No Crystal Stair*

Drex’s life is an interesting blend of abundance and deprivation: as an only child (for all practical purposes) with two parents working from home, he sees a lot of his folks. Often—probably more often than if he shared them with siblings—he gets their attention. He lives in a stimulating urban environment. His is a genuine international education. He has travelled extensively for a person his age. Yet he has been repeatedly deprived of close family relationships and friendships. There exists neither culture nor country where he is not a stranger, a foreigner. The largest open space that is part of his daily life is a narrow cobbled street. Sometimes I envy him, sometimes I’m afraid of being arrested for child abuse. We are completely dependent upon God to make it all OK, and to make us sensitive and responsive to Drex’s needs. Thanks for your ongoing prayers for our parenting.

With respect to that international urban education, results thus far are mostly encouraging. Fifth grade at Fernão Lopes in ’06 seems considerably more violent than I remember fifth grade at Wing Lake Elementary School in ‘72, but Drex, hardly the most aggressive kid crammed into the school’s tiny temporary quarters, seems to bear up with remarkable equanimity. While we walk home together he enthusiastically acts out from whom and under what circumstances he’s received the new marks on his face, sometimes handing me his back pack and insisting I stand still on the sidewalk to get the full effect. Thing is, students are more readily held back here, so it is common to meet children one, two and three years older than most of their classmates. The oldest student in Drex’s class is fourteen. So you’ve got a lot of young adolescents, for whom school has not been a crystal stair, with a lot of negative energy, looking out over the heads of their smaller colleagues like so many heads of wheat ready for harvest. I’ve trained Drex to end altercations by tackling low and driving with his legs but that’s a little nuclear for the school’s confined spaces and often not practical. So Drex ignores my advice and makes friends of his enemies instead. Where does he get that? Please pray for his protection and for his enemies.

He’s doing well enough in class. First semester grades are out and Drex’s GPA was 4.6 on a scale of 5, including the only 5 in his Portuguese Language class. Much of the credit goes to the head teacher, Professor Cláudio, who has transformed Drex’s attitude towards school. Debbie and I met and fell in love with Professor Cláudio last September. He is manly, gentle, radiant, encouraging and engaged with his students. He’s been teaching twenty-two years. Though Portuguese by birth, he grew up in Brazil, where he seems to have caught that country’s contagion for life. He believes the way out of Portugal’s present difficulties is paved with little acts of benevolence on the part of its citizens, especially its younger ones. Drex likes him as much as we do. May God bless him in his ministry.

Thanks for praying for us. May the Lord bless you this week as well.

* from

Mother to Son by Langston Hughes

Feeling God's Pleasure

I drove from one end of Portugal to the other this week. On Monday I went south in the old Habitat for Humanity truck, Manuel, with a load of furniture for Casa Armona, the little beach cottage soon to join the VisitingPortugal.com line-up. We first became acquainted with southern Portugal, known as the Algarve, last summer when the country was in the throes of its worst drought in decades. As far as I knew, the Algarve was brown. Charming in a sun-baked Mediterranean way, but definitely umber. Imagine my surprise when just south of Lisbon verdant hills dappled with sheep, cows and horses and festooned with great lakes—some white, some gold—of tiny flowers (miniature daisies is what they look like up close) began rolling by the highway. Rather than looking like homeless people, destitute, bedraggled and misplaced, as they did last summer, the little whitewashed houses were the very picture of rural simplicity, sufficiency and grace. One wondered how there can be so much talk of economic crisis in the midst of such idyllic prosperity. I played fado—traditional mournful Portuguese music—on my harmonica as I drove along.

Having delivered my load of furniture I was free to take Manuel north to Braga at the end of the week, where I left him for good with Luis Ribeiro, the current Habitat construction supervisor and mastermind of our self-financing Habitat houses. Luis has worked out a system whereby we build a house using the labor and donations of ten Global Village work teams, each of which works for two weeks. It’s brilliant, and because lots of volunteers want to come to Portugal, we can fill our calendar with as many teams as we can handle. So you’d think we’d be putting up houses from the Minho to the Mediterranean, wouldn’t you? Well, not quite. We’re like a really cool kite that hasn’t quite caught the wind. In fact, at the moment we’re in danger of crashing. We’re looking at some creative ways to get turned around. Would you please ask God to keep us in the air?

It had been a long time since I had been in Braga and it was very nice to check in with old friends. I joined my little men’s group for their morning prayer hike, breakfasted at our old house with ex-Habitat construction assistant Alvaro Azevedo and his wife, who are caring for nine foster children there, and chatted with our diminutive eighty-two year old former neighbour Dona Rosa, who had heart surgery in the fall and cried when she spoke of how much she misses us (just as she used to cry when she spoke of how much she misses the Leaf family that lived next door to her before we did). I stopped by As Andorinhas, one of the neighborhoods where Vivarte used to operate, and had a beer with Senhor António, whose deformative joint disease you may have read about here before. His fingers, none of which approaches straight or anything less than twice normal size, were wrapped in plastic—something I’d not seen before—against the weeping of incisions made for their drainage. “You’re a hero,” I told him, awed by his suffering. “You just keep doing what you have to do,” he said, in his patient way, his eyelids and facial muscles drooping in response to pain medication. Please continue to pray for António, that God would heal him completely.

Looking back now upon my autumn trip to America I can see two or three themes that emerged. One was “feeling God’s pleasure.” It came up in conversations with several men. You may remember the expression from the 1981 Academy Award winning film, Chariots of Fire. The hero, Eric Liddell, uses it in response to his sister when she reminds him that God made him a missionary: “Yes,” he replies, “but He also made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure.” Feeling God’s pleasure keeps coming up because it is 1) so nice, and 2) a natural indicator of our gifts and what God would like us to do with them. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart,” King David of Israel, who ought to know, wrote. Just as there is mutuality, a bonding and a shared pleasure, between parent and child when the child manifests his giftedness—in the arena, on the stage, in the classroom, in conversation—so our relationship with God should be characterized by mutual pleasure and delight. One might even say there is a fulfilment, a bringing about of fullness in relationship, when we exercise our gifts, fulfilling the purpose for which He made us. Think about making God feel fulfilled. Where do you feel His pleasure? In thinking about the question myself, I notice that one of the places I feel God’s pleasure is in trying to create a little window upon the world through writing. I’ve been busy about a lot of things lately and haven’t been writing much, so being at the computer this long, feeling God’s pleasure, has come as a pleasant little shock. Would you mind asking God to get me to listen to my own advice? Is there a way to organize your time so you might feel God’s pleasure more? I pray it would be so.

Thank you for praying for us. Blessed week.