Tim Keel's Blog

Advent Conspiracy Update #2

Yesterday I posted an update on the Advent Conspiracy from the Living Water International side of the equation. Today I want to share an email from Pastor Edward Simiyu from City Harvest Church in Nairobi, Kenya. Edward connected the community of Jacob's Well to the Pokot region of Kenya and has facilitated all the work that has gone on related to drilling wells.

I just emailed Edward to share the good news about the results of our 2008 Advent Conspiracy campaign at JW - which I am right now realizing I have not shared on the blog yet. So, for those of you who read along in the blog world and weren't at church to hear the news when we shared it two weeks ago, we once again collected around $65,000 to use to dig another four wells in Pokot. Praise God. Anyway, that is the same information I shared with Edward earlier in the week. And just a day later I received this email in reply.

“This is so exciting! I have been receiving news from Pokot for the last few weeks and drought is really bad in the area. The four boreholes [from last year's AC campaign] are now the only lifeline for both humans and livestock and people are traveling far to come fetch water from the area that was once isolated and forgotten. There would be no people in the area now if there were no boreholes as all would have migrated to Uganda, a neighboring country. For lack of food, our people are surviving on bush berries some of which are poisonous. Famine now has been declared a national disaster here with news of people dying of hunger in different parts of the country. I will be back in Pokot next month and will share the great news of additional boreholes.”

It is so exciting to be able to participate with so many of you in this way. Thank you for joining in with which God is up to in one small and no longer forgotten part of the world.

Morning Prayer

We thank you, Lord, for coming into this world:
Keep our eyes fixed on you today.
Direct our thoughts and our words:
Teach us to know your will.
Be with us, Lord, as we take up our daily tasks:
Help us to recognize you in our work.
Amen.

Advent Conspiracy Update #1

This is the first of two updates that I will make relate to Jacob's Well and our engagement with the Advent Conspiracy in 2008-2009.

The first of these two updates is actually an update from Stan Patyrak from Living Water International. I was one of several leaders who received this e-mail from Stan and whose congregations participated in the [AC] this year. LWI is the organization that handles the actual drilling of the wells in the many different places around the world. Here is what Stan had to say:

Friends:

I can hardly contain myself.

Hundreds of thousands of people are about to get water. It's been so much more than incredible to see the response of AC. Churches all over the world responding to the thirsty. Companies, schools, families, kids - all giving so Jesus can have a drink of clean water.

I can't wait to keep you guys updated.... We are spending HOURS a day sending notices to the field to start drilling wells, start repairing wells... allowing our teams to bring heaven to earth for communities all over the world.

Here is where we are at work: Guatemala, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Nigeria, El Salvador, Peru, North South and Central India, Kenya, Nicaragua, Uganda - all with wells in process because of AC. Hundreds of projects this year in partnership with locals churches.

And the great part? EVERYONE will know 100% of where their funds went. The church that gave, that college student, that school - everyone gets invited into the story of the lives being transformed. We are going to give individual reports back to everyone who gave and noted AC.

Thanks for letting us be along for this ride and for enabling this great work.

We are being faithful, and I am so excited to pass along updates.

Stan

Great, great news. Stay tuned...

Hope Faith Update

In November I posted a blog entry about Hope Faith Homeless Ministries here in Kansas City.

In the post I shared about a video that a JW member made describing the ministry of Hope Faith, especially some of the pressing needs the ministry was facing at the end of 2008. It is worth sharing with you again.

The reason why I am bringing this back up is because I recently received an update of what has happened with Hope Faith in the time that followed. This is from Nick Johnson, Hope Faith board member and JW community member:

In December, Hope Faith had about $2,500 in its bank account, no where near enough to get through the month. Just a few weeks later, Hope Faith had received over $62,000 in donations with more coming in seemingly all the time. Hope Faith is such a wonderful ministry to be a part of. It’s so much fun watching God work in such incredible ways and bring such a diverse body of people together to serve others. The future of Hope Faith is filled with many exciting paths but yet we look to the Lord to determine our steps. A new building, a shelter, 100 people placed in apartments, tens or hundreds receiving job training and interview skills and ultimately get jobs...the dreams are very specific and exciting. We recognize that to who much is given, much will be expected. We are incredibly careful with the resources we are given and aim to use every penny, every piece bread, every casserole, every paint brush, to glorify God and to serve and bless the homeless of KC.

BBC 2: Prayer - Introduction

In chapter two, Benson describes the first of the four elements that make up a good life: prayer. I have to confess that I wish in the discussion of these four elements, he made the exploration of prayer the last rather than the first. I think I understand work and community, though I am open to having my understandings of even such commonplace things reformed in the light of Christ. I am also coming to understand rest, different than collapse, and developing rhythms that allow for recovery so that I might live in a sustainable way. But prayer...

Prayer has always been hard for me. There have been seasons in my life as a disciple of Jesus Christ where I have experienced deep intimacy, connection, and even consistency in my prayer life. But more often that has not been my experience. Most of the ways I was trained to pray were more modeled (and as a result "caught") in the context of the evangelical subculture where passionate, ad hoc-conversation style prayer with God was the norm. Perhaps that is why I have only been able to pray with deep intimacy, connection, and consistency episodically. If prayer is communication between a creature and a personal God, then I would imagine (and have experienced) that the way in which we interact is at least as varied as the ways in which my wife and I (or other human beings with whom I am also in personal relationship) communicate.

In my time at the monastery I began to be exposed to liturgical prayer, praying the daily office - gathering together with the monks and other people in the community to pray the Psalms at intervals throughout the day. In this way prayer began to become something more than it had been in the past - less about me and, somehow, more about God and his people. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am participating in a way of praying that predates and includes and goes beyond the time of Jesus. And maybe it has something to do with the fact that in praying the daily office I am praying the words of scripture, God's own words, back to him in humility. I don't want to go into all the ways in which my understanding of prayer has changed in the last ten years; let it suffice to say that it has, and for the better. In fact if you would like to hear me reflect on this (God help you), you might check out a sermon I preached last year during a Lenten series on spiritual practices: Learning the Rhythms of Prayer.

One more thing I am learning about prayer: I am beginning to believe it is less about what I do and say and more about a posture of being, awareness, and responsiveness that I am either cultivating or not. This way of being is funded primarily by the question, "Where is God active in me, the people around me, and the environment - and what is required in response?"

For Benedictines, prayer is understood to be their primary vocation - their work. From The Rule of Saint Benedict, as quoted by Benson in the epigraph from chapter two:

"We believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that in every place the eyes of the Lord are watching the good and the wicked. But beyond the least doubt we should believe this to be especially true when we pray. Let us consider, then, how we ought to behave in the presence of God, and let us offer our prayer in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices."

Some questions to provoke some introductory discussion on prayer: How does prayer figure, or not, in the rule of your life as you are living it now? It is intentional or haphazard? Beyond the normal feelings of guilt that most of us carry for not doing "it" enough, do you experience life as a result of how you interact with God in prayer? Do you have any experience with a more liturgical approach to prayer? How do you cultivate a posture of awareness, engagement, and responsiveness between yourself, God, others, and the environment.

*Remember in all these discussions, we want comments that are honest, simple, sincere - not profound. Of course if you are profound, that is fine; my point is that I don't want someone to stay out of the discussion because they feel like they don't have anything profound to say.

Quick Blog Update

Hey friends...sorry it's been a light week on the blog. Between Tuesdays election festivities, JW staffing responsibilities, and hosting an out-of-town guest around the church this week, I have not had the time to give our book discussion the attention I promised - or this blog much attention at all. So, a couple quick things.

First - found these stories awaiting me in my RSS reader this afternoon. I love this headline: Obama administration frustrated by old White House PCs. Certainly a sign of a generational political shift, no? Here's another: Mac-savvy Obama staffers frustrated with legacy White House. A quick quote:

"President Obama's staff - accustomed to Macs, social media, and having the latest equipment - found Windows PCs with Microsoft Office 2003 in their new offices. Laptops were "scarce," apparently, and the team had trouble finding ways to update the redesigned White House website and add subtitles to web videos. Perhaps they were misled by the prominence of Mac hardware in the fictional-but-familiar West Wing version of the executive mansion."

Second - I am winding down Kathleen Norris's Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. I'll just post a few more quotes. This struck me in my reading this morning. Norris is discussing her husband's terminal illness and the way in which it reduced her life to bathing him and emptying bedpans. In that time her faith struggles, particularly as she finds herself unable to take on many of the faith practices that had been an integral part of her life. Talking about the grace she found in the midst of that time, she writes:

"The comedy of grace is that it so often comes to us as loss, sorrow, and foul-smelling waste; if it came as gain, gladness, and sweetly smelling flowers, we would not be grateful. We would, as we are wont to do, take personal credit for the unwarranted gifts of God. It is easy to be attracted to the idea of grace - which one dictionary defines as 'divine love and protection bestowed freely on people' - but much harder to recognize this grace when it comes as pain and unwelcome change. In the depths of our confusion and anger, we ask: 'How can this be God's love? Where is God in this disaster?' For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn't know we needed and take us to places where we didn't want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before. And maybe that is the point. It is a divine comedy."

I find that to be beautiful, hopeful, and true.

BBC 1: Longing - An Assignment...

...should you choose to accept it (Give me a break, a little cheese never hurt anyone).

Benson makes the statement in chapter one that "...in order to begin to see your life as a whole, you must first take it apart." He goes on to describe the retreats he leads where he challenges the retreatants to make a grid with each of the following four categories in its own column: prayer, rest, community, and work. Each person is then asked to evaluate their lives, placing the many acts that make up their days into one of the four categories.

"People in the retreat are drawing these little charts and asking where to put stuff, and I try to be as unhelpful as I can, as kindly as I can, of course. It helps not to be a scholar or a teacher at this point, because then I can more easily say that I do not know where those things go on your charts. What I do know is that you have to take all of them into account. What I am sure of is this: All of the bits and pieces of our lives, large and small, must be held up in the light of our longing to live for and with God."

For those of you who are reading along in the book, taking the time to process through what Benson and Benedict and God are inviting us to taste and see, namely a good life, I challenge you to take one hour over the next six weeks of our book discussion to evaluate the living of your life according to Benson's schema. As we have been talking about in worship at Jacob's Well for the last two weeks, this is an opportunity to "fill the jars," to "sit, listen, and ask." When you have done this, I invite you to come back to this particular blog post and share what you have discovered. I will do the same.

"'The Lord waits for us daily to translate his teachings into action,' wrote Saint Benedict in his Rule. 'How we spend our day is, of course,' writes Annie Dillard, 'how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends us from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.'"

Quick BBC Note

Just a quick word to say that I know that different people are becoming aware of the book discussion at different times. The nice thing about having a book discussion on a blog is that if you start late, you can still participate. So, if you don't have the book yet don't worry. When you get your copy, read and post your comments to the appropriate blog post. We will all continue to check them and keep the discussion open and ongoing.

From Saint Bede

Found this morning in the The Glenstal Book of Prayer.

"May that morning star which never sets, Christ our light, find us aflame with charity until the world is enlightened with love."

Sentinels of the Plains, Dusk