With schools closed through the end of the year, I continue to focus my HOPE ministry work on helping those struggling to earn money to eat during the pandemic. Thanks to the generosity of the many people who have donated to my food relief efforts, I have been able to provide food to HOPE families who are unable to put food on the table to feed their families. Without our support, these families are forced to go without meals. With few jobs available in the current environment, many people are without a means to support their families, which is why I’m always asking for help.
As those who have donated know, I have the students make videos to express how the food assistance has helped their families. Not only have the videos been a great vehicle for allowing the students to connect with those who are assisting them, but the process of making the videos has also been a great blessing. The videos have really helped the students to improve their confidence and self-image. They have also helped the students learn how better express themselves.
I typically get together once a week with a few of the secondary school students to make videos, which is one of the most fun and rewarding things that I do in my ministry work. We laugh together when they mess up and feel a sense of pride when they create something special. After making the videos, we have lunch together and then watch a movie. This week we watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. I gave them a list of movies to choose from and they selected Hotel Rwanda, primarily because the movie is set in Africa. Rwanda and Kenya are less than 500 miles apart. I saw the movie when it first came out. It is very powerful telling of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, where some 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days in 1994. I think the movie was perhaps a little slow going for them at the beginning. However, they eventually got into the drama enfolding on the screen and by the end, they were fully engrossed in the movie. They had heard about the Rwandan genocide in school, but really didn’t know that much about it before the movie.
Tribalism is unfortunately also a reality in Kenya and is responsible for much corruption and violence here. Tribalism not only plays a detrimental role in Kenyan politics, but it has taken an immeasurable toll on the development and economic progress of the country. The entire Kenyan population pays the price. Tragically, besides that fact that the movie takes place in Africa, this is another aspect of the movie that the students could unfortunately also relate to.
As I’m watching the movie, I’m thinking how I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I’d someday be in Africa with a bunch of high school students watching a movie about a genocide that happened during my lifetime and not much before they were born in a place not too far away from where we were watching the move. Life takes amazing twists and turns.
We’ll mix in some less serious movies in future weeks, but probably not the typical explosion and shoot out filled action movies with lots of car chases that they would choose if I left them to their own devices. I want them to have fun, but I also want them to be exposed to good film and hopefully learn something along the way. There are lots of good movies that can serve both purposes.
From this vantage point of being in the midst of people who have little but still lead joy filled lives and trying to make the best of the situation with disadvantaged students whose futures have been put on hold, I watch all the events going on in the United States. Being in Kenya, it does not affect me directly at this point in time, but as an American, it obviously touches part of who I am. As I watch things unfold in the US, two things strike me. These are not meant to minimize what is at stake or diminish the need to address the serious injustices that exist in our country, but are just some thoughts on areas where I think we need to do better.
The first is that we seem to have lost all sense of perspective. A number of years ago while at IBM, there was a program that allowed employees to order self-help materials. Looking at the list of offerings and feeling quite stressed out at the time, I ordered a book on anxiety. I don’t remember why I was stressed out, but as is the case for most people, work can just be stressful at times. Although the book is long gone and I don’t recall what its title was or who wrote it, one thing that I learned from the book has stuck with me over the years. Although the book presented this technique as a way to combat anxiety, I find that I can apply it to many aspects of my life. The tip was to change the perspective. That’s it. It sounds so obvious as to be completely useless. However, as most truths in life, it’s so powerful because it is so simple.
So how do you change perspective? One effective way is by distancing yourself in your mind in both space and time from the thing that is making you anxious, or as I feel more generally, the thing you are trying to consider or reflect upon. That is imagine yourself looking at the situation from a hot air balloon. Use something else if you are afraid of heights and a hot air balloon make you nervous, as that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise. Imagine you’re looking at things from before the situation happened or way in the future when everyone, including you, has probably forgotten all about it or even a time when you are no longer inhabiting the planet.
We’ve all had hundreds, or perhaps thousands, if you are truthful with yourself, of experiences in our lives where something was huge and important at the time, where life and death seemed to hang in the balance, that now we either can’t even remember or laugh about how much we overacted. I’m pointing to myself right now. So much for the life or death situation. I’m not saying that some events in our lives are not extremely important and perhaps even are truly life or death in scope, but rather trying to illustrate how space and time can change the perspective. Those who know my family situation, know the tragedies I’ve had to face in my life. Not that the pain every goes away, but things take on a different shape with the separation of time and space. Although I wouldn’t recommend you use this line with grieving person who has just lost someone close to them, but there is some truth in the trite and in most cases unhelpful cliche “Time heals all wounds.”
But we don’t need to wait years and move far away to create this separation to change the perspective when looking at a situation. We can do it in our minds, in our imagination, as a tool to reframe things and look at things from a different angle. In other words, to see things from a different perspective.
Another take on this same concept of separation in time and space is to consider our place in the universe. Although we act like we are, we are not the center of the universe. We are not even the center of our solar system. NASA puts out an Astronomy Picture of the Day that I love to look at: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html. The picture from June 11, 2020, which you can find in archives, is one I especially love. It is a picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 1300, which is a breathtakingly beautiful barred spiral galaxy 70 million light years away from earth.
Besides the sheer beauty of the galaxy, try to take in what a distance of 70 million light-years means. A distance of 70 million light-years means that it took light 70 million years to travel to earth. For those of you who don’t recall from high school physics, the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers/sec in the vacuum of space. This translates to 186,000 miles/second. If we convert light-years to miles, we find the NGC 1300 is about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles from earth. Let that sink in for a moment. As it took the light from NGC 1300 70 million light-years to reach us, this means we are looking 70 million years into the past. We are not seeing NGC 1300 as it is today, but as it was 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Now let that sink in a bit.
The galaxy is over 100,000 light-years across, which is about the same size of our Milky Way galaxy. Like the Milky Way, NGC 1300 likely contains several hundred billion stars. Just for reference, the observable universe contains a billion trillion stars. NGC 1300’s spiral arms include blue clusters of young stars and pink clouds that are forming new stars. Our universe is ever-changing and evolving. As I’ve written before, God created the universe in a state of journeying—not just humankind, but creation as a whole—towards Himself. Marvel in the enormity of this proposition.
The human body contains approximately 20 chemical elements that play a role in our survival and health. With the exception of hydrogen, which was formed during the Big Bang, all the other elements we are made of were forged inside stars long ago and hurled into space by a supernova explosion. As Carl Sagan famously said, “We are made of star stuff.” Yet another aspect of the evolving universe and how we fit within it. We are not separate from the rest of God’s creation, but an integral part of it.
Yes, we are all infinitely important. God created and sustains us out of love. Jesus became one of us as God entered into His creation and took on human nature. Each one of us is a distinct and unrepeatable image of God’s infinite love. While most people today either don’t believe this or simply live as if they don’t believe it, from a simply cosmic perspective, we’ve lost perspective with respect to our place in creation. Imagine looking at ourselves from the perspective of NCG 1300. OK, ignore the fact that you would be looking 70 million years in the past and so we wouldn’t be here and all you would see are dinosaurs! We are so stuck in our ideologies and winner take all mentality that we have lost all perspective.
My second observation is that to a large extent we have lost the ability to see the underlying beauty in each other, in creation, and in manmade things that reflect both of these. We are so caught up in surface appearances that we often don’t see what’s on the inside. We are so fixed in our own ways of thinking that we are blinded from seeing the beauty right in front of us. We are constantly distracted by the noise of our busy lives and the never-ending news cycles that we often don’t even stop and look. On top of this, our society has become completely unforgiving. Life in the current culture has become a zero-sum game. There is no respect for differing points of view. There is no compromise. There is no appreciation for in the inherent beauty of truth itself.
As some of you may know I love music. I love all kinds of music, but specifically classical music, rock, jazz and blues. Sadly, I was not blessed with musical talent commensurate with my love of music, but that doesn’t inhibit me from thoroughly enjoying it. I can completely lose myself in Beethoven symphony, a Mozart concerto, or a Beatles or Led Zeppelin album (yes, they were called albums back then). I’ve listened to some of these pieces of music hundreds of times, but still continue to find deeper meaning and enjoyment from them. For me this is the measure of great music – being able come back to a piece of music again and again and always find something new in it and experience something deeper through it.
I like musicals, but I love opera. Yes, I can hear the snickering from anyone who has read this far. I’m sure I lost most people a page ago. Like many people my age, my introduction to classical music came as a kid from cartoons. At the top of that list of cartoons is Bug Bunny. Those old enough will remember the “Rabbit of Seville” based on Rossini’s opera “The Barber of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” based on several of Richard Wagner’s operas.
When you say opera to someone, the picture that typically comes to mind are rather large opera singers wearing horned helmets screaming in each other’s faces. While this may be a somewhat accurate description of Richard Wanger’s operas (not the screaming, but perhaps right up in each other’s faces), many of which are based upon Norse mythology, it does not hold in general. My favorite operas are those that are about everyday people like Puccini’s La Boheme, Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Rigoletto. Those of you who know opera, will pick up on the fact that all the opera’s I mentioned tell very tragic stories. While I also like comic opera, and how could I not as Mozart wrote several great comic operas, I tend to gravitate toward the tragic when it comes to opera. Maybe that is revealing something about me!
Back to Richard Wagner. While I find his music otherworldly I have to admit, I sometimes find the stage productions of his operas, which as I mentioned are often based on Norse mythology, a little too much. A lot of opera companies are streaming and making high quality video recordings of operas available on YouTube during the pandemic. Perhaps is the only way for them to keep their patrons engaged. I guess even in the midst of a global pandemic, you can find blessings. I already knew that, but this was an unexpected one.
I found a YouTube video of Wagner’s opera Die Walküre produced by the BBC that I recently watched. The novel thing about this performance of the opera is that the stage production was bare bones. Besides a few simple props like chairs, there was no stage scenery. The singers wore ordinary clothes, albeit formal dress, not costumes. There were no horned helmets in sight. I can’t fault Wotan for wearing a tux, he’s the ruler of the gods after all. All the Valkyries (supernatural women who determined who lived and died on the battlefield) remained firmly planted on the ground during the famous Ride of the Valkyries. Most of you know this particular piece of music from the movie Apocalypse Now where it was used during the helicopter attack scene, which anyone who has seen the movie will never forget. In terms of this stripped down version of Die Walküre, think watching Nirvana on MTV Unplugged except in this case, it’s not the music that’s unplugged, but the stage production. Well actually the music is unplugged as a symphony orchestra doesn’t use electronic instruments, but you get the point.
This BBC production of Wagner’s Die Walküre allowed me to focus on the music and not be distracted or deterred by the surface elements of the opera, in this case the staging. In opera, the music is the thing. It’s what tells the story. It’s where the drama unfolds. It is where the true beauty lies. Yes, I could have just listened to the music with no video, but given that the libretto is in German, it would be impossible for me to follow the drama unfolding. With opera, you need to connect the music with the drama it is depicting to get the full impact.
The whole point of this operatic discourse was to give an example of searching out the intrinsic beauty in things—something that we as a country and as a world today do not do very well. Our current culture is much more ready, willing and able to find the faults in people and things. We need to instead look to the beauty that is inherent in each one of us. The beauty that is a reflection of the God who loved us into being.
As a world, as a culture, as a society, we need more perspective. We need to take a collective breath, step back, open up the aperture and look at things from a bigger picture point of view. We need to try look at our world and each other as the God who created us sees us. We need to better situate ourselves within God’s creation, which God created in a state of journeying, continuingly developing and evolving to its ultimate end when God will be all in all. We need look deep and see the inherent beauty in this creation and each other. Most importantly, we need to recognize Christ in every person.
Mungo ni mwema./God is good.
Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. Although schools are currently closed during the coronavirus crisis, many of our HOPE families urgently need assistance with food and other basic necessities. With the lockdowns in place to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, these families have no means to earn money to buy food and pay expenses. They need our help.
You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website: https://hopegiveshope.com