November 30, 2005
Dear Friends,
The year 2005 is ending for us a lot better than it started.
In January and February Arch was weakened by cancer treatment,
and Linnis was taking care of him at Mission Haven in Georgia,
a 10-minute drive from the clinic where he was receiving a “transplant”
(which means in practice extra-heavy chemotherapy) for his multiple
myeloma. If you have to go through such a thing, there is no better
place. Now, Arch is in São Paulo winding up a semester’s
classes at the seminary of the Independent Presbyterian Church
of Brazil, where he is giving a continuing education course for
pastors, and at the Methodist University, where he is teaching
future seminary professors in the graduate school. In December,
the seminary will hold its commencement, and the Presbytery will
hold its annual meeting, probably in two all-day sessions a week
apart. Linnis is deep into handicrafts, not her professional training
but a lifelong interest, finding new things to make and new ways
of gaining income for women who want to leave prostitution.
If it is a long way from the transplant experience last February,
we have also come a long way from the trip to Brazil last April
15 and the infection Arch was hospitalized for afterwards. We
are where we want to be and are very grateful for everything that
has made it possible, including the support of many who will receive
this newsletter.
Monday, November 14, was a different kind of day here in São
Paulo. The next day being a holiday, many people didn’t
go to work. They got out of town or found something else to do,
such as shopping.
Linnis went to a street named the “25th of March”
that day to do some purchasing for one of her projects at work.
Others, more than Linnis had expected, went to that street to
begin their Christmas shopping. Still others went there to sell
something.
What would you do to earn money if all else failed? In our long-gone
childhood, one had the idea that “if all else failed”
one could still “pump gas” in a filling station. Nowadays,
we may think of working at McDonald’s. In Brazil, “if
all else fails,” one thinks of selling something in the
street. “All else” has failed for many people here
in São Paulo, and one sees the result in the street. On
the “25th of March” Street and on certain others,
the sidewalks are so full of vendors stands that a pedestrian
has to step onto the asphalt to get around them, sharing the street
with cars and buses driven by São Paulo drivers (Look out!).
The street vendors are a problem for the taxpaying shopkeepers
on that street, which raises tensions. There are special police
whose job it is to confiscate the wares of unlicensed vendors.
When they start doing it the vendors will run to get away from
them, and the rest of us will run to get away from the confusion.
Linnis came, did what she had come for, and left, relieved that
the special police hadn’t set off a panic. The next day
the newspaper Diario de São Paulo reported that
one million people had visited that street that day.
It got Arch to thinking about the Gospel of Mark, the subject
of several of his classes. The world of Mark’s Gospel is
crowded. There are so many people in a house that people dig through
the roof to get to him. Jesus is so exposed to pushing and shoving
on the lakeshore that he has his disciples keep a getaway boat
handy. More than once, Jesus and the disciples are mobbed where
they are staying, so much so that they have no opportunity to
eat. They get away from a situation like that, people follow them.
As Arch reads the passage, they finally get a chance to eat themselves
after they have fed five thousand others.
Can we focus on that this Christmas, as we shop in our malls,
crowded but safer than the “25th of March” Street?
We know that God loves you and God loves me, but can we really
believe that God loves the crowd and sent his Son into the middle
of it?
In mission,
Arch and Linnis
The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
44
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