Category: Prose

The best, most meaningful things in life, the ones that touch us the most deeply, and evoke the most within our souls, always tend to be multi-faceted and complex. They are never just one thing, but appear differently to us, when looked at from other perspectives, or when held in a different light. In addition to being beautiful and mysterious, the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church, is also homey and familiar. Not only does it have the power to uplift and transform us into heavenly realms, but it also evokes the best memories and feelings of earthly life.

In many Orthodox churches, and all of the ones I’ve attended, there are no pews in the center of the worship space, since everyone who is able, stands throughout the service. Before the Liturgy begins, as the chanter chants the psalms of the hourly prayer, the people meet together and mill about; it is like a gathering of family, for a holiday, at the home of a loved one. It is an informal and intimate experience as families greet each other, children run to visit one another, perhaps a few folks are lighting candles and oil lamps, others are looking over their music as they stand ready in the choir, some find a quiet space in a corner and pray, or they find solace in the embrace of a beloved friend, or they stand in silence pondering the life of a friend from the past, staring intently at an icon—into the golden face of a departed saint. I have always felt this feeling of festivity awaiting the beginning of the Liturgy; the air has a feeling of excitement and anticipation, and the space itself has a feeling of warmth and comfort. Adding to this feeling of coziness are the assortment of throw rugs adorning the floors, much like the home of that loved one we might visit every Christmas or Thanksgiving. In all of these ways, the church is welcoming us and inviting us home again.

I’ve already mentioned the sublimity of the Divine Liturgy, its music, prayers, incense, and so on, yet it also contains innocence and simplicity. Nothing, to my mind, portrays this simplicity and innocence more than when it is time for the priest to share his homily and everyone, young and old, takes their seat on the floor to listen. It reminds me of story time in grade school. All generations, grandchildren, grandparents, all sitting humbly together on the rugs, ready to listen to the story that our father has for us today. There is something so very helpful in allowing our bodies to conform to this attitude of humility and innocence, it stimulates our minds to follow suit, assisting us in acquiring that blessed simplicity that Jesus encourages us to adopt on our journey to the Kingdom of God.

If the gathering of the church—the body of Christ, as the church is defined—could be compared, in a small way, to a gathering of family during the holidays, then the liturgy, which is the primary weekly holiday gathering in the Orthodox Church, is a fulfilling, satisfying and transformative, truly holy day. So very unlike the family gatherings I had come to expect in the houses of worship from my past, here the televisions are turned off, entertaining music isn’t playing in the background for our amusement, and the entire gathering is focused and directed in joyful anticipation towards the thanksgiving meal at the end, of genuine participation in the feast of feasts, our true communion with the body and blood of our Lord.

In other houses of worship, which I have experienced, I was first entertained and informed, and then maybe encouraged, and then finally given some inspiring words, a prayer and a pep talk; and on occasion, I was given a chip or a cracker and some juice as a tribute to an idea, a memorial to an important event from the past, and then benedicted away for the week. But in this liturgy, at this gathering of the people, the goal is true union with the body of Christ, communion with the Spirit of God, it is all about our participation with God, and not merely our conceptualization of Him. We seek to dwell now with our creator, the awesome and magnificent Power behind everything that exists; it is a fearful and presumptuous desire that we have, made possible only through the grace and mercy of a loving God. It is a transcendent and solemn affair, and it is given the solemnity and respect due something so uniquely powerful, holy, and priceless.

For about two years I attended the liturgy but was unable to fully participate in it, since I wasn’t a baptized Orthodox Christian. I can understand why some people might feel left out and feel offended or angry about being excluded from the Eucharist, but certainly the intent in offering it only to members of the church isn’t to exclude people; for everyone is welcome to join, but it is a respect for the importance of the gift being offered, and a protection against our superficiality, which could tend to render this amazing gift commonplace. Scripture itself admonishes us all to take these gifts of our Lords flesh and blood, with respect, and in a worthy way, so as not to bring condemnation down upon us. So it is out of loving concern that the Orthodox Church doesn’t open this sacrament up to those who may not understand its significance, or the appropriate attitude to have when approaching it. As for the inclusiveness, that we in the world tend to want, from all of our institutions, it is there in the form of the antidoron bread, which is available for everyone to enjoy during Communion, as an expression of fellowship and love.

So I had been attending the church for quite a while, and had even joined the choir, but was unable to participate in the Eucharist; the entire teleological reason for the liturgy, and indeed, also for my life. I knew I had found my spiritual home finally, after all the years of seeking in so many different places, I knew my home was in the Orthodox Church. I knew this was the place for me to finally find rest from my years of wandering and experimenting. Not that this was the end of my journey, for Christ and the church promises us an eternity of discovery and growth in God, but rather this was the place where I could finally become myself. I could see, and feel, and understand the potential, and the hope present here, for all that kept me from God, to finally fall away, or be ground out of me; like scales, or dead skin—all the lies, confusion, the emptiness and meaninglessness, the loneliness and anxiety could be shed, and I could be healed and transformed, resuscitated and given new life. The church has a method and a means to do this; an apostolic mandate and heritage, with the power of the Holy Spirit filling its traditions and its teachings, so that each member can, in actuality, attain divine union; attain purity, illumination, and deification, according to the workings of grace granted them by God.

All of this I knew instinctively about my new spiritual home, from all of the things I had already experienced within it, and also from the things I had read about it. In my heart I felt as if I had always been an Orthodox Christian, I just hadn’t known it. I had been a voice crying out, alone in the wilderness, and I could now finally come inside, and live amongst my own people.

(to be continued)

~FS

Congratulations on your graduation from high school, and the advent of life beyond school; the real world, many people call it. Your mom asked if I might write a few words about this for you; on a topic that I think is important, and could be of use to you.

I don’t know whether this will be of use to you, but I do think this is important.

I think every good thing in life begins with Christ, so to have your best life, make Him the center of it. If you lack faith pray for faith. If you don’t believe at all, then realize that this life easily allows you to live without God, or faith in Him, and sometimes one can live here quite well without these, but at some point things usually fall apart in this life, whether from physical or emotional or mental problems, or financial ones, and then it becomes a little clearer why faith, and God, and Christ are important.

But even these are not the best reasons to seek faith, and to seek God, and to seek a relationship with Him; these are in a sense only superficial reasons, even though they are good reasons, but by comparison, the fact that you will die someday, and will need a savior at that time, is by far the most compelling, and unavoidable reason for cultivating a relationship with Jesus, and for living by His commands now, and throughout your life.

But, of course, even the fact of our own death isn’t reason enough, for many people, to seek relationship with Jesus above all other things, because the reality beyond this life is impossible to prove, and we can’t know that His claims are true beyond all doubt; and people want or like proof, before they act. Nobody wants to be a fool, or to appear that way, and basing our life on Christ appears to be foolishness to many people.

Consider this for yourself however, very seriously. Have courage to take your life here, and your potential eternal life, seriously, even if others prefer to avoid the issue, or consider it unanswerable, or pointless, or silly, and consider Christ’s claims of who He is, what He did for us, and why He did it. If you don’t know what He claims to be, what He did, and why, then this is a good first step: to find all of this out for yourself.

There is an excellent quote attributed to Mark Twain, which is: “whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” He is implying that the majority is typically wrong, which of course, isn’t always the case, but it is good to consider that they might be. Don’t allow yourself to go the way of others, merely out of fear or laziness. Your life is too important to squander it out of fear, or from laziness.

When I say to make Christ the center of your life, I mean to do something about that, not to merely say it, or let it just be words without any meaning. There is nothing better that you can do with your time, in my opinion, than to pursue relationship with Christ, and this means learning who He is by reading the Bible, and learning what He asks us to do, which means reading the Bible to find His commands, and then implementing them in your day to day life. This is the source of fulfillment, meaning, and everything else that people want for themselves in life.

Certainly I hope that you find a job that you enjoy, but even if you do, there will be plenty of times that it is just boring, or frustrating, or tedious, and how do you keep going when life can be this way? Do you just find a means of distraction, endless entertainments, only video games and sleep to avoid the monotony, and pass the time? I don’t mean just you, I mean all of us, when I ask this rhetorical question. Maybe this can work for a while, or maybe even for a lifetime, but if you pursue a life with Christ you will come to understand from experience that this is not what He intends for us at all, and while many people settle for just getting by in life, trying not to hurt anyone, and just somehow managing to make it through another day, this isn’t the life you have to settle for.

I can’t tell you what a life dedicated to Christ is like precisely, you will have to discover that for yourself, but I can tell you that it isn’t anything at all, if you don’t do it.

But if you do it, if you learn from Jesus, and follow Him, you will discover a life of joy and blessedness; and I don’t mean a life of ease, or a life without trials and difficulties, that kind of life doesn’t really exist here on earth. I mean a life of joy and blessedness, within the inevitable trials and difficulties of life, and that is something the world without Christ, cannot ever offer you. Take as only one simple example, take the command to love your enemies, to pray for them and wish them good. Who in the world would do that, and who would ever encourage you to do that? But this is one thing Christ tells us to do, and if you do it, if you forgive those who annoy you and who have hurt you, and if you go even further, and even follow His command to pray for them, and to desire good for them, then you will discover a freedom and peace within your soul that would not be there by any other means. His commands are only for your benefit and for your good, and if you trust in Him and in His guidance, you will discover that by doing them, you will find every blessedness that you ever hoped for in this world, and in the next.

This is my advice and suggestion for you as you embark on your life after high school. I hope all the best for you now, and always.

 

~FS

 

 

 

In 2012, as I was approaching Orthodoxy, my first guide and companion along the way was St John Cassian, a saint revered by both the western and eastern Christian traditions. In the west, his two primary works, The Conferences and The Institutes were both required reading for early Benedictine monks, and Benedict himself fashioned his famous rule upon the precepts laid down by Cassian in The Institutes. It is also said, that his works were very important to the illustrious western theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who supposedly always carried a copy of The Conferences with him in his satchel, along with The Bible. These things, while interesting and speak to his influence on later Christian thinkers, were less interesting to me than the path that he took, in trying to find the best way to know God, and the things he learned along the way, that I could relate with so deeply, and which inspired me to continue on my own journey.

I discovered that Cassian was born in the middle of the fourth century, and as a young adult, he and a friend traveled to Bethlehem, and joined an ascetic community of monks for about three years. Already I was intrigued by his life, because I also had joined an ascetic community in my early adulthood, and had spent some time in and around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. After this, they traveled to Egypt where they studied for many years with the Christian monks of the desert, who were famous for their holiness. This brought back to my mind considerations I had often had, throughout my life, about the value of monasticism, as a model even for laypeople, and as a fountain of wisdom about spirituality, and as a guide towards achieving a deeper relationship with God. I often wondered about my own Protestant tradition and why we didn’t have monks and monasteries helping to inspire and instruct us in the ‘angelic’ life, as it is commonly known. This seemed so strange to me that we didn’t, especially in view of the fact that Christ himself modeled solitude and prayer, fasting, and retreating to the desert to be with His Father. Additionally, John the Baptist (Forerunner) was a prime example of the monastic ideal, and again was a model for all Christians; and he was even described by Christ Himself as the “greatest among all that have been born of women.” But going even further, St Paul also described this path, in his letter to the Corinthians, describing the two ways of living: in marriage, or alone serving God. With all of this scriptural emphasis in support of the monastic life it seemed logical, as a Christian, even if I wasn’t able to be a monk myself, to avail myself of every possible thing I could gain, in my own spiritual journey, from the efforts, struggles, and victories of my monastic brothers and sisters, and to sit at their feet, so to speak, just as St John Cassian had done.

After many years in Egypt, Cassian traveled to Constantinople and served as a deacon under St John Chrysostom, and then went on to Rome, and finally to Marseilles, France where he founded a monastery based on the Egyptian model. It was here that he wrote his books. The Conferences consists of a series of interviews with many of the most accomplished elders that he studied under while in Egypt. This book in particular impacted me because of the topics included, and also the style of writing. Each interview, or conference, addresses a topic of spirituality, such as vice, desire, God’s protection, spiritual knowledge, divine gifts, and repentance, among many others, and almost line by line what is being said is referenced to a verse of scripture. It was incredible to me, the way that practically everything which was said, referred back to a teaching in scripture. I had never read anything like it, something so insightful, and addressed topics about which most Christians I knew, like me, didn’t know very much. And all of the citations allowed me to see the connections between Biblical verses, and the interpretations that these humble monks were teaching. Their teachings were within the context of scripture, but also within the context of the living traditions of the early church; these weren’t just some guys making things up, trying to be entertaining, or trying to be innovative and make a name for themselves. The depth and breadth of the teaching contained in The Conferences, and the gentle and humble manner with which it is written, delighted me and gave me hope that a wise and deep spirituality did exist in the Christian church, it merely had been hidden from me for all of these years, but it still remained even now, and just had to be sought after and uncovered.

I found guidance and discipleship through his writings that encouraged me to keep seeking God intently. He described the vital importance that purity of heart plays in one’s ability to know the Kingdom of God in this life, to participate in the life of God here and now, and not to merely waiting for this participation in the life to come. He described the way to achieve purity of heart through the repudiation of our passions, our vices, through repentance and the development of inner tranquility and most especially through humility before God. As an example, here he writes about this humility:

“If you wish to achieve true knowledge of scripture you must hurry to achieve unshakeable humility of heart. This is what will lead you not to the knowledge that puffs a man up but to the lore which illumines through the achievement of love.”      ~John Cassian

He also introduced me to the idea of praying without ceasing, as St Paul tells us to do in First Thessalonians 5:17, and he provided a short prayer, a psalm actually, that he recommended to use in order to always keep the Lord in our thoughts, and in our hearts. It is from Psalm 70: “Come to my help, O God; Lord (Jesus) hurry to my rescue.”  I added ‘Jesus’ myself, when I began to use this short prayer.  Scripture speaks often about keeping our thoughts on spiritual things and not carnal ones, and this prayer, or others like it, are intended to help keep the mind occupied on spiritual things. Through repeated effort, eventually a habit of thought can be developed, and this prayer can help orient us in the direction of God at all times. Of course, maintaining a prayer of this sort, always in our mind, is extremely difficult, but that is the discipline, and the goal.

Adding this ‘prayer of the heart’, as these types of prayers are known, to my daily prayer rule, helped me in every area of life, but especially at work, where stress and difficulty could be a real burden for me.  When I could remember to say the prayer, silently in my mind, I felt a renewed strength to meet the current challenge, and a greater peace within me, enabling me to create loving outcomes more frequently, as opposed to merely reacting to my circumstances. And I felt connected to God, simply put, by this prayer. It reminded me that yes, in fact, God is available to come to my help; I am not alone. So it is also a bulwark against despair, loneliness and temptation.

As with the other components of my prayer rule, praying without ceasing is a skill I am developing, and progress is slow over many years. I wish I could say I created the habit quickly, within a month or so, and that now I pray all the time, silently in my heart, to God. But certainly this is not the case. Even so, now I do pray within my heart much more of the time than I did when I first started seriously attempting it back in 2012. Progress may be gradual, but it is worthwhile, and I sometimes think that the process itself is also as important for us, and to God, as the success or the outcome. Just as the wise man of Proverbs may fall seven times and each time he gets back up; every moment that I forget to pray, is merely the moment before the one in which I begin to pray again.

(to be continued)

~FS

The next month, Patty and I flew to Cyprus to renew our visas for Israel. We spent several days traveling the backroads of the island, and enjoying the relaxed pace of life there, and each other’s company. Not long after returning to work in Israel we received a call from Patty’s mom with the surprising and sad news that Patty’s father had just passed away. We quickly made arrangements to return to the US and after a week or two back home, we agreed that Patty would stay to help her mom, while I would go back to Israel to complete the remaining three months of our commitment to Holy Land Ministries.

One of the most striking features of life in Israel, which Patty and I both admired, was the observance of the Sabbath every Saturday. Nearly everything closed down throughout the entire country, allowing people to rest and enjoy life together, attend synagogue if they were inclined, and spend time on the beach or in the park. Though most of the citizenry isn’t very religious, still they all observe the Sabbath rest; and for those who were religious it was a day of worship and gratitude to God for His many blessings. It was exciting to see such a clear and practical aspect of religious faith permeate life beyond the borders of a church service, and affect the daily lives of people outside of the confines of religion. The Sabbath observance seemed to break down the boundary between religious and secular life and we found this refreshing; it was surprising to see people living a life of faith, uncompartmentalized, and spilling over into ordinary life. We both wanted to live our lives back home in the United States in this way, not literally observing the Sabbath since we weren’t Jewish, but emulating to a greater degree the life of faith, rather than as something to tick off of a to-do list on Sunday morning.

After my remaining three months of volunteering, Patty and I met up in London and finally had our honeymoon. We traveled to Paris and spent several days there and then rented a car and drove through France and Italy, spending most of our time in Tuscany and then back up around through Austria and Germany, and then finally back to Paris. Traveling together, relaxed, and free of any responsibilities, was refreshing and much needed after being apart for three months.

Not long after we returned home, the pastor at our church in the US retired. In his absence I realized that he was essentially the reason I attended that church, and though I liked the other congregants a lot, without the pastor and his teaching, there was nothing keeping me there. Patty had come to this conclusion before me, and didn’t have any problem with leaving this church. We spent several weeks worshipping together on Sundays at home, doing Bible studies, and listening to teachers online, but I wanted to see if I could find another church family.

Patty and I attended ten to twelve various protestant and evangelical churches over the next year, and discovered that all of them were very much the same, and all of them left us feeling spiritually empty and hungry. None seemed to offer anything of much depth to believers; they were focused mainly on new believers already in the church, or in trying to water down everything about the faith, so that they could coax non-believers to join. Additionally, these churches squeezed out the little time gathered for worship each week, with announcements and all manner of other distractions, diverting our focus from the primary purpose of praising and thanking God, and of deepening our relationship with Him. There was often fairly good teaching related to scripture, but even in these cases they seemed to focus on the same things over and over again, without ever getting below the surface, or exploring the greater complexities and mysteries of the faith. There is a verse in scripture about beginning our faith by feeding on easier things in scripture, which is equated with feeding milk to babies, but then St Paul admonishes the church to grow up, and move beyond these things to deeper things—solid food. It was as if the churches were only able to provide milk, and wouldn’t, or couldn’t provide anything more substantial. After months of giving the benefit of the doubt, and patiently enduring these services, in hopes of something better eventually happening, we finally recognized the reality and state of things in these churches, called a spade a spade, and stopped our hunt. For the next four years we worshipped together at home, doing our own Bible studies together on Sunday mornings, and then listening to lessons online by RC Sproul, and others later in the day.

The most instructive thing about this spiritual chapter in our lives was taking a series of courses through The Teaching Company, known as The Great Courses. Without going into great detail about any of them, briefly, these courses helped to provide context to my own theological views, expose my theological prejudices and biases, inspire me by the lives of other Christians throughout history, and open my understanding to the long history of the church, the role the early church fathers played in deciding on the canon of scripture, and the value of church traditions in opposing and resisting heretical opinions which would attempt to lead the church down erroneous paths. Up to this point, my Protestant upbringing, and the biases of my faith from this point of view, had seemed self-evident and I lived by them without very much thought; but exposing myself to the historical context of the Reformation and the relative newness and possible fallacies associated with these theologies, helped me to consider more ancient and time-tested options, and to inquire into the ideas of earlier thinkers, great minds of the church, who lived and set about the direction of all Christians long, long before Catholicism, the Reformation or Protestantism had even begun.

During this period I also had taken a new full-time job with a large landscape company north of Seattle. My job was to meet clients, write estimates and do designs for new installation projects, and to oversee the crews and answer their questions about the installation details and methods. The volume of work was exponentially greater than what I had been used to when working for myself, and the stress of the job was difficult to endure. In order to combat this stress I reinstituted a daily prayer rule for myself, something I hadn’t really done with any regularity since my early twenties. It was a long process to create this new habit, but slowly, month by month, and year by year, I gradually carved more and more of my time and attention away from worldly concerns, and dedicated this to spiritual contemplation and prayer. I began with prayer in the evening before bed, then added prayer in the morning just after rising, and then I made daily recurring reminders in my office calendar to pray each day at nine, noon and three o’clock. This is still a work in progress for me, but now the habit is well established, and if I miss a time of prayer, I notice it very much, and find I must satisfy that need as soon as possible; whereas, for years my reminders could pop-up on my phone or computer, and I would mostly ignore them, on the excuse that I didn’t have time for that.

The goal of all of this wasn’t to ignore my worldly responsibilities, but to prioritize them properly, since I considered myself to be first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul, and only secondarily a man with a career. My first allegiance is to God and His commandments, and only after that do I work in the world, and concern myself with worldly things. At least that is the goal, and what I hope for, though the pull of worldly concerns is very strong and difficult to overcome, and they resist any relegation to secondary status. But my daily prayer rule helped keep me focused on my relationship with God, and my dependence on Him; and on a practical level, it also reduced or eliminated feelings of stress, and gave me a clearer mind, and a more generous heart, in response to difficult people and situations.

As I continued to read more and more of the works of early Christian writers, from the first few centuries of the church, I began to consider that perhaps my path was really to be found outside of Protestantism.  Though I had attended an Orthodox Church briefly in my hometown of Santa Rosa years earlier, and had experienced several others since then, while in Jerusalem and in Cyprus, I hadn’t seriously considered this as a real option for me, because I always saw the Orthodox Church as being for other ethnic groups; for people different than me, and not a place I could call home. But one thing I knew was that the brilliance of these early Christian thinkers, was still known and cherished among Orthodox believers and that Orthodox were still fed spiritually, even today, by the wisdom and insight that these church fathers have passed down. This spiritual heritage and lineage I could claim as my own, even if I wasn’t Greek, or Russian or Serbian, or any of the other nationalities I normally associated with Orthodoxy.

At first I tried a local Catholic church since it was more familiar to me culturally, and shared the same history and could claim the same leadership as Orthodoxy up until the great schism in 1054. The service was fine, but I was surprised to find in so many ways it hardly differed from the Protestantism I had already experienced, and was beginning to reject. There were of course theological differences between the two, but in terms of approach, other than being somewhat more liturgical, I hardly would know the difference between one service and the other.

Because of this, I finally took the next step, a step which today looking back seems so obvious and almost inevitable; I attended an Orthodox liturgy with a serious interest and openness to learning more about their faith, and to possibly converting to Orthodoxy.  All of my previous paths, all of my experiences in life seemed to be leading me to this decision; whether explicitly or implicitly through my seeking for true faith, true Christianity, for a fullness of worship and discipline, for a deeper understanding of the ascetic, spiritual warfare, and for a life dedicated to prayer and stillness in pursuit of relationship with God, and through my desire to give myself to God as completely as possible having given away all my money, my possessions, and desiring to give my time, my body and my life; all of these paths I had previously taken and those I still hoped to fulfill, all of these were understood and supported by the Orthodox Christian life of piety as it is still practiced today in our modern, post-Christian, seeker-friendly, watered down world.

(to be continued)

~FS

About this time I was contacted by a defense attorney in San Luis Obispo who was defending MD in his upcoming trial. He asked if I would fly down and testify on his behalf, which I agreed to do. Basically, he just wanted me to describe for the jury various aspects of the training course, and give my perspective on the whole experience. I answered his questions on the stand, and explained as I saw it, the rationale and purpose behind it all, and also tried to illustrate for the jury the many good aspects of our time together, and the reasons it was beneficial in my life’s journey. After returning to Seattle I never learned the exact findings or outcome of the trial, but I deduced that MD lost, because I heard several years later that he was still being held in the facility in Atascadero. This really saddened me because he remained my friend, and I loved him, and all he had done for me. I wished I could have done more for him, and hoped still that a better outcome would arrive.

The following year I met someone through a friend and we began to date. A year after we first met I asked her if she would like to visit Israel with me, so we took a three week vacation, visiting friends I had made while serving there, and then driving around the country visiting all of the important and well-known sites, as well as those lesser known places special to me. When we returned to the US we got engaged, and about six months later we married. Instead of a honeymoon we decided to return to Israel and volunteer together for six months with Holy Land Ministries.

Our first home together was not far from the women’s shelter in a Jewish neighborhood, down a narrow alley. The apartment was simply furnished but with several unexpected features. For one, we had bunk beds. So my new wife, Patty, took the upper bunk and I took the bottom. Secondly, many of the electrical outlets and switches were missing covers or were broken, and inside these openings in the walls one could discern the antennae and little exoskeletal bodies of our new housemates—congregations of cockroaches. In frustration one evening, Patty defied the law of conductivity, and poured a container of water into one of these outlets, in order to drown out a group of cockroaches living there, and surprisingly it worked pretty well without shorting out the circuit or electrocuting herself. But perhaps the most unexpected thing about the apartment was that the bathroom and shower had been painted black; only the upper third of the walls and the ceiling were black while the lower parts were white and tile. It was a strange choice of color but we grew accustomed to it after a few days, but then grew suspicious, and upon closer examination, realized it was actually a thick layer of mold, rather than paint. Once I scrubbed the mold away, which took a long time, the room, actually the entire apartment, smelled a whole lot better.

There are many new challenges in combining one’s life with that of another person and navigating these changes. Living in a foreign country is also a challenge, as is working with people who are in distress, which is common to homeless shelters. Learning to navigate our new marriage within this framework was eye-opening. Patty had never lived outside of the US before and on our previous short vacation, hadn’t really experienced some of the difficulties of life in Israel. It is a small country and everyone is trying to stake out their place, so some of the common courtesies one expects, such as stepping aside to let another pass on the sidewalk, or saying ‘excuse me’ didn’t come into play very often there. The lack of these social graces took some time, and some tears, for her to work through, and it required of me to be more thoughtful and understanding towards her, to do my best to make our relationship as safe and secure and joyful as possible in order to counter some of the blows coming from our new environment. It was helpful to practice forgiveness on a moment to moment basis, expect not too much from people, and be grateful when kindnesses were offered to us.

While Patty helped the women and children in the shelter, I worked in the office writing the monthly newsletter, which went out to donors around the world, and helped take care of other administrative issues, as well as continued repairs on the facilities and on the vehicles. We had an older van that was used to shuttle people to various appointments and which I used once a week to pick up a load of bread that was donated to us by one of the large commercial bakeries, about an hour away. I enjoyed getting out of the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv and exploring some of the back roads on these little excursions. I found the Israeli countryside intriguing with its little villages, rugged hills, synagogues, mosques and minarets as well as the signs of its troubled reality: the barbed wire fences, road blocks, barricades, warning signs alerting travelers about possible unexploded mines, or not to pass due to kidnapping or other terrorist activity in the area. Along with these things I might also encounter a herd of goats being shepherded by a young boy from one side of the highway to the other, or a group of camels grazing alongside the road, while their Bedouin caretaker smoked a cigarette and gave me a nonchalant wave as I passed.

At Christmastime Patty and I rented a car and drove up to Jerusalem. This was visit number five for me, my influenza visit. It was lightly snowing outside, and I spent a good part of the first night in bed with chills and aches throughout my body. I didn’t want to waste our time off together however, so we drove down to Bethlehem to see what was happening there. It was Christmas Eve so the place was packed with visitors. We drove through the checkpoint in the security wall and then continued winding our way towards the center of town. Having never been to Bethlehem before I wasn’t sure exactly where to go and where to park. It was night, and this was before the time of mobile GPS, so I just continued to follow the crowds. Eventually I realized that ours was the only car on the road as more and more pedestrians filled the street, packing it from side to side. We were carried along from street to street as the crowds grew thicker and I knew now that we probably weren’t supposed to be taking our car in this direction, but there was no way to turn around and nowhere to go, the crowds were so dense.

I continued to drive at a walker’s pace until eventually we found ourselves at Manger Square, the heart of the festivities, and a roadblock preventing us from going any further. Inside the vehicle that blocked our passage was a sudden hustle of activity and several police got out and looked towards us. At the same time men in a different type of uniform came across the road and all of them conversed while gesturing towards us. Eventually one of the officers came down and explained that we weren’t supposed to be there. Apparently they were in the midst of a joint operation between Israeli police and the security detail of the PLO, because the head of that organization, Mahmoud Abbas, was about to pass by and they needed to keep the area secure. I explained that we couldn’t turn around and I gestured to the crowds behind us. He left us and the combined group of Israeli and Palestinian officers discussed this a little further and then he returned and said hurriedly that they were letting us pass to enter the square but we had to hurry, make a sharp right and drive as quickly as we could out of the area. I had no idea where we were going, but I did what I was told and soon we found ourselves alone, on unlit streets driving away from the square. Only we weren’t alone at all. This was the route Abbas was about to take so stationed every fifty yards or so, along both sides of this dark alley stood black-hooded PLO security guards, holding their rifles and standing at attention. The only way we saw them was as our headlights briefly lit them up as we hurled our way past. It grew increasingly uncomfortable as we found ourselves farther and farther away from anyone, alone in the night with these faceless guards, armed and looking very insidious in the darkened gloom.

Eventually I turned off this alley and found my way to a lit street and I could see a way back up the hill to the security wall. I was still quite shaken by the unknown aspect of this adventure, not really certain of what might happen, and Patty was in tears sitting beside me, so I felt pretty bad having subjected her to that. Unfortunately the adventure wasn’t quite over yet. As we approached the security detail at the gate we stopped and waited for them to gesture to us to come closer. I’m not certain what they gestured, but it appeared to me they wanted me to drive towards them so I did. In that moment so many things happened it is difficult to remember them all, but suffice to say they weren’t gesturing to me to come towards them. In a panic, several guards drew their rifles and aimed them at our windshield, and others screamed at us, I assume, telling us to stop. Which I did as quickly as possible. Patty was nearly hysterical by this time and I just wanted to understand what they wanted me to do. I couldn’t see very well as floodlights drenched our car and blinded me. We didn’t move, waiting to see what would happen next. The guards lowered their weapons and one of them walked up to my window and in a grumpy tone of voice said something I didn’t understand. He waved us past and we drove gratefully back to our room at the hostel. We spent the remainder of Christmas Eve safely in our room, far from the madding crowds.

(to be continued)

~FS

I returned to the United States in January 2005 and began working for myself again as a landscape designer. I was living outside of Seattle now and too far away to regularly attend the messianic congregation I had been attending when I first went to Israel so I found a new church to attend closer to home. It was a good church, with a good group of people and a pastor I respected and enjoyed. I appreciated that he wasn’t afraid to live and preach truth from scripture even in the face of worldly opposition; and he did it with humility and with a degree of consideration of the human frailty to which all of us are subject. Several months later I was hired part-time to work with him as the youth pastor. From this job I found that I cared a lot about the lives of my students and wanted to help them in their relationships with God, but I also discovered that it wasn’t a natural fit for me to teach. I didn’t really like it very much, and in many ways I felt more like an activities director, or an entertainer, rather than a teacher or a guide, and this role was very distasteful to me. Even so, my desire to help the kids and be a positive person in their lives kept me at it for several years.

I recall a conversation I had around this time, with my former landlady, who I rented my first house from in Seattle, and in that conversation I said something about being a Christian, to which she reacted with shock and amazement and said she had no idea I was a Christian. It was a stinging indictment, though she didn’t mean it as such, but I was horrified to discover that my faith and allegiance to Christ was so insipid, so obscure, hidden and lukewarm, that someone I was in close contact with for several years had no idea I even had that faith and allegiance. I wasn’t sure at the time what exact change was needed in me, and I didn’t plan to suddenly be something I’m not, nor pretend to be something other than what God made me to be, but this woke me up to the fact that whatever I was, whoever I was, needed to be less afraid to show others the truth.

My faith is the essential thing about me, and yet somehow she didn’t know about it at all. This was a revelation. I remembered my time in the garden at the Mt. of Beatitudes and how my faith, the truest part of my faith, this relationship with Christ Himself, I had always considered a private matter, and one I lived privately, away from prying eyes. Perhaps my faith was too private. Though I served others in many ways and was visible through my service, there was nothing particularly Christian about serving others; any person with good will and natural love for others does this, and many non-Christians do this better than I do. But what is essential and different about a Christian, is his or her relationship with Christ, the Son of God, and by extension everything else that this relationship entails: obedience to His commands, faith in His claims to be the Son of God, belief in His statements that He is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the only way to eternal salvation, and all of the additional things He proclaimed and taught. These are the things that set a Christian apart, that make him different from the rest of the world, and make him the object of ridicule and derision; and these of course were the things I kept most under wraps because I don’t like being ridiculed and derided.

There are whole volumes written about the centrality and importance of derision and ridicule, of suffering for the Lord, and how instrumental and necessary these things are for us to lead a productive and fruitful Christian life. After all, Christ Himself suffered a humiliating death on a cross, and suffered all sorts of mocking, and He calls on each of us to take up our own cross and follow Him, and endure the same things that He did. These volumes exist, but for the most part they have been lost to history, and obscured by the modern trends that Christianity has taken in recent times, such as a gospel of prosperity, or a gospel of peace, or a gospel of social justice, or any number of other things that are practiced and that have some basis in scripture, but that aren’t the essential gospel that Christ Himself taught, or that His church preserved down through the ages, or that the early church fathers wrote so eloquently and instructively about.

But most of these things I hadn’t yet considered at that time, as my brand of Christianity was predominantly about serving other people, and about my personal struggle against vice and towards virtue—aspects of a Christian life, to be certain, but not the entirety of it. In becoming more honest with others about who I am and what I’ve done, I have found it important to remember who the ruler of this world is and what he does. Scripture states clearly that Satan is the ruler of this world, and that through his cunning and deception he has corrupted and brought about the downfall of man. He is our great enemy and our accuser and his intent is our destruction. So it is no wonder that we fear one another and hide ourselves from each other, as his spirit operates freely within each of us and we are prone to slander and to accusation and all manner of evil thought and speech against each other.

We see the devil’s methods on full display at every moment when we see people out of control, slaves to their passions, acting in rage and anger, in sexual abandon, unable to control their desires. He is a spirit, not a physical creature, but a powerful spirit, and his servants are likewise powerful spirits, and their methods are to lure men into evil, trapping them by their own natural desires and tendencies, tricking them into sin and then crushing them under the law. Some are caught here in this world, exposed in their crimes, accused and destroyed, but most are given freedom to fall deeper and deeper into vice, farther and farther from God, until there is no belief that God even exists, nor certainly any belief that there will be a penalty or a payment to be paid in the end.

This isn’t to say that I am not responsible for my thoughts and actions, because the devil made me do it. I am responsible for everything I do and think, and without taking responsibility for everything, and then repenting and seeking forgiveness, there is no hope for me, but it is very helpful to remember that there is someone, a spirit, and many spirits, behind the scenes offering a lot of assistance to me in all the wrong directions. And it is helpful also to recognize that everyone else we meet is struggling with the same battle that we are, falling victim to the same things as we are, and probably these same people are the ones most vocal in accusing us when we fall, and are our most vehement critics and accusers when they discover we’ve committed the same crimes or bad actions as they have done in secret. It is not the innocent that clamor, but the guilty; it is the innocent that are gentle and meek, and who witness the world in silent simplicity and generosity of spirit.

After returning from Israel that year was a particularly lonely one. I missed my relationship with V still, and I missed the excitement and adventure of living overseas in such a dynamic place as the Middle East. Throughout much of my life, since the time I was a teenager, I had been in a relationship, and while I could see a lot of value in this time alone, I yearned still for a partner. Out of this yearning, I succumbed for a short time to the deceptive attractions of internet pornography. I had no interest in anything graphic or depraved, but I wanted to see and experience beauty, physical beauty. This at least was the initial attraction and the basis of my superficial interest in the internet for this purpose. However, very quickly I could see the hypnotic power of this vice and how easily it could trap a person, like a fast current in a river, swiftly taking them downstream to places they hadn’t intended, almost against their will and beyond their power to escape.  After three weeks of dabbling in this lascivious undertaking, I saw the writing on the wall and what danger it presented to me, so I stopped immediately, making a definite and final break with it, never to return again—God willing, I pray.

That experience, though shameful, also filled me with rage against myself and against the evil behind all vice. I was angry that such opportunities exist in our world, and angry at myself for having indulged in them. But it also gave me a huge amount of empathy towards others who have also fallen to this scourge, and especially for anyone who hadn’t been able to fight free of it. But mostly I was just angry that I went looking for this trouble intentionally; and equally frustrated at how pervasive very similar images are on so many magazine covers, in every grocery store, on so many television shows, movies and advertisements. I was angry at how much effort it took to look away, to avert my eyes from these images that the world has decided are innocent and fine for public consumption, but that I could see were not so harmless, and could stir up desires in people that could easily lead to promiscuity, and end in a degrading of the human form, a debasement of sexuality, and a fracturing in relations between men and women.

(to be continued)

~FS

There is an expression, “third times a charm” but for me I needed to double that number. On my sixth attempt visiting Jerusalem I was finally able to spend time there without an injury or an illness. My previous five visits all ended prematurely and with convalescence required. For my first visit, I got a case of food poisoning and spent several days in bed and on the toilet, and lost fifteen pounds. My second visit gave me a mild concussion when I hit the crown of my head up into a steel doorjamb accidentally, while exiting a low doorway onto the rooftop of the Petra Hotel in the Old City; this also required several days’ bedrest and nausea. On my third attempt, I missed one of the bottom steps of an outdoor staircase while watching a cat, and twisted my ankle badly, probably breaking it, since I still have daily pain or discomfort even now, almost twelve years later. My fourth go at Jerusalem was another head injury, and my fifth effort garnered influenza. But my sixth time was the charm; I managed to enter and exit the city limits, and enjoy my entire stay there, without a single mishap.

I don’t believe this is normal; so have no fear in traveling to Jerusalem if that is in your future plans. I should think it is very unlikely you will meet with the same string of misfortunes as I did. However, despite these misfortunes, all of my visits to the holy city also yielded rewards and joys. My food poisoning trip was while serving with Hands of Mercy, helping victims of terrorist attacks and their families. Ye’shi, the director, worked almost singlehandedly to provide enormous support both materially and emotionally for folks that had suffered through these traumas. Nearly every penny that was donated went to help these victims, to the degree that Ye’shi himself made his home in a donated office, and slept in a sleeping bag under the stairwell, so as to save more money to give to those who needed it.

The Petra Hotel is located just inside the Jaffa Gate, across from the Tower of David and provides cheap accommodation to a very eclectic, international clientele. For even cheaper rates you can sleep on the roof, on mattresses scattered about under the stars. One night we ended up on the roof searching for a couple mattresses for the night. Most were already taken, but we managed to find two available on our second pass around the roof, and we bunked down for the night. In the morning, I awoke to see the sun peeking over the Mt. of Olives, and casting its warm, golden glow onto the ancient stone blocks of David’s Tower, just across the road. It was a gloriously peaceful and beautiful way to start the day, in this most beautiful, and glorious of cities.

Later that day I must have eaten something not so peaceful, and I ended the day with a less glorious view of the inside of a toilet. Eventually, I was evacuated from the city and returned to the shelter in Jaffa, but not before I had evacuated every square inch of my stomach and bowels, including, it seemed, things I must have eaten years earlier.

Depleted but not beaten, I recovered my strength in Jaffa, and enjoyed continuing to serve the men and women of the shelters, as well as the homeless population of Tel Aviv with our soup kitchen, which we set up on the beach every Saturday afternoon. Tanya, who had started this ministry, and was dedicating her life to serving her fellow Israelis, had begun with this soup kitchen years earlier. At the time, she just made sandwiches using her own money and handed them out to anyone who needed one, but in time the ministry grew, feeding more and more people, and then finally including the shelters as well.

The team of volunteers at Holy Land Ministries: Tanya, the founder, Michel, the pastor and his wife Ingrid, and including so many other dedicated and loving individuals from around the world, became family—encouraging each other, arguing at times, misunderstanding at other times, but for the most part caring for one another and working together to serve. To serve together with others was one of the great joys in my life and to do it in such a place as Israel, in the geographic heart and soul of my faith, was a true blessing. Before leaving to return to the US I made tentative plans to return to Israel again, perhaps several times, and to do so for longer than just three months if possible. Upon leaving Holy Land Ministries I rented a car and traveled to several locations I hadn’t spent much time yet: at the Dead Sea and in particular Masada, and again up in the Galilee region, and also in the Golan Heights overlooking Syria.

My understanding of religion, based on my experiences in various churches up to this point in my life, had been that church is the place one goes for good teaching (hopefully) about Christ and the gospel, but if I wanted an actual experience of God then I needed to look someplace else, either in my own personal prayer life, or out in nature. Actual experience of God, genuine relationship with Christ, I had never really experienced in a church, and I don’t mean a good feeling, or an emotional event, because church did seem pretty good at manipulating emotions. What I hadn’t found there though, was the depth of experience that the scriptures allude to in the verse, “be still and know that I am God”. It would be quite a few years before I found the Orthodox Church in which this door was finally opened to me.

In the meantime, I sought out quiet places in nature to pray and develop relationship with God as best I could. The Negev desert was an excellent environment for this, as was the Dead Sea, and on the Masada mesa; but the place that I found the greatest and deepest peace in my entire time in Israel was in the gardens overlooking the Sea of Galilee on the grounds of the Church of the Beatitudes. As I sat here and read my Bible, my whole being was gradually washed over by an overwhelming and total wave of peace; and this was not just a small wave, but was one of great size and duration.

I didn’t consider it at the time, but as I looked back on that experience several years later, I felt as though I was being shown a foretaste of the spiritual life to come, the one that is available even in this life through the fullness of church life offered by Orthodox Christianity. And the particular location this experience occurred was significant to me because it was both in a garden, which was my natural place to seek relationship with God, and also on the grounds of a church, which is the place the body of Christ meets together to foster relationship with God. Though I didn’t really understand this corporate aspect of our faith at the time, or see a great deal of spiritual value in church participation, I think this was an opening for me, and a glimpse of what was to come in my future. I felt as though God was meeting me where I was, literally and figuratively alone in a garden, and at the same time showing me a glimpse of what additionally could be added to the spiritual life I was then living, this being a fuller and richer spiritual life supported and fulfilled in communion with other believers, and enriched by the wisdom and tradition of the eternal church.

(to be continued)

~FS

Divorce from V was the first of two great emotional blows that shook me to my core and drove me into the arms of God. The second was the death of my mother years later. I have never been one to successfully endure chronic pain however, I do pretty well with acute pain. If given a choice I would usually choose an intense and sharp pain which is shortly over, to something long and drawn out, though at a lower magnitude. Because of this I intuitively knew I didn’t want to seek diversions to distract me from the utter pain and sorrow I was feeling in losing V. I didn’t want to hide from this sorrow, or avoid it by entertaining myself, or eating myself into an emotional stupor; nor did I want to find excuses to avoid the utter failure I felt. I didn’t want the healing to be drawn out because I failed to put ointment on my wounds, or neglected to go to the true healer of my soul.

I closed the door to my house, literally and figuratively after V moved out and I cried and prayed, and didn’t allow myself any deceptive or false outlet for my grief, but sought out the only One who I believed could truly heal me, my Lord Jesus Christ. Eventually I did seek some outlet: went to a few movies, watched the world cup, and found some measure of distraction because I couldn’t endure day after day in prayer and grief. But for the most part I endured, prayed and eventually began to heal from the loss of my wife. I accepted her decision, I accepted my responsibility, I mourned the loss of her, prayed for her future joy and hoped for her happiness, and moved on with my life.

Perhaps too soon I connected with someone online and we went out on a date. When I told her how recently my wife and I had parted and that the divorce wasn’t yet finalized, but would be soon, she became understandably angry with me and ended any further contact. I completely understood, was a little disappointed, but was also grateful to her because on our date she had taken me to a Messianic Jewish service which I really enjoyed. I felt enlivened by the faith I felt there and I loved the connection I felt to the historically early believers, through worshipping with Jewish believers in Jesus Christ, or Yeshua Ha Mashiach as he is known in the Hebrew tongue. It felt very authentic to me and I was deeply drawn by the history, culture and music of the Jewish people. I began to attend this congregation after my divorce.

After the divorce I needed a fresh start, something to give my life a new direction, and I wanted to find something to serve others. The messianic congregation I attended supported several ministries operating in Israel, so I applied to volunteer with two of these: Holy Land Ministries, which ran homeless shelters for men and women in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, and Hands of Mercy which provided material, emotional and spiritual support to victims of terrorist attacks, located in Jerusalem. In September 2004 I flew to Israel for a three month stint serving with these ministries.

The women’s shelter and main office of Holy Land Ministries was located in a four-story building in a busy urban neighborhood not far from the Mediterranean coast; while the men’s shelter was in a different neighborhood several blocks away. I lived with the men in that shelter and walked or rode a bike to the office and women’s shelter to work during the day. Each morning began with a Bible study on the rooftop patio of the women’s shelter. The sunshine and the light breeze off the sea created a relaxed ambiance and studying God’s word together with the other volunteers and residents of the shelter provided a good start to each day.

The Bible studies were led by an immigrant pastor named Michel. He and his wife, Ingrid had moved to Israel many years earlier and fell in love with the country and never left. Well, Ingrid fell in love with the country while Michel mostly tolerated it; but he loved Ingrid so he stayed. He soon became one of my closest friends because of his honesty, empathy and his caring for others; but not only because of these virtues, but also because his faith was so authentic, and he lived his spiritual struggle so openly, not pretending to be a model Christian, nor putting any effort into a façade of any kind. I had known so many Christians who tried so hard to be what they believed they should be and pretended to be what they weren’t, and Michel had no tolerance for that in himself or in others. I found this incredibly refreshing and enjoyable; and on top of that he was very funny and liked to have a good time. He had a complex relationship between worldly life and the spiritual life—he would mostly rather be pursuing the latest fashions in his favorite city, London, or enjoying the pleasures of Singapore, or cultivating rare plants that he had harvested on one of his many adventures to Asia, but he lived year after year in Israel, “in exile in the desert” as he put it. But this was done out of love, love for Ingrid as I mentioned, but also love for those in need whom he met and helped through this ministry. He had a tremendous heart for the downtrodden, the outcast, and those marginalized by society.

I was attracted to Israel and the men in women in the shelters for many reasons. I had already come to a deep appreciation of Jewish culture; the music especially, but also the language and the customs, so living in Israel felt like home in certain ways, though my heritage is Irish and English. Beyond this though I admired the fact that no other people have endured so much hardship and persecution throughout history and yet endured and even thrived against these odds. In a sense, they are the world’s underdog that has come to outperform most of the world. I liked their toughness. The men and women in the shelters also had come from persecution, most from the former Soviet Union, and were beginning their own journeys to overcome, persevere and hopefully thrive. It was difficult in a new country for most of them because either they didn’t have skills or the skills they had couldn’t be used in their new home due to bureaucracy. One of the men in the shelter had been a top surgeon in Moscow, but here he couldn’t find work, ended up homeless, his wife left him and now he was despondent and wasting away on the street hoping to find new meaning for his life. Another lady had been a concert pianist in Belgrade, but couldn’t find a way to make a living here, had suffered panic and anxiety attacks and became destitute. Many of the younger women had been brought into the country illegally or persuaded to come for good jobs, had their passports taken so they were afraid to go to the authorities, and then were trapped and even imprisoned for the sex trade in Tel Aviv. But they had all managed to find their way to our shelters and were trying to find new paths for their lives now, and to make new beginnings. I appreciated their courage and admired their grit.

Israel isn’t a place for wimps. It is a difficult place, the epitome of a melting pot, at the confluence of so many cultures, so many histories, and even at the nexus of continents. The native Israeli is known as a ‘sabra’ which is the Hebrew term for the prickly pear, because they are prickly on the outside, but sweet on the inside. One friend I met in Israel had a different description of people like me, who live in the United States, she said we live on ‘planet easy’. By comparison I had to agree with her.

But Israel is also a place for reverence and holiness. I found closeness to God walking the ancient streets of Jerusalem, treading the paths alongside the Sea of Galilee, hiking amongst the rocky crags and across the arid sands of the Negev desert in the south. At the southernmost tip of Israel is the town of Eilat, where the Negev meets the Red Sea. It is a place of stark natural beauty: barren but colorful mountain ranges, deep gorges, brilliant sunlight shimmering against bright stone, or heavy shadows darkening the depths of tight river valleys, or wadis, submerged far below. The arid wind blew gently in the fall, when I was there, but the sun was still penetrating—baking the earth and scorching the stone. In the shade of a cliff or a small tree, animals took shelter. At En Netafim, a year-round spring just a few kilometers from the Israeli-Egyptian border, a small family of gazelle satisfied their thirst and kept a wary eye on me as I sat nearby.

Everyone in this harsh climate seeks desperately for water, the gazelles at this spring are not alone in this desire. I hadn’t packed enough water with me on my hike, but in a unique and immediate answer to prayer as I was hiking along the silent trail to Uvda, two jeeps suddenly came into view, and when they arrived, they stopped beside me and one of the men inside reached out and handed two liter bottles of water to me, and then they drove off as suddenly as they had appeared. It wasn’t a mirage, but it sure seemed like it, until I opened the first bottle and tasted the genuine and wholly real water inside. And I thanked my God to whom I had just prayed moments before.

The next day I drove along the border between Israel and Egypt. I pulled off the road and got out of the car and walked up to the barbed wire fence which separated the two countries and looked down into the Sinai. It was an isolated place and I thought I was alone until I glanced along the fence to my left, and down the slope I saw an observation tower on the Egyptian side with two guards watching me. I watched them as well for a few moments and then turned to walk back to my car. One of them called out to me so I turned and looked their way again wondering what this was about. He kept yelling to me so I started walking down the hill towards their tower. As I got close enough to see his face, he gestured as if to drink water. I understood and ran up to my car and grabbed a large bottle of water and then walked back down to the tower. When I made it back down the hill he had climbed down from the tower and was waiting for me on the other side of the fence. I handed him the bottle of water through the barbed wire and then we reached through the fence and shook each other’s hand. In very broken English he asked me my religion and when I told him I am a Christian he made a gesture of an open book and then motioned to the sky. He did this several times until I finally gathered he wanted me to pray for rain. I asked him if this is what he meant and it was. So I promised him I would pray for rain for Egypt and for Israel.

When I turned to walk back up the hill I noticed several Israeli border police had pulled in next to my car and they were watching me intently. I was fairly certain I wasn’t supposed to hand things over this border fence, and my actions might have caused some suspicion, but as I returned to my car, none of them said anything to me, they just watched me silently until I started my car and drove away. Farther up the highway I came to a checkpoint where I was stopped and prevented from driving any further. The Israeli guard asked me if I had a gun with me, which I didn’t. He told me without a gun he couldn’t allow me to continue on this road because it was too dangerous. If I had a gun I could continue but without one I would have to turn around. I asked him what specifically was at issue and he explained this highway had lately been a favorite target for terrorist activity coming through the barbed-wire border fence. In several cases they had caught Egyptian border guards helping terrorists through the fence; once through they were hiding alongside the highway and ambushing vehicles and killing the occupants. They didn’t want anyone traveling further if they didn’t have a weapon to defend themselves.

(to be continued)

~FS

The Mennonites, who had so graciously accepted me into their fold, so to speak, and allowed me opportunity to serve others and God alongside them, also had a working relationship with FEMA. They provided needed volunteers to help with various rebuilding projects after disasters within the US and its territories. About the same time as I was studying at UW a major cyclone hit the island group of Chuuk, Micronesia, destroying many of the homes of this island nation, located several hundred miles southeast of Guam.  Since Micronesia has a close relationship with the US FEMA sent materials to the islands to help rebuild homes devastated by the cyclone and the Mennonites sent volunteers to do the work building and training Micronesians how to build. Sensing a wonderful opportunity for an interesting adventure I applied to be a volunteer and was flown to Guam and then on to Chuuk to help with the rebuilding effort in the summer of 2003.

When I got off the plane at Chuuk International Airport on the island of Weno I felt I had been dropped into a blast furnace. Coming from the temperate region of the Pacific Northwest in no way prepared me for the heat and humidity. By the time I was shuttled to my accommodations on the other side of the island both of my feet had already swollen to the point I had to loosen my sandals to their limits. I wasn’t well suited to this environment. Nevertheless, there was work to be done so I joined a small group of volunteers and native Micronesians as we loaded up one of the motorized longboats used to taxi people from island to island, piled in ourselves, and headed out on our hour-long boat ride to reach my first building site on the island of Uman, some ten or so miles to the south.

The houses were simple stick construction with a deck platform up on wood pilings, light framing with plywood sheathing for the walls, and composite shingle roofing. We just built this simple shell and left the rest to the homeowners to finish as they wished later. Most of the materials had already been delivered to the site and on this particular house the pilings and floor were already completed when I arrived. It was hard work but great fun lugging our tools and generator and fuel up from the beach, through the trees to the building site. On most days the local women prepared our lunch which consisted of fresh tuna caught that morning and breadfruit, a local staple which was mashed and had coconut added along with sea-salt, as well as sweet potatoes and rice. It was a wonderful meal, made all the better enjoying it with the locals who we were working with and forming friendships.

Chuuk is an island grouping comprising a large lagoon in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. It is famous among divers because of the many ships sunk throughout the lagoon during WWII and is a destination for this reason, as it has some of the best preserved underwater wrecks in all of the world. I wasn’t a diver but several of those I was volunteering with were, and on Sunday, our day off, I joined a small group heading out to dive the Fumitzuki destroyer several miles off the west coast of Weno. While they dove down to the wreck I swam on the surface, which still afforded amazing views of the wreckage as I looked down through the crystalline waters.

I was a fairly good swimmer, having competed in several triathlons earlier in life and still routinely swimming for exercise, but I had never before swam alone, miles out in the open ocean. The others in my group had all dove down to the wreck, leaving me alone on the surface. I jumped in over the side of our small boat and got out a few feet from the side when I was overcome with panic. The immensity of the ocean caught me off-guard; and the closest land was several miles away, and barely perceptible on the horizon from my vantage point in the water. I reached back to the side of the boat and held myself there as I took deep breaths and regained control of myself. I slowly acclimated to the open waters by putting my head underwater and breathing out, while holding to the side of the boat. After a few minutes of practicing breathing and submerging my head in this way I relaxed and took a short swim out and back. Once this became routine I was ready to venture out and over the wreck of the Fumitzuki destroyer.

As I swam through the warm clear waters, gliding gently over the bow of the destroyer below me, I forgot all about my fear of swimming in the open ocean. The entirety of this warship revealed its fascinating secrets to my greedy, enraptured eyes. I couldn’t believe I was actually swimming over the top of a Japanese destroyer sunk back in WWII and it was still nearly intact. I floated over the forward guns on the deck and then over a portion of the bridge and the funnels. Depth perception was difficult through the water but, as I discerned these elements and some of the communication antennae rising up towards me, the reality of this vessel struck me, as well as the beauty. It had become a reef for all sorts of fish and sea life which I could see swimming in and around the gun turrets, through the open funnels, and across the deck of the ship. The scene was mesmerizing and other-worldly. I crossed over the length of the ship a couple times, enjoying new details each time and then finally made my way back to our boat.

Next we visited a Japanese fighter plane that had been shot down and sunk upside down in only about 10-15 feet of water. I was able to swim down to this one and touch the wings while one of my companions actually pulled to the surface a portion of the original flight mask and hose for us to examine before he dove back down and returned it to the cockpit. At one point, as I was swimming along, one of the others in our group suddenly yelled over to me excitedly and asked if I had seen ‘it’? Seen what I asked her. “The shark that was following you,” she said. “It was following you for about fifty yards, right behind you, didn’t you see it?” No I hadn’t, and I’m very glad I didn’t, because seeing a shark trailing me in the open water isn’t on my bucket list.

The rest of the following week I spent building homes on the island of Udot, about an hour by boat, west of the main island of Weno where we spent our nights. The weather was mostly clear and beautiful while I was in Chuuk but one day as we worked, the clouds came in and we were warned that a storm was heading our way, and we should hurry back to the main island. We gathered our tools together and set out in our boat. All of the water taxis were driven by locals who knew the waters well, so I never had much concern and besides, the weather had always been perfect and the ocean calm. As we set out from Udot towards Weno the fog came quickly in, so that soon we were completely enshrouded without any visibility. The waters were very calm, and there was a strange stillness as our driver cut the motor and attempted to discern our location. He and his companion didn’t speak English but I could tell there was a problem, based on their expressions. Soon I came to understand that they were lost, and on top of that they hadn’t brought along enough fuel with them for the motor.

As we drifted through the thickening fog I couldn’t help but recall several stories I had heard earlier that week about folks who got lost in these little boats and drifted out beyond the barrier islands that encircled the lagoon and on out to sea. Apparently this wasn’t all that uncommon, but there was nothing I could do about it. If our pilots were lost and they were both born and raised here, I certainly wasn’t going to be able to help. Eventually we heard other voices through the deep mist, and slowly the dark outline of another boat with several occupants emerged. Our two boats came abreast and we tethered their boat to ours. It turned out that they also were lost and drifting but they had fuel. This was a Godsend as our pilot filled our tank and started up the motor. The fog began to lift, along with the wind. The folks in the other boat didn’t have experience on the water and asked to be towed by our boat, so we dragged them along behind us as we made our way back to Weno island. The island was still far away as the clouds grew darker and more foreboding and the winds increased. We were racing the storm now and hoping to make it safely to harbor before the waves grew much higher.  We made it back to shore in time and got inside when the first of the rains and high winds hit the islands. It didn’t end up being a significant storm by their standards, but it was still much better to be on dry land than out on the water.

We didn’t do any more building after this. FEMA needed to divert resources to a different natural disaster, so the funding was suddenly discontinued, and we were told to leave the island the following week. When I returned to Seattle V welcomed me home, and the following day asked for a divorce.

(to be continued)

~FS

The door locked behind me, its sound echoed briefly down the hallway as I gazed along the empty corridor. I was alone in jail—not completely alone, as there were surveillance cameras up near the ceiling, so I was being watched. I made my way through several more locked doors, up an elevator and was finally greeted by an armed guard who led me into a small holding cell. I had made this short, silent journey every Friday morning for months and each time it was a strange sensation to hear the doors lock behind me, and find myself alone in this cold, indifferent environment.

Earlier in the year I had joined a prison ministry program through the Catholic diocese of Santa Rosa and as a member of this I had an official identification card and free access to visit inmates at the Sonoma County Jail. There were three young men who had requested visits so I spent several hours meeting with them one at a time on Fridays, listening to their stories and providing a friendly presence. Occasionally we opened the Bible and read a psalm, a proverb or another passage, but for the most part they just wanted to talk and needed someone to listen.

Once they came to see that I was there to help them and trusted that I didn’t have any ulterior motive, each of them had a great deal to say and were eager to share their life stories, the ups and downs, the good and bad, and how they had come to be in jail. The common thread in all three stories was a lack of support and caring in their homes growing up. They detailed abuse, or neglect and often violence in their childhood environments. When I told them that I loved them, each reacted with surprise, confusion, skepticism and finally in time, when they believed me, with hope and sadness. They were hopeful that what I said was true, grateful that someone finally expressed love for them without anything to gain in return, and sadness for the lack of love in their lives. Beneath the hardness, the craftiness, the worldliness and emotional armor these guys each turned out to be gentle and sad, and more than a little bit empty inside.

I could empathize with them and I saw myself in each of them. Were I to have had a less fortunate childhood, or had I been caught doing this or that, or had I given in to any number of my vices, or been overwhelmed by them to a larger degree than I typically am, then it could easily have been me locked up in this jail, hoping for a visitor. Without any doubt at all, if God had ever made a prison for my crimes committed against Him, for my sinful thoughts and actions, I would absolutely be in that prison.

I hired one of these young men to work for me when he was released from jail. For several weeks I picked him up from his mother’s home each morning and he worked closely with me as I trained him in various aspects of landscaping and construction. However, it turned out he was more comfortable in jail, with the routines that he knew and had grown accustomed to, so shortly thereafter, he was arrested again for a new crime and returned to jail. When we met again in the visiting room of the jail he looked at me and shrugged and said he guessed this is just where he belongs. I didn’t have a good answer to that but smiled at him and told him I was sorry it had turned out this way.

I was also sorry things had turned out the way they did for MD. He had warned us years earlier that a likely outcome of our course with him would be that he would end up in prison.  Even though he had known this was possible, maybe even likely, and even though he had prepared me for this potential I was still sad to see him there. I visited him on occasion in Vacaville, until he was transferred to a different location farther south, in Atascadero.

By the year 2001 I was getting tired of landscaping and wanted a different challenge so I applied to graduate school in architecture. I was placed on a waiting list at the University of Washington, but could take classes towards the degree through their extension office while waiting to be admitted the following year. So V and I moved north to Seattle and I enrolled in several architecture courses starting that fall.

In looking for a new church to attend in Seattle, I told a friend that I wanted to find a church that really lived out their beliefs and practiced their faith in concrete and practical ways. He suggested I look into the Mennonites. Seattle Mennonite Church was not far from the house V and I rented, and it was convenient one Sunday to drop in and see what their services were like. As I learned more about the Mennonites I was impressed with their history: the oppression and suffering they had lived under in Europe and the dedication to their beliefs which they displayed in the face of this oppression, to the point of martyrdom in very many cases, and I was impressed with their commitment to social issues from helping the poor to helping anyone who was marginalized by our society. They were true champions of the underdog, which is also something I had always tried to be, so it felt like a very good fit.

Later that year I was hired to coordinate their volunteer programs which included a service program aimed mainly for college-aged students in which they volunteered for a two-year commitment with various non-profit agencies in the Puget Sound region. The participants came from all parts of the United States and even from overseas. While in Seattle they all lived together in a large Victorian house on Capitol Hill owned by the church. Part of my job was to interview applicants to the program, help place them with agencies and then provide support to them for the two years while they lived and worked in the program. At any given time there were around ten young adults living together in the house and volunteering with the program.

The following year I began attending the University of Washington full-time as a student in their graduate architecture program while also continuing to work as the volunteer coordinator for the church. V wasn’t interested in attending the church with me, and though she exhibited so many qualities of a Christian, in her kindness and empathy among other things, in the final analysis she wasn’t a Christian and I think in many ways she felt antagonized by my Christianity even without my intent. One thing was certainly true, between my graduate studies and working for the church I had very little time left over to spend with her. She was quiet and didn’t often let on what was bothering her but I imagine this bothered her and contributed at least in part to her desire to leave me the following year and to request a divorce.

One of my roles as the volunteer coordinator for the church was to welcome a group of short-term volunteers from Colorado State University who came to Seattle each year on their spring break to serve people in the inner city. Our church hosted this group while they stayed in Seattle and it was my job to welcome them at the airport, drive them back to the church and orient them to their rooms, the showers and the kitchen where they would prepare their meals and then be available for whatever needs might arise for them during their week in Seattle.

One year, as I was walking the group up to the side entrance of the church, we all got a big surprise. Fortunately later that night, after the surprise had ended, I wrote out an account of the entire thing, including the dialog, which I present here:

It was getting dark as we finally pulled into the parking lot. In the van with me were a group of fifteen college students from Colorado State University who had come to Seattle for a week to work on a service project over their spring break.  They were excited to be here but were also tired from their flight, and ready to see where they were going to be staying for the coming week.

 Their accommodations were on the second floor of the Mennonite church building in town.  The church is situated in an urban environment amidst low-rent apartment buildings, thrift stores and car dealerships. At night, it is probably safe, especially if you are in a group of fifteen, but it is still a good idea to keep an eye out for potential trouble.

 This particular year I was working for the church, coordinating service programs. So it was my job to welcome this group, show them around, and be available if they needed anything.

 We piled out of the van, loaded ourselves with duffle bags, suitcases, and sleeping bags and trekked across the parking lot to the church.

 In my mind I was running through everything I needed to show them about the building; the location of the shower, the bathrooms, the kitchen, which door to enter through and which one to leave closed and locked…when I saw, coming out of this very same door, someone who shouldn’t have been.  In his arms he was carrying a microwave oven and stuffed poorly into his backpack was a portable stereo.

 He glanced our way and then hustled quickly around the corner of the building with his new acquisitions.

It is a rare thing to catch someone in the act of stealing, so my mind didn’t immediately register what I had just seen. Was he really stealing from us? I asked myself. Maybe I know him. He probably attends the church and I just didn’t recognize him in the fading light. I rationalized. But then, why did he scuttle off so quickly in the opposite direction after seeing us coming towards him?

 I decided he was definitely a thief so I sprang into action. I quickly told the students that we were being robbed, handed them the keys to the building and told them to go inside and make themselves comfortable as I dashed off after the intruder.

 I caught up with him not far down the street and confronted him. “What are you doing? Those are our things you are taking from the church.”

 “No they aren’t,” he replied.

 “Of course they are. I can tell you exactly where they came from. That microwave in your hands is out of the youth room, and the stereo is also.”

 “They’re mine.”

 “But I just saw you coming out of the door of the church.”

 “No I didn’t.”

 “I see those things everyday. I know you took them.”

 As the conversation proceeds we continue to walk down the darkened street.

 “Look”, he said as he turned to face me. “Do you want me to just smash this over your head?” He gestured to the microwave.

 He looked menacingly at me and I took him at his word.

 “No. I just want you to return them.”

 He started walking again and I followed alongside. “Okay. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are yours and it is just a crazy coincidence. Come back to the church with me and we’ll look at the location I think they belong. If the microwave and stereo are there then I apologize.”

 “I’m not going back,” he snapped. “Just leave me alone.”

 “I’m not going to leave you alone. You have our things.”

 No reply. We walked a moment in silence. Who knows what he was thinking, but my mind was racing trying to come up with the key to unlock this situation. The line I was taking wasn’t working.

 “What do you need?” I asked him.

 “Money.”

 “I understand…look,” I said, “I don’t want you to have to steal for it and you don’t want to steal either.”

 He didn’t answer.

 “I know you don’t want to steal. Not really.”

 We walked a little further and he stopped. We were standing under a dim streetlight, at a corner where two roads met. I pulled out my wallet, opened it, and counted to myself what I had.

 “I have forty dollars. You can have it.”

 His expression changed, softening for a moment. Then he looked suspicious.

 “Why would you give me that?”

 I thought for a moment, and in that space of time, God gave me love for him.

 “Because I love you. God loves you too. I don’t want you to have to steal.”

 He looked at me for a moment, evaluating me in some way unknown to me. And then he asked,

 “If I didn’t give these things back would you still give me the money?”

 That was a great question. I paused to think about it. The answer had to be yes or my ‘love’ was going to look pretty cheap. But the answer also had to be true because I was sure he would have seen right through me if it wasn’t. In any case I didn’t want to cheapen this brief relationship with a lie.

 I imagined the possibility that I gave him the money and he kept the stolen property. I didn’t know how that would eventually turn out but I made myself okay with that chance and told him so.

 He considered my response. I offered him the money, reaching out to him. He thought a bit further and then really surprised me with what he said next.

 “Let me carry these things back for you.”

“Really!? I asked, “I can take the microwave for you.”

 “No. I want to carry them all back for you.”

 So he turned around and began walking back the way he had come, retracing his steps back to the door of the church. I turned and walked alongside him yet again. On the way back he began talking, and talking, and he didn’t stop talking for a long time.

 “Nobody has ever loved me. No one says they love me. My dad never loved me. I can’t believe it, that you love me. I’m just passing through town. I don’t have a home and I don’t know anyone here. You know if someone just would have loved me. That was really cool. Thank you so much for the money. I really need it.”

 “No problem.”

 We stopped in view of the church and he looked at me. “Can I give you these now? I don’t want to go back there.”

 “Sure.”

 He handed the microwave to me and then took off his backpack and pulled the stereo out and placed it on top of the microwave in my arms.

 “You’re welcome to come and join us while you are in town. I won’t tell anyone who did this so if you come in on Sunday no one will know you. It’ll be fine.”

 “Thanks. I probably won’t be around.”

 We exchanged a few more pleasantries and then he waved goodbye, turned and walked into the darkness. I watched him go and then walked back to the church. I thought to myself, I’ve met several thieves in my life but I’ve never before met a thief that gave it all back.

 I felt that God really taught us both a lot that evening. I was surprised to find the person that emerged when he was treated with kindness instead of anger. Though he acted despicably at first by stealing, he was treated with dignity, and in the end this allowed him to respond with dignity and with grace. I praise God for teaching us the value of love, and the practical way that it can make a bad situation good.

(to be continued)

~FS