Thinking and Responding

(Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well, 1640)

Art can be a way of thinking, especially when the thoughts cannot keep up with the input. When the words and the theories don't fit the experience. You know you want to say something, but you can't even think it properly.

Many people feel that in the current American experience. I know I do. 

I especially appreciate Jon Guerra, whose art (song, poetry) has captured and coalesced some of my swirling ideas. He is a thoughtful Christian artist wrestling with the words of Jesus as well as the culture and politics of today. Thank you, Jon!

I am currently processing these songs, you are welcome to join: 

The American Gospel  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

Citizens  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

In the Beginning Was Love  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

Nothing to Say to the New York Times  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

And Russell Moore's podcast interview with Jon is also very good: (Russel Moore's site)   (Youtube Music)

Standing Up

 Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult. It can also be inspiring. People who do so often look back proudly on their actions and are justly celebrated for it after a crisis has passed. But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.

-NYT editorial board

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/opinion/trump-law-firms-universities.html

Of Specialists

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

                            -  Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

An Amazing Time in Kenya

 

Tuberculosis and HIV. Various-colored glasses. Baboons. Time with my daughter. Rice and beans and fried tomatoes. I wanted to reflect a few amazing things from our time at Kijabe Mission hospital in Kenya last month. It was a wonderful opportunity to serve, along with my med-student daughter Erika. We worked on the general inpatient wards, along with awesome local and expatriate staff, interns, and medical students. 

Despite countless voyages at over 30,000 feet to get over oceans and around the globe, I remain amazed at safe transport and God's protection. Getting in one of those massive Boeing or Airbus tubes is magical, like C.S. Lewis or Stargate, where you wake up a little foggy and with indigestion, but in another world altogether.

I am amazed at my daughter, her hard work and determination means that she will graduate med school in May. She worked hard on the wards, amazing the interns who kept asking her to pull night call with them, knowing her hard work would benefit the patients and help them get more priceless minutes of shut-eye. It is a great blessing to share the field of medicine with her, bouncing cases off each other and commiserating when people don’t make it, such as her young woman patient with end-stage AIDS who we couldn’t save. 

The faith and hard work of the doctors and nurses at Kijabe hospital was amazing to see. In America, we get so used to a medical environment efficiently cleansed of anything spiritual. In comparison, Kijabe felt like a feast: weekly chapel services rich with life-giving music, daily prayers before rounds, and colleagues who look to God for help, as well as to quality evidence-based resources. 

Being in Kenya with Erika was amazing. Her Kenya memories were limited to milking cows and walking country roads from her last visit at age 6 with our friends the Kibaritas. That did not stop her from jumping into the current cultural challenge with creativity.

Seeing Erika and how she remembered her time in rural Kenya as a child, I thought it was amazing how differently we translate the world into our mind and memories at different ages. It is like we are wearing different pairs of glasses that emphasize different shapes and colors. 

 

How we see the world depends so much on the glasses we are wearing. It is so easy to put on the glasses of pessimism and negativity. We can defensively wear glasses that look down others. The Bible mentions glasses Jesus wore: "have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus...who emptied himself..." These are humility glasses. Jesus purposefully looked at people asking himself: how can I serve them? Not as better than them, but seeing them first before himself. These glasses keep slipping off my face.

We saw an amazing array of diseases at the hospital in the few weeks we were there. TB, various cancers, malaria, HIV, diabetes and its complications, strokes and heart attacks. But people are not diseases, they are people. Whether their bodies improve or not, healthy connections between caregivers and patients is a good thing. Those who suffer need those who are blessed with health and resources. Erika was especially amazed by the selfless service of Dr Lapore, one of the Kenyan doctors working at the hospital. She trained in Russia, feeling a call to medicine, pushing through to learn enough Russian not only to pass but to excel.

 

Dr Lapore on the right. Medicine Chief Dr. Tony Nguyen on the left.

The pathway to humility is through the humble valley. Having to ask for help interpreting, finding which meds are available, how to make things happen in a new culture, is humbling. Hopefully we grew through this process, and can keep those Jesus glasses on, like the decorations on the bus below.

Chapel on Wednesday Mornings

Christian Bus Culture? And "Stay Humble!"

Erika and I had a day to see some of the animals which East Africa is famous for. Kijabe is on the steep edge of the Rift valley. A drive to the bottom brings you to Lake Naivasha, where you can walk around with zebras, gazelles, giraffes, ostriches, hippos and endless varieties of birds large and small. No lions or Elephants there—but you don’t want to be walking with those anyway. It was an amazing opportunity. Back at the hospital grounds, there were plenty of monkeys and baboons showing off, but we were told to keep our doors and windows locked lest they gain entrance, steal our food, and make a mess.

 

monkey on the hospital roof

Baboon at the hospital

John and Esther

It was so amazing to see old friends! Especially Pastor John and his wife Pastor Esther. A short visit but such a blessing.

In summary, it was an amazing time in Kenya. Thank you so much for praying for us. If you are interested in supporting the work there, I suggest a donation to World Medical Mission. They organized our trip, and do amazing work around the world:

https://www.samaritanspurse.org/medical/world-medical-mission/

Sources of Information

In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.

                                                    -Dan Williams, 2024

                                                                   Why do people believe true things?

Greatness

When it is no longer possible to stretch those so very elastic threads of the historical rationale any farther, when an action is manifestly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians resort to the device of "greatness." "Greatness" would appear to exclude the standards of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing is wrong. There is no atrocity for which a "great" man can be accounted guilty....

And it never occurs to anyone that to admit a greatness that is not commensurate with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable puniness.

For us, with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

-Leo Tolstoy (discussing the actions of Napoleon and their interpretation in War and Peace)

Blessings בְּרָכָה

Background:

The Arabic word بركة (barakah) has several meanings and carries significant theological and cultural meaning in Islam. In Judaism, the Hebrew word בְּרָכָה (barakah) also has deep meaning, including as a name for daily prayers or “blessings.” Both peoples consider "barakah" as deeper and more multifaceted than the English word “blessing.” 

 

When I was looking at Ephesians 1:3-14, a kind of song or poem that starts with the theme of God’s blessings, I found that Paul uses the word εὐλογητός (eulogetos) as the Greek equivalent of barakah that is found in the Hebrew scriptures. So when I wrote this poem based on the Ephesians passage, it seemed using this word with so much depth and meaning was appropriate:

 

Barakah

By Paul Bunge

Blessed be is “barakah”

In temple, synagogue, and scroll

Praise God the source of barakah

He’s the blessings honor roll 

 

God fathered Jesus Christ

Who is our Lord and President

He barakahs us at God’s side

Though he knows our lesser tent

 

Barakah started long ago

Pre-paleozoic age

The God of law and perfection

Took us at our awkward stage

 

Before the time of time began

This God of perfect want and will

Of nature planets cosmos rolling

Used barakah to make them still  

 

Insight of God is fact and wise

All inside of us he knows 

Our plans and dreams of selfish gain

One cut, it’s gone, as red blood flows

 

But barakah and baby’s breath

Eternity found in a stable

Put that red blood in sacred bag

To nurture one who would be able

 

The marrow barakah’d his cheeks

His voice gave life and clarified

In others loss of blood you’re gone

When his flowed out, our sins died

 

Barakah to us is free

Lavished all he has stored up

He planned it though it’s mystery

All punishment he drank that cup

 

But wait, there’s more it’s hope he has

We without a bank account

Have all things promised to deliver

Have his will, last testament 

 

The promissory can’t be lost

Barakah between our cells

Holy Spirit gospel faith

In moving body deepest wells

 

All this promise hope and truth

Now who we are, his final story

He will be back our only vision

In meantime barakah and glory

 

 

 

Money

"Scarcity and abundance have as much to do with the form of exchange as with how much material wealth is at hand. Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow...

Urdu proverb from A Passage to India: If money goes, money comes. If money stays death comes."

                                                                                    -Lewis Hyde, The Gift

The Commodification of American Medicine

"We need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift labors into market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price."

So said Lewis Hyde in his highly insightful 1979 book, The Gift. Regarding the field of medicine in America, we have very nearly, or perhaps completely, reached this realm. I hear daily in conversations at the hospital: how can the administration pay us X when clearly we are worth Y? As if the work and care of medicine can be fully translated and digitized into some currency. The attempt of course has led to massive payments to nurses and doctors, which administrators publicly lament over, but then take pains to profit off of, being as they are the top of the doctor-nurse-patient pyramid themselves.  

No, the field of medicine cannot lose its gift component and remain medicine. It becomes only a tit-for-tat exchange, and even a battle, for the human body always carries scarcity, even when well. The sick will consume all commodities and still be wanting. In today's medicine, the sick person desperately longs for gift, for love, for human, for divine. When these are missing, no commodity will suffice. 

Possible

 

I am reminded of what seemed so impossible in 1986: The end of apartheid in South Africa. Perhaps that is why only we young people were out protesting at the time. We had not yet grown old enough to restrict our activities to the realm of the reasonable, or our ideas only to the possible. Lydia Polgren from the New York Times gets this:

"In his 2020 book 'Neither Settler Nor Native,' the political theorist Mahmood Mamdani offered the idea that South Africa’s transition was possible because of an extraordinary act of creativity and imagination in which the holders of what were once seen as fixed, eternal and opposed identities — settler and native — mutually surrendered those identities and took on new ones, as fellow survivors of a brutal colonial project who would try to build something new from its ruins. It is hard to imagine such a project in Israel and Palestine in these dark days. But what was possible once can be possible again."   (Quote from Lydia Polgren, 'South Africa is Not a Metaphor,' NYT, 6/1/24)