Go and do likewise.

 When he turned his back to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart. 1 Samuel 10:9

And the barbarous people shewed us no little kindness: for they kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and because of the cold. Acts 28:2

This has been a few days of watching the no little kindness of the “barbarous.”

Yesterday I did some political canvassing, “getting out the vote.” Whether it be from the toothless woman who “doesn’t get out much” from her apartment near Dodge to the hot and sweaty union man whose four kids “are doing great and all in college,” to the seriously tattooed family taking their three-year-old daughter for a sunset stroll. The mom teared up when Adam promised that her child would receive a world-class education, with a goal to be above-grade-level before third grade. Each was so happy to be seen, as I wandered the back neighborhoods with this candidate for the TUSD school board. They couldn’t really believe that the smiling face from the brochure was the same face looking at them from over the clipboard.

The Barber Pole School down the street is giving away very sharp-looking haircuts for that all-important first day of school. They gave me a huge honkin’ hug when I arrived with a box of school supplies.

The bright-eyed millennials manning the coffee pot and sign-out sheets.

Today’s inspirational quotes were from William Wilberforce, who after an experience of spiritual rebirth, dedicated his political life to the service of God, in this case, ridding Great Britain of the institution of slavery.

And I have stood by the sidelines too long, wringing my hands over the headlines while “barbarians” tromp under the hot sun, with the sheep's challenge detailed in their four-color brochures: “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

And this next season of life began with my committing to “The District,” stepping into the rather convoluted, seasick swaying mass of well-intentioned people. And I am committing to walk the pot-holed asphalt with them, as they serve the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the sick…and the naughty children who have been kicked out of all of the other fancy fine schools with high test scores and neatly ironed collared shirts. How many times have I overheard the face-saving but very firm slam-the-door-in-your-face, “We cannot meet your child’s needs,” as they are tossed to The District, who can turn no one away.

Yesterday’s Sunday School lesson at Prince Chapel was about the great feast, and how all of those invited were a little too busy with their land and their oxen to show up. Then the invitation was sent out to the poor and the crippled and the blind, and when they did not fill the table, He told his servant to go out into the byways and country streets and compel them to come in. And the context of this Jesus story was at a dinner held at a Pharisee’s home, as to what the Law really teaches, “pulling a child or an ox out of a well on the Sabbath.”

All of the “straining at gnats” folks at the table were pushing and shoving for themselves, for a place of comfort and honor. That made Jesus really sad.

I pray that I will be a light-bearer and a truth-speaker, as I love my neighbor, especially “the least of these.” It was not the well-regulated-behaviored priest or the jot-and-tittle perfect doctrine Levite who loved the Lord God with all of their heart, all of their soul, all of their strength, and all of their mind.

It was the barbarous Samaritan who knelt down by the side of the road and showed the broken what this “like unto it” love looks like.

Because one day, the Son of Man will come into His glory, and reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Object lessons right outside my door.

… For, lo, they lie in wait for my soul. Psalm 59:3

“Then all the trees said to the bramble,
‘You come and reign over us!’ Judges 9:14

And he (Apollo) began to speak boldly in the synagogue: whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly. Acts 18:26

However late, then, it may seem, let us rouse ourselves from lethargy. That is what scripture urges. Let us open our eyes to the light that can change us into the likeness of God. Let our ears be alert to the stirring call of His voice crying to us every day: today, if you should hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. -Benedict of Nursia

It was pretty difficult to see how the folks at Common Prayer were going to tie together this morning’s scriptures: the disasters after Gideon’s death, the training of Apollo, and a lot of stuff about dogs who go round about the city, wandering up and down for meat.

I do know something about stray dogs in the Middle East because there is a small pack who lives outside my front gate and greets me every morning. They are friendly enough, but I put my hands on top of my head when I walk by because they are stinky and belch outside of their mouths. Today I got to see exactly what ol' Psalmist was talking about, because they were pretty satisfied with today’s meat. ;(

We did reflect on the life of Benedict; after he returned home after an extended time alone in a desolate cave, he created his rule, a simple way of life of praying the daily office, studying Scripture, engaging in common labor for the good of the community and performing works of charity.

Check, check, check. I even have signed up for my act of charity, housing a dog for a month for a student of mine who is publicly struggling with life on Facebook. I hope Scott is okay with caring for ol’ Sam. Or maybe they can be friends.

It’s difficult to measure change and growth.

It can be done. For instance, I did not start a single sentence this morning with the word “And.” 

That was something great about Jim the Swim Coach; he stopwatched any improvement to the hundredth of a second, which is always heartening. This morning I noticed that it was pretty dang easy to do twenty push-up thingies after every single lap, when less than a month ago doing just ten would leave me breathing hard and sweaty.

Just a few weeks ago I opened my first lesson with an exercise on qualitative and quantitative data and how both are important.

The question has been framed and explored. The systematic investigations have been carried out. Certainly the variables have been manipulated. Now it is time to draw conclusions and consider application, including the limitations, in relationship to human impact in the local environment.

God, make us bold enough to question tyranny, impassioned enough to submit ourselves to good teachers, and discerning enough to know when it is our turn to lead.

Amen.

My backpack no longer has twenty-three textbooks in it, but my heart is full.

When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. Acts 18:5-7

I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about. -Toyohiko Kagawa

I believe the merciful God regards the lives and tempers of men more than their ideas. I believe He respects the goodness of the heart, rather than the clearness of the head. John Wesley

A few of us went to the Teachers’ Club last night to watch the France Belgium semi-final game. And pretty much I have managed to spend nearly a month in Erbil, considered one of the safest cities in the Middle East, home base of 6000 NGOs serving in the Middle East, without spying nary another Westerner outside of our clump of eight. Nine, if you count one-and-a-half-year-old Leo. But I did find a couple hundred of them bunched under the oleander bushes and misters of the Teachers’ Club, sipping beers and smoking hookah pipes.

A what a bunch they are, lean and dusty and bone-dead weary, speaking a jabber of languages, certainly not following the lunch-around-the-table rule at Rancho La Argentina, that you had to finish the sentence in the same language you started it in.

And they too are full of stories, of strapping smashed Syrian bodies onto burro backs and sending them up over the craggy mountains to distant operating rooms set up under flapping tents just over the Israeli border. Of bumping down dirt roads to interview villagers on the personal impact of water catchment basins installed two years ago. Or juggling the legal documentation for a camp of 12,000 internally displaced peoples not five miles from where we watch Belgium almost score, shot after shot. It’s not just Westerners serving. This afternoon I hung out with two young and lean Assyrian Catholic seminary graduates in their last year before ordination as priests. Sipping a little tea before they head back to Qaraqosh, where for more than two years, Isis jihadists tried to erase any evidence of Christianity from what used to be the largest Christian city in Iraq.

The nurses were happy to hear of our solution to the hot and cold water issue. If one turns off the hot water tank, since it is insulated and hidden somewhere in the bowels of the apartment near the squatty toilet, it will become coolish water, and the cold water stored in huge tanks on the roof is plenty burn-your-fingers hot. Now, because the fixtures were made in Turkey, for some reason red means cold, and blue means hot, so then your brain has to think the opposite of the opposite, and everything is normal.

680,000 Iraqis live in camps. 470,000 continue to live in critical shelter arrangements including unfinished or abandoned buildings, schools and religious buildings. And this is just Iraq, not Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Yemen. Turkey and Greece too.

Ah, the paperwork. A bulk of the weariness is from hunching over computer screens, scrolling through Excel files, cutting and pasting 4,800 cell phone numbers for the government official monitoring her project, and meeting for the ninth time with the NGO Coordination Committee for Iraq to get everything in order for a one-year visa. 

Yesterday one of our team was doing a friendly chat with a new teacher during the 10:15 AM crackers and coffee break. She was from Mosel, and because she looks fourteen-year-old dripping wet even though she has a college degree in English office management, she was asked about her parents, had they returned to their home?

My parents were both killed.

More that 40,000 civilians were killed in the battle to retake Mosul from Isis, by both Iraqi ground forces as well as air strikes.

One of our teachers fought with the Peshmerga for six years.

And yesterday before I headed down the now familiar back streets of Ankawa, I finished reading through the massive six-week transdisciplinary units loaded up onto managebac, as unwieldy website as I have ever faced in all my years in the education world. And worked through three lesson plans each on the new, ahem, “simplified” lesson plan format I designed for them. And gave one last polishing to each of the formal assessments that I must review today and submit to the admin., struggling to fill them with helpful and specific feedback rather than just being a blah, blah, blah sheet, theoretically modeling what I have been teaching this month: formative and summative assessment.

Although, at the end of yesterday I modeled Ability to Reflect on Personal Teaching Practice, filling the board with all of our verbiage:  teaching to the main idea, scaffolding, project-based learning, differentiation, et al. before handing out sheets for each student to fill out: Two strengths, one area for growth, and the lady I just spent literally over an hour with her one-on-one going over her fourth grade Celebrations Around the World lesson plan, wrote down as her Area for Continued Growth, “Use more videos.” Oh well. The baton has been passed.

Because we have already planned our final group activity moment, the tag-you’re-it moment, passing-of-the-baton theoretically-celebratory moment, to a hopefully encouraged and empowered school community.

One last Lord’s Prayer as we stand in circle beginning class, hands lifted up.

One last stroll past the corner construction site, nodding to the sweaty men pouring cement.

One last trek through the air-conditioned guard station of MarQadarkh, “Hallo, Hallo, Hallo.”

I probably still have quite a few more eyes-shut mad dashes across Two Sides Avenue, trusting

​my life to ​

the rhythm of alert taxi cab drivers.

​And Laura and I are going to dinner one more time with Alan Wale Karim's family. And Wale will be there. Who can make this up?​

But Charity is already packing, giving me all of the exotic cooking spices for making biryani rice from her friend, thinking that I am much more likely to use them.

Laura just read a hilarious text from her husband, detailing the endless back-and-forth between the Apple Store and the AT&T representatives trying to fix his phone.

Home again, home again.

First world problems.

Another echoing of Samwise Gamgee’s closing words, “Well, I’m back.”

And may I go about doing good, up and down the equally pot-holed streets of Tucson, and not just settle back into a routine of going about.

Rasha told me today that she would never forget me. That I am more Iraqi than even she, because I understand Middle Eastern hospitality, welcoming others into my heart.

May it be so.