A Genuine Word

I work in a field where a genuine word is, surprisingly, hard to find.  Countless mediums are too often filled with warm and fuzzy content seeks to arouse emotional goose bumps rather than honest, sometimes-hard, discussions that arouse true conviction.  I have often been guilty of producing more than my fair share of fluff, and I’ve struggled with striking balances of sentiment and substance when explaining the context of what we do, how we do it, who we serve and the impact we seek to make.  I often get off-balance, and as an insider to this particular location (the Middle East) and vocation (missions, development), I can see that many others do as well.

So I was surprised when came across a genuine word.  It was in a familiar place (our ministry office, literally next door to me) and from a familiar voice (our national director), but the message posted in an organization newsletter was starkly unfamiliar.  Rather than appealing to clichés, simplicity and dramatics, it spoke with sincerity about what we do and I why.  Not only was I surprised to see the words, I was surprised to realize how much I needed to hear them.  Like a little corrective voice, the passage again turned the head of my heart in a direction worth pursuing.  Perhaps you will too find it a genuine word and a reminder of the purpose to continue with faith in towards the opportunities around us.

Our part of the world has been plagued by war for decades.  I lived most of my childhood through the so-called “Lebanese Civil War” that wrecked havoc in the country for 15 years.  Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost.  We were eventually driven out of our home town and forced to leave everything behind.  That was the hardest part for me.  My sense of security and belonging was gone, along with all my childhood pictures.  Carrying only scarred Memories, my hope in life was seriously shaken.

In His perfect timing, God’s children came into our lives as family providing practical help and sharing the Good News about a better future in a heavenly city.  A new sense of hope was restored in me.  I’m most grateful for the opportunity we have at Kids Alive Lebanon, not only to be God’s serving hand but also His voice that instills hope.  Pain and suffering surround us.  But our programs provide a safe haven for the precious children who have been entrusted into our care.  Their needs are met and their eyes opened to the love and salvation that God has in store for them.

Our ministry embraces street kids, refugee children, orphans, and those who suffer from abuse or neglect.  They all find the care that every child, created in God’s image, deserves.  At the Oasis, using our limited resources, we’ve embarked on an exciting adventure with the Lord to make a difference in the lives of 60 Syrian refugee children. We’ve been learning together with the children that nothing is impossible with God.  They have come to appreciate the Word and they love to sing songs of praise which lift them above the ugliness of war and its horrors.  We appreciate all those who share the same vision and help us accomplish great things for God!”

Joseph Ghattas

Field Director, Lebanon

Remembering to Remember Well

Dar El Awlad was honored again this year to participate in the Service of Remembrance hosted by the British Embassy at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Beirut. For many years one of our young men has been invited to lay a wreath in honor of fallen veterans of war, and I've blogged about past ceremonies here.  Our young man did a fine job this year and represented Dar El Awlad well. We hope continue our involvement in the Remembrance Day event.

While a nice opportunity to engage Dar El Awlad with the wider community, Remembrance Day offers a chance for serious reflection. The more I age the more I encounter the potential pitfalls of memory, a topic I've written about before.  Too often remembering serves to rekindle pain, extend guilt and blame, and stifle the work of reconciliation.  It doesn't have to be this way, but often it is.  Even with the respect and class of an event like this, a Service of Remembrance poses challenges. Can we remember the past without holding on to it negatively?  Can we recount the misery, loss and brutality of conflict without letting it corrupt our hearts? These are good questions to ask; however, I walked away from this year's ceremony encouraged by an example of remembering well. The ceremony concluded by reading a moving prayer. It serves as a compass as we attempt to navigate the mess and the beauty of this world and our memories of it:

The Litany of Reconciliation

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,

Father forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,

Father forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,

Father forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,

Father forgive.

Our indifference to the plight of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee,

Father forgive.

The lust which dishonors the bodies of men, women and children,

Father forgive.

The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,

Father forgive.

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving on another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Amen

Dar El Awlad represented in the company of dignitaries

Laying the wreath

He did a fine job, represented Dar El Awlad well.

A picture with a fellow service-day participant.  We did not realize until later that it is Paula Radcliffe, current women's world record holder in the marathon and Member or the Order of the British Empire. She was in town to support the Beirut Marathon.

Discovering the Lebanon Mountain Trail

Lebanon is in the midst of a number of crises, all of which can drain the heart and tire the spirit. Among the most personally challenging of these recent issues has been the ongoing trash crisis. For the past three months Lebanon has become a wasteland of east as trash piles come and go and shift without any competent system of management.  It's a mess and sometimes it makes me a mess. But recently I was reminded of what Lebanon possesses beyond the garbage.  

The Hamouds shared a rare family gathering in Lebanon this month and most of us siblings planned couple a days of hiking along sections of the Lebanon Mountain Trail.  For the past decade, this non-profit organization has been establishing, maintaining and expanding a 480 kilometer walking trail that covers Lebanon North to South.  It captures Lebanon's natural and cultural beauty in impressive ways.  

The two sections we hiked were more than we anticipated, both in splendor and challenge.  By the end of the journey we achieved an experience marked by meaningful connections: connections with God's creation, connections with people who opened their doors and hosted us, and connections with one another.

The Lebanese Mountain Trail shows both the potential and the challenges of this country. Natural beauties abounded, but along the path we saw the forces of urban development and (trash) pollution threaten the integrity of the trail. Even so, what currently exists is a gem. I hope it will be discovered and well-kept by many, and I hope to be a frequent visitor myself.

Rising above the villages

Passing through a pine forest

The walking trail included paths, roads, and even stone walls

Rare points of tranquility in an urban country

Thank you Romans for creating this road thousands of years ago.  We are still utilizing it today!

Testaments of former times are found throughout the way.

Off the beaten track

A place for reflection among reflections

Haunted by a Child, Desperation, and the Mercies of the Water

Aylan Kurdi* has been haunting the world this week.  Images of the three-year-old-boy washed up on a Turkish beach has likely done more to communicate the nightmare that is Syria than any rhetoric, reporting or study from in the last half-decade. (I will not post the picture, but it can be seen on the provided link)  He and his family were among the masses of Syrian refugees fleeing their hell by putting faith in ferries, smugglers and the prospect of life in Europe.  It’s a journey that I am aware of.  A number of my refugee friends have asked for my thoughts as they consider taking the trek.  I’ve heard the step-by-step breakdown of a voyage that many thousands are taking successfully and many other thousands are taking tragically.  The Syrian crisis has been going on for years and sucking millions of lives into its terror.  Now it may finally have a name: Aylan.

I have painfully journeyed with this crisis from its offset.  My Syrian relatives have been tossed into displacement while friends and loved ones have been lost to the conflict.  I have spent countless hours listening to the refugees’ stories of plight, pain and despair.  This is not new news to me.  Despite all this, the picture of a three-year-old on a shoreline opened my eyes to new depths of war’s true evil.

When I first saw the image of Aylan’s small, lifeless body resting on a sandy beach I immediately thought of my own infant daughter.  So often I see her in the same position sleeping peacefully in a bed far removed from any encounter of violence and chaos.  I know that she will arise from her sleep, but Aylan never will.  He joins the countless babies, infants and children that have been taken by the vicious manifestations of this civil war.  They are both the true innocents and the primary victims.

I can only uncomfortably wonder what it must feel like as a man to take the risk of putting my wife and baby in a dingy boat and surrendering them to the mercies of the waters with the hope that they will arrive to a better place.  How terrible could a situation be to take such a gamble?  How broken must it all be to compel me to make such a move?  I pray I never find the answers to these questions.

Aylan’s story reminds me of another story from ages ago.  A young Hebrew mother in Egypt was surrounded by an unthinkable carnage that threatened to strike down her baby.  Faced with systematic killing by a ruthless regime and murderous operations by terrorizing militants, the mother placed her boy in a basket, set it in a river and surrendered the precious life to the mercies of the water in the hopes that he will arrive at a better place.  It was an act of faith-mingled-with-desperation by a mother that had nothing and everything to lose.  The baby, a beautiful boy named Moses, journeyed well and eventually landed in the care of Pharaoh’s family.  There in the courts of royalty Moses found a promised land that would preserve him so he could someday lead his people to the Promised Land. 

Aylan did not arrive to his promised land.  He was taken by the waters and spit out for the entire world to see.  But Aylan is not unlike Moses for neither was ever truly at the mercies of waters, but at the mercies of the living God.  The flights of the two children may have met differing outcomes, but God is not a god of the outcome; he is a god of the overcome.  The hope for Aylan and every innocent life cut down by this world’s ruthlessness is that God has overcome death through Christ and a cross and a empty grave.  It’s the only hope any of us can claim of arriving at the final Promised Land.

This month Dar El Awlad will take new children into its programs.  Many of these will be among the millions of Syrian children that have had their lives turned upside down by displacement, death and destruction.  They bear scars that we cannot even begin to understand let alone heal.  But we trust in God’s mercies and the unfailing love that has the power to restore and transform.  We try to do our part knowing that He is ever faithful to do His part.  Our prayer is that we can be a type of ‘pharaoh’s’ palace, a place of protection and provision as God prepares these children for the plans set before them.

I wish I had no idea who Aylan Kurdi is.  If lament that his family were in a position where risk on the seas looked more promising than life on the land.  I do not want to see any child’s life placed in the mercies of the waters.  I want all refugees to return to their homes and rebuild their nation.  In the meantime, I pray we at Dar El Awlad can help alter few narratives from hopeless to hopeful and make ourselves part of the solution rather than simply observers of the problem.

*Aylan’s real name is in fact Alan Sheru.  Kurdi was used by the Turkish press to note his ethnicity, and the name has carried on in the press. 

60 years on, I do remember Emmett Till

Emmett Till should be alive today.  He should be spending his twilight years surround by children, grandchildren (even great-grandchildren) enjoying a life well lived.  But Emmett Till is not alive today.  60 years ago on this day the Chicago native was gruesomely killed while on a visit to relatives in Mississippi.  The fourteen year old was beat, eye-gouged, shot in the head, tied by the neck with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and thrown in the Tallahatchie River.  It was an attack that sent ripples across the country for its sheer brutality.  His offense?  Speaking to a lady.  The subsequent trial captured the attention of the nation and ended with two suspects acquitted of any crime (this despite the fact that they later admitted in a magazine interview to murdering Till but were protected against double jeopardy and therefore suffered no legal punishment).  The result was a young, promising life destroyed while the confessing perpetrators walked away free.  American folk singer/poet/historian Bob Dylan captures well the events of six decades ago in his song “The Death of Emmett Till.”

I am haunted by Emmett Till.  I remember hearing about his death as a grade-school student and it blazed in my mind a vivid realization of the scars of hatred and violence that my country regrettably bears.  As I grow older I see the narrative in different ways.  I realize that Emmett Till was not killed because his skin happened to be black and the skin of the girl he spoke to happened to be white.  He did not die because he found himself in a state with a rather terrifying history of lynchings.   He did not suffer because he lived in a time when skin pigmentation determined an individual’s rights, protections and access to legal justice.  Emmett Till died because some individuals were so uncomfortable with themselves, so unsettled in their understanding of who they are, that they acted out humanity’s tendency to violently strike down something different.  It is the same propensity that I see acted out time and time again in my home country, adopted country and every other context known to man.  The problem never is race, religion, culture, or “the way of times.”  These are invariably mixed into the problems, but they do not take away life.  The problem is that, ever since Cain struck down Abel, we continue to strike down our fellow man when he exposes what we do not like about ourselves. 

How incredible it is then to remember Jesus who suffered the absolute worst of man’s violence while never striking out in any way.  He taught a pure message that called for the enduring of violence (even unto death) but never its administration.  In the end, Jesus demonstrated that even the worst of human violence can be turned by God into something glorious.  We see it in the cross where a vile and disgraceful death was turned into the ultimate act of triumph, hope and life.  We see it in Emmett Till, where a tragic death catalyzed one of the greatest social movements of our times in the American Civil Rights Movement.  It may have been a cold, heartless murder but it was not a loss in vain. 

As someone who spends his occupation working with children and youth, I can find only little solace in the thought that one boy’s death was required to help elevate and liberate countless other lives.  I feel the lament of Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, when she writes in her memoirs, “I realized that Emmett had achieved the significant impact in death that he had been denied in life. Even so, I had never wanted Emmett to be a martyr. I only wanted him to be a good son. Although I realized all the great things that had been accomplished largely because of the sacrifices made by so many people, I found myself wishing that somehow we could have done it another way.”

In midst of the violence, war and death rampant in our times, there are too many people who, like Emmett Till, have been sacrificed to death when all they desire is life.  Yet I do thank God that He has shown us “another way” in Jesus.  The one who ultimately suffered declares that the suffering of those past and present will not be ultimate; he compels us to be people of peace to bring a future of healing and hope to this world.  

I conclude with Emmylou Harris's touching tribute song "My Name is Emmett Till," a fitting call for this day and every day to remember the past and build for a future.

Celebrating Citizenship While Remembering the Excluded

After arriving nearly six months ago, Yasmine officially received American citizenship today!  It’s a simple set of documents that do not change who she is essentially, but they do certainly change who she is practically.  Yasmine can now boast membership to a nation-state and access to all the rights and privileges of citizenship.   Acquiring this was not much more than a formality, but even formalities consist of technicalities.  Lebanon does not allow women to transmit citizenship onto their children or spouses-apparently a Lebanese woman is less of a human than a Lebanese man*- therefore Yasmine’s only shot at citizenship was through me and the United States.  However, this required building a case.  Since I am the lone U.S. citizen parent, and since I was not born on American soil, I had to prove that I satisfied the residency requirements to pass nationality to my child.**  Had I not bothered to apply for citizenship nor met the nationality requirements, Yasmine would have been at risk of having no formal citizenship, a condition we call statelessness. 

As a father, I feel a sense of relief and comfort knowing that I have provided my daughter with citizenship.  Most of us take such a thing for granted, but for many millions of children around the world citizenship is a dream rather than a reality.  An estimated 15 million*** people in the world are stateless, deprived of a fundamental human right.  In some cases they have been discriminately denied citizenship while in other cases they have slipped through the cracks of complicated nationality laws and find themselves lacking any.  The outcome is a condition of “being a foreigner everywhere, a citizen nowhere.”  Though most have never left their country of birth, stateless individuals are excluded from society and deprived of the protections and provisions of a state.  They lack the right to access rights and are, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt puts, “rightless.”  An array of services, opportunities and experiences are denied or extremely complicated for stateless individuals, including movement and travel, land ownership, conducting business and banking, gaining legal employment, access to education and healthcare, registering marriages and births, voting, serving in political office, receiving a drivers license, passing on or receiving inheritance, qualifying for insurance or social security benefits, and participating in civic services.  Just imagine for a moment how different your life would be if you had no passport, I.D. card, drivers license, official birth certificate or social security number?  Imagine if you had existence but no legal entity that was ready to recognize it.  Think about all the aspects of life that would be impacted.

Before moving to Lebanon I had no concept of statelessness; I assumed that everyone everywhere has some sort of citizenship.  I knew some lack official status in their country of residence (such as undocumented immigrants and migrants), but they do have citizenship to a country somewhere; there is a place they can claim official belonging.  The stateless, regrettably, do not belong anywhere.  During these past years I have encountered statelessness in many ways and many faces.  It impacts children we serve at Dar El Awlad, relatives of mine, friends and ministry partners, fellow church members and many others.  It is not a rare occurrence or an anomaly, but rather a global crisis that extends its ugly hand to all regions of the globe.  The problem is only intensifying as legal reforms fail to address the underlying issues of statelessness and displacement levels reach record highs. (Refugee situations are a hornet’s nest for statelessness to start and perpetuate.)  Despite its breadth and severity, the international community has failed to recognize statelessness for what it is, and there remains pathetically little effort to fix this theoretically solvable problem.  Even so, there are champions for the cause who are working to confront this injustice with advocacy and action.  I desire to be among this number.

I may be able to rest in knowing that my daughter is now a citizen, but I will not forget the many millions who are not so fortunate.  Until every last person in this world can boast with confidence an official nationality, I will try to be a voice and a minister to those suffering statelessness.  This sentiment has led me make statelessness the topic of my graduate thesis, and I believe it is only the start of my intentional engagement with one of today’s worst human rights crises.  I am thankful for the opportunity with Kids Alive to directly serve stateless individuals in a meaningful way, and I am thankful for friends of mine that have recently seen their statelessness remedied.  Mostly, I am thankful for our God who promises to fully deal with every form of evil and injustice; the eternal hope of heavenly citizenship is true and unfailing. Let it be on earth as it is in heaven.

Please engage yourself with this important topic by exploring the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion website for the most current information on statelessness and by adding your name to the United Nations #Ibelong campaign.

*It is completely possible for a person who has never once stepped foot on Lebanese soil to be granted Lebanese citizenship via the father while another born and raised in Lebanon with a Lebanese mother is excluded nationality.

**This meant providing proof that I resided at least five years in the U.S., three of those years after the age of 14.

*** This estimate is provided by the research of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, although the UNHCR puts its figure at 10 million.  The number is not known precisely but the bottom-line remains:  this problem exists at a huge scale.

A week with Calvary!

We were blessed last week to have a service team from Calvary Church in Waco Texas coordinate a weeklong program for over 40 children in our residential, school and care center programs.  It was a great week, and you can read all about it at the team’s blog, www.lebanoninjuly.blogspot.com.  Here you will find insightful reflections about the activities, individuals and experiences that filled the visit.  I urge you to explore all the posts, but I am sharing one that I found particularly helpful in understanding the dynamics of Dar El Awlad.  We’re blessed to have this team partner with us year-after-year and look forward to growing our friendship together.

A Reflection on Calling

In light of several friends who have been in the midst of transitions and the summer mission’s devotions, I’ve been thinking through the idea of calling recently. Some of us are called to certain things and others are called away from certain things. We are called to serve in a variety of different ways in certain places in a certain time. Most people who know me well, know that I often go between feeling like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and not having a clue what I should be doing in life.

The last few days, I’ve had the opportunity to consider the idea of calling in the midst of this beautiful setting that is Dar El Awlad. I’m always amazed by the staff that are called to this place to love and care for the boys here. There are a few families who have been here for decades serving generations of boys and a new house mother who just started in a unit last night with her first group of boys ever. All of them have responded to a call to serve in this place at this particular time with a wonderful group of boys.

I’m also always in awe by the group of boys and children that we’re working with this week who have been called to this place while being called away from another place. There are children who have found their way here after leaving unthinkable situations such as war torn countries, persecution for becoming Christians, or difficult family situations. It’s unbelievable to hear their stories, to hear the things they’ve seen or experienced, and to also see the joy that they are still able to have at this place.

I’m still not completely sure about my calling half the time, but I pray that I can begin to lean into the calling that we have this week. To be present, to laugh and have fun, and to relentlessly learn from and love the boys and staff here.

-Josh Caballero