A wife of one and mother of many, theologian, missiologist, educator, and story-teller, Ruth Padilla DeBorst has been involved in theological formation for integral mission in her native Latin America and beyond for several decades. She serves with Resonate Global Mission, leading the Comunidad de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (CETI), the International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation and leadership development initiatives of the Christian Reformed Church. Along with her husband, James, she lives in Costa Rica as a member of Casa Adobe, an intentional Christian Community with deep concern for right living in relation to the whole of creation. Her studies include a Bachelors in Education (Argentina), an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Wheaton College), and a PhD in Theology (Boston University).
The love of stuff justifies consuming people in the name of production, progress, and the maintenance of privilege. It also justifies the voracious plunder of our planet with no regard for the delicately balanced web of life, its most vulnerable members, or for the living conditions of future generations. And it eats away at our very soul.
Our mobility, freedom and security put on hold… Our health and our lives threatened… Our wealth plummeted… Our temples of consumerism closed. All because of an almost invisible virus. Amidst very real fear and grief, this gives us an opportunity to rethink ‘flourishing’, and how our economic systems can be regenerative and restorative rather than unstable, unjust, and unsustainable.
There’s a phrase in Singapore, where I grew up, which has come to describe an aspect of our national psyche – kiasu. The word has come to mean a fear of losing out. Being kiasu is rooted in a deep insecurity, a state of being which isn’t unique to Singapore. We are deceived by a heart-breaking lie: that God has not given us all we need to thrive.
COVID-19 has stopped us in our tracks. It is as though the whole globe has been put on a time out. We could fill the unnerving silence with bread-baking, Zoom meetings and Netflix bingeing. Or we could take this rare opportunity to reflect, reconsider and reboot.
As the COVID-19 coronavirus makes its relentless way across the world, it is not the only thing that is going viral. Fear, panic-buying, stock-market slumps, and fake news stories are also infectiously spreading like viruses, making the situation so much worse. In this context, I want to ask two key questions.
A friend this week asked me why I love the sky so much (‘I do mean that question genuinely’, they said). It gave me pause because I hadn’t considered my love of the sky to be overly notable. I also hadn’t actually ever given thought to the reasons why I do, in fact, love the sky.
A friend of mine who has a brother living in Australia recently took the difficult decision never to fly to Australia again. ‘Love hurts’, she commented ruefully. Others will make different choices, for different reasons, but choose we must.
It’s not a word I used much previously, but ‘harrowing’ sums up the experience of the last weeks and months. To my mind it has connotations of deep emotional scarring and agonizing pain; perhaps because a harrow is a farming implement with metal blades, dragged across a field to break up and smooth out the soil.
I walked over and tossed vegetable scraps in the trash with a tinge of guilt at still not having a compost system set up. Then my soul turned to the Lord with arms crossed and heels dug in as if to say, “I can’t care about compost right now” or maybe, more accurately, “I refuse to care when so many people are hurting.”
When Greta Thunberg speaks, the world listens. How is it that a 16-year old Swedish schoolgirl, unknown just over a year ago, has become one of the best-known faces and voices on the planet?
