7 years + much has changed, but God's love never changes!

The crowds of Charmina-Hyderabad: like a carnival where old meets new!

You can always fit another in or on top + do another thing in an Indian tuk-tuk!

Count the Cost

Our convocation of eagles gathered for class here in India this morning,

And the Lord impressed on me that He was breaking limitations off natural dimensions: 

the length + width + height + depth, so we might go beyond mere knowledge to experience His love, 

exceedingly abundantly above all we might ask or think and I read from Ephesians 3:18-21.

Well, He truly did that today!

I continued by recapping a few key points from yesterday + then plunged ahead to break through new horizons!

Jesus doesn’t fit man’s boxes.

They tried to put Him in a box once, but He broke out. It’s called the Resurrection!

And ever since, He’s been breaking boxes: earthly plans + religious stereotypes, set formulas, mouldy molds.

We are not cookie-cutter robots; we are joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).

What does that mean?

We are co-inheritors with Him; we have received an inheritance through our relationship with Him. 

We haven’t earned it like wages. He died and His last will + testament + our inheritance came into effect + He rose again!

It’s a free gift …even though worldly governments will try to tax that too!

But... I asked them: What is our inheritance in Christ!

I’ve been teaching them to let Scripture interpret Scripture, so we turned to Ps 2, the 1^st Messianic Psalm:

v2: ‘the rulers of the earth take counsel against the LORD + His Anointed = Messiah = Christ

        and plot to rid themselves from His rule but

v4: He who sits in the heavens laughs… at their puny efforts of rebellion

v6: Yet I have set My King

       On My holy hill of Zion

v7:  I will declare the decree:

      The LORD has said to Me = Jesus

      You are My Son,

      Today I have begotten You.

v8: Ask of Me, and I will give You

      The nations for your inheritance

      And the ends of the earth for Your possession.’

So there it is: clear + simple: the nations… and not 1 nation today is immune to the gospel!

Not one nation can secure a border to keep the Good News out, prevent it from being sown, taking root and bearing fruit … much fruit, more fruit + fruit that remains!

The rulers can’t stop it; neither can the politicians, nor the humanistic gainsayers; not even the devil himself!

God is raising up sons + daughters, training up disciples, sending out messengers to carry His message to all parts of the globe: arrows tested + true, on target, fitted to the Father’s Heart + released in His Time to hit the mark!

We proceeded to how Jesus called His disciples: ‘Follow Me!’ and then to 3 in Luke 9:57-62 who were called or volunteered, but never followed through. Something intervened between their professed intention + realization.

Following Jesus somehow became personally inconvenient.

They couldn’t break free from their comfort zone. They’d become too entwined in their own limitations?!

The hasty braggart, the hesitant procrastinator, the double-minded waverer: each of them intended to follow Jesus, 

but neglected to Count the Cost, somehow got turned aside, distracted, and fell behind.

v62: ‘No one having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’

As plowmen in the natural, we cannot spiritually plow forwards while looking backward.

We must focus in the direction we are plowing or we will leave a maze of circuitous confusion behind us.

Count the Cost! God wants us to not only start, but also finish well!

Jesus did. ‘It is finished!’

He counted the cost + paid it in full… with His life, His blood!

When I’d taught this lesson previously here and come to this same point, I’d had quite the personal revelation

… and was about to experience another.

That time I’d been seeking a suitable conclusion and a song from my old Jesus People days came to mind.

But… I thought, these Indian students would never have heard that ‘70s tune: I have Decided to Follow Jesus!

But it wouldn’t go away; I started to sing it out loud and was totally surprised when they joined in singing with me!

‘How do you know my old North American gather-round-the-campfire+strum the guitars Jesus People song?’

‘Oh,’ they objected, ‘but this is an Indian song!’

I kinda brushed it off and graciously let them continue in their nice, but I was sure, misguided belief.

And God moved, we ended our class, I returned to my room, and like all contemporary seekers of the truth,

I Googled I have Decided and…

promptly had to repent of my skepticism… and more!

To my amazement, I discovered the song indeed has Indian roots.

Over a century ago, missionaries traveled to Assam in North India, to what must have truly been the ends of the earth at that time, and preached the gospel. Their labours seemed quite unsuccessful, but they did manage to see 1 family converted in the Garo tribe.

However, soon after the missionaries left, the Garo chief demanded that family repent of their newfound faith.

‘Renounce this foreign god… this Jesus!’

Nokseng: the man, the husband, the father, with his family gathered round him, refused his chief's command.

‘Your foreign beliefs are hurting our tribe, our traditions, our unity; you are angering our gods,’ the chief continued.

‘But,’ Nokseng pleaded, ‘I cannot turn away from my Jesus. I’ve come to know Him, He alone is my Saviour!’

And the standoff came to the crisis point.

‘Renounce this Jesus or… we will kill you and your family; you are bringing curses on our tribe!’

‘I cannot,’ he replied; ‘even if you were to kill us all.’

And so the chief had Nokseng’s children slaughtered, right before his eyes.

… and Nokseng began to sing, inexplicably, painfully, through his tears:

  ‘I have decided to follow Jesus

   I have decided to follow Jesus

   I have decided to follow Jesus

   No turning back

   No turning back.’

The chief could not believe Nokseng’s stubborn determination.

‘See what your new beliefs have cost you? Your children have now perished + your Jesus did not save them?!

 He is not a very caring or powerful god. Renounce him… or we will kill your wife also!’

But Nokseng continued, stood on his faith + testified before the entire tribe,

 ‘I love my wife and family, but I cannot and will not deny my Jesus!

So the chief ordered them to kill his wife… again right before his very eyes.

And again Nokseng’s voice rose + broke through his tears:

  ‘Though none go with me, still I will follow 

   Though none go with me, still I will follow 

   Though none go with me, still I will follow 

   No turning back

   No turning back.’

Frustrated, exasperated, the chief demanded Nokseng himself repent or forfeit his own life also.

‘You are a stupid, foolish man and look, your ignorance has cost you your wife + family! Repent!’

But Nokseng had no more words left… and they attacked him.

Except the same melody rose from his dying lips with new words:

  ‘The Cross before me, the world behind me

   The Cross before me, the world behind me

   The Cross before me, the world behind me

   No turning back.

   No turning back.’

… and so Nokseng and his entire family died… for Jesus... in vain?!

No... that was not the end of this story.

That night the chief had a dream.

God appeared to him + reproved him, ‘You have killed My people!’

The chief was so troubled by what he heard and saw that he called the tribe back together the next morning.

‘We have killed the true God’s people,’ he remorsefully confessed and recounted his dream…

 and led them all in repentance from their foul deed.

Somehow someone recalled Nokseng’s song: both his melody + its lyrics, the tribe found forgiveness…

and the chief and his entire tribe… Decided to Follow Jesus

...and to this day, their heirs continue in this tribal inheritance.

And that’s my revelation story from a few years ago

… but that’s not the end of my story today.

This morning God was at work again; not just the same way as before, but exceedingly abundantly above all…

I’d requested we again sing I have Decided, so the worship team gathered behind me + I began to share Nokseng’s story.

But I didn’t get past the introduction: Assam, Gora, Nokseng, when suddenly, 1 of the worship team started waving his arms + cried out, ‘That’s my tribe; those are my people; that’s our story!’

I turned around to see: Sengku, a new student from Assam = the resurrection of Nokseng’s martyrdom: 

the proof of his living inheritance standing right in our midst!

I was undone. My students were undone.

Sengku + I repeated Nokseng’s story together.

And once again, his powerful gospel testimony broke through in new fervency!

... broke through my heart, and my students’ as we gathered together at the front… and worshiped

... and sang Nokseng’s timeless song … and God worked again and did what He does best in hearts: freed, healed, filled!

I have Decided to Follow Jesus and…

I will never be the same.

I always believed there was a Truth.

And I knew I didn’t have it.

It was out there somewhere. Distant. Elusive. Illusory.

But I could never quite grasp it. Just when I felt I had it close enough so I could reach out and apprehend it, it mysteriously moved, shifted, kind of slipped away, beyond me... and my grasp... again.

For lack of a better term, I defined Truth as God. Much of my culture did that, so that fit my parameters too: distant... elusive... illusory... God. Didn’t matter: big ‘G’ or little ‘g’.

And Truth for me was definitely removed and remote, up there somewhere, above the clouds of confusion and ignorance and unknowing, but...

I figured, if I could just find that one first truth, one I could simply count on as absolute truth, then... like building with stones, that first truth would lead me to a second, 

and then connect with a third, and... as I fit them together, building layer upon layer, they would not only stand, but eventually one day reach up and lift me above those hindersome clouds to where I would finally and triumphantly proclaim, ‘I made it, God! Aren’t you proud of me?’

All the while, however, I was oblivious to that still gaping gulf between us; not the vertical gulf, for in my mind I had already bridged that, but the horizontal one, the chasm my self had created, the one still looming between G(g)od and me. So intent on realizing my own personal truth, I had unwittingly created my own personal god: ME!

It’s hard to be god, especially all the time! You’ve got to be perfect and for humans, that demands a lot of work and striving to: meet impossible standards, realize impossible dreams, and self-fulfill your own prophecies.

I tried for a lot of years. Tried real hard. I suspected truth realization might have something to do with character, so I tried all the harder. But some days, after I had purposefully turned over a new leaf just that very morning, no one noticed by noon just what a great guy I had instantly become! That was hard to take! People can be so disappointing!

Don’t know why I was wired this way exactly, but all my pictures in elementary school had mountains in them and I don’t think it was just because I lived in British Columbia. I think it had more to do with trying to ‘Climb every mountain; ford every stream!’

Something like The Sound of Music meets Mission Impossible in my blood, urging me ever onward and upward to make the impossible possible.

Reach the unreachable; attain the unattainable.

Deceptive idealism.

Much of my spiritual journey seemed to end up with me often falling into creeks by that name. They were not only messy, slippery experiences, but most of all, embarrassing.

Self has to keep up appearances for a lot of ego and it doesn’t like to apologize for what it is not.

Unfortunately, I still seem to encounter some of these same waters at times and when you stay too long and wallow, they become, as for all pilgrims of truth, Sloughs of Despond.

And I really did fashion myself a pilgrim, or maybe even a Don Quixote on some formidable quest, forsaking the familiar, turning my back on the status quo to deliberately seek out the exotic unknown, that which could not + would not be nailed down and put in a box...like a coffin.

Or more to my way of thinking, I fancied myself a traveler. Never a tourist.

God forbid! (now who was my god again?) I would never be as crass, lame, nor unforgivably stupid as those tourists: you know, the ones who rent the taxis or go on city tours in double-decker buses with the driver-guide cracking the same old tired jokes he/she’s worked over every trip for the last twenty years?

Same old, same old.

Routine, routine, rut rut routine.

I prided myself that I was able to smell them a mile away and run even further in the opposite direction.

Tourists were not truth-seekers. Tourists never truly know where they are or where they’ve been. I used to ridicule them as poring over their cache of vaguely familiar photos when they got home, the ones they snapped through streaked bus windows while still driving.

‘Funny? why do all these pictures have that same dirt smudge in them!?’

I remember when I was once in Lisbon, Portugal, ‘traveling’ through the Alfama: the former Arab section of the city and oldest district not destroyed by the devastating 18th Century earthquake. Original buildings from over 600 years ago; a still working-class fishermen neighbourhood among narrow, twisting streets and alleys barely wide enough for donkeys to pass.

Sounded interesting... so I went to see it for myself.

While exploring its maze of old shops, houses and marketplaces, I heard a sudden commotion up the street ahead of me and looked up just in time to see one of Lisbon’s unique green-and-black taxis screech to an abrupt stop. Its rear passenger window rolled down.

A camera poked its eye out like a spying U-Boat's periscope, intruding on the medieval scene below.

Then one ‘Click!’ and the interloper receded, back into the anonymous black hole from where it had come. And just as quickly as it had arrived, the taxi sped off again, its window still rolling up with its human cargo anxiously anticipating their next exciting destination.

I stood there, taken aback by the superficiality of what I had just witnessed.

I imagined what bland existence lurked behind that camera incognito.

And then a humorous scenario occurred to me:

Fast Forward to possibly 1 week later, back home in America, where I pictured

‘Fred + Martha’ looking over the photos of their recent quickie European tour.

‘So where’s this one from, Martha? I can’t remember where this was? Looks like some kind of fish market. Disgusting! Look at the way they just lay them out on the street! Probably France. Or was that Spain? They both looked the same. Or... wasn’t there another country in there too? What was it called? Something like.... Portyoucall? Do you remember? Were we there?...

Are you even sure these are our pictures?’

Some people spend their lives like they tour countries: ‘If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium!’

And then, after they’ve returned home and they’re left only with memories, they have no clear recollection of where they’ve been and how it relates to their present picture.

In retrospect, however, I was more like that very tourist I mocked than I ever realized.

Essentially, I was a tourist in my own life: looking for truth, but rolling down my window only enough to poke my opinion out, ignorantly taking the moment’s snapshot, and then, like a tortoise, withdrawing once again into my self-centred darkness; anticipating the later joy of more photographs of places, people and experiences, but never able to appreciate their moments of truth while I was actually there.

And so I kept seeking and stumbling.

One day I stumbled on these lines from T.S. Eliot, a fellow truth-seeker:

“We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.’ (Little Gidding)

But.... I wondered, 
Where is that place, that first place, the first knowledge, that first stone I can count on....
the truth?’

Yesterday was a looonnnnggggg day; up at 6am + drove to ChangRai for my 1st flight to Bangkok: everything went suspiciously almost too smooth. And sure enough, it all seemed to go sideways: my connecting flight to India had been inexplicably cancelled, even months before + no one had notified me?! How to get to Hyderabad looked impossible! But the airline agents worked hard + found a way. It involved quite a circuitous route: flying right over Hyderabad to Mumbai + waiting for another connecting flight 7 hrs later, scheduled to arrive at my destination @ 225am the next day! Of course, my wifi also chose to not connect in Bangkok so I couldn't contact my friends ahead of time to advise them not to come pick me up at our agreed time so they'd be waiting 7 hours too?! And then they charged me an extra $100 for extra weight on my carry-on?!

But God was working through it all + I learned to trust Him more ... again!

I was tired and slept on the 1st part of the Mumbai flight + a couple young guys shared my row. They were filled with life +wanted to talk, me not so much. But they were very generous, shared their food with me +we got to talking about news, they were tired of all the bad news out there so I got to share the Good News of Jesus with them + gave them each copies of my Come Follow Me booklet. They were so thankful: said they'd check out who Jesus is for themselves!

8 hours in Mumbai felt like eternity...waiting for a flight that seemed like it would never take off, but people angels showed up at just the right time... like the 1 guy who just offered to help me access the airport wifi. Here in India that's impossible if you don't have an Indian phone # to get the code? I never even asked; he just volunteered! So then I was able to contact my friends just before they were going to leave to pick me up from Hyderabad airport at our 1st agreed time - now 7 hrs before I would arrive! That would have been a long wait for nothing! So my flight to Hyderabad finally happened around 1am + things turned around...

I slept soundly during the entire 1 1/2 hrs+ my checked bag was 1st off the baggage = a 1st! + my friends were there to welcome me + drive me to their new building.. only 1/2 hr away, rather than the 6 hrs it took before!

And wouldn't you know it? these Indian eagles know how to go more than just an extra mile...

I walked in ... up the top of the stairs + all 70 of them were out lined up in the hallway + surprised me with a welcome beyond expectation! Some knew me from my previous trips but the others I'm sure had no idea who this Henry Canadian was who they were up to welcome at such an hour! And they all started pelting me with flower petals... at 4am: it's hard to outdo such evident love!

I was tired + speechless! And then this creation of coloured seeds+ flowers laid out their welcome!

I am so blessed!

So yesterday was a long, drawn-out struggle: never did find out how/why my plans got so rearranged; sometimes we never get those kind of resolutions.

But today, after only 3 hrs sleep, I had breakfast, a shower, felt somewhat human again + my 1st class with my new eagles: Identity Releases Destiny!

+ I think even this teacher once again had a clearer understanding of who he was + what he was teaching than even just a day ago:

I'm a child of God + I have a Father who loves me = both wings!

And then we went to Thaum Luang Cave where the boys were finally rescued last year.... but they wouldn't let us go in too far!

What a spectacular place for a morning coffee! Thailand, Myanmar + Laos in the distance: this gospel of Jesus is going to the ends of the earth!

Such a wonder-filled Father's Heart seminar with Pastor Tommy + Elizabeth + their church family in Tachileik!
'I am a child of God + I have a Father who loves me'= 2 wings!

Myanmar: there's more than gold in The Golden Triangle!