Dear Friends,
This is the eighth message in a series on the spiritual milestones of my life. It is my prayer my stories will stir you to think and pray about the experiences where God has shaped your faith. I am sorry about the length.
A team of physicians, hospital administrators, and an engineer traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan in May of 2005 to finalize the arrangements for my client, Loma Linda University, to operate a hospital there for the government and USAID. I was added to the team to help sort out the organizational structure and financial arrangements for the project and help negotiate the contractual relationship with the Ministry of Health.
When the possibility of going to Afghanistan was first broached to me, I thought it was a joke. Husband, father, suburban business lawyer from Southern California–I am an unlikely candidate for a mission to a war zone. When one thinks of overseas mission and aid projects, having a lawyer along is not the first thing that comes to mind.
Most of us along on the trip had no idea what to expect. Kabul is 13,000 miles and eleven time zones from Los Angeles–as far around the world from our homes as one can go without starting back. Nothing in my life’s experience to that time, prepared me for this journey. Perhaps the most important thing I brought home was a new perspective on prayer.
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Don Nicolay, a surgeon from Colorado, and I stand in the mud of a Kabul marketplace one afternoon while other members of our Loma Linda University team bargain in a nearby shop. Butchers, bakers, hat makers, fruit sellers, carpet dealers, and tea vendors hawk their goods in front of us with the simple efficiency required of a subsistence economy.
We are surrounded by old men, teenagers and children as objects of curiosity. The teenage boys want to practice their English. One of them speaks to us with passion of the power of education to change lives and his desire to attend a university in Pakistan. His father in traditional dress comes and takes him by the arm and leads him away. A little boy reaches out and enviously fingers the dial of my “cheap” Timex watch purchased by me for this trip so that my “good” watch won’t be a temptation to “thieves.”
I keep one hand on my satellite cell phone and the other in my pocket on my money clip. These items reflect my values just as the chickens and goats, bread, and simple inventory in the market stalls represent the values of the Afghans. But their possessions represent survival. My possessions reflect the cares and riches of this world. I do not live in daily fear that everything I have will be swept away, or, do I?
In fact, I do live with that fear. Every day, I push for more while these folk struggle daily to hang on to what little they have. They smile easily, keep their clothing clean and their market stalls in neat order. There is obvious familial affection between them. Their family and friendships are their “safety net” while my bank account, home-ownership, health insurance and vehicle are mine.
When Don tells them, “I am a doctor” they respond with grins and words of recognition. When I tell them, “I am a lawyer,” the shopkeepers and their children have no clue what a lawyer does. They settle their disputes without a civil legal system and who is to say that they aren’t happier for this?
Doubts and discomfort over this trip plagued me with a vague oppression before I left. I wrestled with those doubts in prayer to the point that I realized that what was bothering me was a loss of control. All of my so-called “advantages” are neutralized in this mission. My title and position bring me to Kabul, but they mean little here. My license as an attorney is of no effect. My facility with the English language fails me because the official language is Farsi. My middle-class affluence and network of influential contacts buy me nothing.
I am vulnerable and without influence, an alien in a land that is hostile to my people and nation. Even my Christianity and spirituality shared with my friends and family back home are considered a handicap and an offense in Afghanistan. I am far from my safe and comfortable life where I at least have the illusion of control over my circumstances. Who am I stripped of the props and conceits of my life?
I have written and spoken of prayer as if I know what I am talking about. A few years ago I wrote these words: “Jesus values his life and the life that he gives you and me as a ransom. A ransom is something worth exchanging for a life. We are the currency of God. We are his to spend and his to invest. Why, indeed, are we trying to save our own lives? We were not meant to be banked and held in reserve. We are meant to be spent by God as ransom for others held captive” (Grace at 30,000 Feet [Hagerstown, MD: Review & Herald, 2002], p. 175).
Noble feelings surged in my soul when I wrote those words. But beyond the small amount of cash in my pocket, the things that I believe give value to my life would not ransom much from the mud of the Kabul marketplace.
Later, a young Christian woman who is a project director for the World Bank, tells me a story about one of her community organizers who hiked ten kilometers to a remote mountain village. He passed a young woman carrying an infant going the opposite direction down the trail. He did not speak to her because she could be stoned to death for speaking with a strange man. That evening when he hiked back out he met the same woman coming up the trail. She was still carrying the infant.
Because it was nearing dark and the young woman was so far from home, the man spoke to her out of concern. “Are you all right?” he asked her in Pashtun.
“My son was sick and I was taking him to the hospital in the city,” she said. But I don’t need to go now because he died on the way.”
I hear about the woman’s unrequited pain over her dead son. I see the beggars in the streets and the traffic stirring the dust. I watch the Gurkha guards watching me. I look up to the summits of the Hindu Kush towering over Kabul. I desire to be alone with God in the snowy solitude. In this moment, I realize that I am insensate of the purpose of prayer.
I’ve prayed for escape my whole life–asking God to help me or someone I love to get by, get out, get over, get through, get more, or to “get it.” I like to meet God alone and hold him all to myself. I confess my prayer for others at best is offered up in the spirit of noblesse oblige, rather than out of the heart of a servant. My prayers are really requests for reallocation of resources rather than a confession of my poverty and a plea for mercy.
But Afghanistan confronts me with a truth I cannot deny and a need that neither I nor the well-regarded American institution I represent can satisfy. Afghanistan is a mother carrying her dead infant up a trail as night falls around her because the only hope of healing was too far away. It is a father pulling a son back from his effort to slake his thirst for knowledge. It is foreigners in the marketplace buying “cheap” and bargaining for “cheaper” while closely guarding their own possessions. It is a beautiful teenager with pneumonia huddled alone on a bare, blood-stained hospital mattress because there are few nurses, and the male physicians will not attend to her.
My companions and I bring to this mess the Christianity of nice, well-ordered lives — virtuous, industrious, optimistic, and wholly inadequate for a place like this. Our capabilities here amount to less than bringing a child’s squirt gun to a holocaust. In this space, my conditioned prayer of gratitude for my blessings in the face of such hunger and want sounds a lot like the Pharisee praying in the temple, “God, I thank you that I am not like these other people” (Luke 18:11).
But I have nothing else but prayer and the faith that leads me to believe somehow, some way, a loving God has something to do through me. Here is a test, though. How does one love in such circumstances? How will my prayer fulfill the obligation to love and to serve?
“You will be judged according to your ability to love” wrote Carlos Caretto in Letters from the Desert (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002, p. 7). I read those words in the morning when the compound is silent and every one else is asleep. They make me squirm because, if true, my skills of negotiation, counsel and drafting are irrelevant to what the Lord requires of me.
A lawyer once asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asked him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”
“You shall love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” the lawyer replied.
Jesus said that is the “right answer”.
But the lawyer, seeking to justify himself, demanded to know, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus told him that the one who needs mercy and the one who shows mercy are neighbors (Luke 10:25-37).
What am I doing in Kabul? Do “neighbors” think of their visits with each other as “mission trips” with all the judgment and condescension the concept implies?
Jesus Christ went to extreme lengths to become our neighbor. He pitched his tent in our neighborhood. He gave up the wealth and power of heaven to begin his life among us as a diapered infant, a vulnerable child dependent on the good will of other humans. He was born to a poor family in occupied territory. He lived without permanent shelter, possessions or apparent practical skills. He ministered to the shunned and dispossessed, took on our diseases and sins, and died our death in excruciating pain.
Jesus’ acted on the instructions of the Father with whom he kept in constant contact (John 5:19,30). In other words, the acts of love that transformed the world from a backwater corner of the Roman Empire rose from a life of prayer.
The Father told Jesus to love us in our messes and redeem us from them. He surprised everyone when he touched the leper, received the touch of a ritually unclean woman, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, the crippled, the deaf and speechless. cast out demons, sat down to eat with disreputable characters. Jesus moved toward the messes, not away from them.
To love as Jesus loved requires an intimate compassion for the human condition that gives up any claim to be special and entitled. Jesus did not consider his exalted station in the Godhead “as something to be exploited, but emptied himself taking the form of a slave,” and became human and died a humiliating human death on the cross, relying entirely upon God for what happened after that (Phil 2:6-11). Here I am on the streets of Kabul mourning because I have no tangible way to demonstrate my specialness.
When Jesus sent his disciples out to witness to the gospel in the surrounding towns, he sent them out unarmed, unsupplied, barefoot and helpless. He told them, “Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals” (Luke 10:3-5). He told them, “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you'” (Luke 10:8-9). He sent them to others as he came to us–with nothing.
Woe is me! All my life I have asked Jesus to give me stuff. I thought I was special because I had stuff including the powers of leadership and influence. Jesus tells me, “I can only use you if you give up your stuff. Until you are helpless, and vulnerable, and impoverished, you are useless.”
Conditioned by culture, education and religion to respect strength and despise weakness, I am learning that I can use my strength to serve the poor and the helpless, but until I am helpless myself, I cannot love the helpless. That’s why Jesus gave up his divine powers to love humans as a human. That’s why he sends his disciples out with nothing–so that material goods and power cannot be mistaken as substitutes for love. “We love [simply] because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Shaken to my core by what I have seen and experienced here, a story gives me insight into the love I have been missing in my prosperity and specialness.
There is a refugee camp on the Northern edge of Kabul. It is a squalid tent city stretched out on the flats behind the shells of a blown-up commercial complex. A Swiss physician told me of going with his team into the camp on Christmas day to distribute blankets and food. They came upon a woman, squatting alone, outside in the bitter cold, giving birth to a child on frozen ground. The men of her family remained in the tent because they believe it wrong to even acknowledge a woman’s pregnancy, let alone attend to her in her physical need. Coincidentally, it is warm in the tent. The baby lived, though. He lived in the miracle of love’s intercession with a warm blanket in the very moment that he entered the world alone.
On that same Christmas day, the relief workers visited a family who had requested blankets to keep them warm in the freezing nights. Kabul is over a mile high and the winters are fierce. The refugee families heat stones and place them in the center of the tent. They sit in a circle with their feet toward the hot rocks. They use blankets, if they have them, wrapping themselves in their little circle to conserve the warmth from the rocks and their body heat.
The family asked for four blankets to comfortably cover the parents and children. They were given them. Turning away with their treasure they saw another family for whom there were no blankets. Without hesitancy, in front of the astonished relief workers, the family with the blankets gave two of them to the other family. That family, in turn, gave one of their blankets to a family that had none.
Love does not appear to be a miracle when we can buy what we need. Love in the face of impossibility is the greatest miracle of all. In the recognition of the limitations of my human existence, despairing of my selfishness and addiction to stuff, I surrender and ask the God of love, for whom life appears out of nothing and who is warmth to the freezing, to take me over completely and use me as he will.
Prayer becomes an exercise in subtraction. God’s love is what’s left after all other possibilities have been deducted, but the God of all grace is not a math teacher. He does not require us “to show our work” or grade us on our perfect results. He gives the answer of love to those who give up on everything else to ask him for help. We want so much more from him, but he wants so much less in us so he can be the difference for us.
I traveled 13,000 miles and eleven times zones into the powerlessness of Afghanistan before I learned to pray is to love.
“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).
Under the mercy of Christ,
Kent
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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.
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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.
Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.