Biography

One of my earliest memories is of a man digging through our trash for food. I remember standing on a stairwell, looking over the high wall at the back of our yard into the alley below at a man in rags sifting through our compost, looking for something to eat. I was four, and my family was living in Dhaka, then the capital city of East Pakistan.

I’m sure the sight of that man in that alley aroused nothing more than curiosity to my four year mind; but all the same, the image has never left me. Eventually it came to invite a question that occupies much of my thinking and continues to inform my identity as a person of faith and a minister: why was that man in the alley and why was I on the wall? I know the political and historical answers; but the answer to the fundamental question continues to elude me. Why would a God we conceive of as infinitely and unfailing ‘good’ create a world in which this foundational evil is permitted to exist?

My family moved on live in the Netherlands and then in the Philippines, making our homes in different places among different people. As an adult, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer for three years in the Kingdom of Lesotho, in southern Africa. In each place, a variation of that question presented itself. And in each setting, the question of ‘why’ continued to frustrate any hope for a definitive answer. Now, as the father of young children, the question seems in some ways more pressing than ever.

But as elusive as the answer proved to be, there seemed to emerge with time a way of approaching the question that provided some resolution. If the question defies an easy answer, it does invite a certain way of living with the ‘why.’ The world is what it is, filled with infinite promise and at times with deep sorrow and inexpressible grief. it is marked by injustice and evil; but redeemed at times by the light of courageous people and communities. It is a creation of divine love, and it is redeemed by the divine impulse to draw close in solidarity, to share in the joy and the sorrow of life. As a part of that creation, we are created and called to live in the midst of its wonder and its tragedy, and to model the divine love. In short, to come down off our walls and enter fully into the life of humanity. For me, that is the essence of ministry.