a contract with God

Forgive me the liberties I’ve taken with the text (I aspire to be the next Eugene Peterson, only without the trite and cheesy* colloquialisms):

Don’t fool yourselves or turn up your noses at God’s contract.  It’s a simple kingdom truth that wages are determined by performance.   If a man works selfishly and for his own good, he’ll receive death.  But if he works in order to please God, his salary will be true life — and he’ll enjoy that life forever.

So don’t entertain thoughts of starting your own private businesses.  And don’t give up doing good and working for God.  Because God’s salary and benefits package is far better than anything you could arrange for yourselves.  [His retirement plan's not bad, either.]  Take advantage of every opportunity that arises; if you’re able to assist someone, do.  And you should especially lend a hand to other employees in God’s kingdom.

— Galatians 6:7-10 (my own very loose translation)

judged by our works

A lot of Christianity frowns on talk of good works being rewarded. “Eternal life is a free gift, and you can’t earn it,” they say.  I’m not suggesting salvation can be earned.  But we can’t deny that the Bible says a great deal concerning our being judged by works and reaping what we sow. This is a kingdom principle. The truth of the matter is that a true Christian shouldn’t be concerned by this, as faith manifests itself in love for God and love for others.  And these are necessarily demonstrated by good works.

the fruits of selfishness

While living selfishly seems to bring us great pleasure, Paul is clear that, in reality, it results only in death.  We would do well to consider the future implications of our behavior today.  Pray that God will help us to see well in advance the fruits of those things we do in the present.

transformed thinking necessary

“As we have opportunity, let us do good…”  Pray that God will help us to notice the opportunities we have to do good. I’m afraid I often miss these occasions — not because of a reluctance to help others, but rather because of a failure to be conscious of their needs.  This seems to be at the root of the problem. If my thinking is selfish, then my actions will necessarily be so. In order to take advantage of opportunities to help others, I must be thinking of others. A self-centered attitude yields service to self.  While an others-based view of the world produces compassion and kindness.

responsibility to help other christians first

Christians are called first to help one another.  We often ignore this principle (which is found throughout scripture) because we think of it as selfish.  We prefer to give to the poor in rural Tanzania or to the homeless in New Orleans because (my guess) it makes us feel good.  But proper kingdom giving begins with giving IN the kingdom. It may not be as sexy as feeding the poor in Haiti or providing water for a village in Sudan, but it’s a kingdom principle.

We’re meant to demonstrate to the world how the family of God functions.  [You could call it a missionary principle.] I’d argue this is God’s form of attractional ministry: that Christians love one another and take care of one another. [Not that we have a great praise band and let visitors park near our front doors.]  For a little more on the subject, see giving: the seventh year and debts.

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May God empower us to take every opportunity to do good works.  May he make us a less selfish people, and may he be glorified in our willingness to serve others.

 

* You know, it’s sad that the word “cheesy” is in and of itself cheesy.  I generally don’t use it, but the irony struck me as humorous today.  It is, however, slightly better than “corny.”

repairing — er, cleaning a generator

A few months ago, our generator stopped working.  And by “stopped working,” I mean fire and black smoke shot out of the exhaust, and the whole thing rumbled and made awful noises as if it were about to explode. This happened right about the time we started having our electricity rationed in Geita.  [We often regularly weekly have had outages, but this rationing is something to which we were not yet accustomed.]

I don’t want to make it sound as if we have a schedule for this rationing, because there’s certainly no such thing as a scheduled inconvenience here in Tanzania.  But more or less, our electricity is off for 12 hours and then on for 24.  That’s actually not bad, because if we’re without electricity during daylight hours today, our next outage will likely be at night.  But, all the same, with a freezer full of frozen pork (that took two days to process), among other things, a generator is useful, if not downright necessary. So I needed to repair the thing.

Now, I like to be thought of as a man’s man, but I’m not really one — at least it doesn’t come naturally. I don’t know how to fix cars, I have allergies no outdoorsman would claim, and I once cried during an episode of King of the Hill. But I’m not unintelligent, and I don’t mind getting my hands dirty.

This is the story of how I repaired my own generator:

disassembling the dirty generator -- black smoke had soiled every inch of this thing

First, I took the whole thing apart. I drained the gasoline and the oil (saving the latter for cooking), and removed every part I could figure out how to remove.  I did opt, however, to leave the engine in place as I don’t have another $1000 to buy a new generator after destroying this one in an (feeble) attempt to repair it.

fuel tank, muffler, and other sundry items at the "cleaning station"

My thinking was that I would clean all the parts really well, replace the spark plug, change the oil, and look for anything that seemed to be obviously broken or wrong.  So we should probably call what I did maintenance and cleaning — and not an actual repair. [Also, in order to be deemed a repair, the work must actually remedy the problem, I think...]

the carburetor, removed and prior to cleaning

I was really hoping the problem was going to be in the carburetor — that there would just be a lot of gunk in there that needed cleaning out.  These hopes were soon dashed.

balls to clean the fuel tank -- they'd also work great in a sling shot

I knew the petrol (that’s what I’ve come to call it these days) in Geita isn’t the purest gasoline in the world, so I thought it’d be wise to clean the fuel tank well, seeing as it was already separate from the rest of the machine.  I was fairly sure black smoke often comes from an engine when it is “running rich,” meaning too much gasoline is passing through (I learned this once while on a boat).  But I was hoping it might also be the result of dirty petrol in a dirty tank.

So I bought an old ball bearing in town and took it apart.  Then I put all the metal balls in the tank along with a healthy dose of kerosene, and I lit the whole thing on fire. Just kidding.  I shook it for a long time and then emptied it, and then did it again.  Three times total.  A lot of dirty stuff came out, so I was feeling quite successful.

I also changed the spark plug, cleaned all the other parts, and put the machine back together.  [No photos...]

the generator safe and sound in it's newly renovated home

After reassembling the generator, I decided to knock out a portion of the wall that makes the machine’s cuddly little home on the back of our house.  This was in (misdirected) hopes that the problem might have something to do with the generator not taking in enough clean air to run smoothly.  Now there’s an opening on the left side for air intake, as well as on the right side for exhaust.

The big joke when you do something like this is to get to the end and say, “Now, where was this piece supposed to go?” Yeah, I performed that joke.  In real life.  Just as if it’d been scripted for a movie.  [Or at least a low-budget sitcom.]

the leftovers -- a real man reassembles a machine using less parts than he started with

But I figured out where those three little nuts went, and they’re not important.  Seriously, they’re not.

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Although, I did second-guess myself when the generator ran perfectly for 3 hours… but an hour later was again shooting out fire and smoke.

I’m still nothing more than a real-man wannabe.  It’s true. Make fun of me in the comments if you like.

it’s a question of church maturity

Let me run something by you.  I haven’t given this a great deal of thought.  Hardly any, actually.  But I’m going to throw it out there anyway — as rough, unfinished, and possibly wrong as it may be.

Background:

There’s a lot of discussion these days about spiritual maturity in our churches.  Some large congregations are being referred to as far-reaching, yet shallow.  Small churches are sometimes said to be unconcerned with the lost and how to reach them, demonstrating their own immaturity.  And it seems there have been a billion criteria suggested by which we should gauge a church’s maturity.  [I wrote the other day about biblically measuring kingdom growth, but I see that as different from the maturity of a single congregation.] How’s this for a thought?

Can we effectively gauge a church’s maturity by asking this simple question:

Who is doing most of the work, and is it being done in love?

What do you think?  And I don’t mind being wrong.  I mind incredibly being told I’m wrong, but — just kidding.  Your thoughts?

2000 liters and 20 feet

The last three days have been 11-hour work days — and by work, I mean real work.  I was missing my landscaping job at Community Care… until this week.  Now I’ve about had my fill.  I like manual labor, but I like it in 8-hour days with lunch breaks.  This week I’ve been doing everything from digging holes and trenches to building mosquito net frames to busting up rocks to setting water towers.  But I’ve had a lot of help — and I didn’t do any of the actual welding on the tower myself (though I learned a lot about it).

The water tower is unique in that it is/was the last piece of the puzzle required for us to actually live in the house.  There’s a lot still undone, but nothing major (for Tanzania).  Provided the plumbing works when we fill this joker with water, we’ll sleep in our own home tomorrow night.  Here’s a picture sequence:

off-loading the tower from the kroppach's truck -- it was welded at their vocational school.

uprighting the tower -- winch on one side, "man-power" on the other.

baylor and i taking a break before pouring concrete.

nearly four feet of pipe under concrete.

a whole lot of concrete to mix with a couple of shovels -- but i only carried and poured.

lifting the tank to the top, which was pretty easy until...

...this point. we dropped the tank once (but only from about five feet).

almost finished product -- tomorrow we'll fill the tank with water.