Proud to Know this Woman

Meg, formerly one of my two’s teachers is now a doctor. After the earthquake in Haiti, she dropped what she was doing and went to Haiti. This article was published in the Erie Times today.

Erie doctor works long hours treating patients in Haiti

By DAVID BRUCE
Margaret Chilcott, D.O., can tell by the screams when a patient is being moved or having their bandages changed.
//
It happens all day long at the Baptist Haiti Mission Hospital in Fermathe, Haiti, where the Saint Vincent Health Center family physician has been treating earthquake victims since she arrived Jan. 20.

“I made it through today and only actually came to tears three times,” Chilcott wrote in one of three Facebook posts that she also e-mailed to her Saint Vincent co-workers since her arrival. “Once, I made it look like I was laughing and once I hugged someone to cover it up. The third time, I put my forehead to the teenage girl in front of me and cried with her.”

Chilcott, 29, is spending two weeks in Haiti as part of a medical mission with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian emergency relief organization.

She and a team of doctors and relief workers flew into Port-au-Prince, just hours after a 6.1-magnitude aftershock rattled the Haitian capita

One of the first things they saw at the Port-au-Prince airport was a group of people working in a taped-off area of the runway.

It was a makeshift field tower. The tower itself had collapsed in the earthquake.

Chilcott rode to the first hospital they visited in a vehicle so small that she had to sit on the laps of several other doctors. The group was greeted on the road by Haitians wearing breathing masks and holding signs with the words “I need food” and “I need water” written in English.

“We saw camps in former parks that literally thousands of people are staying at with no homes, or (who are) afraid to re-enter their dwellings,” Chilcott wrote. “There is a sewage-looking ’stream’ that runs along the roads, and people dip into it to drink whatever they can.”

Chilcott said she works at the Fermathe hospital 14 to 15 hours a day. She spends the day dressing wounds, starting and replacing I.V.s, putting casts on broken arms and legs, and fighting infections.

Sometimes she has to wear a breathing mask because the smell of infection is so overwhelming.

“We have wounds here that are unbelievable — babies with legs literally hanging off them,” she wrote. “I helped bag a woman who arrived that was pregnant and unresponsive. … Three and a half hours later, she and her baby died. I took off all the tubes, wires, etc., and her husband was on his hands and knees shaking outside the door.

“I never even knew her name.”

On Monday, Chilcott was treating a young woman who had her leg amputated just below the knee.

The doctor started removing the old bandages and saw that the amputation wound was still completely open.

“I took off the bandages and worked as quickly as possible, but the screams from the patient could be heard throughout the hospital,” Chilcott wrote. “It became quiet at the end, and I looked up to see the younger sister of my patient with tears running down her face, and the patient has stopped screaming because she was trying to hold and comfort her sister.”

Chilcott said before she left Erie that she planned to stay in Haiti for two weeks, then travel there again in March. This is her third mission to the Caribbean country.

It hasn’t been easy. Besides working long days, Chilcott has also gone more than 48 hours without a change of clothes or a shower. Supplies, especially medicines, remain in short supply, she said. They even have to cut aspirin in half.

But the patients are grateful for the medical care.

“They ask God to bless us. To bless us,” Chilcott wrote. “I have never felt more alive all day long and more at home as a doctor.”

A “Mentoring Project” Mentor and Child Visit the White House

For those of you who subscribe to Children’s Ministry Magazine, I interviewed Dr. John Sowers regarding The Mentoring Project. One of the mentor-child partners that was photographed in the story recently visited the White House. Check it out here.

“…The Goal of our Instruction”

We teach children a lot of information. But I wonder if we do just a good of a job teaching children how they should relate to that information. Check out this recent blog post by Donald Miller. He reminds us that we don’t invent or own knowledge. At best, we are stewards of it. And being around knowledge should make us humble.

Think about all the ways that we’ve abused religious knowledge– we can become prideful, angry, legalistic– and if we are not careful we can pass this attitude onto the children we teach.

Paul addressed this with Timothy (1 Tim 1:5) when he reminded Timothy of why he taught, to create “a pure mind, a sincere faith, and a clean conscience.”

When we teach children we should:

  • Avoid games and prizes that reward those with good short term memories. Encyclopedic knowledge is not the goal.
  • Emphasize debriefing questions that encourage comprehension and help children make authentic emotional connections with the people in the narrative.
  • Emphasize application questions: What is God leading us to do in light of the knowledge we are gleaning.

Some Trends that Could Affect Your Church’s Budget

The Barna Group has release two of it’s three posts on Recession and it’s impact on church budgets. These article have valuable information that should help you forecast your budget and staffing plan in the months ahead. The research provides excellent breakdowns on what types of churches (by size and denomination) have been impact the most and least by the economy.

http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/18-congregations/327-the-economys-impact-on-churches-congregational-budgets-part-1-of-3

http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/18-congregations/334-the-economys-impact-on-churches-part-2-of-3-how-churches-have-adapted

Teach the Bible as One Coherent Story

I’ve blogged elsewhere on this site about how we tend to atomize and moralize scriptures to the point that Bible becomes a collection of fables that teach well instead of the story of God’s salvation history. Well, Phil Vischer– the creator of Veggie Tales– has a new website that helps Sunday School Teachers present the Bible as a unified whole. I’m thrilled. Scoot over to http://whatsinthebible.com/ to check it out.

Oh, and in compliance with new FTC rules for bloggers: I received no material resources for mentioning this website. I don’t know Phil and I took no cash. In fact, Phil and I both did book signings at a conference and were scheduled at the exact same time. Phil had a 45-minute line of fans. Meanwhile, I tried to not look to pathetic, alone, on the opposite side of the book store.  So on second thought…

Christianity Today: The Myth of the Perfect Parent

This month’s cover story of Christianity Today is an excellent look at a myth that infected Christianity and caused much stress for Christian parents. The Myth of the Perfect Parent goes something like this “If I extract 5,7, or 12 principle from the Bible related to parenting and then execute them well then my children will grow up to love and serve Jesus, hold good jobs, and become a excellent spouses and parents.”

Leslie Leyland Fields points out the stress this line of thinking causes. A 2006 study reveals that parents with children in their homes have significantly higher rates of depression than child-free couples. Parents love their children, want to get things right, but face the overwhelming studies that when children grow up they are quite likely to reject their faith and walk away from the church. It’s enough to put a knot in any parent’s stomach.

Fields exposes the radical spiritual behaviorism that lies at the heart of the myth– the notion that our children are blank slates that shaping them to become children of faith is as simple as training a dog. Use these techniques and your child is guaranteed to turn out a spiritual giant.

Harriet Lerner’s book The Mother Dance is quoted:

We believe that we can fix every problem, that we are masters over our fate. The root of much of our pain in parenting, she writes, is “the belief that we should have control over our children when it is hard enough to have control over ourselves.”

Of course, when child doesn’t turn out to share the parent’s goals there are only three parties to blame:

The Child: The child becomes marginalized and labeled the “black sheep.” Fields cites an instance where a church’s leadership declared a child to be demon possessed because of his misbehavior.

The Parent(s): More often than not the blame is turned on the parents. They didn’t work the formula correctly. From the article:

One parenting writer warns, “If our parents’ approach seemed close to biblical parenting, yet bore bad fruit, we can be certain it was not biblical.” We can know this, he asserts, because God’s Word gives us exactly what we need to raise godly children, and if we correctly apply the principles, “parents will not be disappointed.”

(I hope to God that this writer is spared from parenthood, or if they happen to  be a parent that their child does in fact turn out to be the Apostle Paul 2.0. That’s a standard no one should have to bear.)

God: If the parents don’t blame themselves who is left? The alleged author of all those parenting principles. The parent might not consider that God never wrote a book on parenting but the story of Salvation. Sure there are passages that speak to parents (Deuteronomy 6, Ephesians, Psalms 78, etc.) but this is not what the Bible primarily is. The burnout out and discouraged parents remember that it the clergy who offered the formulas and claimed them as God’s. So the parent decides that God/the church has nothing authentic to offer them and checks out.

Leeland instead offers a quick Biblical survey of Scripture’s imperfect parents and offers faithfulness as a superior parenting ideal to perfection.


Just Dust

My church is offering what might be an unusual parenting class. There’s a psychology professor in town who goes to our church and we’ve got her presenting a Sunday School class that emphasizes adolescent brain development. I suspect that class is unusual for two reasons. First, most parents stop paying attention to a child’s developmental stages when all those big milestones are navigated: teething, walking, potty training, language development. The stuff of photo albums. But somewhere along the line, the changes in our children become less dramatic and we’ve already worn our friends and family with stories out how little Johnny and Jane can count so high.

And then we eventually we can stop paying close attention. This is tragic because the brain development that occurs in our teens is dramatic, and yes, debilitating. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for self-control, judgement, and emotional regulation. Somehow in God’s wisdom he determined that this part of the brain would get a complete restructuring at this. This might explain why my sixteen-year-old can hit sulking, laughter, melancholy, frustration, and righteous indignation all during a single meal. The corpus callosum is the gray matter manages self-awareness and won’t finish developing in Alex until his early twenty’s. This sucks as Alex’s high school is filled with hundreds of students who all think that everyone is watching them and that “everyone has their life put together but me.” The temporal lobes provide a person with emotional maturity. Naturally, they are still developing after the age of sixteen.

All this brain development, coupled with vats of hormones washing through the brain, and it’s no wonder that emotion lives of teens are volcanic. Dr. Nixon explained that all this development creates a white noise that makes it hard for teens to think and function. If every teen didn’t go through it, you could label adolescence a mental disorder.

We’re giving Dr. Nixon a forum to discuss brain development during a time slot normally reserved for studies of the Bible because we want parents to empathize with what their children are going through as they attempt to discipline them and teach them godliness. What we’re finding is that parents are becoming more understanding of the civil war that’s taking place between their child’s ears. We suspect our parents will be more supportive with their kids as they navigate all the moral and emotional decisions that come with emerging into adulthood.

It occurred to me that this must be how God deals with all of humanity. We tend to view ourselves as strong and rationale, a least until life overwhelms us and we find ourselves taking on water. But the truth is that if everyone wasn’t going through it we could label humanity a mental illness. When we are in a place of weakness we remember that we are fragile and foolish. And we want our Heaven Father to know it:

I think this is what the Psalmist was getting at when he wrote these words:

“As far as the east is from the west,
So far has He removed our transgressions from us.

Just as a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.

For He Himself knows our frame;
He is mindful that we are but dust.

As for man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.

When the wind has passed over it, it is no more,
And its place acknowledges it no longer.

But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him,
And His righteousness to children’s children”

Psalms 103:12-18

God, We strive to please you but in spite of our best intentions we can’t get out of our own way. We imagine that we are strong and moral, but we imagine this because we are frightened by our own brittleness. We want you to remember that you are the one who made us this way, but you already know this.  So this prayer is our way of reminding ourselves of who we are. Please help us to see you as who you are, a nurturing parent who accommodates our weakness. Amen.

In Leiu of a Screed: Haiti

This morning, I scanned tweet deck and noticed some children’s ministers defending Pat Robertson’s comments regarding Haiti. Pat called the disaster that claimed thousands of lives– so many that cannot be counted now– was “a blessing in disguise.” He also suggested that this occurred because the Haitians had made a pact with the Devil and were now a cursed people.

Here are Pat’s remarks:

I was considering posting a screed here, but instead I’d like to refer you to two thoughtful posts by some friends who are wiser than I:

First, Donald Miller had some thoughts on an appropriate Christian response to both Pat and Haiti. Susan Isaacs followed up with some more brilliant thoughts.

I don’t have anything more to add then these two points:

1) This is from memory, I could be wrong: God did use weather as a tool to judge, but the object of his judgment was always his covenant people, who signed up and committed to be God’s people. They knowingly signed up for the terms of the blessings and curses found in Deuteronomy. This unique covenant was with one geopolitical entity that God was using to bring the Salvation of the world. It does not apply to Haiti, America, or anyone else, as best as I understand scripture (Yes, I know there are other contradictory readings of Scripture).

Edit: I forgot The Flood. Duh. Here goes much of this point.

2) In the wake of World War II, Albert Camus wrote “The Plague” as a response to the problem of evil. In his novel a devastating plaque devastated Europe. The Christians were presented with a dilemma. They were quick to assert that the plaque was the result of God’s judgment. Hence the dilemma, if the Christians gave aid and support to combat the plague they were placing themselves at odds with God’s will. They were attempting to absorb the divine blow. No matter how noble their motives the effect of the behavior was rebellion against God.

As we go to our churches this weekend to help children and teens sort out why such things happen, we’d be wise to admit we don’t know, but we are presented with the opportunity to be God’s hands and feet.

How to Make a Ship Go Uphill

During my supervision meetings with my youth pastor we’re reading Mark DeVries Sustainable Youth Ministry. I’m not able to give a wholesale recommendation of the book, there’s chapter with “norms” that I feel are unrealistic, unobtainable, and unnecessary for most churches (a 1:50 pastor/student ratio and a youth budget of $1,000 to $1,500 per student  to name a few).

That said, DeVries has an excellent section where he talks about that Panama Canal.  For years, merchants struggled to find a short cut that would prevent ships some having to round South America to go from Europe to Asia. Panama is only 48 miles wide but engineers were about to design a suitable water way for centuries. In 1914, the goal was accomplished. Not by blowing away obstacles but by creating a system of locks and channels to lift the ship from one level to another.  A ship would be raised 25 to 30 feet at a time, not by brute force, but the natural power of rising and lowering water supplies.

DeVries goes on to say that youth ministries (the same is true to children’s ministries) can raise their level, not by one person killing themselves to be the celebrity leader, but by building sustainable systems that raise the quality of the ministry, one level at a time.

Great Indy Worship Music

Visit here to find some fantastic Indy worship music. My coworker and friend, Brian Lusky, just released a tremendous worship album. I highly recommend it. Start with the the song “Who Can Stand”?  So good.