Editorial note: Consider this the first installment of Fenton and Pat's blog. It was written before I began posting their blogs to this website and goes back in time a bit, but it's definitely worth the read.
by Fenton Rees
September 24, 2015
We arrived last night in Libreville (Gabon), with all our baggage. We even experienced a little mercy from the check in staff in Paris when we had to check one of our too heavy carry-on pieces (no prizes for guessing whose that was!) and didn’t charge us for it, even though he should of. We spent last nite in the guest house and will take the 2 hour flight by Cessna to Bongolo this afternoon.
This is still the dry season, meaning it is almost continually cloudy but almost never rains. But it is still quite warm; it was 81F and humid when we landed late in the afternoon. Rainy season, (which will arrive before we leave), means that it rains almost every day, but between rains the sun comes out and it becomes more like a sauna. Hopefully this happens slowly so we can adapt.
Just before we left I (Fenton) ordered a book I saw recommended by WORLD magazine, “True Paradox, How Christianity Makes Sense of our Complex World”, by David Skeel. Even though it is a fairly quick read, it’s taken me this long to get through to the end. In it he discusses how Christianity does a better job than other systems of thought, (Communism, Atheism, Pantheism, Islam or other religions), of making sense of things that people through the ages have struggled to explain such as:
• Why we appreciate beauty, whether in nature (one of the reasons to hike), or in art or poetry etc. (OK, I missed out on the appreciate poetry gene). And also why so often it is so fleeting.
• The problem of pain and suffering.
• Our sense that there should be justice in the world.
• And the almost universal belief in some form of after-life.
Towards the end of the book, in the chapter on heaven, he discusses how most Christians through the ages have believed that the world and cosmos will NOT be destroyed at the end of the age, but rather TRANSFORMED into something better. He quotes contemporary theologian N T Wright: “Heaven and earth are not poles apart, needing to be separated forever, or simply different ways of looking at the same thing (= Pantheism), but radically different but they are made for each other in the same way as male and female”. So then if the world will be transformed, rather than destroyed, the contributions we make to beauty and justice, no matter how small, have eternal significance. He then quotes Wright again:
“What we DO in the present by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself – will last into God’s future. The activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable …. they are part of what we may call building for God’s Kingdom”.
It just so happened that as I read that last paragraph we bumped onto the runway in Libreville. May my building / fixing the hospital and Pat’s caring for the needy be in some way more than just making this life a little less beastly for those around Bongolo. And may your preaching / teaching / sewing / coding / etc, etc be likewise. And maybe for us engineers it also includes making or restoring some engineering thing of beauty and function.
While in Wales we took a ride on a narrow gauge railway hauled by a small steam locomotive. There was something pleasing about the sound of the steam engine chuffing its way up the hill, as opposed to a more mechanical sounding diesel engine. While in England I also learned that they are almost done with restoring a LARGE steam engine from 1924 called “The Flying Scotsman”; one that used to run regularly the 400+ miles from London to Edinburgh. And had a clocked top speed of 100mph. And they are going to run it again in some form of regular service. How cool will that be ! I’m not sure what the tree-hugging greenies thing about that;- this is the antithesis of supposedly eco-friendly electric vehicles. Ah well.