Fantail

I've been enjoying watching this fellow in recent days as he flits about in our quince tree.  He seems to be there most times I'm in the kitchen.  He (or she) moves fast, though, so this was the best photo I could get!

New glasses

My old ones snapped in two about 10 days ago, and I received the new ones yesterday.  It's quite a different look, but I think I like it :-)  Also, we had absolutely fantastic service from Specsavers New Lynn: no hard sell, prompt service and they really put themselves out to accomodate me and my slightly unusual glasses requirements!  Highly recommended.

Euthanasia

This week I listened to an Ideas programme from Radio New Zealand National on Euthanasia.  The same arguments for euthanasia that I have heard elsewhere came up in the programme: it gives people control over their lives, and people should have a way out if they don't want to be a burden on their families.  As a Christian, I wish to reject both those arguments: control of our lives (including their ending) belongs to God, and independence is not a virtue.

However Dr. Rodney Syme, the last speaker to be interviewed, made an intriguing point that was quite new to me.  He is pro-euthanasia and has dealt with many patients who have wished to end their own lives.  In his experience it is only the middle class and well-educated who want euthanasia - the poor don't seem to ask for it and he doesn't know why.  I wonder if it is because control and independence are luxuries of the middle class?  The poor have never been allowed to feel that they are in control of their lives, and they need to be interdependent in order to survive, so illness can't take from them things they never had anyway...

Dr Sinead Donnelly, who spoke from the anti-euthanasia perspective, also made a point that made me think.  She talked about exploring with patients what makes their lives unbearable and working in her practice as a palliative care doctor to relieve the causes of their suffering so that they no longer want to die.  It reminded me of my perspective on abortion: we need to create a world where people are able to carry their pregnancies to term, not just prevent them from ending them.  What do we, as a society, need to do so that those with incurable illnesses feel able to go on with their lives?


As something of an aside, I was startled to realise that, were I to have a different attitude to my CFS, I would qualify for euthanasia under the legislation currently in the private members bill ballot in New Zealand.  You have to be over the age of 18, have an untreatable (rather than simply terminal) condition and consider your suffering to be unbearable.  Many people with CFS in New Zealand appear to meet that latter condition, too, even if I do not.

Educating donors

I thought I'd share my response to this post by Vinoth Ramachandra in Sri Lanka.

Hi Vinoth,

You raise good points but, like Carol, I've been wondering what I - a rich westerner - can do with them.  Here are two thoughts:

1. Handled appropriately, child sponsorship itself can be an excellent way to educate donors.  I'm currently reading a Psychology for a Better World by Niki Hare (available as a free download from the author's page here).  The book looks at what psychological research can tell us about how to go about effecting social change.  One point she makes is that people are more likely to respond generously to the plight of one person in need than to the plight of many people in need. Child sponsorship makes use of that psychological trait by giving a potential donor a single person to respond to.

Once the potential donor has responded in that way, the agency providing sponsored children is in a position to further educate them about development needs and where they can help.  However, without the 'hook' of sponsorship, the agency would have been unlikely to be able to provide such education: child sponsorship gives them the entree into the life of the donor and can provide an educational opportunity.

I don't know about other Western countries, but the two main Christian agencies in New Zealand that provide child sponsorship (TEAR Fund and World Vision) both give donors the opportunity to support many other development and emergency relief projects and actively educate donors about them.  For myself, as a young adult at a music festival I was moved to sponsor a child through one of these agencies.  Over time, I came to understand more about development and have supported a variety of other projects instead.

2. The advantages of directly supporting indigenous development initiatives are obvious but, in practise, it's very difficult to do.  I agree with Carol that it's difficult to find such initiatives - I suspect that the majority would, indeed, be impossible to find as it's not trivial for people with little access to resources to have a web presence.

However, in two cases I have come across indigenous initiatives that I have been keen to support.  In the case of one (BEN Namibia - which provides bicycle ambulances etc. in Namibia) this wasn't too difficult: through their website I was able to make a credit card donation and could have set up monthly donations etc. just as I could for a New Zealand charity.  In the other case (Al Nayzak - an organisation which provides extension education to gifted kids in Palestine) I needed to make an international bank transfer directly to their account.  I was unable to do this at first as my NZ bank appeared to have no links to their Palestinian bank and, in the end, I had to transfer money into their Israeli account from which I gathered they would - with difficulty - be able to transfer the money to Palestine.

My ability to support both of these indigenous charities depended on them:
- having a web presence
- being able to communicate with me in English
- having access to the international banking system

This doesn't seem ideal!

I suspect that a better way for people such as myself to support indigenous initiatives is for NGOs in our own countries to take up a brokerage role.  They can identify reputable charities overseas, bring them to our attention and then handle for us the communication and money transfer aspects.  In New Zealand, TEAR Fund has taken on this role, and it sounds from Carol like TEAR Australia and Christian Aid do something similar.

Thanks again for your thought-provoking post.

--Heather :-)

Healing as a sign

Recently I've found myself in a number of conversations about why God hasn't healed various people.  Implicit in the question is the assumption - an assumption I've shared - that the primary reason God would heal a person is to relieve their suffering.  However, as Martin and I have been reading the New Testament book of John, that assumption has been challenged.


Firstly, in John 9 Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who was blind from birth.  The disciples want to know why this has happened.  Jesus tells them it is "so that the works of God might be displayed in him" - presumably by the healing Jesus then carries out.

We come across something similar in John 11.  Firstly, Jesus hears that his dear friend Lazarus is very sick, at which he says: "This illness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it."  A few days later, news reaches Jesus that Lazarus has died.  Jesus passes this news on to his disciples with the words "Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe."  He then goes to where Lazarus is and brings him back to life.  This is followed by many people coming to believe in Jesus.

In both the other healings recorded in John (the healing of the official's son in John 4 and the healing of the lame man in John 5) the reason why the healing occured isn't mentioned.

Miracles in John are frequently referred to as 'signs'.  All four of these healings certainly functioned as such: they pointed to Jesus' being the Messiah and people were polarized by them accordingly.  Relief of suffering (either of the person themselves, or of those around them) seems to be at most a secondary purpose.  Indeed, in the case of the healing of Lazarus, Jesus was pleased that he hadn't arrived before Lazarus died - even though he had compassion on his sisters for their suffering - because it made a better sign.

So, in wondering why God hasn't healed various people, at the very least we should consider whether their healing would be useful to God as a sign, rather than only thinking about the suffering their ailment causes.


This all seems rather 'cold', though.  Doesn't God care about the suffering caused by illness and disability?  That seems unlikely - but it does seem possible that he cares about them less than we do!

Consider the story of the paralyzed man whose friends lowered him through the roof to Jesus (Mark 2).  When the man arrived at his feet, Jesus didn't heal him - instead, he said "Son, your sins are forgiven".  Only when the Pharisees challenged his authority to forgive sins - something that, after all, only God could do - did Jesus heal him.  Jesus seems to have cared a lot more about the man's sinfulness than his disability.  He seems to have used the healing primarily as a means of demonstrating that he really did have the power to forgive sins.  Similarly in John, being recognised as the Messiah seems to have been much more important to Jesus than actually healing people's physical illnesses.

 
I think that my/our questions about why God hasn't healed people may actually show up a significant problem in my/our understanding.  Bad as illness and disability are, sin - and being out of relationship with God - is a much more serious problem.  I don't think I remember that anything like enough!

Fun with hessian

Late last year I acquired a coffee bean sack.

Here are some of the things I've made from it :-) 

Rooster doorstop for my mother-in-law

Kokako coasters to go with 'kokako' brand fair trade drinking chocolate

Padded felt picture of a kokako for my niece

Padded felt kowhai picture for a good friend

Coffee bean sacks are huge!  All of this has used just over half of one side of it!

Sweatshop clothing

At our Bible study group today we got talking about the collapse of the sweatshop clothing factories in Bangladesh and about how we can avoid supporting such factories.  It's a topic Martin and I have been wrestling with for some years: we want to buy products from the Majority World in order to support the employment of desperately needy people; however, we'd rather buy from producers who treat their workers well, if at all possible.


Unfortunately, finding clothing produced in the Majority World in decent conditions is really difficult.  It's easiest to find baby clothing, then childrenswear, then womenswear: menswear is next to impossible.  For adults, T-shirts seem to be the easiest things to find, then really dressy clothes: everyday stuff is hard to source, as is underwear.


With those caveats, here's a list of all the retailers I've been able to locate that sell adult clothing:

T-shirts
Marketplacers (an initiative of the Baptist Union here in NZ)
Liminal
Micah clothing

Womenswear only
Chandichowk (in the UK but ship internationally)

Menswear only
From the Source (in the UK but ship internationally)

Mens and womenswear
Spirals of Abundance (in the UK but ship internationally)
Eternal creation (in Nepal, ship internationally)
Kowtow clothing (mostly womenswear)
Nomads clothing (in the UK, mostly womenswear)
People tree (in the UK but ship internationally)

There are also various people who sell fair trade clothing on Amazon.

Note that we've never actually bought any fair trade clothing other than T-shirts and underwear ourselves.  When we need new clothes, firstly we'll look to see if we can buy them secondhand.  If that fails, we see if we can find anything fair trade that we like and can afford (most of the fair trade clothing is super-expensive).  If we can't, we then just buy something 'normal'.  At that point, we'd rather buy something that gave a poor person a horrible job in a sweatshop than buy something made in New Zealand that does the sweatshop workers out of employment altogether.

In addition, at our study group I mentioned an article reflecting on the building collapse in Bangladesh and how one Christian woman is trying to respond to it.  She includes a few links to information about fairly traded goods, although a cursory look at them seemed to suggest they mostly dealt with food rather than clothing.