Posted in 11 Cambodia by Joe Bunting on 6/20/2010
 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!
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Posted in 11 Cambodia by Joe Bunting on 6/20/2010
Top 3 reasons
missionaries are a drag:
 1. Religion is a
drag. Sure I know we say it's not about religion but relationship,
but the truth is the dogma associated with that relationship is still
intense, for example, the requirement you must be in relationship
with a God, and not just a nice, loving teacher. Maybe you don't
want to pretend to be nice to people who try to get people to believe
in a dogma you don't even agree with.
2.
Judgment is a drag. When you want to drink beers for $1.50, have a
really nice meal for cheap, and then go home with your London
boyfriend, I could see how sitting next to a conscience-pricking
Christian would be a bubble-buster. It's not necessarily that
they're judging you, it's the question, what if they
are judging you. Do I
deserve to be judged? Are my actions wrong? Do they think they're
wrong? No matter the answer, the whole internal dialogue is
unsettling and a party killer.
3. Really good
people are a drag. Because while hearing about people who are
willing to give their lives to serve a cause is cool, you feel great
for them, good job, way to give back! Do you really want to compare
yourself to them? How would that make you look better?
And if you do
compare, and you do decide for whatever reason that you're better, do
you really want to have a conversation with someone inferior to you.
It's a no win, really.
I know after a year
of being a missionary I should have mastered the art of leading
conversations to talk about Christianity with strangers, to hopefully
convert them, teach them something about God and how to experience
the Holy Spirit, connect them with a local church, and then send them
on their merry way. But I haven't. Maybe Joel Olsteen should write
a manual about that or something.
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Posted in 11 Cambodia by Joe Bunting on 6/20/2010
An interesting thing happened at a
riverside restaurant last night. My teammate Liz and I were eating
and watching the Germany-Serbia World Cup game (HORRIBLE game by the
way! What happened, Germany?!). The tables in front of the screen
were full, so the waiter led a foreign couple to our table.
 "Oh, hello," said the woman.
"Do you mind if we join you," said
the man, a tall handsome guy with a scruffy black beard.
"I'm sorry?" I said. I couldn't
hear him over the din of the game.
"Do you mind if we join you?"
"Oh, yes, of course. Please!"
They sat down and ordered, and then the
woman turned to me. She was American, but Asian, maybe half-Chinese.
She asked us where we were from and we had a nice conversation about
our travels. She had been abroad four months, spent two in
Australia, and two in South East Asia. I asked her about Malaysia
and Laos, we haven't been there, and we told her a bit about Vietnam,
where she was going next.
Finally, the question came which I
always sort of dread and sort of get excited about at the same time.
"So what are you doing, like a school
thing?"
"No, actually we're with a missions
organization. So we do some church work and some humanitarian
stuff."
And then she turned back to her dinner
and date and we didn't talk again. When Liz and I got up to go they
didn't look up to say, "It was nice meeting you," and the
presumption is, and this is where I could be wrong, that they didn't
say it because it's not nice
meeting missionaries, even cool, soccer watching, table neighbor
ones. Missionaries, Christians for that matter, are a drag, kind of
like clouds covering the sun on a beach day.
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Posted in 11 Cambodia by Joe Bunting on 6/15/2010
 Peter, one of the leaders of the
Global Ventures team starts talking with the kids underneath the
stage. He shares with them about God and Jesus and shows them a clip
of Jesus' crucifixion. Their attention is fixed as they listen to
him and watch the small screen of his portable DVD player. After the
video, Peter leads them in what is for many of them their first
prayer to God.
Before I leave to go back to the
hotel, the rain has lessened to a drizzle. The kids have come out
from under the stage and are standing in a group with the old
grandfather in the middle. They are singing some songs and the spry
old man is dancing.
The next day, the meeting goes off as
planned. At least a thousand people, probably more, crowd around the
stage. Again, the rain falls, but determined, the group waits it out
and has another meeting later in the night for another 500 people.
The crowd is responsive to the Gospel and many of them open their
hearts to Jesus.
 The amazing thing about the work done
here in the Kratie province is how well the Cambodians and foreign
teams work together. The Cambodians multi-generation unity is
mirrored by the Americans'. The Global Ventures team has a mix of
teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults, and even one grandmother
from Indiana who is in her 70s. They come from Oklahoma, California,
Texas, and the East Coast. Like the Cambodian team, some are from
the city and some are from more rural areas, but they've come
together and partnered with other Cambodian Christians to pursue the
mission of Christ, to make his name known among all the peoples of
the world.
And in Snuol, their work is bearing
fruit.
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Posted in 11 Cambodia by Joe Bunting on 6/15/2010
 As the prayer finishes, a young man in
the corner looks up smiling. He came from a closed country in Asia I
can't name. When he left, the police threatened the young man that
he would be arrested if he met with any Christians. Undaunted, he is
here and praying with us.
The man, who is part of a small,
secret cell group of Christians in this closed country, has already
been arrested three or four times by the government, who forced him
to pay a fine of up to $50 to get out, a huge sum in a country where
the average worker earns less than $100 a month.
We finish our meeting and head back on
dirt roads through orchards growing everything from peppers to rubber
trees to durian. When we get to the hotel, the team of 30 or so
Americans are just finishing up a meeting that mirrored our own. New
Life is still a relatively small organization, and has to rely on
foreign teams for the personell and funding to do large evangelistic
outreaches. At the open air meeting tonight, they are expecting over 1,000
people and may get up to 5,000.
By 5:30, the stage is set up for the
meeting and people are arriving. Little girls stand on the seat of
motorbikes while their mothers us the bikes as chairs. The stage
itself was purchased by New Life a few years ago, allowing them to
put on these large open air meetings for much less cost. Standing around it is
the leadership, who is praying hard against the darkly ominous
rainclouds looming just beyond. I recognize the old grandfather who
sat next to me at the prayer meeting. He is wearing a denim shirt.
A camo-patterned hat frames his dark, weathered face.
At 5:40 the clouds open and the rain
starts falling. Most of the motorbikes leave at the first sign of
the rain, but the children who stay behind run underneath the stage
as the rain and wind crash against the tarp and stage. The field is
full of inch deep puddles. The only one not underneath the
protection of the stage is the old grandfather. He weaves
unconcerned around the puddles, his hands clasped behind his back,
the rain dripping from his camo-patterned hat. The rain falls strong
for half an hour before the leadership admits defeat.
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Posted in 11 Cambodia by Joe Bunting on 6/15/2010
We're working for New Life Fellowship in this, our last month of the World Race, helping them out with their website. This is a piece I wrote for their Provincial Churches section about a trip I took with them to do outreach in Snuol.
 Snuol, Krati Province, Cambodia---I am sitting in a small wooden house
propped eight feet in the air by stilts. Around me are over 15
Cambodian leaders of New Life Fellowship praying all together in
Khmer. If you have never been in a room filled with believers
praying loudly to God in another language, it is a spine shivering
experince, a foreshadowing of heaven where every tongue will confess
Jesus is Lord.
The leaders are here to pray for the
evangelism being done this week in the Kratie Province of eastern
Cambodia. New Life Fellowship is partnering with Global Ventures , a missions organization run out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tonight and
tomorrow they are hosting an open air meeting in the small town of Snuol.
Two of New Life's 62 provincial
churches are in Snuol. In a country where less than 2% are
Christians, 100 believers in a town is a significant amount. This
week, Provincial Churches, the church planting arm of New Life
Fellowship, hopes to make that number even more significant.
Sitting next to me is an old
grandfather. His cheeks are sunken and has only a few yellowed teeth
left, but as he bows his head in prayer, he is beautiful. A few feet
away is a young boy, probably only 8 or 9, bows like the others. The
remarkable thing about what is happening in Cambodia, it is a
multi-generation movement to Christ. In this room the voices of
teenagers combine with those of adults and grandfathers, all praying
together to the Father at once. There are men from the city and men
from the rural provinces, but in Christ they are working as one.
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Posted in 09+ The MANual by Joe Bunting on 5/2/2010
Interesting article Diane Bureman sent me from Reveries Magazine about relationships between men. Read it and tell me what you think (especially you guys).
Bromance
Thu, 04/22/2010 - 02:46 - Tim Manners
Where women's relationships are face-to-face, for guys it's more like side-by-side, writes Jeffrey Zaslow in the Wall Street Journal (4/7/10).
"Our conversations deal with the doing of things rather than the
feeling of things," says Mark Leonard, explaining how he relates to his
buddies -- eight guys he grew up with in East Northport, NY. So, where
women "talk, cry together, share secrets," for men it's more about
going to football games or playing golf together. When they talk it's
often about old times, but rarely about their current lives.
"If we use a women's paradigm for friendship, we're making a mistake," says Dr. Geoffrey Greif, author of a 2009 book called "Buddy System."
Geoffrey "has studied how 386 men made, kept and nurtured
relationships" and "found that men generally resist high-maintenance
relationships, whether with spouses, girlfriends or male pals ... A
third of the men in his study said they learned positive things from
female friendships, but 25 percent had a negative impression of women
as friends, citing issues such as 'cattiness' and 'too much drama'."
Research
also finds "that men often open up about emotional issues to wives,
mothers, sisters and platonic female friends ... partly because they
assume male friends will be of little help. It may also be due to fears
of seeming effeminate or gay." They also tend to turn to male friends
"to momentarily escape from their problems. The buzzword is
'bromance'." It's not like guys never open up to each other, but as
Mark Leonard explains, "We'll say, Yes. We understand. It's really
hard. Now let's go play some baseball."
Some questions to get the conversation started:
MEN: Do men escape their problems through "bromance"? Is there a better way to handle our problems?
WOMEN: Should men be learning from women something about relationships?
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Posted in 09+ The MANual by Joe Bunting on 5/1/2010
In
Christianity, image is everything. "What
will they think of me?" We say it to ourselves every time we're in church.
It really sucks. It needs to stop.
Because as men, we men
often suffer from "Superman" syndrome. We get the capes and
red boots and as long as we are flying through the air everyone
claps. But the moment they see us as Clark Kent the fear of the real
us sets in.
We're
anointed by God, but we're tired. Tired of dealing with issues, and
situations and mess. Tired of swallowing what we would like to say.
Tired of being nice while life is being nasty. Tired of not being
appreciated. Tired of being taken for granted. Tired of paying every
ones bills. Tired of helping everyone else out when there is no one
there to help us out.
What
will you do when the image you have of us doesn't fit this tired
body?
Compliments
turn into conceit. "You're everything I want to be," they say.
But you
don't know everything we are. And though we are honored by your
compliment, you are only intensifying the pressure to live up to your
image. We want to be your Superman. We really do. But the older we
get the more we long to be who we really are, even though that means
giving up the suit.
Will
you love us just as we are? We want someone whom I can be transparent
and say. "This is me. No cape, no boots, no Superman. I'm messed
up, immature, broken, selfish, afraid, bored, and thirsty for more
but not sure what I'm thirsty for." We want it, but are afraid of
it at the same time.
Still,
transparency is what we need. Not another Superman suit. It's too
tight, too hot, boots wrong size, been wearing it too long, feet
hurting, back hurting and I'm getting old. Superman didn't get old on
T.V., but we are.
We
need you to let us fail. We need you to let us take off our suits
and fall a long ways down. We need you to let Superman be betrayed,
to hang Superman on that cross, to let him sit in that tomb for three
days. Then, maybe a realKing
will rise from the dead.
The King that has been hidden in us all along.
We were just waiting for someone to come along and nurture the king
within without the expectations of being Superman. Instead allowing
our hearts to be adventurously free and dangerously captivating so
much so our very souls scream for more of who we are and less of who
you think we should be.
The King within awaits for such a time.
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Posted in 09 Thailand by Joe Bunting on 4/26/2010
 One by one the posts go up, ten men around them, Thai and American. The men walk across the concrete slab we worked on in 100 degree heat for days. This is our house we are building, bought by our sweat.
Of course, it's not really ours though. Or if it is, we're giving it back to YWAM when we leave in a few days. But until then, we'll labor as if it is ours.
It's the Thai men's too. There are about ten of them here this morning. They got here at 7 or 7:30 to help, but none of them are paid. They were all asked here by Arun to help. They come because of favors he's done for them.
"When you help people," he told us, "They'll help you too when you need it."
It's a good system. Arun owns, with his sweat equity, small portions of dozens of farms in this area, and these men now own a small portion of his farm.
 The last post goes up. Eight in all. All weighing three to five-hundred pounds, big and round posts some of which are too big for a man's embrace. They'll support a deck for the second story of the house.
It would be impossible to get them up for one person. We have to rely on each other.
Ma Ping sends out a plate of pancakes and coffee for the men. Some sit in a circle and eat. Others get up to leave on their scooters, time to go to their own farms for a long day of work. They have to work hard during the dry season, sometimes 16 or more hours a day, to prepare for the rains coming next month.
I have never been one to help people much. When the women at church would call me to help them move, I would usually say no or forget to go. I was never in a hurry to help.
This month though I wanted to serve my teammates. I did dishes (dishes for 11 people can be a lot!) once or twice a day. I worked as hard as I could as we did concrete or digging work, and I looked for opportunities to say yes to service.
It has changed my life. There is an inherent joy in service. It's good when people notice and are grateful, but it's almost better when they don't, when the only credit you get for your hard work is from God.
I also notice when I serve I feel more part of the community, my team. I feel more confident that I have something valuable to offer them, that I am valued and respected as a member of the community.
You don't feel like good about yourself when you hang back and avoid as much work as possible. You feel guilty, and kind of ashamed.
So I'm sold on service. I'll work myself down to the bone for my friends and feel better for doing it. I'll fight with my body to say yes when I really want to say no. I'll be better off because of it.
That's it. The men have gone home. Breakfast is ready. Food: another reward for hard work.
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Posted in 09+ The MANual by Joe Bunting on 4/26/2010
 Intimacy and Vulnerability
Intimacy requires vulnerability, but to be vulnerable, a man has to trust that you're not going to use his vulnerability against him. He has to trust you.
When a man says, "I can't trust her. I can't trust him" he means, "Can you be my secret keeper? Can I trust my heart to you? If I do talk, will you use what I said in a moment of weakness against me? Will you use the vulnerability of present to resurface my past against me in my future?"
MEN : How many other men can you trust with your most vulnerable secrets? How many women?
WOMEN : How many other women can you trust with your most vulnerable secrets? How many men?
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