God’s kindness came to us quickly in supplying us a nanny for the kids while I’m at work!

Christy has a sonogram later this morning. We’ll let you know what they discover–or as our hope might be, what they don’t discover. [UPDATE, 11:33am: NO HYDROPS!]

Yesterday, I shared with our community the context Scripture provides when we think of suffering–how without that context, our suffering can consume us. I tried to put what we’re experiencing with our little Bella (our little “beauty”) in context by appealing to what we find in Romans 8.

It’s with that broader gaze that God could allow us to live without total preoccupation with what’s going on with the pregnancy. While we were in Houston, it wasn’t all thumb-twiddling in between doctor’s visits as the below will show. For that we are thankful.

[imagine thick Venezuelan accent]:

I believe in reincarnation. I believe in Jesus. I started reading the Bible, the sacred books, the Qu’ran. I believe there is one universe. I believe we are born free, and that we can use our freedom to get close to God. I believe in the Universe. I believe in everything.

I may have gotten some of what our new friend said out of order, but towards the end of our stay at the Ronald McDonald House (and while Savvy, aka Little Miss Entropy, was asleep), Christy, Seamus–aka Mr. I’d talk to a tree as long as I can talk–and I had a nice lunch with a Venezuelan mother and her teenage son who was there for treatment of an epithelial sarcoma, a huge cancerous formation on his right index finger–(have I broken a HIPPA law by disclosing such information?) She’d made us salmon in her own latin cocina style and let us have a taste not only of her culinary mojo but of her culture–a culture in which going out to eat or swinging by a drive-thru for a meal is a far less regular occurrence than we’re accustomed to here. You want to eat? You’ve got to cook.

We’d spent the last several nights talking family, medical issues, children, cultural differences with her. It eventually paved the way for a shared meal yesterday. We’d heard her make spiritual references and so we asked that we might give thanks before digging into our late lunch–late for America, I suppose.

Following the prayer she asked what I did for a living. I explained that I was a pastor. She proceeded to ask what I believed.

It’s been a frequent prayer lately for opportunities to speak up for the hope that is in me among those who didn’t share those beliefs. It’s unnerving at times to be in vocational ministry but to exist largely within a believing bubble. Got my opportunity yesterday. We may have been in between doctor’s visits but it was refreshing to remember that we weren’t in a “meantime”, a secondary span of time spent only waiting for the next scheduled event.

Our new friend is a speech therapist in Caracas and has a very serviceable command of English, but I still had to choose basic words and phrases to summarize “what I believed.”

I told her I believed there was one God, that He is responsible for the existence of all things. That we are made to know the beauty and majesty of God. That there is something deeply wrong inside us–a wrongness that keeps us from seeing the beauty and majesty of God, a wickedness that leads us to live without interest in and with hostility toward God. That Jesus was the Son of God and that He was sent to die so that we might be forgiven, so that we might be changed from the inside, so that we might grasp that beauty and majesty we’re born to know, but destined to miss apart from God’s work in Jesus.

That may be an embellishment of what I said since I was trying hard to remember I was speaking to someone whose first language was not English, but it seemed to get through since what came in response was a floodgate of information of what she believed, the substance of which I tried to summarize at the top of this post.

This may be a silly stereotype, but I think she is emblematically Venezuelan in her willingness to be so transparent about her core beliefs. I don’t think the average Joe you meet in West Village, even facing a very difficult time like your son facing a life-threatening illness, would be as forthcoming as she was. But I think she is emblematically post-Enlightenment, post-Christian in her broadly inclusive way of viewing religions and people. It’s a patently in-offensive way of operating. It ensures that everyone feels affirmed and keeps smiling.

and it presented Christy and me a challenge: where do you even begin with a response to such a broad–to the point of unwieldy–belief system? and how do you speak for a very different way of seeing the universe that is “narrower” in the sense of not giving indiscriminate authority to any and all expressions of allegiance to what is divine?

and how do you do all that over a light meal that’s about to be cut short because your wife needs to take this kind mother to a 2pm doctor’s consult about her son’s impending finger-amputation?

I remembered a comment by Harold Netland in a book entitled Dissonant Voices that made the observation that most, if not all, religions are asking many of the same questions: is there a God? What is that God like? Who are we? Why are we here? What does it take to be in alignment with the universe and its God? But what distinguishes religions is what answers they give for those questions.

I led with that to make the assertion that while there is something to be respected in most religions–they’re asking crucial questions whose answers give form and substance to the way we live–to embrace them all indiscriminately requires that you ignore the very distinctiveness of the answers they give. (Her 14 year old son’s only comment during our lunch discussion came when I mentioned those common questions; he, less conversant in English as his mother, was nevertheless provoked to say, “I ask those questions, too.”)

I appealed to Buddhism’s view of the illusoriness of desires and how connectedness with what is eternal (you can’t say God because Buddhism dismisses the notion of a persnal deity) requires a casting off of all desires. Enlightenment entails being swept clean of desires. In contrast, Jesus came not to abolish desire but to reorient the heart toward the proper object of desire–namely Himself and His kingdom and His righteousness. But if you assume that you can believe both Buddhism’s and Christianity’s view of what consitutes man’s problem and man’s solution, you attempt to do what the Dalai Lama said about synthesizing religions: (I’ll misquote the details here) trying to make Jesus into Buddha is like trying to put a yak’s head on a goat. Translation: let’s not pretend they’re ’saying the same thing.’

Leading with that was kind of a flanking maneuver: it doesn’t disparage her inclusivity so much as it asserts its incoherence (no, I didn’t call her beliefs incoherent but tried to imply that to embrace everything may in fact be embracing nothing truly). It’s like what Francis Schaeffer called “taking the roof off someone’s world view” in which you work the premises of what they believe to their logical conclusion. If they’re giving different answers to the same questions, they can’t be saying the same thing and so you can’t really believe them both.

at that point, she fell silent, began weeping, sent her lunch plate careening to the floor, fell to her knees and begged, “what shall i do to be saved?”

okay, not really. But I think she heard me, even understood where I was coming from. She acknowledged we “diverged” when it came to resurrection and reincarnation. Jesus, she didn’t believe needed to come back, because He will be manifested in another person and in us. So I had to mention the resonance between that phrasing and the fact that Jesus sent His Spirit that we might enabled to live according to His will. More nodding from her. And that’s when the conversation had to end. Christy gave her a ride to the hospital.

they told us in seminary that evangelism was not an event, but a process. Someone may indeed hear, understand, believe, and repent in a single sitting–it happens often–but in many instances, it’s a progressive grasp of the essential truth over repeated encounters.

We’ve since left RMH and our new friend. She did mention at the close of our conversation that day that, despite our theological differences, she didn’t think it was an accident that we had come to know one another’s families. I agreed.