Morning Thanks--our inescapable needs

What Keo remembers is lines of people outside his father's door, each of them awaiting some a special blessing. His father, he says, was an animist, practiced at the art of giving people some hope in their despair. In the broadest sense, his father was a religious man, someone who dealt in faith. 

You would like to woo that beautiful young woman?--let me dish up some potion, something very special because under its influence, she's will follow you anywhere. He'd reach for a vial or prescribe a herb or root. Keo watched his father deal in faith, watched his father's art, a kind of witch doctor, and he rolled his eyes.

His mother didn't buy it either, oddly enough. She was also "religious," a devout Buddhist, who was thrilled when her son, just eight years old, went off to the temple to become a monk. There he wore the orange robe, off the shoulder, like all the others, spent four years as a monastic, four years learning his mother's Buddhist faith.

But he listened to his father when his father told him he had leave, had to cross the Mekong River, and get to safety in Laos. His father knew war. His father said it would just be a matter of time before the army would grab him, jam a gun in his hands, and send him into the jungle. To fight military conscription the witch doctor had no special potion. 

So Keo left. He was not yet 16 years old. When he did leave, his mother cried. She did more than cry, she wept. She followed him, wetting the road to the river with her tears as she begged him to stay. There's a moment in Keo's telling of his life story that stops him, the moment when, following the direction of a father, he leaves his mother weeping behind him as he sets off to another country and another world. 

His mother is gone now, but that moment he can't help remember without emotion--his mother's grief, his mother's sadness at her son's leaving.

Some wondrous moments in people's lives are alike despite the incredible reach of our vast national and cultural differences.

It would take him years to find a different religion. It would take years for him to find a story that promised the Messiah; it would take the testimony of a man who became a friend, a man who persisted in his claims about a God of love and peace, who was willing to spend hours with him, filling him with a kind of love he'd never thought existed. It would take him some time to become a Christian believer. But he got there.

Last night he told his story again. No one else in that room had a parent who practiced strange magic, no one else in that room ever donned an off-the-shoulder orange sarong and spent four years in a temple learning Buddhism. None of the Euro-Americans in attendance ever crossed the Mekong under the cover of darkness.

But strangely enough, just about everyone in that room, somewhere along the line, became convinced that there is a redeemer, and that that Messiah offers is unique--love, "the greatest of these."

This morning's thanks are for the delightful mysteries of faith, how it is we can be so incredibly different as human beings and yet, at base, so much the same in our undeniable need of deliverance.