Itsara

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments of the last post. In particular, Nathan brings up a good point that the statistics that are often thrown around are not necessarily all-inclusive, and I think we agreed that the government’s job is not necessarily to be Christ to the world.

I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that, at least for Christians, which numbers are looked at shouldn’t matter for two reasons:

1. Our generosity should be so overwhelming that it is obvious by any measure.
2. We shouldn’t care how generous other people think we are.

Of course, now I’m talking about individual giving as opposed to government aid. To the first one, Jon Fortt over at Cross says it better than I could in this post:

In these cases, I believe we Christians have to put proselytizing aside and represent Christ through our generosity. We must become the miracle we wish to see in the world, as Ghandi said.

To the second one, Jesus said it better than I could:

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Sorry for the lack of posts. We’ve had an interesting vacation. Just so you all know, the tsunamis have not affected us nor anyone we know (we’ve gotten a lot of questions about that). Fortunately, none of our relatives in Thailand live in the south. I have no idea if all of this will affect our plans at all - at the moment I doubt it. (Though we did see a headline saying over 30,000 children may have been orphaned by this).

I do find all the talk about the relative generosity of America really interesting. Words like “stingy” and “generous” are relative, so it’s hard to use them. In terms of hard numbers, of course America gives the most - because it has the most. That’s great, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if America wants to compare itself to other countries (e.g. by saying that America is the world’s “most generous nation”), then those numbers don’t really count.

I mean, let’s say Joe has $100 and Bill has $5,000 - Joe gives $1 and Bill gives $3 to some charity. Obviously Bill gave more, which is great for the charity that’s receiving, but for Bill to say he’s more generous than Joe is a little silly. That’s not to minimize what Bill has done. From the charity’s point of view, anything and everything is helpful and it really doesn’t matter where it came from or how much more there is. I’m just talking about the comparison. When we’re talking about who’s more generous than whom, percentage is all that matters.

For the world at large, this is arguable. For the Christian, Jesus answered this for us:

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny.

Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on.”

The stats I’ve seen suggest the American government is not the most generous government in the world by percentage. That is to say nothing of the American people - I haven’t seen those stats, and I don’t doubt that they are quite generous. This of course begs the question as to where a country’s charity should be coming from: the government, the individuals, or both? I might publicly think about that later, but not right now. Right now, I’ve got some things to fix on this website.

Now that you’re here, I’ll bore you with a little more explanation of the move. Some of you won’t care, and you may safely ignore much of this post.

We’ve moved from the Blogger software to WordPress - an open-source (to the non-geek, that means “free”) blogging software tool. But where Blogger hosted Itsara for free, WordPress requires that we have an existing host for the website. Ray has graciously offered to host us here at firewatching.com, which is exceedingly cool because now I have a free webhost.

The main reason for moving is that the new software offers us categories (which I’m not using yet, but I will) and a few other niceties that Blogger just doesn’t offer (though overall, I do really like and recommend Blogger for someone who wants a payment-free and hassle-free blog). Categories are great because everybody comes here for different reasons, and soon the people that just want to hear about Thailand (for example) can just check the Thailand category and ignore all my diatribes on friend’s blogs or geek tests or what-not.

I apologize for the mess at the moment. In the next few weeks I’ll get around to adding categories and categorizing all the posts, as well as making the whole site look pretty again (instead of the WordPress default).

The poetry class I was taking is over, and I promised Ray I would post one of my poems that had to do with his post on the culture of work in western culture. Since I no longer have a class as an outlet, I may inflict future poetry on you. You’ve been warned.

Commuters

The brake lights of
hundreds of cars
moving in rhythm
like unfinished pieces
on a conveyor belt.

Ten feet away,
through open windows,
I hear a man screaming
at the car in front of him
for going just a little slower
than the rest of us.

On the other side of me
there is a woman,
still in her bathroom,
applying her lipstick,
stopping inches behind the car in front
of her.

A man passes me slowly,
already at work
on his cell phone
starting a 12-hour day in which
he’ll be at the office for 8
and be thinking about it
for 24.

I look farther down
the conveyor belt
but I can’t see the part at the end
where they stamp,
mold,
process,
and mangle the material
to produce the carbon-copy
manufactured product.

Not me.
I’m getting off
at the next exit.

I finally found my brother over at Myspace. Although I have my doubts about the Myspace service. In particular, I think they have a far too idealistic view of the world.

I’ll get Andrew (and Lucinda, whose blog I’ve also been pointed to) on the sidebar eventually.

An interesting sociological phenomenon occurred at Cindy’s birthday party yesterday. About two or three months ago, a couple of us were talking about The Geek Test and wondering how we might rank. Sean, Cindy, and I (along with a couple of others) took the test and compared scores. For fun, I put our scores on the whiteboard in our house. Over the intervening months a couple more people asked what the scores were and, upon hearing the answer, decided they wanted to see how geeky they were too.

So yesterday we only had about seven scores on the whiteboard. At the end of the party, our whiteboard looked like this:

There’s gotta be some kind of sociological phenomenon at work here. Is there some inherent desire to compare ourselves to others? There’s some deeper issue here, I know it.

While I’m thinking about what that issue might be, why don’t you take the test yourself and see how you do compared to the rest of us.

I should’ve linked to this sooner, but it’s still there. Tracey has a great story so far about an encounter with a homeless man and her struggle to love him without denying him his dignity. There are currently two parts of at least three. It’s a good read.

UPDATE (7:36 PM): Third part’s up.

I made some more changes to Itsara that I wanted to point out. The major one is that our ETD has changed from “February or March” to “March”. I believe this is primarily due to Sean’s birthday being in early March and a couple of snow trips scheduled in February (although I’m not sure if the ETD was moved because of the trips or if the trips were scheduled because the ETD was moved - maybe Cindy can say). We honestly don’t anticipate anything else moving the dates with the possible exception of the visa acquisition process taking a really long time.

I also added some more friends to the sidebar. Specifically, Ray’s wife Kaoru is online now, and through various means I have discovered Audrey and Dano’s blogs. Audrey went to Thailand with us and Dano is our backup sound guy at Coast when James isn’t around. I met them both through their interest (and skill!) in worship.

Also, if anyone ever wants me to take their blog off the list, just let me know.

Finally, I have a secret to tell you. Both Cindy and Sean officially have access to write for this site now. It’s always been my intention that this be our site and not mine - I can only pretend to know their stories or point of view (it’s just that, of the three of us, I’m the most likely to start something like this). So look for some stuff from them, but don’t tell them I told you…

Very recently, Coast’s planting pastor Don Williams started a Vineyard community website called Kingdom Rain. They’ve been asking for user contributed material (since it is a community site, after all), and they recently posted the first wave of it. I’m telling you because I sent in an article about leading worship and it’s up there if you want to read it.

I had nearly forgotten that I asked for pictures of our land. Kelby sent me some a while ago, so now I’m finally showing them to you. As a disclaimer, I should add that we only had a hand drawn map to find our land with and nobody to tell us where it was. So we kinda guessed, but it was a fairly educated guess. Click on these pictures to get a closer look of what we think is where our orphanage will be.

Here’s your first look at it. Our land is essentially the tall, bright green grass in the middle and (we figure) extends from the trees in the distance to Sean on the right (note that Sean is not still standing there to mark the edge of our land, since he left when we did - I think the land marking job just wasn’t cool enough). That’s Wayland in the front there, probably doing some karate or something. And I’m behind him tempting the poisonous snakes and other wild beasts that no doubt lurk within the jungle that will one day be teeming with wild children instead.

Here’s another angle. Cindy’s looking pretty and cute (as always), while I itch one of my multitudinous and ubiquitous mosquito bites. I’m not sure, but I think the red roof at the end of the street is part of the Buddhist temple. I’ve had some interesting daydreams about “meeting the neighbors” in that temple before (”Hi, we’re the Heine’s, we just moved in next door. So… nice temple you’ve got here…”). And I think that’s Jamie back there walking the length of the land. We spent some time here praying, talking, thinking, sweating, and generally being funny towards the camera that Jess brought.

This shot is of the back of the land (so if you can imagine, the street is on the other side - actually sort of on the right and continuing away from the camera, parallel to the edge of the rice paddies). Again, our land is the taller grass right in front of Cindy, on the other side of the rice fields. I can imagine losing a lot of soccerballs and frisbees to those rice fields…

If nothing else, maybe you can get a sense of how beautiful and quiet it is out there. The city of Chiang Mai is a city in every sense of the word (by which I mean it has noise, people, and pollution), but this plot of land is only 5.5 miles from the main downtown area where we stayed this summer and it’s like the city doesn’t even exist. We heard nothing out there. I hope nobody minds us moving in with 30 kids and a drum kit…