Peter Bradley Adams – The Longer I Run
This month we reside in Malaysia. A melting pot of Thailand, Taiwan, China, India, Pakistan, Cambodia. Really all of Asia.
It is a fusion of Islamic culture and Asian living.
Woman walk around covered in burkas, laughing and doing things that girls do. That sounds so simple but I never realized my American assumptions. I guess I thought all women in that lifestyle would be unhappy. Instead they look beautiful, walking down the road with cell phones and friends, just living life. The younger women flirt and smile.
I wonder how deep my assumptions run.
Men stop everyday to pray to Allah at a certain time of day. Many walk with prayer hats on. Stoic. Religious.
I often watch them with a broken heart. Here it is illegal to evangelize. I’m allowed to be a Christian, I’m allowed to know Jesus, I can carry a bible, I can pray for my meal, but I must stop short of sharing. To tell of God is a prison sentence.
It’s so sensitive; we can’t really even form relationships with locals without great care and effort.
All my assumptions about words like persecution, underground church, and Islam are being rewritten.
I sat the other day in a coffee shop as my teammates politely interrogated me.
I find my days off disconcertingly long.
One of the unknown aspects of traveling overseas is that I return to a time before cell-phones and Facebook. It’s amazing how much life changes when you have to walk to get internet. When constant text messages can’t disengage me from day to day living.
I often wonder what it’d be like to live one hundred years ago. Today we live out our old lives through Facebook, we never mourn the loss of people in our lives, because we never really lose them. Yeah, location changes, but what is that really? We still live life out through the book.
It’s a wonderful blessing to have but when the Internet turns on at ten in the morning, Malay time and off at ten, Malay night, nobody is on the book. The news in America is fresh in the morning but by nighttime nothing has changed. All the reporters are asleep as I live out my day. I can’t understand Malaysian television. I don’t have videogames to play. I don’t have a private room to hide in.
Life slows down.
So take away all the escapes, strip away privacy, and force constant interaction.
That’s when things begin to surface.
I think…
I’m addicted to new information. I thirst to hear of news and change. I long to hear what is happening in America, the lives of old friends, the lives of current friends. New emails. New messages. New pictures and tweets and blogs and instagrams and breaking news stories.
Now that is cut-off.
I I ignore long-forgotten wounds of the soul. Be it the loss of a great friend or the paternal scars, I ignore the natural incline of my soul. It begs me to process, to ask deep questions. It begs me to get deeper.
Now I don’t have enough distractions to forget about myself.
And like an old overgrown untended garden, my life begins to bloom.
I didn’t realize how over-connected I was until the power turned off and my life had this huge void to fill.
“What do I do with all this time?”
I must have filled it somehow.
Today I cracked open books. At night I lapse into a fury of writing. I started scrapbooking. And now… I’m getting deeper with Jesus.
I can’t help it. It’s ironic I have to fly 12,000 miles away from everything I know, all that is comfortable, all that is familiar, just to slow down.
Back at the coffee shop my teammates ask me deep questions. Some are hard to answer. Some reveal insecurity, vulnerability, and in some ways my own deceitful and selfish heart. Sometimes it helps me understand myself even better.
They pry and ask things that force me to be vulnerable. I am terrified of being vulnerable. For someone to know everything about me, and still love me?
That…
That means walking through a thick dark wilderness of fear to reach a spot of the deepest security I could ever feel.
Honestly through the daily team interrogations and interactions, assumptions about myself are being rewritten.
It’s so strange… the paradox of having to go deep with each other and unable to go deep with anyone else.
My heart breaks everyday to see the Malaysians.
Imagine having the answer to life.
The very words that could rescue the captive, staple torn hearts together, break the chains of addiction, give hope to those oppressed by immovable obstacles, father the fatherless, romance the widow, reignite the passionate.
Imagine having those words and not being able to share them.
Here Grace really is a scandal. It’s an insane story. Banned. Censored. Kept from the every day person.
Take a second and think about that.
When I really do, I realize that…
It’s not that different from my normal life. I can moan, cry, and complain, but honestly…
I know in America I often lived the same way as I do now. Silent. Watching people walk towards eternity without knowing Jesus.
Just now I’m not allowed to stop it.
I don’t feel as guilty I suppose. But I realize that I…
Wasted my freedom.
I absolutely wasted it.
These people are not even allowed to know Christ, yet who am I to have the audacity to claim it is a challenge to remain silent when I already did so often in America? Who am I to have the audacity to remain silent with the gospel when people are allowed to hear it?
Malaysia is convicting. Life is convicting. I feel like every single day a new layer is peeled away from my ignorance, my selfishness, my addictions.
I think…
I think I love the World Race because it’s not an eleven-month mission trip.
It’s an eleven-month soul journey.
An eleven-month counseling program.
And I’m already becoming different.
deadtorise 