Good Friday

Hey guys,

It’s been a while. Over the past 3 weeks It has really hit me on how little time I have left, so I have been trying to spend every single minute that I can with the children and I have neglected email and facebook. 

There’s so much I can blog about and I have so many amazing journal entries and funny stories I could share with you, but I’ll save those for in person. 

This Friday I leave, and it’s going to be the hardest day of the year for me. Every single trip I have made to India I have bawled my eyes out by the end of the trip, and that’s after only being there for 1 week. So I’m really not looking forward to Friday morning, and the children haven’t been looking forward to it either. 

About 2-3 weeks ago I was sitting on the counter in the kitchen where the GCH kids eat,  some of the girls were sweeping the floor and Swathi, the girl our family supports, was sitting next to me holding my hand. After a few minutes she looked at me with her big dark brown eyes and said, “Caleb, don’t go to America.” I almost cried right there and then because I realized I didn’t want to go. The GCH kids don’t feel like kids anymore, they feel like my family. I know all of them so well and I will never forget their faces.

What’s going to make Friday morning even harder for me, is that I don’t know if I will see half these friends ever again. It’s going to be very hard to get back here within the next 4 years because of school, and by then a lot of the kids will be gone, married and far away. What I find joy in, is that one day we will all be back together in heaven.

I think India has changed my viewpoint on heaven. To me paradise is living with hundreds of people that you have so much love for that you cannot contain it. And you’re constantly laughing and joking with each other. So on some level, these past 2 months have been heaven for me, and no one wants to leave heaven. 

With all these emotions going through me, I also feel so much joy and excitement to get back to New York. Last night, I skyped with Communitas during the gathering and at the end my dad said I’d be back by saturday and everyone clapped and cheered. It made me realize that I also have a family back in New York that misses me and is excited for me to be back. 

I will talk about this more in my next blog, and I do plan on doing about 2 more blogs, but I have changed so much. If I were to be honest, I haven’t spent as much time with God as I would have liked to. I mean, I probably spend half my day reading the Bible, other books, praying, journaling and stuff like that, but I thought I would commit more time to it then I did. Either way, God has made the most of the time I gave him and has grown me in so many ways. I truly feel like a different person. 

On some level I think I had some anger inside of me that I had grown accustom to and was completely unaware of. God has worked with me over the past 2 months in cleansing me from that anger. It’s hard to describe how I feel now because it’s still a new feeling to me, if I had to describe I would say unconditional love. I have so much love for people now and I feel like I already had a lot of love for people before. I look at people or even think of people and get the biggest smile on my face, it’s like God is just pouring his love on me and I’m exerting that love onto everyone else. 

I will talk about this more later but I wanted to tell you this now so I could give you another reason as to why I’m excited to come home. I feel like I’m a different person now than when I left for India, and I’m excited to bring the new Caleb back to New York and continue life with my family and friends, only I feel like it will be very different this time around. I don’t know if that makes any sense. It’s kind of like when someone goes to school for 4 years to become a teacher. When they graduate they cannot wait to get out into the real world and have a class room and students of their own. Maybe that confused you even more, well it makes sense to me. 

I was supposed to post these a while ago, but a week after I left they started to dig to reinforce the foundation for the chapel they’re building. It’s been cool to watch all this work being done without machines. 

Also, the water buffalo had a baby a month back and I forgot to post the picture. He’s very friendly. 

This is one of the tile pictures in the children section of the hospital. It gave me a laugh.

This was taken just yesterday from the top of the hospital building. 

Well, I’ll write one more blog hopefully on thursday, and one when I’m back. Or I’ll end up writing them both when I’m back. 

Love you guys, sorry for the lateness of this blog and for it not being quite as interesting. 

~Caleb

Bound to Suffer

Hello guys,

Sorry it’s been so long. About a week ago I noticed that I was spending significantly more time than I should on my computer. I decided that I needed to limit that time spent on my computer and focus on just praying and being in solitude and silence with God. 

Before I get started I would like to make a clarification. One of my friends in New York sent me an email challenging me on my last blog. She said she agreed with the overall point but disagreed with the words, and I now see why. 

What I DID NOT mean to communicate in my last blog was that we are insignificant and worthless to God. He doesn’t really care about us and our struggles. If that’s what you got out of my blog it’s not what I intended. 

There were two major points that I wanted to get across in my last blog. One point is that we as humans typically live insignificant, unimportant, adventureless, boring lives. We grow up, make a lot of bad and a few good choices, we hurt people, we sometimes start a family, and then we grow old and die. When our lives are over we typically didn’t have an impact on the world, and we typically didn’t live a story worth telling. I’m fairly confident that few, perhaps none of you reading this will ever have a book written about how amazing you were, and even if you do, it might be remembered for a generation or so and then die out. 

And my second point. Despite all of that being true about humans, God has a love so amazing for us that it passes our understanding of love. He invites us into a story and adventure that will have an everlasting impact on the world and people. It is through accepting God into our hearts, and most importantly, following him that our lives are made significant. It is through the recognition that because of God we are made significant, that we humble ourselves before him. 

That took longer than I thought it would. 

I titled this blog Bound to Suffer and it kind of goes along with my last blog. I’m still processing this thought myself so bear with me. 

I could talk about this topic for 20 pages and still not have half my thoughts down, so I’m going to have to summarize. 

My personal beliefs, 

I don’t believe God always causes suffering. I believe he allows it to happen for certain reasons unknown to us. Take Job for example, God never inflicted the suffering on Job himself, he just allowed it to happen.

I know a few people who are reading this that truly believe that God has everything happen for a reason. If this is what you believe that’s fine, I’m sure you can still get something out of this blog. However, I can’t come to terms with this fact; right now about 15 kilometers from me is a little girl about 4 years old. Her parents are both dead and she’s walking down the street in search of food. There’s a good chance she will get kidnapped, raped, and then be left alone to die. If this isn’t going on in Rajahmundry, it is somewhere else in this fallen world. I cannot accept that that was Gods plan for this girl because it isn’t consistent with Jesus’ character, therefore it isn’t consistent with God. 

That being out of the way, what does the Bible say were supposed to do with suffering and hardship?

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. (James 1:2-3)

Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3-4)

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have felt at some point in our lives like we were alone. Like God packed up his bags and left us with all of these problems to solve and work through on our own. What James and Paul are saying is that when this happens, were supposed rejoice in it! Were supposed to welcome hardship in and be glad that were suffering. 

I think about the idea of being joyful when I’m struggling and I can see myself doing this. I can picture myself saying, “Jesus endured a lot more for me, and if this is what I have to go through to grow closer to him, well then amen!” However, lately I’ve been thinking about the extremes. What if God were to “allow” my mother to get cancer and die, or if God were to allow me to get hit by a car while biking up First Avenue and be put in a wheelchair for the rest of my life? Would I be saying to myself, “Amen!”? 

You may be thinking, well those things wouldn’t by from God’s hands. The fact is God can intervene in any situation. He has the capability to stop bad things from happening to us, and occasionally does. Timm Kelly’s Mother just passed away two weeks ago from cancer. God could have saved her, he could have healed her. He didn’t. 

On some level I’m going to leave this blog unanswered. It’s not like this is a new topic, people who are much smarter than me, and have beards to prove it, have debated over this and still don’t have what I believe is a solid answer. So you can’t expect an 18 year old boy who’s growing about six and a half pieces of facial hair to have the answer. I’ll tell you what I think though. 

First, some things we know about God. God is good, God is loving, he cares about us more than we can understand, he wants us to tell him about our struggles and hardships, he wants to see us happy and joyful, he wants a relationship with us, it’s inconsistent for God to intervene in all situations, we don’t know why God sometimes chooses to intervene and other times steps aside, God himself can give us all we need to be joyful and spiritually healthy, through hardship and trial we develop perseverance and faith. 

Keep all those things in mind.

I believe God views suffering differently than us. I think we can safely say that God views suffering from a God view point and we view it from a Human viewpoint. We tend to focus on today’s struggles and allow ourselves to get overwhelmed by the suffering instead of embracing it. When we pray we tend to ask God, “Please save us! Take this hardship away, this can’t be of your will!” What if instead we prayed, “Thank you for this chance to prove my commitment to you, I pray that you give me the strength and courage to carry on through these trials of hardship.”

I was reading in one of my books that sometimes in order for suffering to come to an end, we need to embrace it. For example, when we are children and get a sliver, we cry in pain when our parents start to pull it out. Our parents know that in order for the pain to come to an end, it has to get significantly worse first. As we grow we start to understand this concept. We start wanting to embrace the pain and we welcome it in, knowing that it’s necessary in order for it to stop all together.

I believe this is more of God’s viewpoint on suffering. It hurts in the moment, but let’s look to the future and embrace this pain now, knowing it will come to an end and we will grow from this experience. Suffering does the most damage to us when we choose to resist it rather than embrace it. If the child refuses to let the parent pull the sliver out, it’s going to get infected and get significantly worse. 

What’s amazing about God is his capability of taking something terrible, evil and wrong and turning it into something beautiful. Jesus’ death for example, Judas betrayed Jesus and allowed him to be crucified for 30 coins. This was the work of Satan, who was constantly trying to turn people against Jesus. There were several times in the New testament where people went to stone him but he “slipped away from the crowds.” Satan was making attempt after attempt to kill Jesus, and he eventually succeeded. God, however, turned it into something beautiful. He created a way out of this sinful world for every human being through the death of his son. 

If we give God the chance to pull the sliver out of our lives, he can truly replace the pain and suffering with something beautiful. We don’t have to like the suffering, and we certainly don’t have to believe that God brought the suffering into our lives and willed it to be so, even though he did not stop it. But we can embrace it and move toward him, or resist it and move away from him.

Another amazing thing about God is how he can make us truly joyful when we’re suffering. E Stanley Jones lost his children and wife while he was brining the news of Jesus to China in the 18th century. Here’s a man dedicated to God, serving him with his life, and God allowed this to happen. The most miraculous thing about it, is that Stanley fell more and more in love with God everyday. He had a peace and joy that was clearly from God, and that joy is reflected in his writings. 

For me, if my parents were to die in a car accident today, there’s a fairly good chance I would jump off my apartment building. I cannot imagine embracing that pain, and God would have to do miracles in me. The reason I titled this blog bound to suffer, is I believe in order for me to have a relationship with God where I completely trust him, I need to suffer. I need to get to the point where it feels like God packed up his bags and left me in a dark hole for a week, or a month, or a year. I’m not going to develop perseverance, hope, faith, trust and love for God until something bad happens. It’s a scary thought, but since I want that close relationship with God, I need to be broken so he can heal me and develop perseverance in me.

I do hope and pray that God keeps my family and friends safe and instead starts with some lower level of suffering. How about eating India food for 2 months? I can tell you certain parts of my body are definitely suffering because of that.

I know this doesn’t answer all the questions, but I found it to be really interesting. If you do have a response feel free to shoot me an email. Calebmayes@me.com

What God says, on the other hand, is “The life you save is the life you lose.” In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself; and only a life given away for love’s sake is a life worth living. To bring this point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of men’s wisdom, he was a perfect fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring under not a cross but a delusion.

Frederick Buechner

With love, 

~Caleb