This Is What A Lay Up For A Major Slam Dunk Looks Like

I recently returned from Thailand working with The Charis Project. This is a major highlight from that trip that I recently shared on the Charis Blog. It is so Important to me that I need to share it here as well.

On our Face Book page a short while ago I said that it looked as though we were on a layup for a slam-dunk. This is what I was talking about.

We have been working with a group of people in Mae Sot for about a year. We have been moving slowly and working at getting to know each other and to understand how, and if, our visions intersect and how, and if, we will be able to work well together.

That work is ready to take the next step.

On this last trip we spent an extended period of time discussing in-depth where to move forward and they were already on-board with where we see going.

The de facto leader of the group is named Philip. His father-in-law led in founding a college for hill-tribe peoples and Philip worked there as a teacher. In fact he was one of Judah and Saeng Chen's* teachers when they went there.

This group in Mae Sot is already working responsibly to build up, support, and empower children of the Burmese migrant and refugee community in the area. They have very little in terms of resources aside from the income they themselves earn as laborers and they do not ask for handouts. Instead they have been envisioning businesses that they could start to do a better job of supporting the work they are doing with the children.They are educated, they are motivated, they are hard-working, and they have already begun to innovate.

They do not want to live on donations because they see begging, even for a very good cause, as a weakness that they would very much like to avoid.

Philip and I excited about our vision for moving forward in Mae Sot

They are about the perfect partners for the Charis Project. They are thrilled with our vision for integrating entrepreneurism and the care for at-risk children. They see that what we envision pushes beyond what they thought possible and are excited to bring this all together. They and we are becoming us.

They brought to our discussions two or three business ideas that they had already been thinking about and over the course of our conversations we together came up with half-a-dozen more workable business concepts.

Now, the step we are working on next, is to model, assess, and select the best of these concepts to move forward on, to invest in, and to launch as the financial and entrepreneurial-education foundation of the empowering work with the children living out in the teak plantations and bamboo thickets.

A few of the kids and another of the team members at Mae Sot

Obviously we are very excited and are chomping at the bit to be on site to work directly with them as we launch this new Charis Community and take what we learn here to feed back into the Doi Muser home to build it up even further.


*Directors at the Doi Muser Home

Deep Value And Truth From An Odd Source

I have never posted a link to another article before. I am doing it now because this deserves it. I read this and think, with tears at the back of my eyes, "What have I actually accomplished?" Then I realize it's not too late.

We have a world to build, lets actually do it.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/

The Difficult Power Of Love

Here is a special treat. A guest post by my brother Wayland. He is a co-founder of The Charis Project, an officer in the United States Marine Corps, and one of the more spiritually aware people I know. A heads up: he prefers to work in shocking and uncomfortable imagery.

I spend a lot of time working through the choices thrust upon me be the sex and violence of day to day existence. Things like, what do I do now that I know the reason I don't see my students anymore is because they got sold to people who gang raped them? How do I keep the other kids I try to protect from having the same thing happen to them? Or, and this is much more banal, how do I keep the people I'm in charge of from doing something really stupid like marrying the stripper they met this weekend? Or how do I deal with my friend having killed himself after coming back from war? Or how come after doing everything I possibly can for this girl, in the most uncreepy, honest, and open way I could, it still seems like I have to use an ice pick to chisel my way through bitch mountain to get through to her?

We all face hardship and suffering, and for those of you who wish to change the world, you know who you are, the biggest sources of suffering come from the dissonance between the way things should be, which is obviously not the way things are, and the way things actually are. (Just admit it. Sh..y.) Now just try and follow the same path of self sacrifice and selfless giving up of yourself to change this and see how long it takes to, either end up drinking every night and generally feeling depressed, or, and I would argue that in this economy with gas prices the way they are this is the worse choice, becoming super conservative religious and trying to shut out all that pain with yet more small groups, even more volunteering and yet ever more advice from spiritual teachers. Not that there is anything wrong with any of this IN IT'S PROPER CONTEXT. That goes for the drinking every night also by the way. But the reason I, we, engage in these types of self destructive behavior is because we have taken our sacrifice and the love behind it and bent it out of it's proper context. Actually we have taken ourselves out of the proper context because we have fallen into the all too easy and most banally evil path of defining ourselves in opposition to what we oppose and in so doing become less than what we are.

When you really care about something, it gets really easy to define yourself in terms of opposing what is bad for it.

On a scale of twisted to perfect, that leaves us twisted, just like everything else that's wrong, including Lucifer, but I'll get to that at a later and undisclosed point. And don't think for a minute I'm about to say something about just embracing universal love and there is good in all. Find out about the girls you spent your time and effort looking after getting gang raped and see how long it takes for you to come up with new and exciting ways to dismember someone unto death and be absolutely right to feel that way.

I'm actually going to take this in a whole other direction. I'm really more interested in penetrating to the guts of the problem, and splitting it wide open to the point that it turns inside out and becomes something new. In doing so, I had to go looking for inspiration. I still find it strange that such would come from my work, which is really a lot more boring than people give it credit for. There is this concept we have called maneuver warfare, by which we seek not to kill off the enemy, but to destroy the enemy's system in key ways that cause him to collapse with as little real destruction as possible. It turns out God does the same thing.

Which means I'm about to go off in yet another direction. Those of you who know or, better yet, are mothers know what real selfless sacrifice actually is. Consider that God describes himself as a mother. He also calls himself love. Now, that word has been corrupted in the modern context to mean something more along the lines of, I love you, but…

I love you but you need to be more open.
I love you but you need to not not push me away.
I love you, but change or I can't do this anymore.

WEAK.

Or, "I care about poverty/love poor people, but we will always have the poor." Read: "I can't deal with this right now".

(What does that even mean? )

In other words the modern context of love has become hugely self centered and ends up leading us into defining ourselves and what we care about in opposition to what we don't like. Mothers, or at least good ones, know better. I'm not, nor will ever be one, but I am aware enough to see that waking up at all hours of the night to let a screaming, completely self centered little mammal literally suck nutrients out of you demands something else to be going on. Something very unselfish and rather embracing of the way things actually are and addressing them as they are, i.e. a screaming little mammal that needs to be fed.

Now, tying this back to maneuver warfare, I'm going to have to make an all too tantalizing jump into the mystical world of ideas. Ideas like, love is actually more than an emotion (it is that too, and that's totally fine) it's a choice you make. In fact it's one of those choices you make when confronted with the sex and violence of everyday existence.

This means I'm going to have to get to the point, which is that there is nothing wrong with pouring yourself out in self sacrifice for what, and who, you care about. And to make sure you don't end up being selfish about it you destroy the system that leads to that outcome. I have found the fastest way to totally overcome it all is to decide to be a slut about it. Love everything. The brokeness, the twistedness, the retrograde behavior. Try turning it on yourself if you want to get real kinky. Forgive and love everything about yourself. I know this feels strange at first, but we have to learn to take care of ourselves, you know. This works because love isn't a two way exchange between something or someone you are trying to get something from. It is a one way transformative (read redemptive) force that changes the twisted, broken things to what they, we, were meant to be. Destroy the system by embracing it and thus causing it to adapt to you, to the light that lives in you.

What better way to damage an agenda of damage than by applying a transformative and redemptive force to it. Instead of pushing away that which we are revolted by, and thus bringing it's existence into more clear relief, why don't we get right up next to it, assume that everything we hear about us being bigger, better, and more powerful is true and thus compel the that which is weaker to adapt to that which is stronger. It's a law of biology that the larger organism absorbs the smaller. It seems to work in all of life as well.

This makes dealing with your former students, if you can ever find them again, a lot easier because you can love their brokenness, and thus have any hope of changing it. You can love your friend who killed himself and leave it at that. You can love the people you are in charge of, and for that matter who are in charge of you, do your job and leave it at that. And you can love the passivity and sadness of the girl making you use an ice pick to chisel you way closer to her, which has a dramatic effect on determining how committed you are and how much you really care and actually produces positive changes. At least that is how it all works for me.

As for Lucifer? God loves him.......                                               

On My Father's Shoulders

I grew up saturated in the belief that the ultimate source of the universe is actively loving and that our highest notions of love reflect that ultimate source*. That is to say that God really loves us perfectly and his love is recognizable to us through our experience of it's reflection. Even more simply: God loves us completely in a way that makes sense to us.

My father did not grow up in this. Rather, he has had to fight for it. This fight has been most clear in his longstanding and often controversial teaching on the grace of God, speaking in defense of it for thousands of hours, all his writings, outworkings of defending the grace of God. The grace of God needs defending because it is and has been for much of history under attack.

To be more accurate, the grace of God does not need defense. It is quite secure in itself. Rather people are in need of being released from bondage to false notions of God that see him as vindictive, judgmental, irritable, distant, etc.

My father has worked at this for most of his life, pulling and pulling  because he needed the truth he knew to train his own heart. He has needed release from the same bondage he fought for for others. This understanding of God is something he has defended. This understanding of God is where I start. I grew up in this environment, starting with a radical notion of the grace of God, early saturation deeply setting the way I think and feel about the world and my life and my place in both. This deeply rooted understanding that reality has such a bright truth at its core grounds freedom and joy at the foundation of my life and work, but at the same time, not having to work for it, impedes my ability to articulate that very grace to people who do not yet truly know it.

The grace of God is not an "issue" for me. That God really loves us and this world he has created is where I start. The difficulty that arises from this is if other people do not start from the this same place, especially on such a fundamentally vital point, what I say can be very horribly misunderstood. Especially since I talk a lot about our responsibilities and the work we have to do in the world. One could very easily think that I am teaching that we in some way earn, by these works, our position with God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nothing I say has anything to do with securing a better position with God. Everything I say is predicated on the foundation that we are all already completely secure in the love and acceptance of God.

We are all fully loved and accepted by God, right now exactly as we are. That is bombproof. That is true whether we feel like it or not. That is just as true for the person across the street and across the ocean as it is for you and me. Jesus has already taken up all of humanity into the embrace of the Trinity. The Spirit is always already present in every place and person, ready to be honored and embraced. The Father has, from the very beginning, chosen each and all of us to be adopted as his true children.

That is my foundation. There is nothing I need to do to "get right with God." There are no hoops I need to jump through, no manual I need to read, no cross I need to nail myself to. All is grace. It is by  the grace of God that I do right and by the grace of God that I sin. My very existence is a gift. I have nothing and yet by the adoption of the Most High everything is mine.

Given the radical depth and power of the grace of God and his complete acceptance of us all the only thing that is left to us is to get down to work. There is nothing for us to earn so we might as well work at life and that more fully. That is where I go. Given the total love and acceptance of our Father lets get to work. We have been given a creation to complete.

I also talk about my father here.

*For a good primer on what I grew up with see: The Gospel Uncensored

My Father's Wisdom: Character

Ken Blue (Dad) with the kids @ The Charis Project

As we get older we realize that wisdom that people gave us when we were younger is actually true. There are things that wise people have told me that I believed because they made sense and I respected the person who said it. I could repeat it to others with conviction in my voice (those of you who know me face to face know that I can say nearly anything with conviction in my voice.) And saying some of these things were good ways of giving others the impression that I also was wise. But the really good stuff shifts over time. It changes from merely being a wise saying with the experiential realization that it is actually true.

One of the really good nuggets my father gave me. He phrased it as a realization or rather a conjecture. He said to me, "It really seems as though God is not all that concerned about achievement. God seems to be more interested in the development of character."

Character is more important than achievement. Yah, that sounds good, almost a platitude. It is the sort of thing you say as a consolation for frustration or failure. A good piece of soothing opiate for the masses.

And then you live more years and observe others and yourself. You see people achieve without character and how empty and dangerous they are. You see people grow character and how it changes them, makes them deeper and more solid.

I have had success, achievement, failure and frustration. It has been in the failure and frustration portions that my father's bit of wisdom comes to me and reminds me to take heart. It is not a consolation, it is an imperative in disguise. A call to endurance, not to capitulate and just say, "Well I failed, I guess I get character." Rather to say, "Here is a decisive opportunity for me to grow that which is really important. The other bits and distractions have fallen off for a moment. What I do now gets at the core of me."

It has taken some really unpleasant times for this to come home to me. And I really would not like to repeat them. However, coming through, having had that bit of wisdom from my father, I have gained measures of character that I didn't realize were available to be had and so never realized how valuable they were. My wife will be happy to back me up on this. And living in my own skin has taken on a different flavor. The development of character means being more truly and fully you in ways that you didn't know that you were missing. This affects everything about you and is visible to the people around you. You become stronger and more gentle at the same time. You become both more creative and more grounded. You become more like the person you really are and didn't realize you hoped you could be. Once this realization takes hold hardship takes on a different meaning. Instead of being something you dread, you begin to welcome it as the catalyst that can propel you toward the person you can now see yourself becoming.

Far from being a consolation, my father's bit of wisdom has taken the sting out of suffering and the fear out of failure. Far from being disempowering, those words reset the stage for me to risk and endeavor to achieve more because in the worst case scenario I will get to become more the person who I have glimpsed it is possible for me to become.

My father mentioned God as well. This character thing goes even beyond our quality of life here and now. God has no intention of letting a bunch of little children (and I mean that in the pejorative sense) run around with his authority mucking things up, we are already doing that. The reason why God cares more about character is that is what prepares us to partner fully with our heavenly father in working for the redemption of this world. From this perspective, there are fathers with starving children in Mali that are far farther along than me. In this development of character we are being formed into the sort of creatures that God can trust with his authority.

Remember my father's wisdom and become more and more the person you couldn't dare to dream you might be and together we will build the house of our father, a place truly fit for the sorts of people God calls all of us to become.

Oh, and, thank you Dad.

A Big Enough Story

She deserves shoulders to stand on

I have a day job that almost pays the bills and that has me traveling much of the time. I am CEO of The Charis Project, working like crazy to establish a model for self-sustaining care for at-risk children that transforms the surrounding communities to the point that the children are no longer at risk. I am working out a theology that drives human participation in cosmic redemption. I try to be a present husband and father to my wife and four children. I claim no particular moral fortitude in any of this. At one level this is just the work I see that needs doing.

On the other hand, I could have a much easier life if I dropped a few of these things.

Children learn to live in the stories that their parents create. Parents create these stories by the words they say to and around their children. But more so they create these stories by the life they lead, by how they live their lives. We build the universe our children live and grow in.

If we live a small life we provide our children with a small universe with near horizons. They will learn to live in this story. They will learn to settle the way we have settled and they will not know that they have settled.

C.S. Lewis talks about sin in terms of being satisfied with too small pleasures. "Reality television," a new iPod, sex without commitment, making the next rung on the company ladder: pleasures too small to sustain life. But, pleasures that fill a small universe. Symptoms.

It is one thing to tell our children that they can do anything. It is a completely different thing to lead by example. To build a larger universe, to create a larger story we need to live in a larger universe. We need to not just talk about it but we need to actually interact with it. We need to, by our actions, push back the horizons.

It is not enough to not watch "reality television." It is not enough to only have sex within a committed relationship. We need to start living in a larger story ourselves. However, what is required is something that goes beyond ideology. Another way to put this is that we need to live beyond ourselves.

In order to actually build we need to act in the concrete. This action cannot be transient but must be committed. It cannot be random but must be intentional. Whether that action is deciding to find a way to fund an orphanage or doing stand-up comedy to give people freedom and hope.

(It may be that most any concrete action that brings benefit can push the horizon as long as the stated and true reasons for that action extend beyond the action itself. When we do not act merely to act, but rather for the sake of something greater that is still embodied in the action itself.)

My parents gave me a big universe. I grew up in a world where people's lives were transformed by a power greater than my parents because my parents acted. I grew up with a father who gave more than he had for the sake of not just an abstract notion of truth but a truth that hit the ground and set people free from crippling abuse and lies. I grew up with a mother that decided that her measure of success was the quality of humans she let loose on the world.

I do the things that I do because I owe it to my children to provide them with a big enough story for them to come fully alive in. I owe it to them to turn them loose on a universe big enough for them to find pleasures great enough to bring life in abundance.

Rather than bemoaning the decline of the youth, let us push their horizons, let us give our children a universe and a story in which they really can do anything then they will not be satisfied unless they are really doing something.

What concrete actions can you take to make your children's universe bigger? I want to hear them.