Today is Ascension day.  When most of us grew up in South Africa, in our pre-democratic days, it was a holiday.

When we read about the ascension in the Bible it is critical to keep in mind that this event took place in Israel and was witnessed by Jews who had imaginations impregnated with the Psalms (and Daniel 7).  On this day Psalm 68 would really have been relevant for them.

The Old Testament professor, Walter Brueggemann, notes that this Psalm is one of “God riding around in the sky on a cloud, supervising, monitoring, breathing life, and giving power to creation”p.2

A verse in the Psalm invites us to,

“Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds- his name is the Lord – be exultant before him.” Psalm 68.4

Ascension is the celebration that God has rose to power.  It is an image that places Jesus at the top.  He is higher.  In the heights he has ultimate power.  In the creeds we confess that, “He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God”. This power is used to be,

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows
is God in his holy habitation.
God settles the solitary in a home;
he leads out the prisoners to prosperity,
but the rebellious dwell in a parched land.(v5-6)

Bruegemann states that,

It turns out that the one who has ascended into power is not transcendent in remoteness, is not splendid in indifference, but is deeply in touch with the reality of the earth where money and power and social leverage and differentiation of gender, race, and class leave some dangerously exposed. This father-God to whom we pray “our father” rides the clouds not as a joy-rider, but rather to be in a position to see and to know and to care and to intervene and to feed and to heal and to forgive and to reconcile and to liberate. It turns out that ascension, whereby God is celebrated in power, is a claim that the earth is ordered differently because of the one who governs it. (p3-4).

Ascension is therefore the day in which we celebrate that what God has done to Jesus now becomes the mandate of the church to serve the world.  We become agents of the new government!
The ascension states that there is a regime change in the world.

Jesus is Lord! 

Therefore imagine (with Brueggemann) on this ascension day:

“The ascended Lord Jesus, riding on a cloud of glory, keeping the world under caring surveillance.  Imagine that the cloud is the throne room where sits the Father of all mercy.  Imagine the governance of Father-Son sending out edicts, directives, and policies that concerning the earth:

Here is a press release that says,

The newly ascended power has decreed that there is more than enough, and greed is inappropriate in this world of God’s generosity.

Here is a new act of legislation from the government of God that says,

Perfect love casts out hate, that we are not free for vengeance but must leave such matters to the wise Father.

Here is an edict from the government that says,

Do not fear for I am with you and the world will hold.(p.6)

In the book of Acts we read that when Jesus ascended the disciples stared into heaven.  A messenger then told them to get a move on … something was about to happen … they would receive power to live into the rhythms of the new government.  Come Holy Spirit.

“I saw the scissors the last time here (pointing to the table), when Jesus hung on the cross”.

His sister and mother were within earshot building a castle. The three of us laughed uncontrollably. I guess one of the positives of Liam’s timeline is that his imagination has been filled with the Easter events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and that he recounts it in the present. Jesus was crucified on Friday, this Friday and that was the last time he saw his scissors.

This is another aspect of toddlers that I love, they live life with a sense of immediacy and anticipation. So as we found the scissors we had a good laugh and remembered that we live in a timeline eternally affected by the life of Jesus.

In February of 2012 I celebrated fourteen years of marriage with my best friend Lollie, in a hospital. We organised for our children to stay with their grandparents and planned to spend a few days relaxing, eating and doing those things people do when they celebrate their engagement. When we arrived at our destination I felt extremely lightheaded and almost fainted. So we rushed to the hospital where they performed an ECG (Electrocardiography) on me. The ECG revealed that my heart had irregular patterns.

And so it was that we spent the first two days of our anniversary sitting in hospital, riding the ambulance and waiting for the results of various tests. During my hospital stay they placed three armbands on me. They were white, pink and yellow.

On them were three pieces of information.

The white one had my name on it “MR TJ Smith”, some numbers “595400000040” and my doctor’s name “Dr.D Pretorius”. The pink one described the test I was going to undergo, “Angiogram”. The nurses called the procedure and “Angy”, which my wife commented sounds kind of nice. The yellow one identified the two medical conditions that plague me, “Cardiac” and “Asthmatic”. These were the three armbands that labelled me. TJ Smith identified by a number who will go for an Angiogram because he is a cardiac asthmatic.

Reading “Asthmatic” and “Cardiac” was a reality check for me. It reminded me of the stark reality of my brokenness and my vulnerability. There in front of me were two of the things that challenge my hubris and any illusions that I am invincible or immortal. Even though I had a heart attack last year followed by a triple bypass, the fact that I am broken can elude me sometimes. In my busyness and activity I can easily ignore my own brokenness. But then there is a yellow armband.

More than those labels

But, I am more than my brokenness and labels. I am more than number 595400000040 who is a cardiac asthmatic. We are more than the labels that are ascribed to us. I am also husband, father, friend, pastor, joker, jogger and Lion’s rugby team supporter.

One of the hardest things in life is to bring our fragmented lives with their shattered identities to the One who ultimately names us.

Because Jesus loves us with all our stuff and invites us into a relationship with Father, Son and Spirit where we are named and offered the gift of healing. This does not mean that I can ignore all those other labels, even though some will have to be ignored. What it does mean is that I have to herd all those other labels under a Label that can bring wholeness and coherence to the rest of those ordinary labels. Like stray sheep we have to bring those labels into the sheep pen with a shepherd that can name us in a way that the other labels become secondary.

In John’s Gospel I find a whisper of what it could mean to be herded into the camp of Jesus the Shepherd. In the first chapter of his book John writes that, “But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves.” (John 1:12, The Message).  Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of “he gave them the right to be called children of God” is refreshing. In Jesus’ day your name signified something of your character and also what you would become. That is what I find so refreshing, that I, Thomas Jacobus Smith an asthmatic cardiac can be and become my true self – a child of God.

Of course it would be nice to just be Thomas Jacobus Smith without the asthmatic cardiac part. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Like Paul’s thorn in the flesh this is something that doesn’t seem to “leave me”, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that is should leave me” (2 Corinthians 12:8). So I am working through another whisper that Paul described. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”(2 Corinthians 12:9). Even within this broken body I can discover my real identity. It is through grace that I get to know my true name. This true name erodes or reorders the other labels that shout out to become the primary identifier of my life.

While I lay in the hospital bed I looked at my yellow, white and pink armband and prayed a prayer of thanks that those labels were not the ones that ultimately defined me. Our journey into wholeness initiates with the loving invitation of the One who loves us and calls us into a relationship of love. From this relationship we are called into a life of wholeness. This is a lifelong journey.

After my tests they found that my heart is ok. The doctors don’t know what happened. This frustrates me, because I don’t feel like I have control. Which is true. But it reminded me that my life is in the hands of Someone else and that I am a child in the arms of a Good and Beautiful God.

Imagine that you have three armbands with labels on them, what are written on them?

Which labels have caused you pain?

Which ones have given you life?

If you could write your own labels what would it be?

What do you think Jesus would write on your label? 

Earlier in the day Lollie and I arrived in Durban to celebrate our fourteenth wedding anniversary. After lunch I felt dizzy and we rushed to the hospital where an EKG confirmed that something was happening with my heart, and that it was abnormal. Four hours later I was transferred by ambulance to the Saint Augustine hospital where a cardiologist would do an angiogram on my heart.

Lent is a season for examination. It is a time wherein followers of Jesus examine our lives for those aspects of our lives that block our relationships with God, people, the environment and our various communities.

Lent is an angiogram of sorts.

An angiogram is a procedure to see which blockages may be in the coronary arteries. During the procedure a dye is injected into the veins and this shows up on an x-ray. During my angiogram I could see my heart pumping on two high definition screens. Each time the dye is injected it causes a warm and painful sensation. It then shows the flow in the heart. Thankfully there were no new blockages in my coronary arteries.

The angiogram is a metaphor for the season of Lent. The season consists of injecting dye into your system to see where the blockages might be. Some use the dyes of fasting, confession and almsgiving.

As I laid in the ICU for two days I battled through the first few days of my Lenten angiogram. My most surprising discovery was that I somehow still work with images of God that are destructive.  One of these images showed itself in the thought, “I wonder what I did wrong and why God is punishing me”. This destructive image of God was one I thought I have laid down a long time ago. My Lenten angiogram showed something else. I somehow still hold on to the thought that God loves me when I do good and punishes me when I don’t. This is one of the blockages I am facing during this Lent time.

It is a good reminder for me that Lent is built on the foundation of God’s love. That there is nothing I can do to make God love me more. Lent is not a way to try to appease God, or to earn God’s love. Lent is a time to remove those blockages that blind me to the fact that I am already loved. Even though angiograms are painful, we need them. But they only show the blockages that prevent us from Life. May we celebrate God’s immense love during this Lenten season.

Schalk’s written response

Once I realised the title was not a sarcastic or ironic joke but yet another expression of the linear managerialism technocrats seem to be addicted to, I started reading the words of the article with much grater care.

The type of care that that is accompanied by sadness, irritation and intellectual indignation. The author revels in a feeling of cleverness, but his cleverness is merely the incorporation of economic and engineering terms into a field of which he has very little contextual experience, or it seems academic background.

That an article about the poor, written by and American starts with a deification of the US Dollar is perhaps typical. That it is not recognised as an absurd starting point by readers of a Christian magazine is surprising. The superficiality of the picture painted is affirmed by the narrow list of ‘americanised’ help channels: all of which are quick and clean. Its a pity American church goers have not learnt from the rich vain of anthropological knowledge and experience which recognised contextual richness. Let us be clear from the start, using the Dollar as yard stick is just as silly as the list of helping options supposedly under scrutiny. That “best” is unashamedly qualified by “bang for your buck” explains why movies like Avatar is made in a last ditch effort to educate wealthy North Americans.

The author creates a big category he calls self-studies and continues to point out the flaws of the bad ways many NGO’s conduct their reporting. We have to pause however and point out that there is a fundamental difference between an American NGO working writing his own report and scientific evidence based qualitative research. Does the author and readers know that it is now assumed best practice to value downward accountability, meaning the poor tell their own stories that has to be approved by their fellow community members. Filling in form and sending it ‘up’ the ladder to those with deep pockets is old-school for those well acquainted with development theory and practice. It is much more powerful for the poor to reflect on and assess their own efforts, rather that being policed by a fresh academic who bought new outdoor gear and a Macbook. The bad studies that are currently being done is often a result of the very pressure articles such as this tries to enforce. The control group comparisons, the before and after impact indicators, are all systems of a sick system enforced by those who give away money but who are not willing to give away control. Problems of ‘confirmation bias’ and ‘illusory superiority’ are not mechanical problems of how, but are symptoms of a disease. The disease that is held as some magic wand is the very illusion of ‘impact evidence’ which the author chooses not to question.

The author explains the error in over optimistic and positive representation by NGO’s and Donors, yet does his economic evaluations that are normally quantified encouraging of failure stories, does reflecting and learning from failures fit into his ‘bang for your buck’ philosophy? Or is it perhaps not cost effective for poor people to learn from mistakes? That “love, understanding and knowledge is deeply intertwined” is probably the first smart thing I read in the article. The critique against mindless giving accompanied by feelings of self-righteousmnes is valid. The author shows remarkable perception with the example of staying next to a dying person- no life change, no bang for the buck there! Economists like to mention ‘tangible impacts”, again ironic that this goes down unchallenged by a spiritual community like the church. I dedicate my life to affect the tangibles affecting poor people, and in that I have learned that the impact we are after is not the tangibles, not the things that can be easily numbered and counted.

Development Economists indeed feel ‘privileged’ to carry such a title and the experts from the World Bank left a glorious trail of the type of work done by these development economist experts… How many development workers or poor people are equiped to conduct high level social research like randomised control groups? I’ve seen Master’s students masacre programmes and communities with clumsy ‘research’. Before deciding on the bang for your buck, consider the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and research burden and cost that experts are demanding! Could these experts be carving out a niche for themselves in a food chain that could really do without another group of vultures? These experts specialise in creating universalisms, giving names to categories they create, they standardise because contextualising is smply too expensive and time consuming. The need generalisation so they can produce more and climb their very own success ladder. Let’s do a reality check: the author (and eager white Christian readers) ask how to help ‘the poor’? All my friends who are poor will frown when they hear this question. My smart academic friends smiles and shakes their heads when they hear this question! What is ridiculous about the central question that seeks answering in this article? The arrogance of labelling thousands of unique communities and individuals into a single category. If we cant resist the temptation to arrogantly label, we will never create a good bang, whether cost effective or not. The question should be what does Chikwa, Zambo or Maria need as they live in Manica…which is different that what Sipho and Thandi needs living in Katlehong. THe author succumbs to the same temptation of intellectual massagng that he criticises American donors for.

Is this survey scientific or the very same self-reflection we were warned about at the start of the article? Results of ‘greatest estimated impact’? So we are dealing with estimates? Generalised estimates of privileged career academics? Is this the academic rigour the author was calling for, or does the fact that he does not include his own opinion prove his bona fides cancelling the question of how these 16 researchers were chosen? Here the man on the street really has to employ the grey stuff in his or her head and have the tomatoes to call dung dung (this sentence could look very different from a literary point of view).

Water, deworming, malaria, education and health sponsorship, stoves (!), small loans, cleft surgeries, farm animals, coffee and laptops… wow. So this is ‘the list’… who chose the list? the author or his fellow experts? Again I see the frowning, shaking of heads and smiles of disbelief from my friends… in Africa.

“organizations working with the poor must subject their programs to rigorous, scientifically based evaluation by impartial third parties.” I f rich NGO workers and their donors want to play this game, it is fine. But for all those good intentioned readers of Christianity Today that’s out there, please be aware that this burden of rigor will be passed down to the poor. This demand for paper where there should be trust will erode the very bang your buck is after. Prevention over cure… thank you for this insight! But I’m slightly confused because if the goal is for the poor to lift themselves out of poverty, then the top three items of donating wells, mosquito nets and de-worming, although preventing disease and suffering are still reactionary and dealing with the effects of poverty, not the causes… and to look at the causes of poverty is something rich Americans are not accustomed to do. Nope, the beef, cereal and sugar eating nations feel better about these short term handouts that keeps the poor far away than they do about honest self reflection.

Financial transparency… again easy to demand, and not the start and end of everything, but how many net and cow donors bother to help youths to learn accounting software packages? Transparency and accountability are two words no-one would dare to challenge. Bot transparency and accountability should be firstly downward. Is the author of this article willing to publish his personal bank statement showing us what money he spends on what? how much he gives away, to whom, how much he saves for his pension, how much he spends on books and restaurant? Can he give us the same expenditure for his children? Can he measure the efficiency of how he spends every US Dollar his Lord has placed under his care? The aid industry, with focus on industry should be scrutinized indeed, as should academics. But the reality is that in the end the poor will be the ones scrutinized, the ones having to change their lives so it fits in better with ‘rigorous third party evaluation’ forms and logframes. Not even the readers of Christianity Today can complete the output, outcome, aims, goals, objectives, impacts, vision, mission, etc forms that is part of these pseudo measurements of paper loving economist developmentalist experts.

At least this article, after juggling a couple of development hand grenades returns to sense with the simple advice to get personally involved. NOt personally involve in writing a cheque, but to make friends and get to know realities different to your own. But be warned because emersion into the poor is scary, it asks question that you might not want to hear when you decide on the brand of your pram, car or coffee machine. In the end the author moves to words that is much different from the marketable title and introduction of his article: ‘friends’, ‘organic’, ‘network’, ‘tiny’, ‘relationship’, etc. The author gives a convincing account of the reality he end his friends encountered, affirming they found now magic bullet, they did encounter difficulty. They go there twice a year. They started it… all very interesting, and fair play I suppose.

I concluded my reading in utter confusion: either the author got tired and wanted a brief landing for his article, or he is schizophrenic. I dont mean it bad, but it seems that this article was written by two different people! Where is the rigorous third party evaluation of his efforts in Guatemala? How much money did he spend on that and where is the link to this research? The author tries to keep it all together with a thread that becomes much more tolerable towards the end of the article: ‘the effect of our actions’ substitutes the extreme demands of evidence based impact gained through expert led control groups.

Has the author measured his bang for his buck? Could it be that our academic does not practice what he preaches? And if not, lets consider why not?

Tom’s written response:

I read an article in Christianity Today’s poverty issue and it disturbs me greatly. It strikes me that the article subtly shifts the focus from the poor that should be helped to the donors and the projects they can fund. Help gets equated with “a plethora of attractive options”, “effectiveness” and “bang for your buck”. Furthermore, the article describes statistics, ratings and scientific methods that dangerously flirt with reducing “the poor” to nameless recipients of the donations and options for rich benefactors living overseas. The article’s title sets the tone, “Cost-Effective Compassion: The 10 most popular strategies for helping the poor.”

By describing most NGO’s methods of evaluations as biased the author argues for the methods developed by certain experts (of whom he is one), ” In recent years, development economists have made remarkable progress in measuring blessings to receivers. I have been fortunate to belong to a generation of development economists who are borrowing tools from the field of medicine. For example, the use of randomized controlled trials to evaluate development programs has helped us understand the relative merits of different approaches to poverty alleviation. Other new methods that mimic the impact-identification power of the randomized controlled trial have also proven fruitful in this area.”

The author asks, “… what are the best ways to help the poor in developing countries? To answer this question, I polled top development economists who specialize in analyzing development programs. I asked them to rate, from 0 to 10, some of the most common poverty interventions to which ordinary people donate their money, in terms of impact and cost-effectiveness per donated dollar.”

It strikes me as odd that the people who decide on the effectiveness of these programs are not the poor themselves but the “top experts” sitting over the sea in some of the most prestigious universities. These top experts use “scientific methods” that are quantitative rather than the biased reporting of the NGO’s. They know how to “rigorously assess.” The experts decide, “The experts who were polled are not anti-laptop, but given the more basic needs in poor countries, they said donating computers was highly cost-ineffective compared with the alternatives.” What do the poor themselves say?

The way in which these experts test whether a program is effective is through, ” rigorous, scientifically based evaluation by impartial third parties.” I think this is dangerous because it is really difficult to plot a person into a scientific method, a program maybe but who still thinks that development is about programs! Apparently the experts do. The expert continues, “…[L]arge donors have begun to insist on scientifically based evidence of positive program impact as a condition for giving. Small donors should do the same. Aid and development organizations soliciting donations should be prepared to provide credible third-party evidence that their work actually helps the poor.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that the “scientifically based evidence” provided by the third party usually becomes some external measure that gets projected unto the poor. Why can’t the third-party become the poor themselves where they get to tell their own stories (which will not muster the quantitative scientifically based methods of the experts)? Thankfully the article ends with some hint towards relationships with the poor themselves … but it must be scientific.

It is indeed a compelling video on discipleship, and I would like to offer a few reflections about this video (you may want to skip my reflections and just watch the video and formulate your own, but please share them in the comment section).

The art of sword making

I. The sword maker (Korehira Watanabe) says that there are only a few people still making Japanese swords – I think this idea of a small minority is attractive to me, but also dangerous. It is attractive when I am part of a minority group who is really committed to something and who differentiates themselves from other people, whether it is rock-climbing, scuba diving, marathon running or discipleship. Jesus himself noted that the journey is not a mass movement. The danger in this is that one can become sectarian and create very strong boundaries of us/them or in/out.

II. The sword maker realized that he had to pass what he had on in order for a legacy to continue. In his words to, “…pass along the aesthetics and soul of the Japanese people through my swords.” For him his sword making is part of a bigger story (the Japanese story), making a sword is therefore more than just making a sword. He creates beauty. His legacy is therefore the creation of something beautiful that can be passed on.

III. He identified a Master and then studied under him, but this decision cost him something. His family didn’t believe in him. Discipleship always involves a cost and the cost will only be paid if the prize is deemed worthy. He says, “don’t ever come back home if you want to be a sword maker.” Jesus once said that, ““If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26, ESV)

IV. The sword maker says that there are “basically no directions or formulas left to make Koto (ancient swords)”. This touches on the uniqueness of every journey of a disciple and flies in the face of packaged trademarked product that you can take from a shelf and read over a weekend. The sword maker has been at it for 40 years! This is slow work, or mustard seed work.

IV. The sword maker talks about the way in which craftsmen hand down the tradition in a way that makes the tradition suffer. The modern methods thin out the tradition.

V. He wants to make disciples better than himself. He does that by passing on two things: technique and passion. It is the passion that will ensure that the tradition gets passed on to the next generation.

We were really proud of him.

Liam’s name was inspired by the life of William Wilberforce who was one of the main abolutionists against slavery. Liam, which is derived from William means, “protector” and “strong willed”.

I pray and hope that Liam will continue to be a champion of the humanity of people.

And he inspires me to do the same.

To have the guts to say, “… he/she is a human”.

Every developer and estate agent will tell you: House buying is all about location, location, location. I couldn’t agree more. Having just moved into my first own(ed) house in Cosmo City Ext.8, I’m already experiencing my location doing a work in me. The area I stay in is especially developed for 1st time home-owners and is integrated with the low-cost housing of Cosmo City. My bedroom window looks out on the RDP housing and Itsoseng (an informal settlement that will eventually also get low-cost housing). Every morning as I rise and draw the curtains to let in the warm SA sunshine, my view brings a liberating light to my potentially selfish soul. It reminds me that I have been given the gift of stewardship. It reminds me that God loves all of humanity and loves it when we love each economically-, culturally- and religiously different/same ‘other’. I truly mean that it brings light. We become free when we can part from our possessions, share what we have and make our circle bigger. We become free when our gratitude grows into maturity through tangible generous living.

What is it like to stay in Cosmo City? It’s joyfully wonderful. Kids play in the street, there are not a lot of fences and people greet each other. Most of my neighbours have beautiful, tender stories to tell about how their dreams came true of owning a house or how they’re the first in generations of their families to own a house. The dignity and privilege of ownership is visible and often reminds me of Genesis 1.

The process that led up to owning a house was quite a rollercoaster one for me. Up & down I considered stewardship, rootedness, mobility, wealth, equality and the dreams I had as a little girl. Ownership wasn’t the issue, but ‘settling down’ was. As a witness to the lives of Joburg-citizens, I’m petrified of a life that’s burdened down by mortgage payments, private property philosophy, fear and postponed dreams. It seems to me that those who own more, fear more. I wasn’t sure if I could trust myself in holding on to the belief that ‘What I have, has been given’, that I’m merely a steward. (I’m still not so sure, but I’m confident that my location might help me with this). I didn’t earn my education, cultural background, family and intellect. I was a beneficiary, and have now been given a lifelong mission to share what I’ve been graciously given. I want to embrace this reality and the joyful opportunity it offers.

During the house-buying process, I had to attend a ‘1st time home-owners’ class. Being the only white person on the block, I’ve never in my life been so aware of how important 1st impressions are. Since then, the awareness hasn’t stopped. The day I’ve been handed my house-keys , the developer asked if I’ve bought a house for my maid. Since then I’ve been asked similar questions about this ‘maid’. This obviously brings me great delight to tell my community that I’m their neighbour and that I will be the maid of the house. I’ve been curious to know if I might be staying in the same street than some of my other friends’ garden/house staff though ☺. To add to the confusion, Doc Mabila, my previous house-mate (30 year old ex pro-footballer who works with my friend Schalk), has moved with me, so I look forward to all the funny gossip stories this will bring. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ gets a new meaning if you’re the neighbour that’s hoping for the acceptance in an environment where, historically or through personal Apartheid stories, people have good reasons not to trust you.

Owning a house is teaching me how to ask for help. Every day a different handyman knocks on the door offering welding, building or carpenter-skills. (I’m tempted to make an artwork out of their business cards.) The youth I work with has been life-savers, a lot of them have plenty of handy-man skills or contacts and have come to my rescue. Their lives tell stories of survival, and therefore many have acquired multiple skills in order to get piece jobs and feed their families. Who knew that I know so little of so many things . I’m totally hopeless in helping myself with most of the things required: How do I make a garden? How to put in a floor? Hanging stuff, Etc ,etc, etc! It feels like I’ve been hi-jacked by an insecure, indecisive, overwhelmed version of me. It’s been a great ego-busting experience thus far! I’m surprised at how difficult it is for me to ask for help and to receive it. I’ve identified a pride that I don’t like, and how I control relationships by being the ‘giver’. In receiving I make myself vulnerable and allow love to enter. This is community, and I have a lot to learn and unlearn. My location will be the best teacher I can ask for.

To God, I ask for His prophetic imagination. I dream of making my home a house of healing, exposure and reconciliation. I dream of having a playground for the kids on the block and a community vegetable garden in my back yard. I dream of community, and I ask for the courage to live consciously and intentionally to make these dreams a reality. For anyone who’s currently feeling ‘stuck’, I would recommend looking at their location. Where and with whom you spend your time will shape your being. Simple. True. Be brave, and change it. Move if you have to. God has a soft place for the broken, if you want Him, that’s where to look.

My dad passed away 10 years ago, and this has been a time where I’ve missed his presence deeply: helping me decide, putting in skirtings, giving me a bear hug, etc. A few months after his death, we sold our big house in Ruimsig and my mom built herself a beautiful smaller house. She handpicked everything… I remember that this process was a lot like the movie “Life as a House”. Building a house was part of her healing, part of her new beginning. I have a similar sentiment when it comes to this precious new house of mine. I have a beautiful opportunity to build a new Life. God has been writing a story for 31 years in me… perhaps just laying a foundation. Now He’s continuing the story of Beauty and Justice through using a house in a specific location. This will be a building process to help align my beliefs with my life, in a new location that will provide opportunity for reconciliation, love of ‘others’ and befriending the poor.

Mi Casa Su Casa,

My house is your house

My house is Your house

Home is where the heart is

Make my heart Your home

Make Your home in me

In order for the oppressed and the oppressor to become a new humanity, a “third way” has to be explored.  This way is a different space than the ones occupied by the oppressor and the oppressed.  It therefore, looks different than the lives of the white oppressors and of the black oppressed in our post-Apartheid South Africa.

Freire comments that the dehumanization of the oppressed will have some concrete effects,

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

In our post- Apartheid South Africa the beneficiaries of Apartheid and the oppressed of Apartheid are both dehumanized.  Both parties need restoration.  Freire boldly states that the oppressed has the challenge to struggle against the oppressors in such a way that they:

-  Don’t become like the oppressors.

-  Restores the humanity of their oppressors!

He states it bluntly,

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power; cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

There is a difference between true and false generosity.  False generosity is a kind of giving that gives goods that are received through oppression and through current injustices.  The “fount” is unjust.  It takes what belongs to the poor and then gives a portion back, and then calls it generosity.  The church Father Basil the Great identified this kind of generosity when he once challenges his church saying that what they are giving away as charity is what they stole in the first place.  Basil showed them how “false” their generosity was.

True generosity happens when the sources of injustice are challenged.  In Freire’s words,

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

In my humble opinion, this false generosity is at the heart of most outreach in churches (and a lot of time myself).

The oppressor cannot identify these “causes which nourish false charity”.  It has to be identified by the oppressed.

In plain language- a group of beneficiaries of Apartheid cannot sit in an all-white discussion and identify how to be truly generous.  The main reason why we cannot do this, is because our rationalizations for our false generosity are shared rationalizations.  Years of collective rationalizations have become so common-sense for us, that it would take outsiders to puncture our paradigms.

The rich, beneficiaries of Apartheid have to become students.  We have to become apprentices of the poor. We have to listen. Learn.  Freire describes it,

“This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves …”

Yet, this apprenticeship will not come by chance.  It will come through a decision of the oppressed themselves.  They have to decide that they have an enormous role to play.[1]

But what do we do when thousands of our black brothers and sisters believe that they don’t have a role to play?  When their self-image have been destroyed to such an extent that they can see no way forward? Do they know how desperately we need them to teach and show us?

[1] “They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it.”