Today I have dark fantasies about making a voodoo doll of the emergent church and giving it to the impoverished street kiddies of the world to play with. After emptying it?s pockets and stealing its I-pod, perhaps it would stop taking photos of them.

This morning I am angry.

Angry at myself for sitting safely in the blameless position of not yet owning an I-pod but for being part of the coffee groups and art installations and talk-fests that articulate very nicely our uncomfortably with other peoples problems.

So much so that our uncomfortably becomes our problem and the solving of it our mission.

Did I mention that I am working on a book to describe this conundrum??.Or that I spent a shitload of rice money (because our resources are never really ours) on paints and canvas in order to express what I, in my burdensome wealth, have witnessed

That when people ask me ?how was India?? I say ?really hard? and then we talk a little while about how shit it is to be rich.

What I want to talk about is, how shit is to be poor. How boring to sit in the dark near the rice pot with dust (like that greasy dust that collects on old jars in the pantry) on your skin because the water is too cold to bathe in. To go for days in clothes you don?t have the energy to wash. To pass round burdens of dead and dying friends and neighbours unpayable debts, like a baby to be nursed through the night. How watered down curry continues to taste like watered down curry, even when it?s shared, and sex and heroin feel less dangerous and more like something that God is giving you to bear the sheer mundaneness of the moment.

If I didn?t think you?d judge me, I?d tell you how I succumbed.

Today, I am angry that Janet is sleeping with men to pay the rent and I have nine hundred and sixteen dollars and thirty six cents in the bank. (not including the little savings a account thing that I set up to fund my next trip back to India to ?encourage? Janet).

I am disappointed that in all the talking, this conversation always seems impossible. And so I sit here on a borrowed computer, with toast in my belly and a day of social engagements in a comfortably lit apartment lined up and construct a virtual voodoo doll of me.

My felt arms outstretched and vulnerable, and everything I have ever read about ?the emergent church? and ?making radical discipleship sustainable? stuffed like cotton wool and nonsense in my head. Handing myself over to the poor, and broken and users of heroin and sex and saying ?play with me in the dust until my stuffing falls out?.