Birgitta Almeby

I hardly knew her. A Swedish missionary who has been serving in Lahore for 39 years with the Full Gospel Assembly, an indigenous Pakistani Christian church group. We might have met on a few occasions during our time in Pakistan, at a Board meeting or at a school or church function.

I was shocked to read that this week she was attacked and shot, though not fatally, at her front door by two men on a motorcycle. She is 71. Dawn, the Pakistan newspaper had this to say :

“According to the Swedish lady’s maid and some of her neighbours, Ms Almeby had just reached her residence when two motorcyclists appeared on the scene and fired a shot at her. The assailants fled from the crime scene without taking any valuables which showed that it was not a street crime, as was being portrayed by some policemen. Ms Almeby had been living in Pakistan for the last 38 years and was looking after social programmes of the NGO she worked for and had nothing to do with politics.”

In a week or so the news story will no doubt, be buried among a host of other crimes, injustices and acts of cowardly terrorism.

This, along with the shooting of 15 year old Malala Yousafzai, in Mingora, in the Swat Valley October 9th strikes me as the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the cowardly acts of bravado of today’s terrorists. No need to target heavily guarded army generals or political leaders, if you can get away with gunning an old retired spinster or a young schoolgirl and still create a climate of fear in the common people. Makes me angry.

But in the end, history proves that this kind of violence has a way of backfiring on the perpetrators and ends up doing more in service of the causes that the gun is trying to silence than against them. As we sing once again at year’s end “Peace on Earth, good will to men” may it indeed, be so.

Dying and Behold we Live

 This must have been my week for watching movies about condemned men on Death Row.... (and then subsequent thinking and meditating on sin and hell and judgment and repentance and forgiveness and such like as well). First off, I found the full movie of “Dead Man Walking” with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, and glorious music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn on the soundtrack on youtube, of all places. ** Yes, all 2 hours of it. Well worth watching. I always thought that that movie was about a terrible miscarriage of justice, like one of those John Grisham novels. But, as it turns out, the Sean Penn character killer is totally guilty of murder of the first degree, but the film is about how he finds the release of confession and repentance and redemption through his relationship with the Susan Sarandon prison visitor character.

Then, I looked for  “The Green Mile” with Tom Hanks, and big man Michael Clarke Duncan, who died earlier this year. You can’t get the full movie on youtube, but a short clip of one of the last interactions between Hanks’ warden and the gentle giant inmate John Coffey (like the coffee, just not spelt the same) is worth finding ***. Hanks ask the prisoner whether he ought help him escape, because how can he face God on judgment day, when he’s asked how it was that he helped kill one of God’s “true miracles”. Coffey answers that he’s ready to go.

“I’m tired, boss. Tired of bein' on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. Tired of not ever having me a buddy to be with, or tell me where we's coming from or going to, or why. Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world everyday. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time.”

Sometimes I feel like that these days, reading the media, and becoming angry/upset/weary with tales of miscarriages of justice, man’s inhumanity, and examples of perversity from all around. I suppose it’s a kind of a glimpse of God’s grief at sin and its effects, and in that sense, its right and proper that I feel it, but that it should impel me, not to a desire to depart, but rather to work harder for that which is right and honest and true.

** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSo5dDoXYAM&feature=fvwrel


*** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_mlS_dpp4

Time Waits for No One

The hour went back on Sunday morning. Time in reverse, as it were. Snatching a free hour from the jaws of the inexorable forward march of time. But of course it’s a virtual step backward. Like crossing the International Dateline. A longer lie in and brighter early morning run by the river is what it meant for me.

Time, much like life itself, keeps moving forward. You can’t undo the past, you can only add to it, learn from it, adapt to it, in spite of all of those science fiction “back to the future” dreams. Which makes the idea of the gospel and God’s grace so healthy and healing. because it has a way of dealing with the past while looking forward positively and definitively to the future. As it says in the book of Hebrews “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith ... we throw off everything that hinders and entangles...”

Most of us live their lives with a whole pile of regrets, unfinished business and unfulfilled hopes, and there are always things we wish we had never done, relationships we wish we had never entered into. But few of us have a sure way of deal with the baggage of the past, other than moving on and trying to put it all behind you. Most couples would rather “unmarry”, if that could be possible, than divorce. The process of undoing that which you have entered into is messy and difficult, a tearing and torn edges are always painful to look at and to touch. It would have better, we think, if we could put the clock back to our previous life and try again

Jesus, through his cross, is able to heal our past - not to change it, or make it go away - but heal it, and, in fact, grow something better and stronger out of it, so that we can move on to more positive futures.

Old Man in a Hat

A quiet night in Lisbon. The gentle sounds of laughter and clinking glasses mingle with the lapping of the water along the riverfront. I’m on my way to meet an old man in a hat and a grey suit. To hear him sing. He’s been singing and writing poetry since I was in school. The man in question is Leonard Cohen, and the occasion is a concert in the Atlantic Pavilion - a birthday present from my three kids. I’m going on my own. I know that’s a bit sad, but in some ways it’s fitting too, to drown in the melancholy of that gravelly old voice. Well, it’s not really gravelly, much smoother than that. Tom Waits is gravel. Cohen is more like a smooth grey shale, sliding down the mountainside. But it is an old voice.

Cohen, along with Dylan and Van Morrison, were the principal voices in my head, growing up in the sixties in Northern Ireland. I’m always a bit wary, however, about the prospect of seeing them perform in their old age. Don’t want to be disappointed. But this was great. Really great. Superb, in fact. Probably because, not only was he on top form, but his band - each own was a superb musician in his own right - and the backing singers - well, that’s a slight to call them backing singers. The Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie, ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1gu4YdA6tE ) and Sharon Robinson  were amazing and sang wonderfully.

Lisbon packed out the arena, and as I looked around the hall at so many fiftysomethings just like myself, I realised how, while I was lying there in my bedroom in Coleraine as a 14 year old, drifting off to “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy”, in the midst of all the political reality that was unravelling in the sixties in Northern Ireland, these men and women were going through their own personal nightmares as children during the Salazar years of dictatorship and through the 1975 revolution. Poignant then, when he sang those lines at the end of “The Partisan”
 “Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing, 
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come; Then we'll come from the shadows.”
Portugal is different now. Northern Ireland is different. But in some ways, we’re all still waiting for our freedom...

No Longer at This Address

Well, Tesco managed to mess up the delivery of a box of groceries to Colin’s latest address in Bristol. It was supposed to be a welcome box, as he has just started a new job and settled into new accommodation out there in the west country, and to remind him of parents in far distant Lisbon who were thinking of him. 

But such is the lot of students and the recently graduated. To be “of no fixed abode” for months on end and to move from pillar to post before eventually settling down into some semblance of routine, and have a place to sort of call your own.

I was reminded of this transitory lifestyle recently, by a quote I read from a German theologian, Helmut Thielicke, of the last century in an article in the Evangelical Alliance’s online magazine “Idea”.

“The Gospel must be constantly forwarded to a new address
because its recipient is constantly moving house.”

Even back in the 1950’s, he recognised how rapidly the goalposts were being shifted, and how the way we communicate the eternal truth about Jesus Christ to one generation will not work for the next. And here we are in 2012. And I don’t think we’ve learnt an awful lot in the evangelical churches, how we need to keep on re-addressing the package, so it gets to it’s destination.

And, by the way, Colin did get the groceries!

http://www.eauk.org/idea/is-there-a-theology-for-pioneering.cfm

Jesus Está Contigo

On one relaxing afternoon last month, I was sitting, minding my own business, as it were, and enjoying a coffee by a river somewhere in northern Portugal, while I browsed the weekend newspaper. My eye caught something - the title of a book - that happened to be number three in the listing of bestseller books posted by the two big book companies in Portugal, FNAC, and Bertrands. “Jesus Está Contigo” , (or in English, “Jesus is with you”) by someone called Sarah Young.

I had to go and find out what this is about. It is truly astonishing that, in our secular, cynical age, when it seems that this country, at least, has moved far beyond faith and Christianity, a book of devotions based on a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ should hit the bestseller lists like this. Normally the religion and self-help categories in the local bookstores are filled with all sorts of exotic titles on zen and yoga and so on, with maybe one or two Bibles and a biography of Pope John Paul in the corner.

So I’ve discovered that Sarah Young is a Presbyterian missionary from  America who has served with her husband in Japan and in Japanese communities in Australia. And also that the format of her book “Jesus Calling” is sort of based on an anonymous old devotional from the 1930‘s called “God Calling”, characterised by daily devotionals addressed from God to the reader in the first person singular. In fact, I remember that old devotional on my mother’s bedside table.

Now, whatever one thinks about the potential danger in presenting words and thoughts, as it were, spoken by Jesus, I cannot help but be amazed that, without any significant promotion (as far as I can see) on the part of churches or evangelicals here, this book is finding it’s way into the handbags and onto the bookshelves of thousands of Portuguese. May God use it to raise an awareness of how great, how amazing and how wonderful He really is - something that is so needed in our current spiritual climate here in Portugal. 

Portugal's Top

There’s something very inspiring about standing on the very top of Portugal. Torre, in Serra da Estrela, is the highest point in the land, if you don’t count the volcanic Mount Pico which rises straight up out of the sea on the island of Pico in the Azores.

Portugal’s generally not known as a land of mountains, ice and snow,  but up at 1,993m enough falls in the winter to warrant a couple of ski resorts, and in the height of the August summer, it’s still chilly enough with a fair wind blowing across a bare landscape of granite outcrops. I read somewhere that the reason it's called "Torre" (tower) is because King João in the early 19th Century had a tower built to bring it's height up to 2,000m. I'd need to verify that. Sounds a bit like "The Englishman who went up a hill but came down a mountain"!

Any sense of achievement we might have had in reaching Portugal’s highest point has to be offset against the realisation that we drove all the way up, rather than climbed, along with a hundred other visitors! Sorry, no walking boots this time!