This Week's Prayer

A Prayer for the Bombed Out, Burned Out, Driven Out:

Lord God, we pray for all the bombed out, burned out, driven out, relocated, wondering , wandering, unwilling pilgrims in this world. Forgive us for our part in uprooting them. Restore their lives, make us partners with in the rebuilding of their lives. We pray in the name of the Son of Man, who had no place to lay His head.

(Arnold Kenseth and Richard Unsworth in Prayers for Worship Leaders)

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Back from Ireland and Scotland

As you can see from this morning's posting elsewhere, I'm back from our nearly two-week trip to Ireland and Scotland, a pilgrimage that ended up in Iona, one of the world's "thin places," especially notable for its dedication to peace, the extending of love to everyone. Later this week, I'll share with you much of what we experienced so that you too may come to know the witness of Celtic-minded Christians who commit their lives to reconcilliation, justice, environmental protection, and peace.

Away in Ireland and Scotland

It's time for my wife and I, along with two other couples, to visit one of God's "thin places"; this time I'm off to the Isle of Iona by way of Ireland. and the west coast of Scotland. We'' be gone for almost two weeks, returning around the 23rd of May. In the meantime, do your best to promote peaceful Christianity, share your food/money with the hungry, walk lightly upon God's earth, and do what you can to take the sting, bites, and wounds out of injustice. Prayer s often a good first (and second and third and fourth and so on) step. And, oh yes, I will able to read email while away; do write!

Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President

Yesterday the mail brought me Shane Claiborne's Jesus for President. I first heard of Claiborne while listening to a recent interview by Krista Tippett on Speaking of Faith. It was a passionate discussion about what's unfolding in public and in private conversations among Evangelical leaders and communities. Should Christians be involved in politics and if so, how? What has gone wrong, and what has been learned from the Moral Majority up until now. In this live public conversation, Krista probes these ideas with three formative Evangelicals: Chuck Colson (a hero in the faith for my father who was a prison chaplain), Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne.

Colson is the founder of Prison Fellowship and author of God & Government; Boyd is a former atheist who surrendered his life to Christ in 1974, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, Professor of Theology for 16 years at Bethel University. founder and senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church, an evangelical megachurch in St. Paul, MN, and author of The Myth of a Christian Nation.

After hearing the interview, I ordered Claiborne's Jesus for President.

Visit Claiborne's homepage to take note how a radical disciple of Christ is also an intelligent and articulate spokesman for non-violent Christianity. When I get back from Ireland, I'll be glad to loan Jesus for President to any of my central-Kentucky and Georgia friends. It's a great read!

By the way, in the decades ahead, God willing, you'll be hearing much more from and about Shane Claiborne.

The invisible wounds of war

A Benedictine friend sends this report by Greg Dobbs, published yesterday in the Rocky Mountain News:

It is a crude way to put it, but "they are dropping like flies." That's how one soldier I spoke with characterized the spike in suicides among servicemen coming home these days from war. With bodies intact, but minds wounded - sometimes mortally.

It's not a new phenomenon - mental trauma is a normal reaction to the abnormal horror of war. Back in the Civil War it was called "soldier's heart." In World War I, it was known as shell shock. In World War II, battle fatigue. After Vietnam, it was called Post Vietnam Syndrome. Nowadays it has a formal name: post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

But it is an invisible wound, and soldiers with injured minds often haven't gotten the treatment they needed. Some have been discouraged from even seeking treatment because of the ghost called "stigma." Some have only been told to "suck it up," get back out there and fight! Which has cost our armed forces dearly.

According to a RAND Corp. report last month, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wounded the minds of 300,000 Americans. That's because trauma is cumulative: some servicemen have been back to the battlefield as many as four times, and particularly in Iraq, they live with fear 24 hours a day because, unlike most previous wars, there is no "rear" to the front line - they are always surrounded; there is no safe haven.

That is a recipe for wartime PTSD. And for some, a prescription for suicide.

According to the military's own numbers, suicides were up 20 percent last year over the year before, with six times as many suicide attempts as there were the year before the war began. In the Veterans Administration it's even worse. E-mails, recently exposed in a federal court case, showed an average of 18 suicides a day among vets, and twice as many attempts, about a thousand a month.

In our HDNet documentary we interviewed victims of PTSD. One young infantryman who went to Iraq from Fort Carson, having seen friends blown up and himself crushed by "survivor's guilt," came home diagnosed with PTSD. But when I asked him to describe his treatment, he laughed and said, "Didn't exist." Even when he got "mental health" appointments, his line commanders made him work so he'd miss them. Eventually, he took a kitchen knife and cut his wrists. He was saved, but six hours after being released from the psych ward, he was sent back to his unit to train for redeployment to Iraq.

A Marine out of Camp Pendleton told us he came back with PTSD and was put on overnight guard duty - armed. He called his mother one night with a gun in his mouth, telling her he had killed so many innocent Iraqis, he didn't deserve to live. She kept him on the phone, praying neither battery would die, as she drove six hours to save him.

Our third interview was with the Massachusetts parents of a Marine reservist. Their son had come home and started drinking heavily - a symptom of PTSD - so they committed him to a VA hospital. But the VA wouldn't treat his PTSD until he stayed sober - like a doctor refusing to treat your head cold until you stop sneezing. Three weeks after his release, he hanged himself with a garden hose slung over a beam in his parents' basement.

What these guys - and many others - had in common was, they got wounded in the line of duty, but didn't get the treatment they deserved. In the active military the barriers were bureaucracy, stigma and the culture of courage. In the VA it was just a systemic nightmare of red tape, short staffing, long forms and long waits - obstacles that are hard enough to navigate if you're not disturbed, virtually impossible if you are.

What's the impact of these avoidable inefficiencies? More trauma - which means more PTSD, and more suicide. The Army itself warned a couple of months ago that as the number of troops in Iraq was surging, the number of mental-health providers was declining. That does not bode well for the future.

Nor does the Pentagon's take on PTSD and suicide. The top Pentagon psychiatrist told me that, most of the time, the crisis that leads to suicides is the breakup of relationships. And when it's not about relationships, it's about legal or financial problems. When I told the Massachusetts Marine reservist's parents about this, they used a word I wasn't able to put to put on television.

It's fair to say that at least a few positive changes are taking root. The new commanding general at Fort Carson, who lost one of his own sons to suicide and another to combat, is teaching troops and commanders that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. Several state National Guard units have pilot programs for "reintegration." They invite Guardsmen returned from war and their families to come for counseling and bonding 30, 60 and 90 days after returning home.

Some who come back from war have been driven over the edge not just by combat, but by their experiences when they got home. They are casualties just like casualties on the battlefield. The difference is, if we ever build a Vietnam-type wall to honor the victims of Iraq and Afghanistan, their names won't be on it.

Former Rocky Mountain News media critic Greg Dobbs reports for a documentary program World Report on HDNet Television.

© Rocky Mountain News

A Letter from Benjamin Kleppinger

Ben Kleppinger, editor of EKU's Eastern Progress and member of First United Methodist Church, Richmond, Kentucky, is being sponsored by Mission Discovery for intense summer work. Ben sends Peaceful Christians the following email. Do all you can to support him!

It’s about two and a half weeks until I leave, and I have a few updates for everyone.

I will be flying from Nashville, Tn., to McAllen, Tx., on May 27. I’ll be in the Rio Grande Valley, commuting each day into Mexico for my video work until June 11. On June 11 we will be flying to Denver and driving to South Dakota, where Michael Kneff and I will run the project there, which I’m told involves home repair and construction ona Native American reservation. On June 22 we will return to the Rio Grande Valley to do whatever we are needed for. We will be in the Rio Grande Valley until July 5, when I return to Nashville. I’m then homefor a short time, until I leave on July 16 for Guatemala. I’ll be in Guatemala working on that project until August
4.

Plane tickets are remarkably cheap right now, which is excellent news for me, because rather than needing well over $2,000 for plane tickets, it looks like I’ll only need about $1,100. As of right now you guys have supported me financially in the amount of $1,050, which is pretty amazing. This means my plane tickets are covered, which leaves only my traveling expenses (the last two summers I’ve made it by on $200ish) and my bills here at home while I’m gone (app. $900). As always, you guys are awesome at supporting me. Thanks to everyone!

I will be posting photo updates on my photo blog: benkleppinger.blogspot.com .
Whenever it’s possible. I’m thinking about creating a CD of the best photos I take at the end of the summer for anyone who wants one. Let me know if you’d be interested in this, and I can try to make it happen. Thanks for supporting me, and helping people all over the place feel the welcoming warmth of God’s unconditional love.

If you want to help me out, you can send whatever amount you would like to:

Ben Kleppinger
1042 Burnell Dr.
Berea, KY 40403

If you would like your donation to be tax-deductable, mark it "for Ben Kleppinger's Mission Trip" and send it to:

Richmond First United Methodist Church
P.O. Box 27
Richmond, KY 40476

Ben

Ben Kleppinger
Eastern Progress Editor (859) 200-7266
ben.kleppinger@gmail.com
benjamin_klepping@eku.edu

One morning last month I went to the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center in Georgia, about fifteen miles from our lakehouse, for a "Spring Migratory Birk Walk" with Tim Keyes (on the right) as our ornithologist. It was just great; we saw or heard sixty-six different kinds of birds, including a summer tanager, a kingfisher, and an osprey catching a braem on the wing. If that weren't enough, I got to meet Rusty Pritchard (on the left), the editor of Creation Care: A Christian Environmental Quartery, to which I have subscribed for several years. The two boy's are Rusty's kids: Angus and Euan. In the Spring 2006 issue, Tim has written "It's a Frog's Life: The songs of frogs are an early promise of spring." Couldn't have prayed for a nicer day! I've placed a link to Creation Care, along with its sponsoring organizaiton, the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Poverty in Haiti

As some of you may know, a group of us scheduled to go to Haiti last month had to cancel our trip because the civil unrest in Port au Prince and elsewhere made it too dangerous to travel. Even the pilots flying the single-engine planes for Missionary Air Flights were unable to take off and land for fear of being targeted by some desperate Haitians whose hunger had driven them to violent protests. This week we received news that the airflight restrictions are now being listed and a group of us, two pastors, two physicians, and I--under the planned supervision of Christian Flights International (CFI)--plan to spend a week in Haiti at the end of July. While in Ranquitte, Haiti, we'll be building the Haitian version of a Habitat Home. To give yourself some sense of the grinding poverty in Haiti, take a look at Poverty in Haiti, a slideshow published by The New York Times. The photograph above shows Pastor Ron Luckey and Claymon, a Haitian master-mason, mixing up "mud" (sand, concrete, and water) for the morter used to hold together the home-made concrete blocks for a small four-room home constructed for a grateful Haitian family who lived for decades in a 10' x 14' mud-wattle home with a dirt floor and no furniture.

Might you want to help build a home for "the poorest of the poor"? If so, contact Richmond's CFI supporter Harry Smiley; he'll tell you how you can help.

What Happens When Christians Work Together for Justice

The following article by Jim Niemi was published in the Lexington Herald-Leader on April 8, 2008, the morning after an April 7 meeting of BUILD, associated with the Direct Action and Research Training Center. Several Christians from Richmond--Pastors Bob Jones and Robert Blythe among them--attended the meeting! Andy Harnack's pastor at Faith Lutheran Church is co-chair of the organization.

COALITION WORKS TO PROVIDE FOR NEEDY: HOUSING, HEALTH CARE ARE PRIORITIES

An overflow crowd of more than 1,000 left Consolidated Baptist Church with smiles on their faces Monday night after city officials and health care providers committed to helping thousands of low-income residents find affordable housing and medical services.

An initiative of churches from across Lexington called BUILD, or Building a United Interfaith Lexington through Direct Action, brought worshippers together to seek financial aid for people who can't find or afford a safe place to live or pay for health care.

Mayor Jim Newberry told the audience that his office would draft an ordinance to help low-income home owners and renters, including those in mobile home parks, with relocation assistance and submit it to the Urban County Council. Included as part of the city's effort will be an affordable-housing trust fund.

"The demand for affordable housing in Lexington is huge," said the Rev. Adam Jones, pastor of Open Door Church. According to a 2007 government study, at least 6,691 households pay more than 50 percent of their income for rent. In addition, 20,000 households pay more than 30 percent, and Jones noted that not all of the housing is up to standards.

Funding for the trust would be left to the city. Other cities have programs in place, Jones said. "Louisville just enacted one."

Council members Jim Gray and Linda Gorton were there to support the proposal. As Newberry said, "If it isn't for council involvement, it does not happen."

Later in the meeting, prominent health care providers including St. Joseph Hospital and Central Baptist Hospital agreed to form a plan to cover health care costs for 2,000 uninsured adults each year over a three-year period beginning in 2009. Others signing on to the plan included Bluegrass Community Health Clinic, Mission Lexington and the Fayette County Health Department.

The Rev. Ron Luckey of Faith Lutheran Church said, "People think everybody has health care, but there's no continuity of care. People (without insurance) go to emergency rooms or urgent care centers with a specific problem, like a broken arm. But they are not given physical exams (to diagnose) other problems."

Affordable housing and health care were also BUILD initiatives in 2007, and they produced results, especially in health care, Luckey said. The hiring of an additional doctor at the county health department allowed 700 more appointments to be scheduled each month.

Dr. Rice Leach of the county health department told the audience that the power generated by large numbers of energized, concerned people would propel this year's recommendation even though it had been tackled before.

He recalled that when he was providing health care to Native Americans early in his career, there was a saying: "Ain't no such thing as your side of the canoe leaking.

"This time, we're going to have a bigger canoe."