Wayne Jacobsen

What a crazy week!  This one began in the Bay area of California with some great dialog.  Not everyone loved it, however. We did have some people that wanted to promote some abusive views of God that others among us were trying to break free of.  It was in interesting conversation to say the least.  I know people like them mean well, or so they think, but when you’re militant about others knowing that God will strike them with calamity just to get their attention, you’ve missed who he is entirely. 

They even argued that that is exactly what God’s discipline is about.  My heart hurts for such people.  They sound like abused kids of an angry alcoholic dad as they try to explain that dad’s violence is a sign of his love.  God simply isn’t like that.  He’s in the world to rescue us from its destruction.  Our troubles arise from a fallen world, not a disciplining Father.  Discipline means to train up, as in a dad directing his child, not one who’s beating them into submission. 

Then, Sara and I had a couple of days on the Central Coast before I head off to Australia.  Then we returned home for a quick visit by some dear Swiss friends.  All the while we’ve been trying to sort out the new website.  I appreciate the patience and help so many of you have offered.  It turned out to be more of a mess than we thought it was when it launched, so now we’re having to fix things on the run. But I’ve heard from many of you that you love the new look and how much easier it is to find the free stuff!  People really love the free stuff! 

Next up is a three-week trip to Australia.  There are a lot of hungry hearts there and people taking great risks to follow God instead of man.  I love that!  And we’re going to begin some of the conversations there about Seeding Community in the world.  We have the tendency to keep creating various systems to try to manufacture community in the world.  Most don’t realize that God’s kind of community is a gift he gives. We can’t create it by anything we do, but we can recognize what he’s doing and participate with him.  By living lives of freedom, love, and hospitality we can open up space in which God can seed his community in the world.  I’m excited about exploring that more with people who share a hunger for nonsystematized ways encouraging community in the world. 

In June, we’ll be looking to take some of that to the Carolinas as well, though the schedule is far from complete at the point, but will be in the first two weeks of June.  And in between those two trips Sara and I will be on Vancouver Island for an anniversary trip, though we’ve set aside some time over the weekend to connect with other hungry hearts in the region. 

And finally, we’ve been putting the final touches on a Lifestream trip to Israel next February, February 5-16 to be exact.  I’ve wanted to take Sara there since I first visited seventeen years ago.  It impacted me more than I expected and has forever shaped my enjoyment of Scripture having been in the land in which it was penned.  Standing on the shore of Galilee, or sitting in a private spot in Garden of Gethsemane, or being in the holding cell where Jesus was the night before he was crucified were forever stamped on my heart.  Finally God has opened the door for us to go and take 40 people with us and we’ll have the same guide whom I enjoyed so much last time.   Full details will be available soon, and we’ll announce it here first.
 

It’s been eight months in planning so that we could make this website more accommodating to the people who come here, and more functional on the backside for Sara in the office. It was far more complicated than I imagined, but we’re still excited to let you in on our new web site.

I love the new design and how it makes the items for which people come to the website so muc easier to find. All of our free resources have been gathered into one section to make it easier for people to find and utilize. Our most current information is all on the front page, including the most recent podcast, blog, and newsletter as well my travel schedule and recent items on the website occasional visitors might have missed.

Certainly there will be glitches as we finally take the website public, so please be patient if you find a missing link or if something loads more slowly than it should. You can now open an account with us that will track your orders and contributions as well as let you control your email subscription options. For those who’d like to make local, personal connections, we will be adding a feature to let those who opt-in communicate with other Lifestream readers and listeners. This would be done blindly so that people would only exchange personal contact information if they desire to. Primarily we want Lifestream to be a resource for people who are wanting to grow in the reality of living loved by the Father and becoming part of his unfolding kingdom in the world. It is our hope that this new website will further those goals.

There are few international stories in our time more compelling than the struggle for reconciliation and collaboration in post-apartheid South Africa. I have long been amazed by this story of oppressor and oppressed trying to find a way to build a society together and not to let vengeance hold sway, which so often happens in human history. My interest here is not just historical. It is also interpersonal. For the past twenty years I’ve been on a steep learning curve in human relationships learning what makes them thrive and what destroys them. I don’t know that there’s anything closer to God’s heart than relational healing. One of my recent LIVING LOVED articles, Betrayal, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation, was on this topic.

Two weeks ago Sara and I attended “A Conversation About Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Healing: Lessons from South Africa” at the Pepperdine University’s School of Law. It was a fascinating day and a powerful reminder of how critical reconciliation and forgiveness are in human culture. As part of that day we saw an award-wining documentary, Reconciliation: Mandela’s Miracle, a taped interview with Desmond Tutu about his work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and excerpts of an uncompleted documentary, “The Foolishness of God: My Forgiveness Journey with Desmond Tutu“. We also heard from a panel consisting of South African Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, Desmond Tutu biographer John Allen, and Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest who was severely injured by a mail bomb for his outspokenness against apartheid and now heads the Institute for Healing of the Memories.

What a day! For a long time I have been fascinated with Nelson Mandela’s story of coming out of 27 years of imprisonment for his political beliefs and fight for an equitable society in post-apartheid South Africa, instead of exacting vengeance for the oppression he and other blacks had suffered. I hadn’t realized how critical Bishop Tutu was to that process as well. Having the ear of both blacks and whites and a whole-hearted devotion to forgiveness as a way forward for his homeland.

The story is all the more fascinating because it involves an entire country and so many people on both sides of the conflict who have had to find a way to work together, but the lessons that rise from that experience are as applicable to individual human relationships. I can’t share with you all I gained there, but here are some of the highlights I took away from the conversation that day:
Freedom is a community experience. One person cannot truly be free with others around them who are not. Mandela, “Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.” They sought negotiations where there was no victor and no vanquished, but that each understood the story of the other.
It is easy to have compassion for people who are like us, but freedom comes from having compassion for all people, especially those unlike us. We are different not to be separated by those differences, but to be united in harmony. We are different to know our need for each other.
“Hard vengeance is doing to them what they did to you,” Albie Sachs, a judge on the Constitutional court of South Africa. It will not lead to peace and freedom.
You cannot be human by yourself. We were created for interdependence. Your well-being is tied to my well-being. We are family is the truth.
There are three imperatives to reconciliation: (1) Confession: There can be no reconciliation without contrition on the part of the offender. Admit what you did was wrong and ask for forgiveness. (2) Forgive: It is a gospel imperative. It frees you from bitterness and makes you available again to love others. (3) Restitution: Give back what you’ve taken. Find a way to mitigate whatever damage you caused.
In their Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they asked what is the legal test for remorse? Of course there isn’t any. But they did find how very few people were really blood thirsty for revenge. Most people wanted acknowledgement for their pain and many found healing in the pubic telling of their story. They uncovered a huge generosity of spirit from those who had been victims of oppression.
They couldn’t rebuild society through absolute justice because it would only punish the perpetrators by turning the victims into victimizers. They sought what they called transitional justice, what would get us from where we are to where we want to be–from a dictatorial state into a democratic one?
From Ambassador Rasool, a black man who grew up a victim of apartheid, “When our hearts are filled with fear and anger, there is no room for generosity and peace.

It may be easy to judge South Africa harshly for their policies of apartheid, but European colonizers back in the day subjugated indigenous cultures throughout the world by violence and theft to seek a better life than themselves. We are still untangling that mess around the world. It’s just more pronounced in South Africa where the whites remained such a small minority of the population, whereas in the United States and other countries the indigenous people were overwhelmed by those who settled there.

The quest for reconciliation in South Africa was a gift from two transcendent individuals, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu, and the response of a country that chose truth, forgiveness and reconciliation over perpetuation of one side dominating the other. What they been able to get people to embrace strikes to the heart of the Gospel where generosity wins over broken humanity’s constant quest to take power over others for its own gain. Of course, the challenge still continues and a second generation of leaders will have to continue the quest. The huge economic divide between white and black South Africa will continue to test their resolve and demand that they seek creative solutions the embedded economic inequities of their culture.

It is easy for the oppressor to use forgiveness as an excuse to let bygones be bygones and not work to mitigate the inequities their domination caused in the wider culture. And hopefully their lessons are not lost on us in our own interpersonal relationship. Jesus died to bring ALL things together under one head. We live in that reality in the human relationships before us right now. Are we living to gain power over others so we can get our way, or are we learning to live in a generosity of spirit that seeks the well-being and freedom of others around me as much as we seek it for ourselves? Does the way we live in the world foster more pain by lying, gossip, and taking advantage of others, or are we finding our way into confession, forgiveness, and sharing that allows the kingdom to unfold around us?

There are lessons here for us all. Maybe that’s why Jesus didn’t tell us followers to start political movements, but to simply love their neighbor as they are being loved by Father.

Finally, the birthday gifts and party are now in the past, but what a weekend it was! I am so grateful to all who made this one special in so many ways. To have my home and yard filled with people I love and share the laughter and joy of family and long-time friendship was truly a blessing and an honor. Sara and I know some pretty incredible people and connecting with them again filled our lives with gratitude.

And there were so many others who wrote and shared their thoughts and greetings as well. I already told you about my birthday book my daughter created for me with letters people sent from all over the world to celebrate our relationship. It turned out to be quite a project as she worked on it for more than eight months. It was a secret she and many others had to keep for much of that time. Here’s what she wrote about it:

              The secret… a book of letters to my dad… expressions of love, gratitude,

              special memories, or as simple as a birthday wish written from people that

              have known my dad at some point over his 60 years of life. It all started

              with a simple email that spread from Ventura County through California,

              across the US and all across the world…Australia, South Africa, Canada,

              and all over Europe. I received well over 100 letters when all was said and

              done. And put them all together in this book.

If you want to see some of what she wrote about it, you can check out her blog and pictures about the night she gave the book to me. And the book was a big draw on Saturday. Everyone wanted to see it and many spent time reading it. I won’t post it here; it’s over 40,000 words. So you’ll just have to come by and look at it if you want.

   Part of the crowd that was able to join us this weekend for my birthday

Sara and I are now left in the afterglow of that rich weekend and the love of so many people. As we’re slowly reading through the book my daughter put together, I’ve been reminded of a couple of things that are pretty important:

First, what people most appreciate about your life is not what you’ve accomplished but how you’ve treated them. What came up over and over again in the letters was not the books I’d written or the achievements people attach to my life, but how they’ve watched Sara and I have live our our lives and the simplicity of conversation, whether in laughter and tears, that helped them through a tough spot, or encouraged them to lean more deeply into Jesus. I love that. I think that’s why Jesus didn’t write books or start ministries. He knew that how he lived with Father would best be conveyed by simply living openly in the world, and he knew that the power in a real conversation was all that was needed to allow the kingdom of God to spread in the world.

Second, I’m refreshed in the power of affirmation. Reading what others have appreciated about my life has impacted me far more deeply than I thought it would. It has helped me be reminded of those things that really matter in life, and not get lost in all the projects I sometimes think are so critical. Sharing with someone how you appreciate them and what they’ve meant to you is life-changing. It is often difficult in our culture either to give or receive complements. Both make us uncomfortable. We don’t often give them for fear will be responsible for stoking someone’s pride, and we often deflect them when given to us because we feel undeserving.

I’ve often gone away from funerals thinking how powerful it would have been for the deceased to have heard those things said about them while they were still alive. How much would it have set them at ease in knowing how God had made himself known through them, or how much they meant to others? Reading my daughter’s book was like attending my own funeral, without the death part, which really is the worse part. And I’ll admit to being incredibly surprised at what many people said and how they looked at my life. But it has been and continues to be so enriching and it has allowed me to relive memories of my times with them.

So I come away from this week wanting to be more intentional about speaking life and encouragement into people while it still matters. I want them to know how much they are loved and appreciated and what I see of God’s glory reflected in them. Imagine if our conversations were filled with that an dhow it would not only change the tone of many of our conversations, but perhaps the tone of the world around us as well.