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Hello Friends -- We, Millie and I, are sitting out on our front deck watching the sun set, on the volcanic San Francisco peaks tonight. The juniper trees must have grown another six inches since last summer, as we see less of the mountains. This past year we got more than our norm of moisture here in the high desert of northern Arizona, near Flagstaff. The clouds are wispy and white above us, a strong gray and white in the middle ground. A thin moon is just below, and a delicate rosy fractal wave over the peaks.
We are still recovering from jet lag, having returned from Micronesia late last week. Somehow, we traveled through three days making our way home. Chuk Lagoon, usually know as Truk (famous for being the underwater resting place for some sixty or more Japanese ships back in WWII) was a place of beauty and despair. Sin's consequences in beautiful places is especially disheartening. This place has so many problems and again such possibility.
The Spanish came through about five hundred years ago. Followed by the Germans, the Japanese and now Americans. It was when we got fifty or sixty miles out to a smaller island that we got a sense of what life had been and perhaps in some measure could be again. There wasn't the plastic and aluminum trash piled around the homes, nor the ubiquitous junked cars. In fact there was not a single car on this little island of perhaps four hundred souls. That is about the size of the Hopi village of Kykotsmovi where we resided for ten years.
Back in Chuk we stayed with a pastor and family for about a month. Their hospitality and affection was nearly overwhelming, sometimes smothering. Between that, the despair and the frustrations of language, etc. we decided to escape to Guam for ten days. Plus, we wanted to celebrate thirty years of marriage.
To our complete surprise, Guam was more like Hawaii. It had good two lane highways and a clear concern by the people to care for their land. They had a similar history to Chuk, in that the Spanish had come charging in during the 1500's. In fact, Magellan's first landfall in the Pacific was Guam. They eventually they made it their big jail for the Philippinos that they didn't want to deal with.
I think Millie and I came to really appreciate the Chamorro people, who had been nearly decimated. For the last few decades they have been working hard to recover their cultural heritage. This is what we would hope for among the Chukese, along with a revival in their legalistic and largely dead churches.
They, like the Hopi and so many of us, have been lead into thinking that Christianity is just religion. We never, or rarely, introduce ourselves as "Christians". No, we would rather avoid the baggage and ambiguity of that word with the statement that we are "followers of Jesus". That says a lot, I think.
It implies of course that we are seeking to follow a person and not some set of religious practices that must be accomplished in a particular type of building. It also implies that in following Jesus, rather than just His teachings, that He might have an active presence in this world. And a third implication might be that He must be worth following in some sort of day to day, even moment to moment way.
So anyway, we are back home. I have wrestled for quite a while, both in Chuk and now here with my own sense of inadequacy and powerlessness for the people and land of Chuk. But I know too that the story isn't over. First of all, we left behind some Micronesian pastor friends who have a real heart for their people. One of these guys, a good friend from California, has been for a couple months now meeting almost daily with his large extended family seeking to renew relationships with them and working to help them reconcile and renew relations with one another. He is actively seeking to follow Jesus.
The second pastor is a resident there. He has broken away from his father's and family's church to lead people into life giving relationship with God. This has made him a target for attack from some, who don't like to see anyone mess with what is comfortable and can be controlled. This fellow has also become a state legislator as he seeks to find new life for himself and his people.
So there really is hope. And it is not somehow about me and my weak response to the whole difficult scene. At the same time I have been telling God that I want to be open to going back again, more knowledgeable and hopefully better equipped to help.
If you've read through all of this, thanks. I was just going to say a few words, but it turned into more.
Love to you and yours -- Will (formerly Bill)
