You're not hallucinating - the ship really is going down

You feel it, deep in the recesses of your mind and heart: things are not going to be OK. Life is not going to return to normal. You sense that you will never again have a peaceful, easy moment. Deep down, you feel something coming, and you dread it. You're not sure what it is, and so you don't even attempt to share this feeling with anyone. If you did, the words would come out jumbled and chaotic, because the thing you fear is nameless, effervescent. When you try to latch on, to pin it down, it slips like smoke through your fingers.

Sure, you also have plenty of fears you can name. Illness. Financial ruin. Loss. Death. But this is something deeper. This is the thing that keeps you up at night, this nameless fear. You try to tamp it down, ignore it, scoff it away, blame it on the pandemic, the isolation, politics, your own anxiety. You try to drink it away, but it wakes you up in the middle of the night and keeps company with your hangover as you toss and turn. You attempt to drown it out with Netflix and music, or the myriad voices competing for attention on social media. But it only keeps getting louder. Even in the dead quiet, you hear it in the sound of your panicked breaths, your rapidly beating heart.

We are born with an instinct for self-preservation, and this instinct is screaming at you now. What is it saying? Is it speaking a language you don't understand? Actually, yes. 

Whatever you do, don't ignore it anymore.

Friend, I feel for you. You are not going crazy. This is not a mental illness. The ship we're on, the ship called planet Earth, with humanity as its crew, is not OK. In fact, it's a wreck in the process of breaking apart. It's been happening for some time, although it has seemed like the small leak in the bottom couldn't possibly bring down such a great big ship. But it can, and it is, and when the ocean pours in, everyone on the ship without a life preserver is going to die. The problem is that, like those on the Titanic, most people don't even realize that the ship is doomed.

I am not going down with this ship. My life preserver is securely fastened; my oxygen mask is on, and the air is flowing. While the ship is taking on water, and the bulkheads are splintering, I will remain on board. I used to be part of Earth's crew, but now I belong to another vessel, one that isn't sinking. Nothing can poke a hole in this vessel; it plows through storms and waves and icebergs as if they weren't there. And there's enough room for all of you. There are quite a few of us, the crew of that unsinkable ship, still here on Earth, and we've been assigned the task of letting the rest of you know about this rescue ship, so that you can get on board before Earth goes down. We want to help you find your air supply and your life preserver. We're here to show you the way. I'm really hoping that you take it. 

The ship really IS going down. There is nothing anyone here can do to save it. And there is only one way off.

I'd like to introduce you to my Captain, who incidentally, is also the rescue vessel. His name is Jesus, and His message to you is this: "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die." (John 11:25-26).

I've been working my way through His training manual, which contains His battle history and commendations, strategy and tactics, intelligence, weapons inventory, recruitment materials, medical training, and predictive maintenance. He's brilliant and brave and selfless. Before He asks anything of His crew, He does it Himself first.

Do you realize that when He first arrived offering to rescue us from the shipwreck, the crew of Earth killed Him? We were following the orders of Earth's captain, Satan. Luckily for us, that was all part of Jesus' brilliant, secret plan to beat Satan at his deadly game. Satan tries to convince us that Jesus is the enemy, rather than the Savior He actually is. In reality, Satan is a homicidal maniac with a death sentence, and he would like to take all of us with him when he goes. He is doing everything he can to keep us asleep and believing lies about Jesus, so that we all drown with him as his ship goes down.

At home in Bethany

Often when I am reading about Jesus' last days, I start thinking about the gaps that the Gospels didn't write into, the unwritten moments of down time. Jesus spent much of that down time in the town of Bethany, where lived a few of His closest friends: the family of Lazarus, Mary and Martha. His quiet, beloved chosen family.

Alone in the understanding of His rapidly approaching death, I imagine Jesus taking comfort from the presence of these particular friends, who not long before had become a living picture of what He was about to do, in the form of Lazarus' death and resurrection. I think that they, more than His chosen 12, had a much clearer idea of His inner turmoil - as evidenced by Mary's anointing Him with a year's worth of perfume (John 12:3), as well as their willingness to host Him in spite of talk that the chief priests were thinking about killing Lazarus as well as Jesus (v.10).

To me, this family most clearly represents us, Jesus' everyday followers. They couldn't, for whatever reason, travel around with Him during His ministry, anymore than we can go back in time and do so. But they were the ones He loved. They believed in Him as the Messiah even before He raised Lazarus from the dead (John 11:27). And in the final deep breaths before heading into the worst moment in all existence, this was where He wanted to be.

It's a comfort to think about Him there, gathering His strength and enjoying a foretaste of His great family, the one He put together before He created the universe.

"Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes His life an offering for sin,
He will see His offspring and prolong His days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in His hand.
After He has suffered,
He will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities." (Isaiah 53:10-11)

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,  looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:1-2)

"Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again, and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy." (John 16:22)

As we, His chosen family, gather tonight (for some of you, tomorrow) to observe our precious Savior's suffering, into which we have been privileged to enter, which is one of the great mysteries of God in Christ Himself, remember that we are not truly separate. We are members of one body - HIS - and united through Him in spirit. In His eyes, we are together. In His eyes, we are one. And we will all see each other again.

Meant to Be - The Love Story (or, how I met Jesus in Vietnam, and why it matters)

I have been coming to realize, with a greater and greater certainty, that the Lord has placed me here in time and place and among the people I am with...He planned out where I would be today BEFORE HE CREATED THE UNIVERSE. There are no random occurrences, no accidents with God. I am 100% certain that I am where I am supposed to be. This is a wellspring of joy into my soul that makes me eager for more of the Lord. The more I have of Him, the more I long for Him.

I am aware, as we are called to share in Christ’s suffering on the way to being like Him, that this may involve hardship the likes of which I have never known or expected. But I also have never been more prepared for it, in that I am secure in the knowledge that I am headed HOME to my Lord, to live forever with the best Father, brother, friend, Savior, King, Captain, Counselor, Shepherd anyone can have.

How am I confident I’m where I’m meant to be?

What follows is a look back through time, from the 1960's to the present, at the Lord's providence for me, particularly as concerns Vietnam. He built this country into me as carefully and intricately as any of my organs, any freckle, any pre-existing condition.

1

My father enlisted in the Marines in the 1960’s, during the Vietnam War. For whatever reason, he intended that he should die fighting. He wanted to be a helicopter gunner, an extremely dangerous position that meant almost certain death. This was before he met Jesus, and long before I was born in 1983. As you can imagine, since I am sitting here writing this, he did not get what he wanted. Instead, he was made a radio repair technician, and he never saw combat. He returned after only one tour, met my mother, met Jesus, and settled in for a mundane life on Earth in exchange for hoping in the glories of Heaven.

My father brought many stories home from his time in Vietnam, but none of them involved the tragedies that so many other soldiers participated in, like killing innocent civilians. He was enthralled with the country: the food, the starry skies at night, the beaches and beauty. And when I got old enough, he started to tell me some of them.

I was curious enough about the war and that he was there. He didn’t tell me the story about wanting to die until I was an adult, and so there was an air of mystery over much of his experience. I read novels and biographies about the Vietnam War, listened to Bruce Springsteen, wrote stories and poems about it. I took Astronomy in college and learned enough to develop a multi-spectrum photo of the Orion Nebula. Eventually, in 2006, I drove across the country, from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, Oregon, and settled there to write poetry. I even took a class in Vietnamese at a local language center for a while.

2

In Portland, I met my husband, and when we married, we had a narrow list of places we wanted to visit for our honeymoon in 2014. One was Ireland; another Cuba. The last was Vietnam, this country I had always been curious about. I’ll give you 3 guesses where we went.

We chose to visit Hanoi in particular, the northern city from which the country finally shook off its aggressors and former colonizers and gained independence. We fell in love immediately: with the people, the history, the food, the unusual architecture, the grit and determination of a long-subjugated country only now rising to its feet and finding its place in the world.

3

We never intended to have children, but in 2018, we changed our minds. The same year, we decided to move overseas to teach. We drew out extensive lists of places we might like to live, along with various criteria - income, cost of living, quality of life, and oddly enough one of the necessities was that the country not quarantine pets for months - because our 2 cats would not be able to tolerate it. We got two job offers that fell in line with those criteria: Cairo and Hanoi.

In December 2017, the same day we signed a contract for the school we now teach for in Hanoi, we also learned that we were going to have a baby - our son, Ernesto.

Cornerstone Comics

I updated the banner on my comics page. It's so pretty that I just had to share!