Esther Brady Crawford - faintstarlite

This morning was my third visit to a refugee camp.  I’m not sure how many people out there in blog-land have ever been to one, but it’s something that I recommend everyone does at some point. If only to personalize and humanize those who suffer around the world.

The Ba’qa Camp is the largest refugee camp in Jordan, although there are roughly 10 camps scattered throughout the country – 8 of them being for Palestine refugees from 1948 and 1967, and 2 for Iraqis. It’s a strange concept to see entire generations growing up, marrying and dying within the camp; people are not meant to live in such poor conditions.

UNRWA seems to be doing as great of a job as they can with the finances they’re given, but is it ever enough?

I don’t think so.

There are several blocks that make up the camp, which houses just over 90,000 refugees. People don’t live in tents anymore because the camp has been there for almost 55 years, instead they live in apartments that they’ve built out of cement and cinder blocks. It is basically a ghetto created for displaced Palestinians.

Walking through I couldn’t help but feel guilty for being an American – for being able to ignore them if I so chose. I know how easy it is to not have to notice them. It’s easy to just discuss politics and foreign policy and act like things are all find and dandy in the world, and that somehow it all evens out in the end – but it doesn’t.

Each person, each American, each Christian has a duty and obligation to care for those who are oppressed, for those who are poor. It enrages me to think that I, and we, are not living up to that responsibility.

It isn’t enough to donate a few dollars here and there – it really isn’t. All that does is ease our conscious and shut down out their humanity.

Do we truly love our neighbors as ourselves? Do we wholeheartedly pray for those who persecute us and others? I don’t believe we do.

At the end of our lives we will give an account for what we did, what we have contributed, and whose lives we have impacted. I’m so tired of apathy. I’m tired of excuses. I really am so tired of it all.

I want believers to mobilize – to fight for justice, equality and love. Every time I think about the rediculous amount of assets and resources we have – it makes me sick. People do a lot of talking, and not a lot of doing.

A few days ago I was with my roomie watching a worship DVD from the UK. The song was “Send Us Out” and had hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the crowd passionately singing along. I turned over to see my roomie who was tearing up. She said, “They don’t even believe what they’re singing – it’s just nice words. Why don’t they see what’s really important in this life? I just don’t get it.”

She wasn’t saying it to be self-righteous. Her heart is truly broken by the overwhelming need, and the overwhelming lack of response to it.

I’ve learned a lot about community, and the importance of it this year. I think that as individuals it’s easy to feel like improving this world is just not possible. But when a community of people come together to achieve something, it really changes things. The presence of light always expels darkness, no matter in what arena of life.

It’s true that the task at hand is difficult, and in fact impossible without divine assistance – but that’s what’s so fabulous – we haven’t been left alone to just wander aimlessly. We have the ability to come together to work under the guidance of One who knows and sees all the problems.. and solutions.

I find it encouraging that I think lots of people are starting to wake up. It’s like The Matrix in a lot of ways – the entire world looks the same, and yet radically different. The things that were once impossible, suddenly become possible. There are just as many obstacles, and yet it’s easier to look beyond them and see that there is Hope and Love and that it needs, and can be, taken to the ends of the earth.

 

Yesterday was just one of those days. I had borrowed a professional digital videocamera, worth a couple thousand dollars to shoot some footage for a promo video I’m making. I took it over to a friend’s house because she was planning on driving me around to shoot the footage.

I took it out of its case and turned it on, only to find a completely white screen on both the lcd and through the viewfinder. Thinking it might be the battery I went and plugged the camera into the wall – and still the same.

In fact, everything on it shut down. Even though power is getting to it (thus the white screen) it won’t do Anything…. not even eject the tape.

I spent the entire afternoon on the phone and internet trying to figure out why it might be doing that – only to hear the likely possibility of “electrical failure”… ahhhhh.

Anyways, last night I was pretty upset about it, and in a few moments of clarity I began to just give it over to God and spent the entire evening listening to worship music and just having a really great time. I’d been struggling with some of the video concepts, and Finally it came to me.

So, after all that I still don’t know what will happen with the camera, but now I have some peace about whatever will go down.

Most people know me as someone who is very politically and socially aware of the issues – more recently I’ve become particularly engrossed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it is now in my proverbial “backyard”. Having lived with a family of Palestinian refugees from 1948, much of the info I’d read before and taken as de-facto truth has become only one piece of the puzzle.

After visiting the holy land tour my friends were on in Israel/Palestine, I’ve realized just how little many American Christians know about the conflict and it is one of the things I wish to raise awareness about when I return to the states. It’d be one thing if our ignorance didn’t affect anyone – like, say if we lived in Iceland – what would it matter, right?

But the fact is that we live in the country that gives more to Israel than we give to any other country in the world. Israel has the 16th wealthiest GNP and yet recieves over 1/3 of U.S. Aid – totaling around $23, 240 per Israeli given by U.S. taxpayers. The reasoning for all of this is very complex and has a lot to do with religious (particularly end-times) beliefs held by Christians – particularly evangelicals which hold a powerful position when it comes to influencing foreign policy in the Middle East.

I could write a lot about this – and maybe sometime I will. But I thought for now I would just post an article by Richard Mouw – the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Southern California – he has written several articles about this topic, so here is one…

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How to Bless Israel

Subtitle: Why do we evangelicals think support for Israel is the main thing on God’s list of priorities?

by Richard Mouw

 

I had finished my speech about the impact of Sept. 11 and its aftermath on theological education, and now I was responding to questions from my evangelical audience. This particular questioner was obviously upset with me. “You have managed to talk a lot about world events,” he said, “without expressing any support for the nation of Israel! Don’t you know that this is the main thing that God is concerned about right now?”

 

I had a strong hunch about what was behind his question, but I decided to draw him out before answering. “Well,” I replied, “I have no doubt that the Lord is deeply grieved by the terrible things that are happening right now in the Middle East. But there is much tragedy in other parts of the world as well. Why do you think that this the main thing on God’s list of priorities?” He wasted no time getting to his basic theological point: “God has said that he will bless those who bless Israel, and curse those who curse them. If you don’t want to be cursed, then you had better support Israel against her enemies!”

 

The biblical reference that my challenger had in mind here is the opening verses of Genesis 12, where the Lord is promising Abram—soon to become Abraham—that his descendents will be special beneficiaries of divine favor: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12: 3). This verse is a favorite among those evangelical Christians who are inclined to see contemporary developments in the Middle East as the unfolding of a “Bible prophecy” scenario. They are convinced that God’s ancient promise that Abraham’s Jewish descendants will, as the Chosen People, return to the Promised Land and prosper there— that this promise began to be fulfilled with the establishment of the modern state of Israel, and that the rest is yet to come. To take the side of Israel’s enemies, then, is to go against God’s announced plan for the Middle East.

 

While I tend to hang a little loose on questions of “Bible prophecy,” I do take the issues at stake here very seriously. Indeed, it isn’t just evangelicals who take the question of Christian solidarity with Jewish people seriously. Roman Catholics have struggled with this topic in recent years, especially in light of much-publicized debates over what the Vatican did or did not do to protect the Jews in European countries during World War II. And for many Protestants the role of the church in Nazi Germany—a conflict that led, for example, to the martyrdom of the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer—has received much attention.

 

I personally believe that God has not simply backed off on the key promises made to the ancient Israelites and their descendents. So because of that—and because I am deeply ashamed of the Christian community’s long record of anti-Semitism—I do not take it lightly when someone accuses me of being weak in my support for present-day Jews. But that does not mean that I am ready to follow my questioner in his insistence that support for all the present policies and campaigns of the Israeli government is a test of Christian faithfulness.

 

For one thing, my theology also tells me that I should also take a special interest in how my fellow Christians around the world are faring. And some of those fellow Christians happen to be Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the impression is often given by evangelicals that the struggle in the Middle East is basically one between Jews and Muslims. This ignores the plight of thousands of members of the Christian churches in that region. Israeli policies affect at least two groups of people who loom large in the Bible’s scheme of things, Jews and Christians.

 

But there is an even more basic theological point to be made. Even if we believe that God wants the contemporary nation of Israel to prosper in the land that was promised to her ancestors, evangelical Christians do Israel no favors by refusing to criticize what the Israelis are presently doing in the Middle East. No one cared more about the well-being of the Hebrew people than the prophets of ancient Israel. Yet those prophets regularly criticized Israel’s leaders for their corrupt practices. They minced no words when they were convinced that the people of Israel were guilty of injustice: “O Israel, return to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity” (Hosea 14: 1); “Woe to those who devise iniquity, and work out evil on their beds…[who] covet fields and take them by violence, also houses, and seize them” (Micah 2: 1-2). Why did they utter these harsh words? Because those prophets knew that God would never bless Israel unless that nation conformed to God’s standards of justice and righteousness.

 

I know that the present situation is an extremely complex one. I am deeply appalled by suicide bombers who destroy the lives of innocent Israelis. I certainly have no clear proposal that would solve the present crisis.

 

My only point is this—and I believe it is an important one. For people who want to be faithful to what the Bible teaches, simply being “pro-Israel” has never been the posture that honors the will of God. Or to put it differently, to be pro-Israel in the proper sense is to urge—in word and deed—both Israel and her neighbors to heed the ancient formula for righteousness: “and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6: 8).

I am so rediculously sore. I feel like I’m 80yrs old. Walking at all hurts, but walking up or down stairs, is along the lines of prison torture. Why you ask? Because yesterday I participated in the Dead Sea Marathon. =)

Ok, granted, I only did the 10km version… I ran almost the entire way. That is pretty impressive if I do say so myself.

Anyways… it was great seeing Jamie and Alisha last weekend – it really pumped me up to see everyone else in exactly 8wks. Soon I will likely start the official countdown.

Lately I haven’t been able to really get my thoughts together in a suitable way and so I’ve forsaken my blog because of that… hopefully soon I’ll find some inspiration to try and express some of the internal dialogues I have and want to express to the world. Til then… just know I’m thinking of all of you more than you know.

By the way: I highly recommend reading the book posted above: Light Force by Brother Andrew… it will give you a better insight into life of Christians in the Arab world – and the role of the Western church in supporting those here.

I’m in Jerusalem again – this time to visit friends from the states – Jamie and Alisha.

The IDF (Israeli Defense Force) is out in full riot-gear. Apparently Jewish settlers are planning to storm the Dome of the Rock and reclaim it. Obviously, that doesn’t sit well with Muslims.. but it also doesn’t sit well with me.

I’ve never seen the city like this before – with so many police.. it’s eerily quiet – like the calm before the storm.

If the IDF isn’t able to hold the settlers back, and they break through and have physical contact with the Palestinians… word on the street is that another Intifada (uprising) will begin. Everyone is talking about Sunday – that is supposed to be THE day it all goes down.

It’s very strange and surreal.