As of this past week, the Karen National Union has officially signed a ceasefire with the Burmese government.

{Please take a minute and let that resonate.
Please let a warm, thankful smile spill onto your face.}

The Karen have been the most determined in their defense, and they have resisted and fought the Burmese government and military for decades. They have also set the tone for resistance in many ways, and since pursuing a ceasefire, other ethnic groups have followed into talks and now into signing.

We had a long staff meeting today discussing the hopes, fears, and dreams that are encompassed in this event.

And as we discussed it, you can sense the deep hope. It is a step forward; it is a reason to be excited. It could be the horizon of something beautiful. This could be the beginning of the end.

But, a ceasefire was signed a few years back right around the time of Karen New Year.  The celebration that year was huge as Karen from all over came to celebrate.

The party was interrupted with gunfire and a brutal attack.

One of our staff members was actually present at this New Years celebration many years ago; and her excitement today was through teary eyes.

And now, more than ever, we are praying.

We are praying for the Karen; we are praying for freedom. We are praying for Partners to be wise and discerning. We are praying for hope to resonate in the hearts of the Karen, for prayer to come forth out of hope, and for hope to not put them to shame.

“Home is an illusion we all chase.”

My roommate said this in conversation a few years back, and it has continued to reverberate in my mind over the past few days.

I have no idea which feels more like home, America or here.

But I can tell you what did feel like home:
being received into twenty-five hugs from friends and family at the airport in Little Rock.
being received into twenty-five hugs from the neighborhood children on our dusty little street.

Both were absolutely beautiful.

And then weeks went by without a word.

The past weeks have gone quickly, but have been so good. There have been so many hours spent with family, a few hours with friends, and even fewer hours resting in an exceptionally soft bed.

And now we’re flying out tomorrow.

Erwin McManus once related in a lecture, “I am on the board of a seminary where they have a psychiatric wing, and they wanted to send psychologists around the world to work with missionaries.  They were coming in telling us how they were going to spend millions of dollars to bring mental health to all of our missionaries. And I couldn’t hold in; I said, ‘No! Don’t do it! We don’t need healthy missionaries. We need missionaries who are delusional, who are out of their minds, who are insane.  There are two of them among ten million and they think they can change that whole city. You make them normal, healthy, sane and they’re going home to Kansas tomorrow.’”

Let me first say that I don’t particularly like being considered “missionaries” to Thailand. This seems to glorify the fact that we are simply living in a different country, but living life in much the same way. Yes, it has been wonderful to be among family; to have coffee with friends.  It was fun to understand conversations, read signs, and have salad. America is so soft: comfortable couches, cloud-like beds, painted walls, carpeting under your feet, cozy sweaters, warm fires. But the reality of it is, even when we lived here, we still lived in the Asian district of town; I still spent alot of my time with people I couldn’t communicate with; I was still served questionable dishes on multiple occasions. God has given us a love for the Karen and Burmese that transcends beyond the group living across the street in Mae Sot.

Even so, I have found great comfort in this quote.

Perhaps because insanity seems closer than I’d prefer as I plan to get on a plane to return to a place that I know is uncomfortable; where we are much more isolated; where our sisters are miles and miles away from us.

Perhaps because I know I need to remain insane enough to believe that we are part of something that makes this worth it; that all things left behind are somehow justified in the hope of playing one small part in God’s plan. I know that there is a level of insanity to believing that playing Go Fish with our neighbor children is somehow communicating Christ.

Here’s to insanity.

I had breakfast with a friend today at Panera. It was lovely.

We sat by their fire while I kept my mittens and hat on, and I had a Caesar salad at 9am. Yep, they let you get salads at any hour, which is pretty nice of them.

It’s been a month full of traveling.

From 2 December to 11 December, we spent 24 hours in the car.

In the week following, from 12 December to 16 December, we spent 26.5 hours in the car, with a majority of this being off-road 4WD with a cloud of dust behind us.

And then we left for America.

On 17 December, we started with an eight hour bus ride, followed by a thirty minute taxi, a six hour flight, an eleven hour flight, and a one hour flight. Oh, a few layovers in between each.

Totals, anyone?

With all layovers aside, that’s 77.5 hours moving.

But we’re here. We’ve actually been here a few days, so we’re obviously still running; we’ve just added family and friends, some warm coats, and a delicious meals into the mix! Oh, and a bed that is much more comfortable than we remembered.

In a podcast we have, Erwin McManus begins by praying, “Father, my wife and my kids are back home, and I just pray, God, that I’m not on the wrong side of the country for this moment; that you have something that you want to do tonight that requires all of us to be together.”

This is my prayer for us in this time at home: that we have just stepped off the plane on the right side of the world, and that we’d be on the right side of the world on 14 January when we step off the bus back into Mae Sot. In the times that we’re here with family as well as the times when we’re not there for life changing moments, I pray that we’re on the right side of the world. And I pray that God has something he wants to do with that.

I found this on a friend’s blog and thought it was too funny not to share.

In my political science classes at university, we studied Stanley Milgram and his experiment on obedience to authority figures.  Milgram was a psychologist who “measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.” I find it to be a fascinating study, and would encourage you to read even a summary of it from the Wikipedia article I linked above.

In short, each participant was given the role of “teacher.” A trained member of the experiment was acting as a student, hooked up to an faux electric shock and required to recite back certain words. When he was incorrect, the “teacher” had to shock him at increasing levels, to which he then responded to, including screams of pain. Whenever the “teacher” hesitated to shock the student, he was given four prods to proceed: please continue; the experiment requires that you continue; it is absolutely essential that you continue; you have no other choice, you must go on. If they continued through the entire experiment, the final shock was 450-volts.

Before he began, Milgram polled fourteen senior-level psychology students, which estimated between 0 and 3 percent would go to the end and deliver the 450-volt shock.

In Milgram’s first experiment, sixty-five percent administered the final shock.

Milgram concluded, “The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

[Is the connection of this to Burma’s army as obvious to the general public as it is to me?]

It’s hard to conceive this: that these are ordinary people in Milgram’s study; that the Burmese soldiers carrying out gross human rights abuses are as well.  That, in many ways, this is you and I.

How close am I to shocking an innocent person with 450 volts?

How willing are we to create destruction, perhaps based on authority and instruction?

How close am I to completely undervaluing human life?

Maybe not even directly, but how am I disregarding human life now–perhaps in my purchases, perhaps in ignoring the suffering of another?

Or a million others?

My college roommate, Mallory, wrote it so well in her senior thesis, Shake, Shake the Mango Tree:

“It is frightening to think that one person could forget or ignore the suffering of another person. What is more frightening is the ease with which people do it. And Gabriel, the most frightening thing of all is that we see that it is made so easy for others and they are so able to do it, which means we are at risk for doing the very thing we now see as horrible…”