactly my listening changes lives.  I do know, however, that God cares for my patients more than I do, and that they can cast their cares onto me only because I can cast my cares—and theirs—onto Him.

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Eden Garber is a family nurse practitioner.

Most of the patients I see have had every test in the book; many of them have had tests repeated over and over even though the results are normal.  My diagnostic and therapeutic tool is listening.  It is the one “test” they have not had during all their evaluations.  I ask them about their present health issues but also about what their lives are like with the disease.  My appointments are two hours long which may seem extraordinary but often times is barely enough to let patients tell their stories from beginning to end.  Rarely do I find a patient with chronic pain or fatigue who does not have a story that goes back even into childhood of physical and sexual abuse, neglect, fear, abandonment etc.  At least half of the women that I see in my practice were sexually abused as children and at least a quarter of them have never told anyone before, and virtually none have ever been asked by their doctor about it.  Daniel Seigel M.D., advocate of “interpersonal neurobiology” calls this “feeling felt.”  The patient needs to feel that someone else truly understands what they are experiencing, and once that happens they begin to heal.

There is not a bright line that separates our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.  For chronic health problems, each area is important to help a person become well.  There are no blood tests that give the answer, only talking and listening.

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Dr. Larry Bergstrom is a general internist who practices integrative medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Through His Holy Spirit, God has called us into communion with Him, and though our feelings can be muddled and our thoughts unclear, Rev. John Yates in this sermon delivered on April 29, 2012 at The Falls Church explains that even when we find ourselves speechless and tongue-tied before the throne of Heaven, the Spirit perfectly intercedes for us making just the right request of the Father for us, and we can take comfort in knowing that the Father always answers the Spirit’s requests.

May this sermon be a comfort and an encouragement for us all.

Sermon Links

To listen to the audio, follow this link.

For a PDF of the sermon, click here.

(Photo courtesy of Roma Flowers)

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The Rev. Dr. John W. Yates II has been the Rector of The Falls Church in Falls Church, Virginia since 1979.

(Dr. Steven Garber deliered this commencement address at Geneva College on Saturday, May 5, 2012)

President Smith, respected trustees, gifted faculty and staff, distinguished guests, and especially honored graduates and their much-loved families, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today.  In the mysteries of heaven and history, generations of graduates watch and listen this day, a cloud of witnesses that they are, hoping for us as we take up this 164th commencement ceremony of Geneva College.

Imagine following the Beaver River down into the Ohio, and then upstream past Ambridge and Sewickley, finally to the place where the great river is born from the two rivers. Along the Allegheny are several grand public spaces, two of them for Pittsburgh’s sports teams.  Last summer I spent a very interesting day between those two stadiums.

From morning to night I met with a group of people whose vision I helped form some years ago.  We call ourselves theWedgwood Circle, and its vision is focused on cultural renewal.  Believing the culture is upstream from politics, we have drawn together people from the world of the arts—the storytellers of our society in film, in music, in art galleries, in television, in theater–and from the world of industry and philanthropy as well, asking the question, “What would happen if we invested in the culture together? What if we cared about history together, about the way the world turns out?”  Not easy questions, and not easy answers.

That day I had the privilege of speaking to the group about our vision, and why it matters, but the privilege was mostly that I did so alongside John Perkins, a man whom I first met here atGenevain the 1970s.  Some of you know him well, as he is a hero to all of us who care about justice rolling down like a river, especially so in light of our long and tragic stumbling over race in American life; what the writer Wendell Berry has called “the hidden wound” of our life together.

Alongside courses in the history and philosophy of science and seminars in film criticism, in my last year as an undergraduate I gave much of my time to planning a conference we called “Reshaping the American Dream.”  1976 was the Bicentennial Year and it seemed to me that Geneva Colleges hould take the lead in rethinking our history and our mission as Americans.  Audacious?  I suppose.  Arrogant, I’m not sure.  But hopeful, definitely.

As the 1960s became the 1970s, as the counter-culture merged in and out of the culture, many in my generation were rethinking everything.  We dreamed dreams about the way world ought to be.  One of those we invited to speak at our conference was John Perkins, the Mississippi native that he is, the African American that he is, the son of sharecroppers that he is, the courageous visionary that he is, who joined others in helping us think through who we are and who we needed to be, if we were to take our part in “reshaping the American dream.”  When all was said and done, the world did not change dramatically—which was a disappointment.

But years later, I am still dreaming dreams.  And that I do took me into a day of conversation in the inner sanctum of the Pirates stadium, with people from across the country, each one committed to the responsibility of cultural renewal.  Some were business people, some were city planners, some were clergy, some were journalists, some were philanthropists, some were artists, and together we spent a day doing the hard work of seeing what might be done, of seeing what we might do to take responsibility for the way the world turns out.

As good as that day was, the night was even better.  We walked across the large parking lots between where the Pirates and the Steelers play their games, and along with thousands upon thousands went to the U2 concert.  Have you ever been?  They are amazing phenomena, grand and magnificent and artful.  And perhaps surprising to some, there is even something majestically, mysteriously graceful in a U2 concert—and Pittsburgh as Pittsburgh was there to witness a little bit of heaven touching earth for a summer evening.  Looking at the crowd gathered under the towering Mt. Washington, it felt as if the whole city was in Heinz Field, rocking and rolling along with Bono and his band, taking part in the final concert of the biggest tour in music history.

Listening to him that night I was once again reminded of the unusual gift that is his, viz. he sings songs that are shaped by the truest truths of the universe, but in language that the whole world can understand.

Can you?  Have you learned to do that?  In these years at Geneva, has that been what your learning has been about?  Have you learned to think so clearly about the vision of the kingdom that you have developed a proper confidence in your ability to translate, so that those who do not think like you and believe like you, still might be persuaded by you?  When you commence from here on into the world, will you be able to enter into the vocations and the occupations that your disciplines have prepared you to take up, with the skills of heart and mind you will need to sing songs that the whole world can hear?

It is an important question for undergraduates, wherever they may be found.  Some years ago I spent a week in Chicago, lecturing between the University of Chicago and Wheaton College, in both schools meeting seriously Christian students.  They are two very different institutions with two very different histories in two very different parts of the city.  The longer I listened in both places though, the more sure I was that the students needed to know each other, to listen to each other.  They needed to understand that while the social settings of their educations were profoundly different—the one an almost Ivy League education founded on a great books curriculum with deeply secular intent, and the other a faithful vision of Christian learning with everything, everything, in place to support students in their vocations as students—my reading was that they would face a common challenge when they finished, viz. would they be able to graduate and make sense of faith in the face of the intellectual and sociological challenges of a pluralist and pluralizing world?

Do you hear that question?  Do you understand that challenge?  It is one thing to study hard in one’s undergraduate years, even to think things through carefully and critically in light of faith, but it is something else altogether to take up the next years of life in the push-and-shove of a secularizing society, still making sense of what you believe and why you believe what you believe.  Many do not make it.  In thousands of very different ways they fail to develop the habits of heart that will sustain them as adolescence becomes adulthood, as they move from being kids to having kids, as they move from dorms to houses, as they move from paying tuition to paying taxes.  Everything becomes more complex.

That is not terrible, even if it is sobering on a day of glory such as this.  I honor its glory—we all do.  But the days that follow, the twenty-something years that become the thirty-something years, are what wise observers call the valley of the diapers.  They are the settling-into-life years, where we begin to buy cars and houses and washing machines.  There is a wonder to all of that, but there is also a harder face.  Will we coherently connect what we believe with how we live?  Especially so as we take up our lives in the secularizing, pluralizing, globalizing world that is ours?  That is not only a question for students at the University of Chicago and at Wheaton College, but it is yours as well, almost graduates of Geneva College that you are.

This question of belief and behavior, of worldview and way of life, of doctrine and discipleship, is a question I began asking atGeneva in my very first semester.  By unusual grace, Dr. Robert Tweed allowed me into an upper division seminar in New Testament themes.  In almost every way I did not belong.  And yet, week-by-week we would read, and we would talk through our reading in his office in an old home that is now gone, somewhere up on the ridge between here and Old Main.

Over the course of the semester each one came to know and love the Bible more fully, even as we came to know and love our professor more personally.  That is always the best of education—the very best of a Geneva education—the mysterious place where the one who is teaching loves both what he is teaching and whom he is teaching.  Our final project was to be from a Pauline epistle, and I chose Romans 12, the first few verses.  Somewhat innocently as I look back, and yet clearly providential, as it was the first time that I saw the centrality of the relationship between belief and behavior, what another teacher, Francis Schaeffer, once called the critical connection of “the orthodoxy of doctrine and the orthodoxy of practice.”

That opened a door for me that has never closed.  When I finally finished at Geneva I was still following that question, and through the years of my masters and doctoral studies, I kept asking and answering that same question through the long labor of love that learning is.  And now, most of my life later, it is still at the heart of my vocation, a question that became my calling.

I will say this gently, even if plainly: for as good as four years of college can be, for as hard as four years of college can be, the years that follow will be both: wonderfully wonderful in ways that you have not yet imagined, and horribly hard in ways that you have not imagined either.  The years will be both, joy and sorrow twined together in hundreds of different ways, embodied in the lives of each one of you.  It cannot be other than that.  In marriage and family, in work and worship, in the range of your relationships and responsibilities from the most personal to the most public, it will not be other than joy and sorrow twined together in the now-but-not-yet world that is ours.

Who will you be?  What will matter to you?  How will you work out what you have learned in the way that you live?  Will you become men and women marked by the coherence of the kingdom?  By a deeply graceful seamlessness between what you say matters most, and what in fact does?  Will your educations be the light onto the path of your vocations, offering contours that make sense of what you do and why you do it, of where you live and with whom you live?

We all hope so.  In fact we are here today to stand with you, hoping with you and for you as you leave the Beaver vale, entering into the villages and cities of the world.

What will be the core of your calling as you do so?  What will be at the very center of your life?  While we might gladly settle with the answers of Westminster and its catechism, I want to set another vision before you today.  It comes from the prophet Jeremiah, speaking to the exiled people of God who were singing their songs along the rivers of Babylon.  Always longing, sometimes weeping, they sang their songs, waiting in hope, living in hope.  “How long, O Lord, how long….”

And into their longing the word of the Lord came through Jeremiah, “Seek the flourishing of the city.  Pray for it.  Build houses.  Plant trees.  Get married and have children.  Know that when the city flourishes, you will flourish.”   In many ways, they are difficult words to hear.  Babylon was the capitol city of the conquering kingdom, the political face of a way of life that stood against God.  Thousands of years later Babylon is in our ears the most iconically pagan city we know.  Babylon of all places!  Seek its flourishing?  What could that possibly mean?

This is not a sermon today, but I do want you to hear these words of Jeremiah, words that echo across centuries and cultures, from pre-modern peoples to very modern, perhaps even postmodern peoples.  They represent a vision of human flourishing that is as true for the exiles from Jerusalem as it is for the graduates of Geneva.  Seek the flourishing of the cities that will be yours, and know that as those cities flourish, you will flourish, human beings will flourish.

Simply said, it is a vision of vocation for the common good, seeking the shalom of cities in and through our vocations.  The word “flourish” that Jeremiah uses is the word “shalom”—the world as it ought to be, in every way.  In business and engineering, in the arts and education, in law and medicine, in neighborhoods and towns small and large, in this society and all over the world.  Always and everywhere it is a vision of vocation for the common good—for Babylon, of all places.

In my work in The Washington Institute we speak often of common grace for the common good.  The best theology understands that God alone is the savior; we do not save ourselves.  His grace is always amazing grace, and a saving grace it is.  But the whole of life is his gift, what we call ordinary or common graces.  Families that love us, dogwoods that blossom, the sun that shines, highways that are safe, laws that are just, surgeries that heal, a bowl of ice cream late at night and a cup of Earl Grey tea in the morning—common graces each one.  They do not save us, they cannot save us, but they are graces to us, gifts of God to us.

Our lives are to be common grace for the common good.  Whether we teach kindergarten or advanced calculus, whether we build cabinets or buildings, whether we listen to the hurts of trafficked women or of aging parents, whether we counsel high school students or multinational corporations, whether we write computer code or novels, whether we bandage the wounds of little ones or surgically repair their broken bones, whether we make wills or make laws, we are to be common grace for the common good.

The vision of Pro Christo et Patria is one worthy of your life, signed into the very seal of Geneva as it is.  The words assume that Jesus who alone is Lord calls his people into every square inch of the whole of reality, giving ourselves away to the hope of history, seeking the flourishing of cities and countries and cultures the world over.  For Christ’s sake, pro Christo— for the city, for the country, for the culture.  Common grace for the common good.

That was the word of the Lord for Daniel—exile from Jerusalem that he was—whose vocation was to serve three despots, three mercurial rulers who wanted his wisdom for thinking through the complex social, political and economic responsibilities of the day.  For most of his life, that was Daniel’s life, a vocation for the common good of his society.  Agricultural policy, military strength, highway construction, water resources, political administration—the stuff of life for ordinary people in ordinary places, whether in Babylon or Beaver Falls.

That is to be our life, butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers that we will be.  With a smile I will say what all of you already know: most of us will not be Bono singing his songs along the three rivers ofPittsburgh, “How long, how long, O Lord, do we have to sing this song?” That summer night scores of thousands joined him in that ancient Hebrew psalm, somehow hearing their own hearts in his heart.  But his work is his work, and we have ours.  We have our own songs to sing.

• Will you have learned so well what is yours to have learned here along this Beaver River, that you will be able to translate the truest truths of the universe so that people who do not think like you and believe like you, still might be persuaded by you of what is right and just and fair?
• Will you be someone who takes the long calling of Jeremiah and Daniel into the 21^st-century, seeking the flourishing of the city?
• Will you find your way into a vision of vocation for the common good?
• Will you be able to sing your song so that the whole world can hear?

May it be so in hundreds of wonderfully different ways, honored graduates that you are.

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Dr. Steven Garber is Founder and Principal of the Washington Institute and author of The Fabric of Faithfulness.

My friend Jonathan Chan has spent the last few years working for Haiti Partners, an organization which contributes to the work of Haitian educational and economic development.  The emotional and spiritual reality of Haiti’s story is perhaps best captured through Kent Annan’s Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle and After Shock.  Below, Jonathan Chan shares his impressions of what it means to be part of God’s plan for “one of the least” of the nations.

Jay Bilsborrow:  How do you understand your work with Haiti Partners as being part of God’s mission in the world? Why is that important?

Jonathan Chan:   It seems like many in the evangelical world are recapturing this sense of how we play a role in God’s cosmic mission of redemption and restoration, not only of our own sinful lives, but in every sphere of this broken world.  And so I’d say that we see our work to help Haitians change Haiti by empowering schools and churches to transform their communities as part of God’s restoring and reconciling mission that’s talked about in 2 Corinthians 5 and Colossians 1.

But it’s not just about our motivation and goals, it also has to be about the way that we work.  All too often we see foreigners with good intentions doing their work in a way that actually only increases the brokenness in Haiti.  We look at these poor people, and subconsciously, we think that they need us to fix these problems for them.  So we work in ways that aren’t culturally appropriate, create unhealthy dependencies, and don’t address long-term problems.  Not only is that something that doesn’t work in the empirical sense, as so many experts and practitioners in development will tell you, that’s not the way that God tells us he accomplishes his restoring work in the world.  Paul says in I Corinthians 1:26-29:

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called.  Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.  But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.  God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.

For us, we strive to make that one of the primary guiding principles of our work.  It’s Haitians that are going to change Haiti, not those of us coming from the outside.  So in the mission of God for Haiti, we see our role as being facilitators and supporters, creating the space, inviting participation, finding resources, supporting this work of restoration that begins and ends with God, and that’s been primarily entrusted to our Haitian colleagues.  And that’s not an altogether natural thing for us as Americans, and for me in particular.  There’s always this impulse within me to be the one in control, the one leading the charge, the one who gets the glory.  But that’s not the way Christ would have it, that’s not the way that he worked and still works today.  So I’m blessed that our staff culture is one marked by humility and respect, one that dignifies and empowers everyone, regardless of skill set and background.

Jay:  What specifically is the work that Haiti Partners does in order to contribute to the work of restoration in Haiti?

Jonathan:  As our name implies, our model is based on one of partnership and collaboration.  We partner with Haitian-owned and operated schools to support operating budgets, provide teacher training, facilitate a more open, democratic leadership structure, and start social businesses that will enable them to be financially self-sufficient.  This network of partner schools, along with a Children’s Academy and teacher training center that we’re building, is an incubator for new ideas and practices that we believe could shift the paradigm of education in Haiti to one that emphasizes student-centered learning, democratic leadership, and financial self-sufficiency.  We’re working with churches to distribute 10,000 Bibles in Haitian Creole every year, and providing resources and training to pastors and lay leaders in group Bible Study, prayer, theological discussion, and community development.  This past September, we just added an initiative called Micah Scholars, to impact the next generation of church leaders in Haiti.  We’re providing 15 full scholarships every year for church leaders to go to a Haitian seminary, and then they’re getting involved in the work we do with churches, providing a holistic training for ministry of the Word, of compassion, and of justice.

Jay:  It sounds like evangelism is not the exclusive focus of Haiti Partners, but that your work is much larger than that.  Some Christians who subscribe to a 2-chapter Gospel might not see the educational work that you are doing as being valuable in itself.  How do you understand the work of Haiti Partners as fitting into the larger Biblical metanarrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration?

Jonathan:  The 4-chapter Gospel is really the only way to see the full story of Haiti.  We have to start with creation, with the imago dei, and with a God who makes a beautiful and bountiful Earth, because that’s what we see in Haiti.  The soil there was so rich, Haiti produced more sugar and coffee than the rest of the world combined for most of the 1700s.  But then Haiti becomes a bit of ground zero for the Fall.  The French create an economy built on the backs of 800,000 slaves, a total affront to the imago dei.  There’s environmental degradation on a catastrophic scale from deforestation and over-farming. The long history of oppression and authoritarian rule, first and foremost by foreign powers, but also by Haitian leaders, really exacerbates distrust, antagonism, and injustice in Haitian society.  Poverty and oppression break down people’s internal sense of their God-given dignity, empowerment, and respect.  These effects of the Fall, they don’t exist apart from our broken relationship with God, they’re intertwined with it.  And so we have to approach this holistically, because we believe in a holistic creation, and a holistic restoration.

Jay:  As Christians, we believe that beginning with Christ’s death and resurrection and through the Holy Spirit’s continued work in the world since Pentecost, God is slowly redeeming and restoring the world.  When we look at Haiti though, it can be hard to imagine that redemption and restoration is actually possible.  What gives you reason to believe that it is possible?

Jonathan:  First and foremost, it’s Christ.  Incarnated into our world, showing us the perfect way to live, crucified for our sins, and resurrected to bring us into new life.  Sin and death have already been conquered.  And so we know that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, because Christ sits on the throne of the universe and he bends it that way.  And also, the common grace that I see so many Haitians demonstrate, caring for each other, showing hospitality, pressing on in the face of challenges and hardship.

Jay:  Haiti can seem like such a dark place.  In what ways do you find yourself pushing back against the darkness?

Jonathan:  Really, it’s not me pushing back against the darkness.  This goes back to the previous question, I find hope for restoration because our Haitian colleagues are pushing back the darkness.  I think of our colleague Enel, who directs our work with churches and seminaries.  He’s such an example of perseverance and hope despite the challenges.  He was injured in the earthquake, on the 3^rd story of a 6 story building that collapsed.  He was back in action within weeks (you can read more of this story in After Shock), and he always tells me “Don’t be discouraged in your work, for the work that we do in the Lord is not in vain”, quoting I Corinthians 15:58.  There are so many others, Benaja, Abelard, Frantzie, Madame Do, our co-directors Kent and John, I can’t list them all, but they’re pushing back the darkness, making a difference.  Then there’s our administrative staff, working overtime to get the job done, volunteers who are faithful to the work, supporters who are faithful in giving what they can, I could go on.  So no, it’s not really me pushing back against the darkness at all.  It’s the light that I see, in Christ, manifested in so many others, that’s doing that.

(Photo courtesy of B Pete)

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Jonathan Chan is Partnership Coordinator of Haiti Partners.

But Stephanie Gehring, in a recent interview with Comment Magazine, insists that “saying ‘there is not enough time’ is heresy.”  Stephanie, a woman of many artistic capabilities, has honed an attentiveness to the world that operates at a slower speed and which allows her “to see what is really there.”  She is one who has eyes to see that Common Grace abounds.

Read the whole interview here, and may her perspective on life give your soul a fresh breath of air today.

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Jay Bilsborrow is the Program Coordinator for The Washington Institute and one of the Capital Fellows at McLean Presbyterian Church.

But one day in college, I formulated what I thought was a brilliant, or at least thought provoking, question.  And so I systematically polled the guys on my cross country team with the following query:

“You meet the woman of your dreams, and she is everything, and I mean everything you’re looking for in a woman—gorgeous, fun, great conversationalist, and etcetera—except…she’s a robot.  Would that be a deal breaker?”

Now of course, a question like this requires a bit of qualification.  No, she wouldn’t look like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz—she would have a normal, physical body, except with an artificial robot brain.  And no, she wouldn’t be a lifeless automaton—her computer programming would be so fine-tuned that in every way, she would mimic genuine human behavior.  Basically, if she didn’t tell you she was actually a robot, you wouldn’t know.  The only difference would be that in her mind, she wouldn’t be real—just one’s and zero’s.

Little did I realize that I had unleashed a social thought experiment that would sweep my hyper-geeky campus like wildfire.  The mantra became, “Pro-bot, or no-bot?”

Slightly over half of my team was pro-bot (i.e. they would be fine with a robot girlfriend or wife).  The women’s team was more no-bot.  And I hear that those who frequented the bars just off campus tended to lean more heavily pro-bot.  Material reductionists, who believe that human experience essentially consists of the activity of axons and synapses in the brain, tended to see no difference between a human brain and a robot brain—pro-bot.  Theists, who acknowledged the reality of the supernatural, tended to think that a robot brain would lack something essentially human, call it a soul or a spirit—no-bot.  And people who weren’t sure what to think fell somewhere in between.

Reading this, you might think that such an inquiry is silly, or at least, you might assume that real people in the real world don’t operate with such assumptions.

And so it is that I find Sherry Turkle’s piece from April 21^st of the New York Times, “The Flight From Conversation,” to be most fascinating.  A psychologist and professor at M.I.T., she has spent years studying the sociological implications of electronic media and communication devices on human lifestyle and culture.  And with keen insight she comments on the phenomena of the digital age.  With our iPhones and iPads, texting and Facebook posting and Twitter tweeting, she argues that “we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.”  She argues:

“In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.”

Maybe we would prefer to have robot friends and lovers after all.  Based on her research and interviews, Turkle would seem to agree.

But as my friend Matt and I have taken to saying this year, “We’re pushing back against the Beavis and Butthead’s of the world!”  Yes, I’m pushing back.  I desire genuine conversations and meaningful relationships with real, flesh-and-blood people.  We’re fond of wearing masks that project an image to the world of who we want people to think we are, but I’d rather we burn the masks.

We are not our marketed Internet profiles, or our carefully edited tweets and texts.  Turkle says that “it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.”  That’s the kind of person I want to be, and those are the kind of people I want to know.

If there is one thing I have especially learned this year, it is the importance of living coherently and being self-aware of the subtle things I do everyday.  Because as James K. A. Smith says, the things we do, ultimately do something to us as well.  Liturgies shape us and form us, even the liturgies of the digital age.

I confess that I have explored online dating websites, and like everyone else, I have a Facebook page.  I even recently—finally—purchased a text plan for my phone (in some ways I’m slowly crawling into the 20^th century), but as I discern what it means to live authentically in the modern world, I need to continually ask myself everyday, “Pro-bot, or no-bot?”

By the way, I prefer no-bot.

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Jay Bilsborrow is the Program Coordinator for The Washington Institute and one of the Capital Fellows at McLean Presbyterian Church.