Thoughts On Being Grateful

Over the past two months here in Nepal, Heidi and I have been struggling with what it means to be grateful in this place. I decided to post some of our thoughts and questions so that our friends and family members who read this blog can see how and why we’ve been wrestling with this idea. I’m grateful (an appropriate sentiment for this blog entry) to friends who have listened to us and shared their own reflections on the concept of gratefulness in contexts similar to Nepal. I’ve taken the liberty of stealing some of their words and thoughts.

Should we feel grateful in this place? grateful that we were not born here? grateful that we can basically leave whenever we want? grateful that we have the economic power to give someone on the street more money today than they will make this year? Should we be grateful that our apartment is bigger than most peoples' homes and has far less people living in it? We don't feel like we should be grateful for these expressions of inequality. Rather we feel like we should be ashamed, humiliated, outraged. Perhaps instead of being grateful for these things, we should be grateful that despite our accumulation of wealth, despite the legacy of oppression and imperialism that we have inherited, despite our own complicity in systems of injustice, God has mercy on us. We should be grateful that we can be here, that we can experience the pain and beauty of this place, that we can enter into relationships with people whose feet we are not worthy to wash, that we can be redeemed, born again, made new. We should be grateful that there is still hope for us, that we can find joy in emptying our hands.

This whole concept of gratefulness struck us in a new way a few weeks ago. A young Nepali friend invited us over for dinner. We braced ourselves for what we knew would be a living situation that was far different than our own, but we weren’t ready for the “simplicity” of her living situation. Her "house" was a room, smaller than the guest bedroom that we don't use. She lives there with her parents and younger sister and is the sole wage earner for the family. We sat on their single bed while they sat on the floor and served us dinner. They had prepared a feast for us. We wanted to cry and scream. Their hospitality was so genuine. We wanted to get up and leave, run away from it all, back to the comfortable world that we used to live in, where we could be grateful for the “blessings” that we had been given without having to recognize the blood on our hands. We found our way through the meal. It was awkward on many levels, trying to eat cross-legged on a bed, not being able to drink the water they offered because we knew we would get sick, trying to communicate with our small bits of Nepali and their small bits of English- not to mention the fact that all of us knew we live in different worlds. It was awkward and yet in some ways, it was beautiful. We realized that if we allowed our guilt, shame and embarrassment to keep us from being grateful for this gift, we would be adding another injustice to a situation that was already filled with them.

With this experience in mind, we realize that we do need to be grateful for gifts such as these. But it’s not a gratefulness that says “God, thank you for not making me like them”. Heidi and I have both been on too many mission trips where that thought has been the prevailing theme. Rather, we need a gratefulness that acknowledges responsibility. We have to be grateful for these gifts and yet we need to be angry that these inequalities exist in a world where this is plenty for all. Particularly as Americans (who comprise 6% of the world population but consume 42% of its goods), we need to live in and feel this tension. We have to pray a prayer of thanks, along with a prayer of repentance. When asked how we can respond to this situation, a dear friend of ours gave us several suggestions, paraphrased here:

- we can engage in daily acts of mercy, justice and love and so mitigate the effects of evil in and around us.

- we can keep saying “no” to the temptations of consumerism and materialism and keep making more just choices, in small and big ways.

- we can be thankful for the gifts that we are given like the one described above, and by doing so, refuse the temptation to categorize people according to their material wealth.

-we can tell the truth about the world and by doing so, refuse the attempts to rationalize and explain the suffering of so many (like our Nepali friend) and the wealth of so many (like us).

This blog entry is an attempt to carry out the last point. I realize that many of you may read our blog in hopes of seeing beautiful pictures and hearing fun stories about our time here. Certainly, we will continue to post those types of things. But we also feel that by living here, we have an obligation to describe experiences like the one in this post. We do this, not to pretend to speak for people like our Nepali friend or to portray the people here as “impoverished” or “undeveloped”. Rather, we are speaking for ourselves, as two individuals who are recognizing that the world is complicated, that the simple answers we’ve been told most of our lives simply do not answer our questions…we are speaking as two people who are in need of conversion and the grace of God. To remain true to this obligation and to ourselves, we hope to periodically share these kinds of thoughts/experiences on this blog. Thank you for listening.

Nagarkot or Bust

We returned yesterday afternoon from our first vacation...a one-night stay in Nagarkot, 32km from Kathmandu, at 2175m elevation. This resort village is a popular destination for those who want to catch sight of the Himalayas. At this time of year, the mountains are supposed to be on full display at sunrise.

The ride there was certainly exhilarating! All of us (Amos and myself, Charlotte and Micah and Ben) awkwardly climbed onto the roof of an old bus that was too full to hold anymore people inside. An hour later, we arrived in Bhaktapur, wind-blown and achy from sitting on and holding tight to metal bars. Here we stopped and switched busses, once again ending up on the roof--this time with about 15 Nepalis. This time there was a spare tire to sit on, and I was lucky enough to snag a piece of it. Even so, after nearly two more hours of driving uphill on very narrow winding roads, I was (and I think we all were) white-knuckled, cold, and ready to be on ground again. The sweeping view of the valley below...the villages, the terraced farms and fields surrounded by lush green hills...was breathtaking, although I couldn't help but imagine how easily I could be propelled from the bus roof into all that agricultural loveliness. Thankfully, we all made it unscathed.

We rented a quaint cottage at "The End of the Universe" (a very fitting name for the resort) for the night, and woke up just before dawn to watch the sun rise over the Himalayas...and while the sun rise was beautiful (aren't they always?), the clouds overtook our view, teasing us with a few brief glimpses of those majestic peaks.

After breakfast at the lodge, we packed up and headed back down to the valley, a four hour hike through the farms and fields we had only seen from FAR above the day before. Village people greeted us and helped us navigate along the way--upholding the Nepali reputation for being the nicest people in the world. (According to me, anyway.) We even got to watch as two village women made fresh steaming hot wheat liquor (raksi) and enjoyed a taste of the surprisingly smooth brew before continuing our hike. Through villages, farms, and jungle, we made our way to Changu Narayan, a village that is home to a beautiful historic temple--its origins date back to the 4th century. We wandered through the ancient village, watched as people dried corn and grains in the hot sun. After seeing the temple at the top of the hill, we rested our weary bodies at a restaurant for lunch, then headed back to Kathmandu...this time inside a bus.

It was probably the least relaxing vacation we've ever taken, but hands down the most purely beautiful and enriching.


going a bit stir-crazy on the bus


sunrise at Nagarkot


precariously perched goats



village women making raksi

Are we losing something?

There’s a festive spirit in the air these days. The streets are aglow with strings of lights, the stores are filled with last minute shoppers, and people are busy preparing to host family and friends. Sound familiar? Here in Nepal, we are nearing the end of the Dasain Festival, which begins on the day of the new moon in September and ends on the day of the full moon in early October. In the weeks leading up to this festival, I have been struck by the similarities that this “auspicious” holiday shares with Christmas. Dasian is the Hindu celebration of the ultimate and inevitable triumph of Good over the forces of Evil, when the Goddess Durga killed the wicked demon Mahisasura who had been tormenting human beings for generations. For Christians, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ, the pivotal moment in history when the world began to turn from darkness to light. We believe this event set into motion God’s ultimate redemption of humanity, the imminent victory of Good over Evil with the death and resurrection of Christ. There are other similarities- decorations, the giving of gifts, extended vacation from school and work. And of course, there are many differences (i.e. we don’t slaughter thousands of goats for Christmas and Nepali’s don’t believe that an overweight old man slides down their chimneys to deliver gifts for Dasain). However, there is one similarity that has been particularly striking. I get the sense from Nepali’s that I’ve talked to and a few newspaper articles that I’ve read that the Dasain Festival is changing, and not necessarily for the better. It seems this festival is no longer focused on the celebration of a monumental moment in history. It’s no longer about spending quality time with family and friends. Rather, it has become commercialized. Dasain is now a commodity that is bought and sold to the highest bidder. It’s about consuming. Billboards, displaying flashy motorcycles, entice shoppers with a “Special Dasain Giveaway”. Stores lure passersby with “Desain Discounts”. In this impoverished nation, many people simply cannot afford to celebrate Dasain in this new way so they take out large loans that they will be paying off long after the end of this Holiday. Sound familiar? As I’ve read about the fate of many American and European banks over the past few weeks and the subsequent crashes on Wall Street and many other streets throughout the world, I’ve been reflecting on this monster that we in the West have created. We have built systems that require people to buy, not just things that they need but more importantly things that they want (by blurring the lines between “needs” and “wants”). Sacred celebrations like Christmas and Dasain are necessary victims of this monster. In order for our economies to grow, we need people to have more reasons to buy and consume. In the name of “progress”, we sacrifice those things that were once very important to us. Perhaps we are gaining the world, but what are we losing?

Small featured men dancing during Dasain.

Village children enjoying a swing, set up specifically for this festival.

Hundreds of thousands of goats like these are slaughtered during Dasain.