In the Land of Irony

I’m moving to China this fall. I talked to my grandmother on the phone about it and she’s rather worried.

“They’re a communist country,” she said. “Are you sure you’re going to be safe?”

And that’s where it gets tricky. Well, not the safety. Life for expats in modern cities like Nanjing could be a lot worse. But what about the assumption behind my grandmother’s concern – is China a communist country? Well, the last revolution was won by a decidedly Marxist group. The government in control now is led by what is called the Chinese Communist Party. But today, the way things are, things are very different than anything that could honestly be called communism.

A timely reminder

Climate change and politics have been on my mind lately, and I was glad to hear they’d be addressing these ideas in the newest podcast episode of Freakonomics Radio. It wasn’t exactly what you’d expect to hear from NPR programs that address climate change – that the more we learn the more obvious the need to accept it; rather, this episode focused on the strange phenomenon that the more scientifically literate one is, the more extreme one’s opinion tends to be … on either side of the debate. An interesting reminder to those of us who like to read and follow news on the subject. The more we know, the more we select sources that back up what we already believe.

Does this mean that there’s no objective reality out there? Of course not. There’s a real, physical world out there doing things without stopping to consult its little human inhabitants about what they believe. There is really a truth. But it is good to be aware of our own approaches to meaning-making. It’s a sticky, messy reality!

“. . . and man became a living soul”

When we read the account of the creation in Genesis, what do we picture? We see the world being formed at God’s word, perhaps rock flying through space, colliding and being shaped, and then rivers bursting forth across its surface, later to be covered with plant and animal life that the Lord designs and puts into place. The actual text is very short and very vague, and most of us wonder how any of that actually came about, what it actually looked like. If you’re anything like me, you’re hoping that when you die you get to go to a giant museum that explains everything that’s ever happened in the world.

We have chances while we’re still here, though, to at least get a glimpse – we can look around us at the magnificence of nature. Some of us are lucky enough to live in breathtaking mountain valleys where the heart of the earth seems to have been sliced open and thrust upwards. We are dwarfed and awed by the size and scope of it. We are humbled by its magnitude and age.

Picking Teams

When I was in 4th grade, I started my school’s Kids for Saving the Earth (KSE) club. I’m not sure why I started it or whose idea it was or really what we did. Maybe Mrs. Patterson the substitute teacher brought it to my attention? I remember vaguely something about it being sponsored by Target stores and I know as a club we made our own tshirts with puff paint and went together to see the premier of Fern Gully, in which the bad guy sprays a little bottle of pollution around in her office when she’s feeling stressed.

But the odd thing about that memory is that I remember it being the first in a series of stances I would take on the environment as reactions to what I thought I was supposed to do. Good kids want to save the earth, right? Of course!

Science, Religion, and a God who doesn’t Live in the Clouds

When I was in Numazu, Japan, I met a couple from Malaysia. They were very friendly and kind and liked to talk to us missionaries. They took us on a drive around the base of Mt. Fuji on our preparation day and showed us the beauties of nature in that particularly lovely corner of the globe. I still remember the sight out the car window of bamboo forests waving surreally on the side of a mountain like a giant field of grass that looked to me like a scene from another planet. This couple was educated, interesting, and insightful and paid us a lot more time and attention than the average person we met, listening respectfully to our introduction of the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, they didn’t believe in the usefulness of religion and shared their viewpoint with us quite frankly.

I still remember what the woman said to us. She had been raised Catholic in Malaysia and, living in a poor area with her only education coming from her Catholic school, had very naïve views of not just religion but reality. She had been taught at school that God lived in the clouds.