So do all who live in such times

I was going through my old papers, and I found something I wrote a few years ago. I presume, from the content, that it was 2008. And I presume, from the style, that it was meant to be spoken. I don't think I ever used it anywhere. So I suppose it can make its debut here!

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How many of you have watched lord of the Rings? Ok?

Well, if you haven't, I encourage you to! One of my favourite scenes in the story is this: We have a land where a huge war is brewing... and we have Frodo, who is just a pretty normal guy, from a small town, nobody special. And as things turn out a really major responsibility for protecting their land from this major attack falls to him... and its difficult. He is speaking to Gandalf, who is his mentor sortof, about it. He is saying that he wishes these things weren't happening in is time, to him, his family, his community, his nation.

The same way we would wish for peaceful lives...
"Why AIDS?" "Why the situation in Zim?" "Why xenophobia?" "Why racism, violence, crime, potential recession, escalating oil prices, escalating food prices, corruption... the things we worry about, our families worry about..."
"Why now, why us? Why do these things happen in our generation?" "Why are we in SA now, when people might think things are looking a bit precarious?" "We wish they weren't happening now, to us and our people."

And Gandalf, his mentor, replies to this wish:
"So do I, and so do all who live in such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

We don't get to decide where we will be born, or when, or the situation we will be born into. It says in Acts 17 that God determined the times set for them and the exact places were they should live. If you're living in South Africa today, its because God chose to put you here. With full knowledge of the situation, with full knowledge of the problems.

What you decide is what you are going to do in the time and place and situation God put you.

Guys, do you think that God is worried about the future of our nation? We've been watching these stories of xenophobic attacks on the news recently... do you think it freaks God out? Do you think he is having emergency meetings? Or putting together a working group to investigate the problem?

Or do you think perhaps that he has already got a plan? Plan A, just a continuation of the plan he has always had, that he has put the solutions in the hands and hearts of his people, that he has already called his church to be salt and light in a community he knew before time he would set them in?

Do you think these events suprise God? Or do you think he has already gifted people, called people, equipped people to be the answer?

Do you think God is waiting for Thabo Mbeki to announce Zimbabwe is a crisis situation? Or address the nation on xenophobia? Do you think God is waiting for the government to do something about poverty or AIDS or job creation?

Or do you think he is waiting for his church, his people, us, who he is already equipped and enabled, to rise up and actually do what he has called them to do?

Found

I know pretty much no one ready my blog, but for what its worth, to whoever stumbles here:

When I was a teenager, I used to grapple with the idea of God. If he was out there, it made no sense: the world was cruel and hard and painful, how could God be out there, and let things be as they are? But then the thought of there being no God was even worse, it felt like if there was no God then nothing whatsoever made any sense at all, everything seemed pointless.

I guess I was a bit of a smart-alec (to use an Americanism!), I used to think I was pretty smart and I used to tease my Christian friends about their illogical beliefs.

Then one day one of those Christian friends invited me along to their youth group. I went along just for the hang-out. But I came home curious. I picked up a bible to investigate this thing that seemed to make such an impact on people. Paging through the stories of Jesus, I realised that they were true. And I remember thinking "why has nobody told me about this before??

The thing I discovered in that moment was what Christians would call the gospel (it means the 'good news'). That the God who created us and loves us, and who we have pretty much ignored, he saw our sorry state and how we are slaves to ourselves and our desires and how we destroy each other, and instead of the punishment we deserved he sent his son to die to to pay the price for our sin, and to set us free.

So God himself paid the price to fix the broken relationship between him and us, even though he wasn't the one who broke it. Through Jesus, he forgives our sin and sets us free from all the rubbish that we have gotten ourselves tangled in in this life.

And all we can do is respond with grateful hearts, and receive what he as done for us already.

In the Bible, Jesus once told us that he came to seek and save what is lost (Luke 19:10). Lets be found by him.

Mazibuko-Trollip coverage

I had the most trippy experience a couple of days ago. I read a Daily Dispatch online (DD) article about the Mazibuko-Trollip contest for the DA caucus leader position. The DD told me that of the seven Eastern Cape DA MPs, one supports Mazibuko, five support Trollip, and one could not be reached for comment but was believed to also support Trollip. A nice little article with quotes from the various people involved, titled Home support for DA's Trollip:



The trippiness occurred later in the day when I went to the TimesLive website, and saw and article entitled DA Eastern Cape backs Mazibuko:



At first I thought perhaps the TimesLive article had more recent information, but looking at it, it doesn't. It just quotes the single EC DA MP that supports Mazibuko and presents it as if the EC supports Mazibuko... ???

The conspiracy theorist in me says "media bias!!" or would maybe insinuate that Mazibuko is favoured by the press, or perhaps just that the press likes drama and DA support for Mazibuko in Trollip's home province (the EC) is drama.

But the TimesLive article is from sapa, so I suppose this may be more indicative of people not checking things properly before publishing them. More a problem of time pressure than bias, perhaps. Especially for online news.

Either way, it is certainly another reason not to believe everything you read :)
And I've long said the DD is a great paper, kudos to them.

I emailed the TimesLive people to point the problem with their article out, no response though.

The Dubula I'bhunu ruling

My 2c on what I believe is a terrible flaw in Judge Lamont's Dubula I'bhunu ruling.

The judgement seems to argue that:

* Hate speech incites violence.
* We evaluate whether it is hate speech by considering how people interpret the words.
* Words can be interpreted differently based on context and background, so who the words are said to is significant.
* Although Dubula I'bhunu was sung primarily in political rally contexts, where the bulk of listeners were familiar with it's struggle context, it was also broadcast to all South Africans, who may not all interpret it in the same way.
* We therefore need to consider how it would be interpreted by all South Africans.
* Given how the song was interpreted in the media, the violent "kill the boers" interpretation was out there in the public space.

I think all of that is fine. But then Judge Lamont speaks about how sufficient people would interpret it as killing boers (especially given that it was translated that way in the media) that it can be considered hate speech.

But wait.

It seems to me that to be considered hate speech, the people interpreting it as "kill the boers" would actually have to be incited to kill boers.

But that is not the case, I believe. The people who interpret it as "kill the boers" are people who are afraid that OTHERS might kill the boers.

So... it seems to me that even if this song is legitimately interpreted in two different ways, it is not incitement to violence, as those who interpret it as violent (predominantly white SAfricans) are not being incited to violence.

This is the fatal flaw in his argument, in my opinion.

He even noted that no violence could be linked to this song.

There is no incitement to violence, hence there is no hate speech.

#myopinion

Stories from today

Last year I used to pray at the healing rooms in my city. It is really just a place that is open for a few hours once a week or so, where Christians are available to pray for people who want prayer. For healing, or anything really. Its pretty cool, mostly because God actually heals people. A few weeks ago some ladies I know prayed for a lady who was blind, and God healed her, and now she can see. For serious.

Anyway I was out of town for quite a few months this year so I got taken off the healing rooms roster, and I haven't got it together to get myself involved again since I got back. But in the interim a new healing room has been opened in my city, in an informal settlement on an old dump site closish to where I live.

So I thought I'd go pray there this week. I've only been there once before so I wasn't quite sure how to get there. I kindof found the place on google maps (tricky because dumps don't have street numbers!), I drove down there, but at some point you turn off the suburby tar road onto a dirt road, that continues for a few hundred metres through a bushy area, then you get to the dump.

So I turned onto the dirt road, and drove past a guy in the road. He tried to get my attention, but I was a bit nervous to slow down and roll my window down because there was no one else around, and... well, you know. Bad things have happened to girls in bushy areas not far from there. Anyway so I carried on driving and pretended not to notice him, but this guy was persistent, he started running after my car shouting "sisi, sisi!"

I don't know if its some sort of white guilt thing or what, but I feel terrible when I treat people rudely because I am afraid they might do something to me. I saw a few people further down the road and figured that probably made it safer, so I stopped and rolled down the window. And the guy came up to the window and said "sisi, you don't want to go this way, this road goes to a dump!"

Lol, so the poor dude was running after my car trying to warn me! Shame!

Anyway, the lady who leads the prayer room went to visit a couple of people in the settlement before the prayer room time, among them the lady who God healed of blindness a few weeks ago.

I didn't go into the lady's home, it was a shack and too small for everyone to squeeze in to. So I just waited outside. But while I was waiting I noticed the she had put up shelves on the front of her house with pot plants on them, and she had hung up a sun hat as decoration, and she had put up these decorative metal... I don't know what they are called, but the curley metal corner shapes you might find maybe in the front veranda of an old style house.

The flower pots were all broken, and the metal curley bits were just tied on with bright red chord. But the style of decor reminded me of my gran, those sort of pretty ornate touches.

So anyway, this story has no point, it was just something that struck me. I guess I could say it made me sad, that this lady living in a shack, on a dump site where the ground is a mulch of soil and rubbish and it is always wet, that she made her house pretty with broken things. I guess I could say I was amazed at that woman, or humbled. But I don't know really.

Bang bang club

I saw the movie Bang Bang Club this past weekend. I thought it was pretty good actually. I've read a few criticisms of it, which I think are valid. But it was also good to see some of the things that were going on during that period, and to remember what we got through.

But this post is not about any of that. This post is about non-South African actors playing South Africans. The accents in this movie were a bit weird, but then I think contrived South African accents will probably almost always sound weird to actual South Africans. And they weren't the worst, as South African accents go.

But was what truly funny was their slang. I assume some sort of South African accent coach must have told them that South African men use the slang words "bru" and "china." Which is true. But the characters seem to fit them into nearly every sentence. Really.

So as the world produces ever more movies set in South Africa, I am putting forward a list of alternative South African slang expressions. As a service to humanity.

I can only think of a few for now, but please feel free to add as you think of any...
(as I was writing this list I found some lists of SAfrican slang online, on wikipedia for example. You'd think the movie directors would have done a google search ;) )

South African slang
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china
bru
boetie
hectic
eish
Ag
tjommies
dinges
woes
kiff

Talking to people

Do you sometimes find words coming out of your mouth, and even as you are saying them you are cringing and a part of your brain is crying out "why are you doing this?!?!?!"

Well, that happens to me sometimes, and one recent occasion was at a student conference in Stellenbosch. I had ditched some of my fellow students who were still out drinking, and come home around 1am-ish, so that I wouldn't be an absolute vegetable at the conference that day. We were staying in res accommodation at Stellenbosch so there was a Stellenbosch student on duty to at the front desk. I chatted to him briefly on my way up to my room, asking him what he was studying. He was a theology student, doing a Master's thesis on something about the Christian response to poverty.

This was when I opened my mouth and had the "what the heck are you saying Laura??" experience, as I asked him why he would choose to study theology as Stellenbosch, in the actual actual department where apartheid was conceptualized? (He was coloured, maybe that makes my question make more sense.)

Anyway, outside of my instant mortification at having asked such a question, we had an interesting chat about it and he said some very thought provoking things.

One of the things he said was that he wouldn't be there if he didn't believe that people had the capacity to change. Isn't that quite profound?

Blue collar

So here is another embarrassing story from My Life.

When I was in the higher grades of high school I was thinking about what career I wanted to embark on, and what direction I wanted to take after school. I thought it through, reflecting on the fact that I like methodical work, I like structure (I liked accounting at school), but that I also have a bit of a practical streak, and I like doing things with my hands. So it occurred to my young brain that perhaps the perfect thing for me would be to work in some sort of production line in a factory. Methodical, practical, structured, sounded like my kind of thing!

I went to my mom and told her that I wanted to be [to quote] "a blue collar worker." Se told me that I didn't know what that meant. I responded that I did, that it meant working in a factory, and that is what I wanted to do.

Of course, in retrospect, I didn't know what it meant. Well, I knew that it possibly meant working in a factory, but I didn't know that it meant working very heard to earn a pittance, probably without benefits, probably without job security, and being the bottom rung in the employment food chain (or near to the bottom rung).

Now that is just something I can't get my head around. There has to be something terribly wrong with a society where people can work hard all day, making or processing things that society needs, and earn barely enough to live on (possibly not even enough to live on). Whereas some guy in an office can come up with "angry birds" and make a gabajillion dollars, and some other guy with a connection in local government can make a gabajillion on a tender for chair covers for official functions, or unnecessary water purifiers for hospitals. That he just buys from a supplier and makes a killing selling at a massive profit.

I would never argue for a society where we all just earn a flat rate of money, there needs to be room for people who work harder to earn more, or people who take up more responsibility to earn more.

But really, someone who works hard for a full day, in an office block or in a production line, should go home with enough to live in a decent place and provide for their families in a decent way.

"Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty." James 5:4

Were do the kids go now?

I read this article a few days ago and it made me sad:
Sobukwe would not be proud of us.

It is part of a great series the Daily Dispatch are doing, where journos travel the Eastern Cape and speak to people and write their stories. The story I've linked to above describes their meeting Robert Sobukwe's son.

I'm not into big shrines or monuments to the dead. But really, it is sad that this man is buried in an unkempt nondescript grave, forgotten by many (except his family). I've been to Biko's grave too, and it is also not in a great state. Biko's grave is in a (very unimpressive) "garden of remembrance." Which is basically just a wall and a plaque.

Perhaps it would seem less cold to leave graves to be personal matters, to families, if we had other places to remember these people. But we don't.

I remember as a child, going on school field trips to the 1820 settlers monument, to the German settlers monument. Going to historical buildings in Grahamstown, that old fort thing. That old gaol in East London. Where do the kids go now?

I know I am terribly biased, but it seems to me that so much of the history of South Africa is written in the Eastern Cape, in small cities and small towns and rural areas. But we are just not bothering to tell the story.

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USA Democrat boycott

I just so happen to be in a smallish town in the USA at the moment. And it just so happens that this smallish town has been in the national news in the US: it has become a hide out for House Democrats.

I don't really understand American politics, but I think the bottom line is that the Republicans now have a majority in the House in some states. So they can pass bills that the Democrats object to, because of their majority vote.

So the Democrat strategy is to literally run away - they escape to other states, so the Republicans don't have quorum, and can't pass their bills.

Apparently there are over 30 House Democrats from other states holed up in motels in the city I'm in.

And what is even more ludicrous is the fact that this is a tried and true, long standing American political tradition. Lincoln himself once jumped out of a window and ran away to stop the Democrats getting quorum!