theothegrey

Our staff team visited a Buddhist temple last week. We had an opportunity to dialogue with a Buddhist nun. Some points of interest from our tour and conversation:

- The temple we visited has started doing several things to adapt to their new Western environment. They use pews. They have a piano which they use for meditation in addition to the traditional drums and bowls.
- Our guide repeatedly emphasied that Buddhism is about cause and effect. You reap what you sow.
- Again, according to our nun guide, Buddhism does not teach people to pray for supernatural intervention. It’s a way to ask for wisdom and opportunities to do good things.
- Very few people make it to Nirvana. The nun we spoke with doesn’t expect to make it there in this lifetime.

I really enjoyed the trip and especially the time we could spend talking with the nun. She was articulate and genuinely helpful with our questions. She was a nurse for twenty years before entering monastic life, a very compassionate person. One thing, however, that struck our team was how foreign the idea of grace was to her. Our senior pastor, Dave, tried to explain grace to her. But her response to the idea was simply a denial, that the world simply doesn’t work that way.

In a little over a week, our community will be celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the cornerstone of grace in Christianity, that God sent his Son Jesus to die for humanity, bring forgiveness, and heal us of something we can’t fix on our own. Is it true that the world doesn’t work by grace? I hope my life can be a better example of how it can.

Thanks to my friend, Bing, for alerting me to this video. It uses the PC vs Mac commercial to talk about Christian culture.

The following quote caught my eye. It’s from Rich Stearns, president of World Vision.

Compared to her male counterpart, a girl growing up in the developing world is more likely to die before her fifth birthday and less likely to go to school. She is less likely to receive adequate food or health care, less likely to receive economic opportunities, more likely to be forced to marry before the age of 16, and more likely to be the victim of sexual and domestic abuse.

Girls are forced to stay home from school to work. In fact, two-thirds of the nearly 800 million illiterate people in the world are women. Only one in 10 women in Niger can read. Five hundred thousand women die every day from childbirth complications—that’s one woman every minute. Girl babies are even killed in countries where males are considered more valuable.

Women are denied property rights and inheritance in many countries. Worldwide, women own only 1 percent of the world’s property. They work two-thirds of all the world’s labor hours but earn just 10 percent of the world’s wages.

Being female, in much of our world, is not “heavenly.�

And yet, in my opinion, the single-most significant thing that can be done to “cure� extreme poverty is this: protect, educate, and nurture girls and women and provide them with equal rights and opportunities—educationally, economically, and socially. According to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan: “No tool for development is more effective than the empowerment of women.� This one thing can do more to address extreme poverty than food, shelter, health care, economic development, or increased
foreign assistance.

There is a saying in Ghana: “If you educate a man, you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a nation.� When a girl is educated, her income potential increases, maternal and infant mortality is reduced, her children are more likely to be immunized, the birth rate decreases, and HIV infection rates (especially in Africa) are lowered. She is more likely to acquire skills to improve her family’s economic stability, and she is more likely to ensure that her daughters also receive an education. Educating girls pays dividend after dividend to the whole community.

You can read the rest here.

February was an eventful month. I was in Orlando for Humana 2.0. Then, I visited Seattle for another conference. In between those trips, I was down and out with a five day fever and a nasty respiratory infection. Thanks to my good neighbor, Dr. James Toung, I was able to pump some antibiotics into my system and heal.

Lately, like everyone else it seems, I’ve been drifting into thoughts about the health of the environment. A few weeks ago I watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” I enjoyed it. I’m not a fan of Al Gore but his movie was good. I also enjoyed the latest issue of Fast Company and the article on Business 3.0 about entrepreneurial businesses tackling the world’s problems. It’s hopeful. If you read the article, be sure to click on the slideshow on “Next Best Buisness Ideas.” I especially like Idea 43. Apparently, someone in Holland has come up with the brilliant idea of embedding water pipes in the countriy’s asphalt roads. According to the Fast Company editor, if these pipes are placed in 15% of Holland’s roads it would produce more energy than the nation’s utilities!

As someone born and raised in California, environmental messages fit pretty easily into my view of the world and my beliefs about what needs changing. I lived through water shortages and for a time I learned to take three minutes showers — 1 minute rinse, 1 minute turn off water and soap, 1 minute rinse. I was taught to “give a hoot, don’t pollute” and I still find myself deeply annoyed if trash isn’t in the right place. Last week my trash can tipped over and junk spilled out into the street and on to neighboring lawns. I was compelled to pick up every last piece of litter and stick it back in my can. And, speaking of cans, I also recycle. Recycling was something my parents were really good about.

What strikes me, is that in this area of my thinking I’ve been shaped more by my Californian childhood and less from my being a follower of Jesus. My beliefs and practices are more informed by Woodsy Owl than Scripture.

Last week, I started teaching a class on the Book of Genesis. I think it’s very clear from the the first pages of Scripture that we human beings were meant to be environmentalists. God put human beings in the garden to take care of it (Gen. 2:15). I think this is part of the message we were meant to get in Genesis. To be human as God intended is to be an environmental caretaker. Scripture is certainly not silent on the issue. It’s just that most modern evangelicals have been more concerned with asking questions about darwinism and evolution when they read Genesis. But this is changing. I’m sure we’ll start hearing messages about being an ecofriendly Christian in the near future.

I’ve got a lot to learn and change in this area of my life. Even with my California upbringing, I fall pretty short. If anyone in our family is an environmentalist it would be Amy. She still keeps the three minute shower habit to conserve water. But I’m learning…

Your thoughts?

Welcome to the future.
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Hello friends!
Here’s my venture into voxtropolis. You can also find me at theothegrey.