Meet me in Portland

Roast here in the summer light

See you in the evergreens

I will catch you down on the Northeast side

-M.Kearney

My thoughts are many and I don't know what order to present them in. My heart is heavy with a kind of joy that is only attained when choosing to move toward hardship. In nearly four months of human rights work, my battles were almost entirely waged against fear.
Anxiety is a kind of elusive thing, not knowing its there at all until it strikes at the most inopportune moment. Like when starting a new position, or right before the big speech that I thought I was perfectly comfortable giving until I'm tripping over the intro.
I hate that.
I didn't know I cared so much about what other people thought of me too. I hate that I was   fearful of terrorism, sometimes in terrible ways picturing, what it would be like to blow up. But to face the fear, to rely on public transportation day in and out despite this persistent, gutwrenching strain, I learned to let it be.
When I fear much, truth has left me. God's character becomes hard to grasp and I go scrambling for earthly comfort, friendships, distractions, anger, anything to alleviate myself of the fear. It's really been incredible to become aware of this weakness. More incredible to realize just how many in this world are building their lives so as to avoid ever encountering it.
I am entrapped in this broken condition in which I find myself yielding to fear. But I am called to bear a different yoke. That of  hope.
 In Zechariah 9:12 it is written:

Return to the stronghold, you prisoners of hope.

I am irresistibly bound to this verse, returning to the triumphant echo of it's prose repeatedly. In the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I am sealed with an inheritance of glorious hope. And what choice do I have as a child of the most high, but to look toward this hope with confidence?

None.

Jesus said, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
He is preemptive to correct my most natural tendency, to worry, to fret and cry out in moments of fear. Like the disciples on the angry seas, I too watch the waves of this world wreak devastation and wonder if they will swallow me whole. But what sweet joy when He orients me toward His goodness again.
Anticipating the familiar faces I had longed to see for months, I sat on a commuter flight from Seattle to Portland when a kind older gentleman took his seat next to me. His name was Terry which was his segue into the usual, tidy airplane conversations that so often occur. I told him of my time in D.C. with IJM, doubtful if he had ever heard of it. His silence suggested otherwise as he turned to me intently and said, "well, you should know that I'm the uncle of Gary Haugen, founder of IJM."
More shocked than I could express, I said, "Imagine that."
I know that it was not mere coincidence that Terry sat next to me at the conclusion of one the most meaningful seasons of my life. He was there to confirm what I should have known all along, that life with the Holy Spirit is ever onwards and upwards. 
The Lord delighted to send me off with a commissioning of his comfort. With a heart full of gratitude humming to the drone of the southbound plane, I looked out the widow at snow capped mountains and smiled. It wasn't just leaving D.C., I was coming home and hope was following me.




Courtesy A. Carillo

    




I woke up in that sheet-tousled, beaded sweat kind of way. A residual headache moved into my threshold of my awareness as I turned to face the half-open window next to my cot.


I could hear rain falling outside. My glasses were on the nightstand just where I discarded them. I reached out with languid dexerity to put them on again to confirm that the leaves on the shrubs were in movement.


I thought about how the rain would likely pass and how I liked that it did this, contrary to the furious unleash I had known to expect for days--sometimes weeks in the Northwest. Still turned over in bed, I thought some more. It wasn't time for a shower yet.

Yesterday was heavy with an expectant heat. A newcomer, I stumbled around the concrete between the Capitol building and the Senate offices in whatever fabric intolerably trapped my sweat against me. I bet it was Polyester.


I was not supposed to be thinking about sweat. I was there to have something to say to the legislative aides of Congressman Blumenhauer and Schrader, to the staff of Senator Wyden and Merkley. But how does one deal honestly with the emotional weight of reality that 27 million human beings are OWNED? It just seems absurd to me that I use that statistic without time to paint the picture of the brutishness, the ugly depravity, the desperate humanity that is the life of even a single slave.


All that ripples in the shallow pool of the political conscience is prioritized to foreign and domestic. I wanted to ask where the deep end was. I couldn't find how to shove slavery into either category with satisfaction. It is just heinous and that is all. In the world of budgets and other middle-sized objects, my colleague and I spoke of the Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act and how Oregon representatives could show their support to co-sponsor the bill. The meetings were positive and the aides showed what I ascertained to be genuine concern.


The cry of the suffering is never far off, but when we push it enough away, we won't have to listen. Or we can hear it, as surely as rain falling outside and confirm that our fears about our neighbors are more real than the tsunami that came crashing into Japan. As Gary Haugen said in his speech for the Global Prayer Gathering, reality always wins. When we begin to see the world falling all around us into broken pieces then we will care enough to begin fixing it. Nevermind the excuses and our generally large incompetence to do so. Justice was never a longing birthed in the heart of man, but that of God. I wish I cared about it more even at this moment but it's funny how something like a little comfort changes me.

Suddenly, I'm on a different level and continent and suddenly, that sub-human treatment of human beings becomes something that just can't quite be measured correctly in statistics. Or the criminal enterprise of the sex trade becomes tricky to pinpoint--so let's not overreact. This could be what Jesus meant when he said: he who has ears, let him hear! Truth involves more than perception, but an act of the will.