This is the final part of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
People always ask us, "Did your trip
change your life?"
"Yes, of course. I am totally
different," we tell them.
But are we, we wonder? Isn't this the
same house? And the same town? And the same life? Aren't I the
same person?
We don't know the answer until we
remember our Freddys, these people who we led into God's presence and
were changed.
I wonder about John the Baptist. While he was with Jesus, and the Spirit came
down and landed on him like a dove, and when that voice came and
said, "This is my Son," was the witness, the baptizer changed? And when Jesus left and
John stayed in the wilderness, eating his locusts and wild honey, did
he look around and wonder, "Isn't this all the same? The same
food? The same life? Aren't I the same person?"
But he wasn't right? He couldn't have
been the same person, right?
Special thanks to Emily Drevets for help editing, to AIM and the staff of the World Race for enabling us to do the things we did, and to our friends in Vietnam.
This is part 7 of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
A few weeks ago I told my church about
Freddy at a coming home party at my parent's house. I stood in front
of my parent's big screen TV and talked about how he had never seen a
worship service like that one. He couldn't have; he had just become
a Christian that day. He had never seen someone do anything like
that, fall down in the presence, because of the presence of
God. As I talked to them, I started to tear up and my voice got heavy and I told them what
a hard month I had been having, how I was
trapped in the pale walls of my hotel room, stewing in air
conditioning, playing MMA Pro Fighter.
I told them how in the midst of my
boredom, my complacency, and even in the midst of my counting down
the days, I got to witness Freddy having this intimate moment with God,
lain on the floor by the Spirit in a strange and holy way,
experiencing God as he had never before.
I remembered how after the seminar
we hung around and talked. It was after ten. We started at
nine AM, but no one wanted to leave. They shared stories about what
God had done that day with wide, excited eyes. They laughed. I gave
Freddy a hug as I left.
"Do you have to go to work now?" I
said.
"Yes."
"It's going to be a long night."
"It will be a good night."
We left the Vietnamese and walked over
to get some late night frozen yogurt. We were still talking about the seminar, unwilling for the night to end. Finally it did. We were all
tired and when one person got up to go, the rest followed.
I was back in my hotel room. Alone.
Air conditioned. Pale walls. Comfortable. I thought about reading
my Bible or else just
sit and pray so this good feeling would extend forever.
Instead I got out my computer. In one
window I opened a movie. In another I opened Facebook and played MMA Pro Fighter. I watched a movie. After a few
hours, I went to sleep tired and unfulfilled.
But the next day I woke up refreshed
and ready. I ate breakfast in my room and went to the coffee shop to
write. The person I had been those few weeks, the
one trapped by addiction to pale walls and hotel rooms seemed
dissolved. I had gotten over myself and the next month, our last,
was one of the best of the year.
This is part 6 of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
The other day I was at a coffee shop
in my home town. I sat next to this old man with a pink newspaper.
"Someone washed your paper with a
red sock. It's pink!" I say.
"Yeah, it's easier on the eyes.
American papers blind you. They should make all papers like this!"
"You're not from here originally are
you?"
"I'm from New York."
"I thought so." He had big jowls a gullet that stuck out almost to his
chin. His mouth, surrounded by all this skin, looked like a
chipmunk's. I told him I just got back from travelling. That I went
on a year long mission trip. He thought it was great.
"Travelling really opens your eyes.
Makes you appreciate this place at least." He gestured to the
sycamores and the mountains, the parking lot and the IHOP.
He had been in the import-export
business. He told me he had been to over 150 countries. I told him
about Cambodia, how big Phnom Penh was getting.
"Yeah a lot of money has gone into
that place," he said, and told me about the time he was in Laos
with the Navy. He went up out of the city to a big dam the
government was building and took a bunch of weapons, automatic rifles
and things like that. As they went up there was a man beating a dog
with a whip, "tenderizing" it, he said, before slitting its
throat. The man's family would probably eat the dog later.
When they got to the dam site, there
was a machine gun guarding it. He told me there were supposed to
be a couple of soldiers guarding the machine gun, but no one was
around. When he asked about it they told him the gun was rusted and
had stopped firing.
The government was going to build the
dam to put a lake in the middle of the country and build some nice
hotels around it. It would be a regular tourist attraction. The
only problem was the tribal people who lived on the land the lake
would flood.
"What are you going to do about the
people living in there?" he asked.
"Well to be honest," said the
commander of the Laotian military, "We're going to go in there and
kill them all."
"I didn't want anything to do with
that," the old man said to me, "so I headed out. But the
commander asked me, 'When you're going back, look in on the people.
You tell us what to do after you see them.' We headed back but we
stopped in on a few villages of these tribes. They were vicious
looking. I had never seen a group of people more vicious looking. I
called the commander. 'They look pretty vicious,' I said. 'You do
what you want.'"
We talked a little longer. He told me
he went to Westmont College for two years, my alma mater, a little
Christian school in California. He was one of three adult students
at the time and to get in as an adult he had to sign a form saying he
wouldn't drink, smoke, or date.
"That's all I was doing, so I sort
of lied there," he said. He told me his classes helped him
appreciate the countries he was working in, the history, the culture.
After he left I wondered if he was
changed from the man who told the commander to do what he wanted, the
one who didn't care if the vicious looking ones died.
This is a video I showed to illustrate what a shepherd was to Vietnamese students. Like them I'd never really seen a shepherd. Now I know exactly what Jesus was like.
This is part 5 of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
We were told to speak about the basics
in Christian Discipleship. Tres had organized the talks around the
themes Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
I was supposed to give two talks, both
about God the Father, but then Julia unexpectedly got sick and I took
over her talk about Jesus the Shepherd.
"God isn't mad at you," I told
them. "You may not have the best relationship with your father,
but God the Father loves you. He's not disappointed with you and
he's not trying to punish you."
My talk on Jesus the Shepherd didn't
go so well. The best thing I had was a YouTube video of a bunch of
Scottish sheep that were equipped with LED lights and herded around
to make shapes like fireworks and a game of pong.
The seminar was held at a coffee shop
run by a European woman. She locked the doors when we started
singing worship songs. What we were doing
could have been enough to get us arrested. Even writing this
now, months later, 15,000 miles away, with the coffee shop and its
owner unnamed, I'm nervous someone with a grudge will read this and
make a few calls to a few officials who might close the coffee shop
down.
The participants of the seminar were
Vietnamese, all English speakers but one. The girl who didn't speak
English sat in the front and watched us while another participant
translated. Also in the front was Freddy short for Frederick. Though of course that is not his real name. His real name was equally un-Vietnamese. Most Vietnamese have names
like Nguyen and Nguyac and other Nga names. Or if they take an
English name it's a simple Bible name like Peter or James or Mary. Frederick, Freddy, was unique.
He wasn't
sitting in his chair, he was splayed upon it. His legs stretched in
front of him, his head lay against the back of his seat. Sometimes
his head nodded and his lids struggled to stay open behind his
glasses. Later I found out he worked nights at a hotel and had come
to the seminar right after his shift. After lunch we sat down over
our empty bowls of Pho and talked.
"How long have you been a
Christian?" I asked.
"I'm not," Freddy said.
"Oh. I'm sorry. I just assumed..."
"It's okay. I go to church a lot.
I just haven't decided to go through it yet."
"Ok. How long have you been going
to church then?"
"About six months. It's good. I like it.
The people are very nice. I haven't gone in the last couple of weeks
though because I've been so busy with work."
"What's keeping you from going
through with it, as you said?"
"I love Buddhism. I feel like I
would be turning my back on it. When I was a kid I was a monk for a
couple of years. I... I just don't know."
"Sure."
We talked for a while longer about God
and Christianity and what that meant. Before he left during the
break Freddy said he felt better about being there. After the lunch
break he came back showered and energized. Later, Tres talked to him
and he decided he was ready. He wanted to be a Christian.
The seminar followed the Trinity,
Father Son Spirit, and after the last talk we had a time of worship
and asked the Spirit to meet with us. I played songs on my guitar
and Tres and the girls laid hands on the participants. The owner of
the coffee shop played guitar too. She sang and her voice was rich
and warm.
Lindsay prayed for a girl who started to cry, to sob until
big tears were hitting her arms and falling on the floor.
"Is it raining in here? she asked.
"No," said Lindsay, "but you're
crying."
"No, it's raining! I can feel it!"
The girl touched the skin of her face and arms. Lindsay remembered
she had prayed that the Spirit would come upon the girl like rain.
Then Freddy was stumbling to his seat.
For a minute Tres waited and then held him up protectively. He led
him to a space on the floor. Tres told me later Freddy had been laid
out by God.
This is part 4 of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
We lived in the backpacker's section
of town. The streets were covered with men walking around with
boards covered with sunglasses, lighters, vendors with stacks of
knock-off books for $3 for backpackers like us.
Like us? No, the backpackers were not
like us. Cold and unsocial, they wouldn't look you in the eye. They
spent their nights in the outdoor bars, sitting on plastic chairs
facing the streets. It was not for us the book vendors asked,
"Marijuana?" after we turned down their legitimate products. The
shops carried bottles of Absolut and Jack for $5.
We were asked not to drink, at least
not near the coffee shop we were doing ministry with. Instead we
walked four blocks or more away if we wanted a bottle of Saigon Red,
which I would get at a family restaurant along with a big bowl of
fried rice for about a dollar.
Also, there was La Fenetre de Soleil,
which means Window of Light in French. It was an old abandoned
looking building. We wouldn't have found it if Danielle wasn't with
us.
It was ten o'clock and street was
dark. The only thing marking the door was a small, pale, neon blue
sign. Geckos watched us as we walked up the broken-tiled stairs.
They perched on the tagged and scratched concrete walls. We found
out later they were tearing the building down in a month. I could
tell why. What a piece of crap. We walked down a long concrete
hall full of shadows, the kind of hall you imagine drug addicts lie
along, passed out in their own piss and drool.
"Where are you taking us, Danielle?"
I asked. "This is ridiculous"
"I've been here before," she said.
"Just wait."
We turned through a tall wooden door
and then all of a sudden it was light. The ceiling was high, crowned
with French molding. Silk tapestries laced with Christmas lights
decorated the walls. The furniture was colonial and mismatched,
sitting atop shimmering but well-worn oak floors.
And there was dancing. We came as
swing night was winding down. There was a European guy dancing with a
Vietnamese woman in a black dress, white sneakers and black rimmed
glasses. They stepped forward and backward, spun in and out. They
did a slow diagonal step, he pushed her forward as she slid back,
back three steps slow, and then leaning forward, pausing, leaning
back, pausing. It was strong and subtle and looked like they just
wanted to play, tease each other a bit and take it slow, no need to
show off with the room almost empty. I don't have the language to
describe that dancing. I'd never seen anything like it before, nor a
place as surprisingly magical before, the twinkling eyes and shadowy
luminescence.
A British expat with a dark and joyful
face talked to us after the dancing finished. He was elegant and
open, like La Fenetre itself. He had the most beautiful accent. It
was like being introduced to a new world. It was an oasis in the
midst of Saigon's large tacky spectacle. But it was a world that was
going to die, die as soon as their month expired and someone came to
tear the place down.
We came back twice more and I learned
to salsa alongside balding Asian men with slick black combovers,
tweed jackets and pencil mustaches. The best dancer was a small man
whose lips set into a tight grin when he danced. I watched him for
an hour trying to understand how he was doing the things he was doing.
I couldn't get it watching him, he spun too fast, sashayed too wide.
I held my breath and counted his steps but never understood.
Instead I had to learn by holding
Danielle's back and counting 1, 2, 3 and stepping on toes. The small
Vietnamese man danced late into the night, was still there when we
left, and tired out all his partners so that by the end I felt sorry
him. His partners' smiles were beginning to lose their life, to
become empty shells. His were still full of enjoyment. He would be
there until they knocked the lonely, rundown building--geckos
too--down.
La Fenetre saved me. It got my feet
moving down six long Saigon blocks, through the super-heated ,
shimmering air, up broken stairs, down shadowy halls, and into one,
two, three steps alongside Vietnamese dancers. I was finally away
from the pale walls of hotel rooms and into the life of the city. I
had been stewing in the death of my hotel room--the death of my
team, the loss of my friend--for too long. It was time to begin
again.
This is part 3 of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
A few days before this a girl came
into my room having a panic attack. She had just found out one of
her teammates was getting sent home, had broken the no-dating policy,
had been in a quasi-relationship for months. The guy she was
involved with was on my team. We figured he would be sent home too.
In less than 24 hours both were gone.
I started sleeping a lot. I skipped
meals because I wasn't motivated enough to
negotiate the pale, crowded streets to attempt to find food that
didn't smell like fish paste. There wasn't much ministry. I told
myself I was going to use my free time to write but instead
watched movies and played MMA Pro Fighter on facebook. We were
counting the days, all of us.
In my air conditioned hotel room I was
writing a story. It was about a group of American missionaries.
While they started out well and had good, if naive, intentions, they
would quickly turn back to comfort and conformity if given the
chance. These American missionaries, the ones in my story, had been
given the chance. They ignored the suffering poverty of the people
they'd been sent to. They went to beach.
I was having trouble with the end. I
couldn't decide whether to redeem them or let them destroy
themselves.
This is part 2 of a short story I wrote about our time in Vietnam. Please feel free to find the other parts here.
It was May and the streets were pale
with heat. Though the rainy season was supposed
to be coming, you wouldn't know it from the heat. One-hundred to
110. You walked down a Saigon block to get lunch and were soaked in
sweat by the time you got back to your hotel room. The walls
of our hotel rooms were painted as pale as the sun.
All 42 of us
were together, posted up in two hotels across the street from
each other. It was month ten and we were tired, tired of travel, of
missionary discipline, of the heat, of new things, tired of Africans,
Asians and whites in our faces selling us things we didn't need. We
were set up in these two hotels with AC all month, waiting for the
next 45 days to be over so we could go home.
One day, we were in a hotel room
having a meeting. Tim and I brought our lunches, containers of Pho,
noodle soup with thin slices of beef. Tim had red hair. He was from
Austin and had memorized more movie lines than anyone I'd ever met.
We sat on the floor and mixed bean sprouts and mint into our noodles.
"Can you not eat that here," one
of the girls said as I took my first bite. "It smells."
"This is my lunch."
"I know but it's my room and it
smells.
"Get over it, you spoiled..." I
said in my mind.
Instead, I put the top on my noodles,
set it in the plastic bag, and shared a long look with Tim.
The meeting started as Tim and Bethany told us the ministry options for the week. Stuff like
playing with AIDS orphans and doing crafts at an elderly home. I
tried to choose as few as I could.
I was afraid of over committing
myself. I felt I didn't have enough time to level up my character in
MMA Pro Fighter on facebook.
The last ministry was the most
intense: an all day seminar for new Christians. I'm not sure why I
volunteered. Maybe I was feeling guilty or maybe I did it for Tres,
the guy who was organizing it. Anyway, I chose to do it. It was two
weeks away. Two weeks in a Vietnam is a
long time.
I wrote the following story for the Awakening Conference going on now in Dublin, Ireland. I hope you enjoy
this brief glimpse into our time in Vietnam, and the even briefer glimpse into my life
after the race. Vietnam was month 10, and my
hardest month of the Race.
It is too long for one or even three blogs, so I have broken it up into 8 pieces of manageable lengths that I will be publishing over the next few days. While they are best as one, most of the sections work as smaller stories so feel free to read two or four or all eight as you find the time.
The Old Man's Sea Left Scars Upon His Palms
People always ask us, "Did your trip
change your life? Weren't you gone for a whole year? Travelling the
world for Jesus? Oh how fun!"
"Yes!" we are supposed to say.
"Of course. We are totally different."
Sometimes. they are content with these
answers they were expecting. They smile. They say, "Well it's
good to have you back." They walk away.
And as they walk we may start to think
about how we arrived home and dropped our heavy, old, smelly packs on
the tan carpets of our parents' homes. We looked around at all the
furniture that was in exactly the same place. There were the family
pictures and the old bed we slept in when we were in high school.
We went on catch up coffee dates with
our friends--some of them are married now. They asked us to tell
them stories of our year. We told them the same one we told at the
last catch up coffee date.
"Yes, of course. I am totally
different," we tell them.
But are we, we wonder? Isn't this the
same house? And the same town? And the same life? Aren't I the
same person? Did we even leave?
What I hate about
that question, the "Why are you traveling," question, is also the
reason I like it, because sometimes it doesn't end a conversation,
sometimes it turns the whole conversation to deeper things. Like the
30-something English guy in Kenya who asked it about 10 minutes into
our chat. We talked about Jesus and Christianity for 10 or 15
minutes before going to throw the football around with Tres.
I like that
question as much as I hate it because some people don't think
missionaries are a drag. Some people think missionaries are just
like other people, different, interested in things like world soccer
or Italian food, and not just convert-making machines, and I like
this question because it tells me something about the questioner.
But the days of
that question are nearing an end. Instead the question will, "Oh,
you were in Kenya/Thailand/Croatia/Ireland/etc? What were you doing
there?" It's the same question really. Maybe I will always be at
the mercy of people's boxes of what a Christian, what a missionary
is?
That's okay. I
shouldn't let it bother me because at the end of the day, I am Joseph
Christ Bunting, filled with some kind of injected love for the people
around me, a love which longs to talk about the deeper things with
people, a love unconcerned with boxes because it is irredeemably
free, a love which will be a missionary always, box or no, World Race
or no. Break boxes break!
I told them how in the midst of my
boredom, my complacency, and even in the midst of my counting down
the days, I got to witness Freddy having this intimate moment with God,
lain on the floor by the Spirit in a strange and holy way,
experiencing God as he had never before.
"I thought so." He had big jowls a gullet that stuck out almost to his
chin. His mouth, surrounded by all this skin, looked like a
chipmunk's. I told him I just got back from travelling. That I went
on a year long mission trip. He thought it was great.
"God isn't mad at you," I told
them. "You may not have the best relationship with your father,
but God the Father loves you. He's not disappointed with you and
he's not trying to punish you."
Like us? No, the backpackers were not
like us. Cold and unsocial, they wouldn't look you in the eye. They
spent their nights in the outdoor bars, sitting on plastic chairs
facing the streets. It was not for us the book vendors asked,
"Marijuana?" after we turned down their legitimate products. The
shops carried bottles of Absolut and Jack for $5.
I started sleeping a lot. I skipped
meals because I wasn't motivated enough to
negotiate the pale, crowded streets to attempt to find food that
didn't smell like fish paste. There wasn't much ministry. I told
myself I was going to use my free time to write but instead
watched movies and played MMA Pro Fighter on facebook. We were
counting the days, all of us.
One day, we were in a hotel room
having a meeting. Tim and I brought our lunches, containers of Pho,
noodle soup with thin slices of beef. Tim had red hair. He was from
Austin and had memorized more movie lines than anyone I'd ever met.
We sat on the floor and mixed bean sprouts and mint into our noodles.
What I hate about
that question, the "Why are you traveling," question, is also the
reason I like it, because sometimes it doesn't end a conversation,
sometimes it turns the whole conversation to deeper things. Like the
30-something English guy in Kenya who asked it about 10 minutes into
our chat. We talked about Jesus and Christianity for 10 or 15
minutes before going to throw the football around with Tres.