Does anyone care?

I've been getting an uneasy feeling lately.

As American Christians, we claim to love the people of the world, yet we don't even seem to notice when they are dying.

There have been a lot of headlines lately when the US casualty count in Iraq hit 2000, but has anyone noticed that the civilian body count has hit an estimated 25,000?

Everywhere you turn, there are fundraisers for those impacted by Katrina. That is appropriate -- I've gladly contributed myself, and it makes sense that we should take care of our own people.

But here's my question: what about the people who are suffering from the earthquake in Pakistan? It's not even mentioned on most news programs any more. No one really knows how many have died. Some say 55,000. Some say 80,000, but no one really knows, partly because half a million people have not received ANY aid because no one has even reached them yet and the dead have not been counted.

People are dying daily from preventable diseases, such as tetanus. 3 million are without food and shelter, and winter is setting in. Due to the combined effect of the mountainous area and the roads destroyed by the earthquake, the only hope for many of these people is via helicopter, which frankly is going to require international donations both of cash and of equipment. This isn't yet a reconstruction effort, it is still a critical rescue phase. It's too late for the people who are buried, but it's not to late for many of the injured and homeless, if they are rescued before they have gangrene, and before they freeze to death, and before they starve.

Save a life today. Donate to World Vision, or to another agency that is on the scene.

But now that I've said the serious stuff, I'll mention a funny aside. In a peculiar twist of fate, I actually know the prime minister of Pakistan (not that he would remember me). Several years ago we worked together on the same computer project. I can't quite recall whether I taught him how to make his own coffee. That was before he was prime minister, of course.

Flaky Intercession

I've been reading a lot about prayer lately. I find that God knows how to work with my personality (He should, He created me!), and since I am an 'information person', he often communicates with me by causing me to want to read about something. And then somewhere down the line I start wanting to bring it into real life. So as I said, I've been reading a lot about prayer lately (and have gradually been starting to actually pray more too).

The title of this blog is from a chapter of a book by Cindy Jacobs, called Possessing the Gates of the Enemy. The subtitle is 'a training manual for militant intercession'. I like the book because it gets very practical, and moves beyond the theoretical.

For some reason, I was especially taken with the chapter Flaky Intercession, which contains warnings about things to avoid, and advice about safeguards.

The first safeguard is spiritual accountability and submission. This goes counter to the American value of independence. Cindy Jacobs stresses that intercessors (especially prophetic intercessors) need to be in relationship with a local church.

The second safeguard is having a clean heart. It is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we know best, that the tendency is to overstep and let our pride in hearing from God distort our prayers until they are manipulative or critical.

areodjarekput

Peter's comment about the Eskimo and the missionary reminded me of an interesting article I read online last week. Adam Jacot de Boinod has just written a book called The Meaning of Tingo. He studied hundreds of dictionaries in different languages, and found that the existence of unique words can actually imply something about the culture. As he puts it, "the culture of a country can be best summed up by its untranslatable words."

Anyone who has studied another language realizes that some words just can't be properly translated, because a true synonym doesn't exist. Sometimes it's because other languages simply don't need to support that much subtlety. As children, we used to go around impressing each other by boasting about how many words eskimos had for snow. I don't know where we got our information from, but it's probably true. Jacot de Boinod found that Hawaii has 47 separate words for banana. I can understand if there were separate terms for green, ripe and overripe, but I can't imagine needing 47 varieties, because I live in a place where it is not relevant.

Back to the Eskimo. "The Meaning of Tingo" cites the Inuit word "areodjarekput". Google news quotes the book as defining areodjarekput as the practice of exchanging wives for a few days to help pass the time in the long winter nights. A knowledge of the language might have helped the hapless missionary to understand the cultural norms, and be more sensitive in how he went about trying to teach a different way.

Similarly, perhaps missionaries to Bolivia should be aware that they have a word that means "I was rather too drunk last night and it's all their fault"?

I couldn't resist ordering the book. When I get it, I'll tell you if it is as interesting as it sounds.

The science of garbage disposal. How could I have missed that?

Have you seen this? It is a solar powered trash compactor. There's one across the street from the building where I work. I couldn't figure out what it was for a while. It had a 'Keep Queens Clean' poster on the side, which made it look like it had something to do with garbage or recycling, but the shape is more like a mailbox. And the solar cells on the top were puzzling. So I did a little research, and found out that this is the latest thing in garbage disposal.
For only $4,500, you too can purchase a solar powered trash compactor. The advantage is supposedly that the trash is compacted by a factor of 8. I have to warn you, though, that the lid and chute into which you feed the garbage gets pretty disgusting.

But while we are on the topic of garbage, at least it's better than the garbage cans on my side of the street, which have these attractive rounded tops, with cute little half-circles cut into them to deposit the garbage. The openings are cleverly just a tiny bit smaller than salad-bar take-out containers, thus forcing people to actually carry their garbage back to their desks rather than fill up the cute trash cans.

And that brings us to the trash can in the ladies room at church. I don't like the fact that you have to lift the lid with your hand. Doesn't that sort of defeat the fact that you just washed your hands? And if you take an extra paper towel to lift the lid with, it defeats the purpose of having the garbage can anyway, since you walk out still holding the extra paper towel.

Then there's the recycling notice we periodically get at work. The company wants to recycle all the computer printout. It's a goal I agree with, but the method never quite works. Basically, the problem is that in order to recycle the paper, it has to be separated from other kinds of garbage (such as the salad-bar containers that we carried back to our desks at lunch-time). For a while they actually gave us each two wastebaskets at our desks, that were color coded to separate recycling from garbage. I think that was too much work for the maids -- it's not as trivial as it sounds, because they have about 100 wastebaskets to empty just on one floor. So now they want people to throw only recycling paper into their desk wastebaskets, and to hand carry all other kinds of garbage to the receptacle in the central hallway.

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that I don't think 100 people will bother walking across the entire wing every time they want to throw out a soda can. But even if they solved that part, there is a more fundamental flaw. They haven't quite figured out that the maids empty all the garbage cans into the same big disposal bins for removal. It sort of reminds me of the story of the teen whose mother explained how to sort laundry before sending him to college. He carefully separated the lights and the darks, and then innocently dumped both piles into the same load.