Dr. D's Diagnosis

International Travel

2011-01-24T18:47:00.000+01:00

It is a bit bumpy on this ride. Riding through wind currents and trade winds and the jet stream at 600 miles an hour can be bumpy. In fact it's making this blog a bit difficult to write, or at least difficult to hit the correct keys. Wait a second while I get my seatbelt back on . . . there, that is safer. Hopefully the iPad and the keyboard won't go flying and hit some unfortunately person in the head or something.

But in terms of time, nothing comes close, bumps aside. There is no other way to get from Amsterdam to Atlanta in 8.5 hours. Almost 5000 miles and most of the folks were complaining. They should try swimming next time, or even using a jet ski or ship or submarine, and they would quickly find that KLM is a far superior option in the big scheme of things. Now if only I was one of those people who could sleep for hours and hours on a plane, that would be outstanding! Make an astounding stretch of distance seem even much shorter!

Spiritual journeys are like International Travel in few ways. There is the exotic food, and perhaps the close proximity to some strange looking and acting people, but spiritual journeys are not about the destination nearly as much as they are about travel itself. The movement from one level of maturity and understanding to an new and different level is the point of a spiritual journey, not always where you are going as much as how you are going. International Travel is about how to get from point A to point B with the least amount of time, money and discomfort possible. Spiritual journeys are about tastes, textures, experiences, failures, growth and maturing. Very different trips indeed. Oh by the way, they both can be quite bumpy at times. Better put on your seatbelt.

The $523.00 meal

2010-12-26T21:57:00.000+01:00

It was pretty salty to be honest with you. A month ago I would not have noticed, but know I can really tell, since I have been cutting out almost all salt from my diet. The doctor threatened me with death if I did not get my blood pressure under control, but that is a different story altogether.

So as I was saying the tiny bit of meat with three slices of mushrooms on it, surrounded by gravy on one side and pureed potatoes on the other side, was a really expensive and salty meal. Although I must admit they were serving free wine along with it, to enhance what little nutritional value that might be found somewhere deep in this dish.

The reason I call this the $500+ meal, is that I had to buy this ticket a second time. And it cost four times as much the second time as it did the first time. Competition would be nice. Then these airlines in the hairy armpit places of the world would not have monopolies and be able to charge whatever they want for a given ticket, because more venders would create more options and more options would create an environment where one company would charge less or give more options for the money. Competition always results in lower prices eventually. They don't really know what that is here in Ukraine.

So as I was saying I had already bought this ticket once and now I had to buy again. And I mean HAD to. There is no other way back home. So when you are stuck somewhere because of visa problems, and the only option left to you is to go back the way you came, and there is only one flight going that way, well that places you at the complete and utter ruthlessness of the one selling the ticket. The way I look at it, I basically paid $524 for a very poorly made meal.

Shame on me

2010-12-26T21:52:00.001+01:00

This is being written in a rather bad way. I feel terrible because I have been bad-mouthing British Airways and Raptim travel all day . . . and now I find myself sitting in a business class seat -backwards. Yes I said backwards. The reason this is so, and that I am uncomfortably close the man facing the proper direction is that these seats fully recline and the way that they accomplish this is by facing one seat forward and the other one toward the rear.

Worse yet, this is actually my wife's seat. She gave it up for me, because she can't bear the thought of being in business class with all these high-fluting souls who can actually afford these seats. Brenda had what is known as a "forced upgrade" whatever that means. How do you "force" an upgrade? Anyhoo it was totally weird taking facing the rear of the aircraft, but I am glad that I am being forced to do so.

Being able to cross my legs and eventually lay down is such a huge relief. The lack of possible positions in standard coach seats is one of the reasons that long distant travel is so tiring and exhausting. But I feel a little ashamed for talking bad about all these companies and then having such a gift bestowed on me. The moral of this story, don't complain, because you never know what good thing is coming.

Jots of the moment

2010-12-26T21:47:00.000+01:00

This is a journal of the moment. At this moment I am sitting in an Indian outdoor cafe on the island of Penang in Malaysia. If that sounds weird to you then you need to understand that 50% of the 800000 people that live on this island are Chinese, 40% are Malay and 10% are Indian. So the Indian food is quite authentic and tasty. I would have enjoyed this meal more, except for the waiter who was fascinated with my iPad and was a serious Apple fanboy, and wanted to talk Mac OS throughout my meal. All I wanted was some peace and quiet and a good meal. The meal I got, the quiet I did not. Sometimes being an early adopter of technology is rather hazardous. But the tandoori chicken was still excellent.

I got to see a disappointingly small amount of Malaysia and the island of Penang. One has to work it seems, and after coming so far, it would had been a pity to have not garnered everything possible from the conference. Yet, it would hzve been more relaxing to have toured a bit.

Two very very short days after my return to Macedonia from Malaysia, I find myself on another flight bound for London. I have no idea what time zone my bod is in, but my watch seems to be swinging wildly from one time zone to the next. In London more of the same sit down and type as fast as I can mode, gaining the material as cogently as possible for digestion at a later date. I hope the food is better than I have been told, and that the beer is as good as promised.

After Paradise where can one go?

2009-05-08T04:08:00.000+02:00

For the seventh time in my life, I went to Paradise. Not the Muslim one nor even the Christian one, but rather Paradise, California. Now having lived in four countries and having visited some 30 plus other countries, I think that I can safely said that Paradise is, um, Paradise. All cliché’s aside, Paradise California is a lovely place. It’s always hard to go somewhere well after having been in Paradise for any length of time.

Yet what makes Paradise a paradise is not merely the location nor the vistas nor the mountians nor the lakes nor the rivers nor the wildlife nor the peacefulness of a small wonderful town. It’s the people of Paradise that make Paradise a paradise.

And as I think about the last week of my life in Paradise and all that happened there and all the connections made there and all the incredible people I was blessed to meet, I came to realize that there is a great spiritual lesson here for the church and for the Church. That heaven or the church and eventually the Church will be a heaven or hell or paradise because of the character and integrity of the people that populate it . . . or not. What an indictment to our modern evangelical movement, and what a challenge. After all, once you have been to paradise, you rarely want to go somewhere else.

A culture of self-destruction

2009-04-23T23:57:00.000+02:00

There are many many things about American Culture that are fascinating, but this one may take the cake (or kill the constituents) more so than all others. Take the cake in the sense that it is so much more widespread here in North America than elsewhere, or kill the constituents in the sense that this culture of self-destruction is amazingly accomplished or at the very least leads to much of the crime that this country is facing; either way destruction follows closely.

I was having a lovely conversation with my youngest daughter who is one very tough yet compassionate chick (she plays hockey on the varsity BOYS team!). She wants to help everyone she meets. Yet she confessed to me in our lovely conversation this morning (between traveling trips for me, making it all the more important and lovely) that there is not much you can do to help people bent on destruction. People determined to have the most irresponsible sex you can imagine, determined to try every illegal drug available, determined to get high at every opportunity, determined to diminish all morals, determined - we agreed - to self destruct. There is not much you can do to help those bent on self-destruction.

As Sam Levenson’s father told him when he was about five years old, “son, if you ever need a helping hand, there is always one at the end of your arm.” A lesson few seem to know or understand in the modern world and one that I tried to teach my daughter today. Only those who are willing to take some responsibility for their pursuit of self-destruction are potential candidates for help. You can’t help those who aren’t interested in being helped . . . the entire horse and water story in a nutshell. Nor can you change those who are convinced that irresponsibility is the rite of adulthood, as are the vast majority of the high school students in my daughter’s school. Perhaps all high schools?

As I said in my opening volley, these seem to be particularly North American traits, “due to the fall of the traditional family“ as I was told in church this past week. But these matters are not the centerpiece of youth culture in other countries who haven’t had a ”traditional“ family structure for decades. so can we really blame the fall of the traditional for a current culture of self-destruction? I think not. Moreover I think there is a tie-in here to the piercing, tatooing, and now cutting trends seen in the youth cultures of North America. While there are many people out there far more qualified than I to assess these trends, as a father of three teenagers, I think that my understanding carries some small weight and I think these trends come from a society bent of the pursuit of self-expression at the cost of logic and reason. ”We aren’t in the age of logic and reason any longer“ some would quickly say, and for once we would agree. But nevertheless, without a voice of reason in a world of self indulgence, one rarely finds a higher reason for living. Lost is the chance to live ofr others, God, eternity or family. What other possible conclusion can they find then in this world, except out of leisure, wealth and boredom they destroy themselves? A culture of self-destruction indeed.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

2009-04-14T13:51:00.002+02:00

The clocks are ticking. Especially here, at my parents house, in the deep country, where the ticking of the clocks are the loudest thing going. I am not talking only about those noisy (relatively) things with pointers that endlessly go round and round either.

Today is my parents 50th Anniversary. That clock has been ticking a long long time, even longer than me! :-) It is a huge milestone that few reach. According to Divorce Magazine.com only 5% of all marriages reach the 50 year mark . . . or another way of viewing that statistic is that 95% of all marriages do not last 50 years. Kudos to my parents, number one for raising me - a most cantankerous child, number two for staying together when it would have been so easy to go their own individual paths. I am humbled and amazed that my folks are so special.

But this morning at 3:18am when I woke up and could not fall back to sleep, I realized that their clock is ticking. Health issues are eroding their quality of life. That clock has now become an enemy of sorts. While they have beaten it by staying together 50 years, it will still win in the end, and it appears much sooner than later.

I also realized that my clock is ticking as well in the quiet of the sleepless night. 47 years old is such a big number . . . to my 16 year old especially, not so big to my parents, and a childishly small number to my grandparents who are almost 90 years old and still pushing cows around with their walking canes. But everything works a little slower than I think it should, heals slower, comes to mind slower, decisions are slower, even my definition of fast is slower. Yes the clock is ticking.

I guess than means it is a good day to make it count. Tick Tock Tick Tock go the loud clocks out in the country . . . make 'em count.

Mileage

2008-12-04T02:03:00.005+01:00

Mileage. We all have more of it on us that we would like to admit. But I like old things. Heck, I am an old thing! Everything I own is old, except for my technology:-). My little old house that I bought sight-unseen some 6 years again has some serious mileage on it. It was built in 1895 with square nails, not round ones! My clothes tend to be old too, although not made in 1895! My mother (I am visiting my parents at the moment) grabbed my clothes this morning and dumped them in with her clothes in the washer, while I was yelling, "don't dry my jeans on high heat!" She listened to me thank God, but commented when I returned home, that my jeans are the oldest piece of clothing that she has seen in the last 40 years. The reason that I don't dry them on high heat is because high heat makes all the patches peal off. (Don't feel sorry for me, I could buy new jeans if I wanted :-))

My oooolllldddd jeep wrangler was reaching some milestones this afternoon on the way back from Carnesville, Georgia (a city that you have never heard of) after trying to do some banking. These mileage photos throughout this post, have been from my old worn out Wrangler which hit a huge milestone, as I pulled off the road into someone's driveway and took this amazing photo this afternoon. Well the photo sucks, but the numbers are impressive.

Two Hundred Twenty-Two Thousand, Two Hundred Twenty-Two point Two miles. Thats alot of mileage. Not the most that I have ever had on a car that I drove daily (my Toyota Van had 365,000 miles on it and ran like a top. I hated to leave that van in America when we went back overseas), but definitely the most unique number I ever turned over in a car that I drove daily. But what that big number means is that my jeep has lots of character, lots of memories, lots of things that could be fixed, but a keen sense of dependability - that it will get me where I intend to go. I like it and wouldn't trade it for a new one.

My point in this post, is that most folks have a mileage one them, and milestones behind them. Hopefully we all have more mileage and milestones ahead. My personal milestone of the moment is a job change. This month, December, 2008, is my last month in the employment of the CMA. I have worked with no other organization since August, 1986. Twenty-Two years and four months. I have logged far far far more tham 222,222.2 miles in those years. We have led churches in two states domestically, and planted three churches in two different countries in three different languages abroad. But now it is time to move on to a larger vision and hopefully more milestones. I'll be sure to send you more pictures along the way.

BBQ GA style

2008-12-03T04:05:00.005+01:00

There are many cultural ways to eat, not to mention a million different cultural foods. In Russia the thing was peroshkies, and in Macedonia it is Ajvar or Lutenitsa. The South is no exception, neither in culinary arrogance nor in specialties. One of the local favorite haunts is Zebs.

You would not be impressed with the decor. It is the utmost in utilitarianism. It is a celebration in Southern simplicity. A worship service of minimalism - the Brinks would love it. It is the ultimate no frills no chills design.

But the food is divine, in a good ole boy, country boy sorta way. It is plain eating done well. Tender, spicy and filling (the three main roles of food in this part of the world) and frankly it is a one of a kind experience to go and have BBQ at Zebs. You have to have an adventuresome spirit to embrace the experience :-)

Here is a photo of my meal . . .

That is BBQ pork, or "pulled pork" as they would say up in PA where I live at the moment, cole slaw, and Brunswick stew (a Southeastern delicacy, which is a thick vegetable-meat stew). While I will admit it is not much to look at, the taste is top-notch, kinda like most American's who look at Macedonian Avjar think it looks awful, but once sampled, never find anything quite as satisfying.

So on this trip to see my folks, my dad treated us today to this great local piece of culture and cuisine. I am still savoring the experience. Jesus is the same though; He is an unrepeatable flavor, an irreplaceable taste, and unforgettable experience and contextualized piece of heaven to the senses. As He well should be. Jesus is uuuummmmmm.

The roads of freedom

2008-10-21T16:37:00.000+02:00

America the beautiful. And tis true as I can testify to with authority after completing a 6800 mile trip to the West Coast from the East Coast and back again. America is indeed beautiful. But for someone like me who has lived much of the last 14 years in post-socialist nirvana, better known as Russia and the Balkans, beauty, while breathtaking, was not the most profound discovery of my transcontinental motorcycle trip. Freedom was.

Freedom to travel so far, unmolested, without documents, without police interference, with no border guards, with no customs officers, with the freedom to stop wherever I wanted whenever I wanted and pretty much do whatever I wanted . . . was . . . amazing.

Few people in the wide wide world experience such freedom of travel, thought and action. While American citizens who never leave their zip codes probably would not notice, nor appreciate this phenomena nearly as much as I did, they should. Freedom should never be taken lightly.

There are other freedoms I pondered while on my motorcycle for days and days . . . the heaviest of these is the end of my professional holy man days. I am more and more convinced that our evangelical system of church is less and less biblical. Professional Christians, known as clergy in many circles, are those people who stand in for God. We serve His sacraments, we lead His hymns and songs, we pray His prayers, we teach His book . . . we also take much of His abuse and almost all of His adulation.

Professional Christians maintain the system that makes weekly gatherings mandatory for those who wish to be in good standing with Him. We professional Christians also dictate that you, the Christian professionals, must give your money to this system, that you must volunteer your time to this system, that you must serve on committees that preserve this system, that we must do everything possible to maintain and perpetuate this system . . . and on and I could go, but won’t.

There just seems to be little left of the two great commandments of Scripture, in the system (we all this church). There is little human, caring, loving texture left in the system. I think God wants to set us free. Free to be human, free from rules of the system (think modern contemporary pharisees here) free to love and care for humans in human ways. I may still work in the system occasionally and I may still perform some of actions of clergy. But inside the garden of my heart, and in the manner I earn my living, my professional holy man days are numbered. As my friend Mark said to me not too long ago, I can be a Christian professional, but I can’t be a profession Christian any longer.

Deserts and Mountains

2008-10-02T07:07:00.002+02:00

There is so much varied terrain in the USA. Today I drove through a 170 miles of Nevada desert and also crossed the first range of the Sierra Nevada mountains. What a day of contrasts. The flabbergasting hues and colors of the desert are amazing. And how anything can grow out of nothing is even more amazing. But it was so hot that I was riding in a short sleeve shirt on October 1, 2008. I don't often ride in a short sleeve shirt, because my riding jacket is also one of my best lines of safety defense. That ballistic material could be a life-saver if I lay the motorcycle down. I ride without my jacket very reluctantly on the highway at high speeds. But when it is 100 degrees in the desert, you ride without the jacket.

But as I crossed the 6000 foot elevation marker, I had to stop and get the jacket out . . . the change in temp was phenomenal. And as I reached nearly 8000 feet elevation, it got downright cold! Brrr!

Then there was that running out of gas problem. There are such large distances between gas stations, that I came into Big Pines, California today on nothing but gas fumes! Add to that that no one should every try to cross the Sierra Nevada's after the sun sets, and you have the recipe for a tough and difficult ride today.

But what a study in contrasts. I am having so much fun that I feel guilty.

2250 miles so far

2008-09-27T05:38:00.000+02:00

I am currently on the road, traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast. Working along the way to pay my way, speaking at churches and small groups and meeting some great people. I have always wanted to make this trip and so far I have traveled 2250 miles west on my motorcycle (which is affectionately named Therapy).

It has been a very interesting 2250 miles so far and I still have quite a ways to go yet. The most fascinating thing is how big and beautiful this country is . . . especially the big part. The people are interesting. I am amazed at the creative people I am meeting and how they are reaching out to their communities. I have also met with key leaders from my current parent organization, including the president. I have also met tons of regular church folks who are seeking to live out their faith. And I have met lots of pagans who have no faith.

But the 44 hours that I have spent on the motorcycle thus far on this trip has been the most beneficial. These 44 hours are great thinking times and great working-it-out times. You can solve about half the world’s problem with 44 hours of thinking time. Now if only people would listen :-)

The best part of this process is the de-structuring that is forced upon you. It de-structures the life that schedule-obsessed North America obliges one to live. There is nothing to do but continue down the road . . . and that is refreshingly freeing.

In the girls room

2008-09-19T03:53:00.002+02:00

There are times when a person can be too tired for doing things right. I am currently riding my motorcycle across the USA, speaking in churches, riding my motorcycle across the USA, meeting cool people, riding my motorcycle across the USA . . . you get the picture. Well this afternoon in Missouri of all places, I made a stop at a rest area on I-70. I needed to go.

Well I was going to the right and saw that the right side of the building was the girl's room. So I went to the left side of the building and went into the bathroom. Choose a stall and went inside. I noticed that this was one of the nicest State Restroom's I had ever been in. No cigarette damage, no graffiti, no missing parts to the doors . . . you know what I am talking about if you are a guy.

I started to get the idea that something was amiss, when someone came into the stall next to mine . . . someone with very dainty shoes on . . . and then again it happened . . . and it suddenly occurred to me that somehow, someway, I was in the ladies room!!

I carefully waited until I was reasonably sure that the place was empty and I made my escape!! Just glad I did not get arrested :-) I then discovered that the Women's room was on the entire front of the building, the men's on the back!!!

There has to be a lesson in this somewhere, be it escapes me. All I can say is that the girl's rooms are much nicer than the guys rooms.

I've Shrunk!!

2008-08-04T19:09:00.000+02:00

No this is not sci-fi pseudo science. This is not an attempt to not be tall. This is also terrible for the BMI scores and all that jazz ... puts me back in the obese category (is anyone normal according to Mr. BMI??) Perhaps it is too many air-miles logged, and all that pressure inside airplanes at 35,000 feet. Perhaps it is too many bone-crunching accelerations in my lifetime, motorcycles, skis, snowboards, race cars, etc. Perhaps it is too much diving and the atmospheric pressures that come with that, I don’t know. But long story short, I have shrunk an inch and a half!

If only my waistline kept up with my height loss, things would feel better, but in America, they eat big time, and I am struggling with that side of things more than enough. Plus we eat so often in this country! Yikes . . . the pillsbury doughboy returns :-(

So I wonder if this means I will be one of those tiny little old people (when I get old I mean)? Naw, there is no chance of that happen. Short does not equal small, much less tiny. Maybe this is God’s judgment on me for calling my niece and executive assistant “shorty” for the last year? Actually I think this whole getting shorter thing is about the Dr.’s measurement tool, I couldn’t really be getting shorter, can I?

Compression

2008-07-31T22:59:00.001+02:00

Compression is what I am experiencing right now. I find myself sitting in this hard chair, staring at this computer, attempting to figure out how to express four years worth of literal blood, sweat and tears . . . in 25 minutes. That is what most churches are giving me . . . to tell the tale.

To tell the tale of Ahmad, Sasho, Sime, Dragi, Mirche, Vanessa, Linda, Jagoda, Bilijana, Nada, Linche, Boyjan, Dan, Rodger, Tim, Jonathan, Leonie, Gerco, Ray, Michael, Leyla, Dragan, Sasha, Bledar, Angie, Olie, Simon, Alexsandra, Marko, Dejan, Memo, Rachel, Caroline, Sarah, Mite, Tony, Venco, Katarina, and on and on and on I can go . . . literally.

Don’t get me wrong, the 25 minutes is generous, especially since most folks have about 5 minutes capacity for such telling of tales. And I find this to be true even though I am generally considered to be an excellent teller of tales.

But this level of compression even Jesus could not do. So obviously this format of telling will not work a fair hearing. The stories are worthy of being told, of being heard, because they have the power to encourage, challenge, wow, hurt, build and change us all.

So should I write them all? Compose a poem for each one? Perhaps make a movie? A skit? The real problem is that most of us are only interested in histories and stories that are immediate to us. The wider work of God in the world bores most people that I meet. Perhaps I should get out more some of you are thinking. And that may be so, yet who among you are free/interested/open to/willing to/hot to/wanting to spend a few days talking about what is happening in the lives of people 5000 miles away? If you are, then you belong to a small and select group of folks.

I confess this compression moment depresses me, because I too am guilty of a reduced attention-span for the life stories of those not very near by me. Maybe instead of compression, I should be concerned about my lack of compassion and overpowering selfishness.

Childhood memories

2008-07-25T04:36:00.000+02:00

There are few things more jumbled than childhood memories. Everyone has experienced going away from their parental home at some point, and then coming home to the feeling that everything had gotten smaller while gone. Its not that I have gotten larger (although that may be true too), but that our childhood worlds have grown small. Our childhood worlds are very small, inclusive, introverted, inwardly focused, not much beyond 5-7 relationships.

Adult world is much larger (and more frightening) and the scope is terrifying. Adult life is huge! But that is not the point nor subject of this particular post.

Childhood and youth memories are funny. As I have been riding about the roads and venues of my childhood these past days, the memories are all out of perspective. Those painful ones are not so hurtful anymore . . . and those wonderful ones seem to have lost their richness and pleasures. On the other hand, when I review those hurtful one and/or great ones, I can see the tapestry of who I am . . . and I then question who I have become, because of that perspective skew.

I think of what I may have become if I had made this choice, or that choice, or took that option, or travel that road instead of this highway? I think of those things I ran away from by going to Russia, and then wonder if I have lost too much by making that run? Or did I gain? Or did it matter? Did it really matter? Honestly?

There may not be an answer to my questions. Perhaps all any of us can do is enjoy today for what joys and pains that come our way. Perhaps 80% of life is attitude and not circumstances. Perhaps the best things are now, not the past nor the future. Perhaps we should just enjoy today, this moment, now. Childhood memories are too small for today.

Childhood memories

2008-07-25T04:06:00.000+02:00

Swirling mists

2008-07-08T13:28:00.000+02:00

It was kinda like being in a spooky sci-fi flick. My friend said that it was a sign from God. It was strange at the very least. On my very last bike ride up the mountain of this four year term, Vodno was capped by a heavy cloud cover . . . and I mean capped, as in the sky had a solid ceiling of gray clouds. Nothing peeking through that mass at all.

So as I was approaching the end of my ride up, about 75% of the way up the mountain, I actually entered the cloud cap. It was spooky to see ghost-like hunks of mist enveloping me and seemingly moving through me. I have flown in planes hundreds of times through the clouds. I have been in pea-soup thick fog that was bulletproof. I have climbed and skied in and above the clouds a number of times. But I have never been in such a swirling mist that seemed so . . . alive and living.

The weight of the air was so heavy that breathing was as solid as eating or drinking. It was like I needed gills rather lungs. It also was like I was in a room alone with God. God was in the swirling mists . . . and it was refreshing.

$7.33 gas and currency robberies

2008-06-08T15:41:00.000+02:00

There is much to like and love about Western Europe. Gas prices aren’t one of them. This morning I filled up the rental car at a Shell station to the tune of $7.33 a gallon for the very cheapest unleaded gasoline. That sticker shock is bad enough but following our $61.32 splurge at the ice cream shop last night, the gas was anti-climatic. I could go on and on for pages about how expensive Europe is compared to North America, but I won’t. The bottom line of what these numbers mean above is the devaluation of the US dollar. You don’t want to know what attending my son’s graduation in Germany actually costs. Of course he was worth every euro :-) Yet it was an obscene amount of money in the end.

This blurb is being written at 34,000 feet in the air in a tin sardine-can commonly called an airplane. We are about half way across the Atlantic ocean and as Aderholdt traveling adventures go, this one has been terrifyingly amazingly flawless. Up at 5:30 this morning to shower and shave, final packing in the room, re-packing of the car, breakfast with Frau Shulberger, getting Jake, then picking up Helen, driving to Zurich, stopping at the Petrol station to top off that embarrassingly expensive gas, missing the rental car return - with Jake finally figuring out how to actually do it, getting all our car bags to the check-in, Jake and I then going to get the remaining bags that Brenda and I had left in storage when we came through Zurich on Wednesday evening, then checking in at United, paying the $193.00 for having one too many bags, breakfast at Burger King (Jake’s choice!) which cost an astounding $43 for burgers and fries and ketchup, meandering to our gate, going through security where Jake was flagged and searched because of the breathtaking number of electronic gadgets in his backpack, boarding the plane with me pushing in front as much as possible in order to find a relatively safe place for the guitar to make our trans-continental journey, to this moment where I am logging my thoughts onto my computer. Believe it or not, the plane is actually supposed to arrive an hour early in Washington! As I said . . . terrifyingly amazingly flawless.

Frankly it is a fitting end to a long and productive term. Four years of our lives poured out into the soils of Macedonia, Germany and the USA. Five Aderholdts working, stretching, changing, and getting it done. Heidi graduates with honors from High School and goes off to college, where she works two jobs, and continues to make the Dean’s list semester after semester. Jake has a great four years of high school where the boy became a man. Everyone looks up to Jake, and not just because he is 6 feet tall either. He is a voice of reason and wisdom everywhere he goes and he enables others along the way so that they shine. Helen traversed the pain of Middle School, two different dorms as well as a year with mom and dad, completing an amazing run at her first year of high school under the most challenging circumstances. Brenda has trained more women leaders in Macedonia than any other women in recent history. Churches will never be the same, women have evolved into powerful sisters dispensing God’s grace and mercy in their cities, and lives have been forever changed. Not to mention years of teaching English in multiple cities and settings and making a way for people to read God’s Word for the first time in their lives (and I could go on and on). David finished his doctorate, began teaching in regional seminaries immediately, and along the way planted the International Church of Skopje. And these are just the highlights of all that happened. There were disasters along the way too . . . I think I may save those for another day . . . today is for marking the progress we each made these long four years.

Interestingly enough, this day marks the first time in four years that the five of us will actually all be living together once again. We are all eager for that closeness again. Too, you would think that after a slam-dunk term of work behind us, that life would be stable and predictable. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. We have never faced more ambiguity about our future than we do today. Perhaps in a couple of weeks I will be free to share more about that . . . perhaps not. The point of today’s blog is that life is amazingly expensive, in terms of what it costs and demands from us. If we knew the final tally ahead of time, few would willingly pay it I think. But I think the real question here is this, is it worth what it costs?

Six strings loose

2008-06-05T08:54:00.000+02:00

After two flights, tons of waiting in airports, renting cars, storing luggage in Left Luggage departments, missing exits, finding the Gastehaus, getting our room, collapsing into bed and finally sleeping like the permanently dead, our day of travel to Germany came to an end. Compared to my usual travel horrors, this one was a charm (because I had lovely wife with me for sure) but still exhausting.

One of the main reason it was so exhausting is that I am lugging around my amazing guitar. Now guitars are not airplane friendly. Heck, they are not even travel friendly! Guitars want to be lovely held and cherished and be stroked and strummed into sweet oblivion. They are not kind nor thoughtful passengers while traveling. They are more like demanding fragile brats.

So this morning after a nice Germany breakfast, I returned to our room and as usual have the compulsion to reach for the guitar and hear a few measures of beautiful music. This morning no such thing happened of course because I had six loose strings. I loosened the strings prior to flying so that neither they nor the wood instrument itself undergoes undue stress.

So I tuned for a half hour or so, until all the strings were once again vibrating under the appropriate tension and the harmony produced was satisfying to the ear. Then Brenda and I sang together for a half hour. But tuning those strings back to proper tension got me to thinking . . . dangerous I know.

I said yesterday, we are at the place of new starts. New tasks, new place to live, new people to meet, new (different) cars to drive, new roads to explore . . . and perhaps new jobs, new futures, and new everythings. I am sure we will make mistakes and have to do it over and try again and again. There will be times when have to stop in the middle of what we are singing (doing) and adjust another string to find harmony once again. Getting it just right is sufficiently challenging to a person like me with an average ear for music, and that means lots of effort to compensate for my deficiencies. This coming year has many many parallels.

I have a feeling it is going to be much like tuning six loose strings . . . .

A New Start

2008-06-04T13:02:00.001+02:00

New starts are hard. At my age and with my temperament new starts seem terribly threatening. But life with the living requires new starts. Even if you go kicking and screaming.

Today one of my very best friends encouraged me to start blogging again. And she said it in such a way that it made sense and gave me hope that more good than harm could come from it, so here we go . . ..

In an hour I will walk outside, get in my car for the last time, pick up my ever-social wife in the center, turn the car toward the airport, check-in my tons of luggage, and fly away from our third term overseas.

New starts are almost always tied to new endings. This end is one of those that cycle around every four years for us and is almost unbearably painful and difficult. How do you put into words the sum total of your relationships? The internet is far too small a medium to handle the immensity and weight of such significance.

Of course the new start has its ups as well. Re-unitied with all our children, son’s graduation from High School, living all together for the first time in five years, fishing in pristine waters with another best friend, motorcycles, some rest and restoration of my soul.

But today is about pain. The pain of separation, of not knowing if/when we will see one another again, who ever will be that honest and truthful with me in caring concern?, an end to the richest and most comfortable being that I have experienced in decades, not being judged for who I am, . . . good friends are in short supply and high demand, and are the richest currency of life.

Heaven simply may be the contentment of having all these friends in the same place and never having separations ever again. New starts and new endings are hard (I can think of several choice choice words in a number of languages more descriptive than hard, but I will let this one stand today).

You know, my friend was right as usual . . . I needed to start blogging again, and not allow the naysayers and whiners in this sometimes miserable world, win yet again.

Test First

2008-06-04T12:32:00.000+02:00

Test First new MacJournal connection

111.6 miles per hour

2008-02-25T17:19:00.001+01:00

Date: February 25, 2008 4:15 PM

Topic: 111.6 miles per hour

I love speed . . . you are just closer to God when you go fast. Danger and death and pain and injury are all just a moment away at racing speeds. This morning I was enjoying the scenery (however briefly) flying past me at 111.6 mph! No I wasn't driving, I wasn't even sitting in the front seat. I was merely a passenger in the back seat, riding in a car being driven by someone else.

Although it is only 10:00 am, I have already have traveled at a wide wide range of speeds today. First of all, my Field Director graciously got up at Zero Dark Thirty this morning and picked me up at my house at 5:00 am to take me to the airport. He obviously had just rolled out the sack and was only partially awake, because we never got over 50 mph the entire way to the airport, even when we were on the highway. Then the plane that took me up and over the problems in Serbia to Croatia was moving at about 400 mph. And then the ride from this airport in Croatia to the seminary.

Believe it or not, I did not actually notice that we were going fast, until we got up over 100 mph. I was reading and typing in the back seat, preparing for class lectures. But once you start moving faster than 100 mph, you have those little floating feelings deep inside your lower abdomen, and that caused me to look up at the landscape flashing by me, and then I glanced over at the speedometer . . . 180 kph! According to my calculator, that equals 111.6 mph.

I have probably driven this fast myself more than a few times :-), but I rarely sit quietly in a car while someone else drives that speed. Most people make me far too nervous, but my driver today did not. He handle himself and the car with great skill and confidence.

Carolyn will be upset, but there is a spiritual principle that I want to make from this. While we may very well enjoy the thrill of moving through life at 111.6 mph, there are many extra dangers that come from moving at such speeds. I find the most dastardly one, to be exhaustion. The focus and energy required to safely (ok, relative safety) navigate such speeds is exhausting. When I start counting up how few days I take "off" and how many days I am "on" the numbers and imbalance is alarming! The second is the intense "doing" rather than "being". You are simply moving too fast to BE anything, racing from one assignment to the next, from one task to the next.

The result is a tired overachiever! I am not sure God finds much pleasure in such followers. He seemed to enjoy those who sat at His feet and hung out with Him far more than those who did something all the time. Maybe it's time to slow down?

temp changes

2007-12-07T07:33:00.000+01:00

Well when I left Asia last night it was 77 degrees warm (25 C) and this morning when I arrived in Budapest it was 29 degrees (-1.6 C). Burrrrrrrr! Of course it was especially biting since I decided to stay in short pants and short sleeves as it was unbearable last night to think about an 11 hour flight in jeans and a long sleeve shirt. Now I am reconsidering, but of course I have no access to my clothes since they are being held for the Skopje flight this afternoon. At least it is warm in the Airport, although the TP is terrible.

The best breakfast in the whole world

2007-12-03T05:47:00.000+01:00

I have new favorite breakfast . . . it's the local noodle shop. The noodle soup is to die for . . . more taste per spoonful than anything I think I have ever eaten in my whole life. And being a terminally fat person, that is alot of eating.

When I transition later this week, I will really miss the food . . . but my waistline will be relieved that I am returning to a saner style of eating.

I wonder if I could open a noodle shop in the Hairy Armpit?

A Mountain of Flowers

2007-11-29T12:18:00.000+01:00

My brother told me. I did not believe him. There simply does not exist a mountain of flowers. But there does and there is and I went there. Here is the story in pictures:

The 2000 curve road . . . with no brakes!

2007-11-27T11:41:00.000+01:00

The amazingly beautiful and picturesque road to Mae Hong Son is known as the road with 2000 curves. It requires patience, skill and more than a bit of foolishness . . . especially when we cleared the first humongous mountain range and started down the other side and discovered that my brother had no rear brakes on his bike! And he was riding double! Needless to say this is a recipe for disaster.

So we stopped and I took the passenger, and allowed my brother to lead at a speed that felt and was, less lethal. We were about 17 kilometers from Pai and so our goal was to reach a motorcycle shop without dropping the bike, or going off the road into one of the ravines. I on the other hand, was struggling with a second rider . . . which greatly affected how my bike was handling and to be honest, my brakes aren't the greatest in the world either.

Long story short, we found a bike shop, he changed the brakes, and off we were again on our wild adventure on the 2000 curve road.

As the afternoon progressed, I could not help but think that my life is much like this 2000 curve road. It has shifted direction and focus and passion and means and methods and priorities and resources at least 2000 times. And admittedly, there are stages of this life where I seemed to be headed downhill into lethal curves with no brakes with which to stop or even control the pace at which I move.

I also was wondering if I kept good brakes on my life, would I have chosen the same paths that I have thus far, or would I have chosen a different road here and there had this life a more controlled pace? On the other hand, I am fairly certain that far less would have been accomplished in my life to-date, had I stopped and thought about it too much.

Every curve is different. Each one has risks and thrills. Each one is potentially lethal. Each one can take you to a breathtakingly beautiful vista.

Fireworks on the 21st floor

2007-11-25T14:00:00.000+01:00

Last night was a magical night. As we headed for the rooftop of the Pornping Hotel the excitement was energizing. On the rooftop . . . literally the 21st floor of the hotel . . . we enjoyed a reservation-only atmosphere and fabulous meal they prepared for us right there on our table. The chicken, fish and pork kabobs were only the beginning of a meal fit for a king.

The fireworks are going off all over the city, which of course we had a front row seat being on the roof of the tallest building in the city, and there were an endless stream of fire balloons lighting the sky for hours. On the other hand . . .

It can be very interesting to be at the same height and level as the fireworks explode all around you. It is one thing to watch fireworks from the York fairgrounds and quite another thing to experience the fireworks 21 stories high in the breezy Asian night.

It was a great memory to make with my brother and Asian friends. One of the sad and unfortunate things that occurred, is that some of the Westerners got upset about the fireworks being so close (and granted sometimes they were close), but if that is your attitude, why don't you just stay home?

If only the rats would eat the cockroaches

2007-11-24T10:43:00.000+01:00

There are several stereotypes of Asia that I have heard from friends who have lived in this part of the world . . . that seem to be perfectly true. Asian bathrooms can be interesting places, but nothing tops the rats and the cockroaches . . . both which seem bound and determined to chase me whenever I am in the same room as they are. It is disturbing to have rats and coackroaches be so aggressive toward me. Generally people find I have a gentle and lovable soul . . . perhaps these carnivores don't have socializing on their small minds?

As I was returning from the computer mega-store here today and I came into the kitchen area to take the stairs to my room, there was a ginormous cockroach guarding the door. It was huffing and puffing and it was not about to allow me passage to the stairwell. I was afraid to move at first (who knows what a startled cockroach the size of a small horse might do??), but then I decided to make a break for it. I faked going right, then double-pumped an imaginary piece of bread to temp it with, and then jumped left.

Whew! I made it to the stairs, but did not linger, in case it wanted revenge . . . and as I thought about this close encounter on the way to the third floor, I thought, wouldn't it be nice if the rats (in the same kitchen – roughly the size of the local elephants) would eat the cockroaches! At least one fright would then be gone.

Looking the wrong way

2007-11-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

Looking the wrong way.

Looking the wrong way while crossing the street can be deadly. You know you are in a foreign country that you are not accustom to when you are constantly looking the wrong way while trying to cross the street. Here in this part of Asia you drive on the LEFT side of the road, not the RIGHT side of the road. And while this sounds simple enough to adjust to . . . having looked the wrong way several thousand times over the last 7 days, has convinced me that I will need some time before looking this other way will feel correct.

I need to successfully make this mental shift, or it's going to get me killed, maimed, hurt, damaged, and hell . . . it has already scared the life out of me about a half dozen times!

As I sit here thinking this afternoon, I have come to realize that I need to look at life in a different way as well. I need to see reality in an alternate manner than I currently do . . . I am locked into a bad pattern and I have been doing this particular way so long that, I cannot seem to make the leap to a new dimension.

It is dangerous to be in such a rut, it can maim your heart, damage your soul, crush your spirit, and make you a slave to fear. Being startled over and over emotionally takes a heavy toll after a bit. If you don't make the jump to the new reality, then you can only stay stuck in the same old way that you have perceived reality all the years before. Then all the things I listed above are your future.

So a fresh perspective is the order of the decade. You have got to stop looking the wrong way.

Sumo Mania

2007-11-20T12:47:00.000+01:00

The World Championship of Sumo Wrestling just occurred here this past weekend. Sumo Wrestling is to the uninitiated, just a bunch of overweight bullies pushing one another around . . . and granted there is a measure of that going on. But when you see the explosive power of these two giants coming out of their stance and colliding . . . you wonder that the building does not shake and fall!

I included this video of one of the mighty falling . . . literally!

There were competitors from Germany, Poland, The Netherlands, Russia, Japan, Thailand, USA, Ukraine, Mongolia, Malaysia, Hungary, Hong Kong, China, Brazil, and others.

Perhaps I have a new career in the making?

Hungarian TP

2007-11-19T03:18:00.000+01:00

I thought I had returned to Russia to be honest with you. It has been many years since I have been forced to use paper this coarse, rough, unfriendly and painful. If you can imagine posterboard thickness and sandpaper grain, then you have a good idea how bad, painful and useless one finds Hungarian toilet paper.

At least this is the case in Ferihegy Airport in Budapest. Perhaps in the private homes of Budapest, there is a much more pleasing process to be experienced, but the one at the airport hurts.

When I encounter this style of displeasure, I am always tempted to take some and write a letter to someone on it . . . it certainly would be pen-proof and durable.

Perhaps I will write the local government in Budapest about this issue . . . or take the whole roll (it's industrial size) and start a petition against such abuse on the general public, especially the traveling public. I imagine that everyone in the airport would gladly sign it.

The White Temple

2007-11-18T15:43:00.000+01:00

The White Temple is one of the most startling artchitectual complexes in the world. It is one man's vision and understanding of the world shaped by his Asian culture and his Buddhist upbringing.

Here I am standing in front of the main temple on the site. It is an amazing building. And you are not supposed to take pictures inside and so I did not. But in the creator of the White Temple's understanding of god, humanity must go through hell, in order to reach heaven. Here is his depiction of hell.

It is a really graphic horror . . . one that will give you cold chills. And the other horror that evangelical Christianity does not address in any adequate manner, is that that this fellow's perspective that you must go through hell to reach heaven is the mainstream understanding of the majority of the world. I am not stating that he (they) are correct, only that evangelicals are the miniscule minority with the PollyAnna concept of reality.

The wealthy culture surrounding Western Christianity makes it a destitute thought-system in the two-thirds world. We have sacrificed so little, suffered too little, been hungry so little, been thirsty for clean water so little, lacked for so little, that we have little to offer the two-thirds world which is in a daily sumo-wrestling match with these life and death issues.

The perspective of the world we say we are called/trying to reach is, you have to go through hell to reach heaven. We say that Christ already has, so that no one else is required to do so. In the 2/3's world few of them have heard of Christ's perspective. So do they now go through hell and stay there, or do they reach heaven? And whose fault is it either way?

It seems to me that we do not seriously believe our own theology. Not when 95% of what we make in life is spent on us, and only a tiny fraction of "the church" lays down their life for these said beliefs. No wonder they don't believe us, even the few that get to hear.

The 50 foot Buddha

2007-11-15T13:45:00.000+01:00

The biggest Buddha in the world.

I almost wreck the motorcycle! We came around this curve and there was a 50 foot buddha on top of this huge boat right on the mekong river. Like I said, I almost wrecked the bike this thing appeared so suddenly. It is impossible for me to give you a proper feel for how big this thing is . . . it was an amazing sight to see, especially for me, the buddha-uninitiated . . . you can see the photo here . . .

I had barely been in-country for 24 hours and this was my first buddha, and what a buddha it was! Now that I have been here for a week, I have seen 1000's of buddha's but still, this one was unique. It was "sitting" in a ginormous boat with elephants and the whole nine yards!

Now I am no Buddha expert, but the whole experience left me more than a bit dazed. There were these bronze gongs at each entrance, and the person was to rub it in such away that it started to hum . . . and several of the 100's trying were successful. These are the people who walk away with good luck from the Buddha himself.

All I know is this, don't be startled if you come around a corner and see a 50 foot Buddha all decked out in gold, glinting in the sunlight, in this part of the world . . . hold on to your motorcycle handlebars!

Riding with Eddie

2007-11-14T03:26:00.000+01:00

There are lots of new things that I am doing currently in Asia. As you can see in this photo, I am riding a motorcycle as my main ride . . . and obviously it is very warm here . . . you could not be riding a motorcycle in the Hairy Armpit without loads of clothes right now since it is 25 degrees in Skopje, versus the 77 degrees it is here in Asia.

So not only am I riding a motorcycle everyday, I am also riding with a motorcycle gang! And this past weekend we took a long long trip together and it was a very interesting experience. The road rules here in Asia are ginormously different than the road rules I am accustomed to elsewhere. This is where Eddie comes in. You can see Eddie, my brother, Natty and I at a eating joint somewhere near the Golden Triangle.

Eddie and I are roughly the same age and that helped us get along, but his English helped even more, since I am struggling with "hello" in the local languages. But back to road rules . . . the hardest thing here is that people drive on the left side of the road, rather than on the right side of the road. 30 years of driving experience on the other side, makes me constantly think that I am sure to die at any moment! It is freaky!!

Moreover the "passing" rules are even stranger . . . traffic is much more fluid here than I am used to and it is difficult for me to master as a foreigner. So Eddie helped me for two days, as he initiated my intro into driving in Asia on a motorcycle. Add mountains and curves and Eddie probably saved my live a half dozen times at least on that long road trip with new road rules. I got my motorcycle legs back (for Asia at least) riding with Eddie.

Sandwiched at 31000

2007-11-12T03:29:00.000+01:00

It has to be some curse on my family. Some long forgotten relative or kin has seriously damaged my ability to catch a break while traveling. I always get in the slowest toll line, I always choose the slowest immigration line, the slowest passport stamping line, the meanest traffic lane, the hottest seat on the bus, the coldest bathroom, the hardest bed, and worst pillow, the dirtiest hotel, the most expensive meal (if there is no menu), the sickest train compartment . . . and on and on I could go for at least another hour. But I won't bore you anymore with these extremes of my traveling experiences in general, but rather tell you of the one last night.

I was sandwiched at 31000 feet . . . sandwiched between two people possessed to make my 10 hour flight a living hell. The one in front of me was just constant motion, and it seemed that each time I laid my head up against his seat, he was jerking and moving like he had turbo-folk music (a particularly vicious form of Eastern European music) pounding through his veins and he just could not be still for a single moment. No possible rest by leaning forward.

But the selfish cow behind me took all honors for the curse thus far in my life. She was totally commited to driving her knees into my back for the duration of the 10 hour flight. In fact she refused to sit up at all during the trip, keeping her knees sharply pinned against the back of my seat. So tightly in fact that the seat simply refused to recline at all. Since she weighed more than I did, I could not move her. But I sure as heck decided to irritate her! Since she was not going to let me recline nor sleep, I became highly motivated to interrupt her sleep as much as possible. I was so successful in fact, that she turned into a screaming wench, waking up everyone else around me. You gotta laugh. It was one of the longest-least-pleasant flights I have taken . . . and I have taken quite a few in my travels.

I know it does not sound like I worked very hard at making the best of the situation, but that is not true . . . I tried for hours, but in the end decided that some things you simply cannot change in life and you have to either accept it or join in the rumble . . . and this time I joined in the rumble. Now if I could only figure out how to get rid of this family curse . . ..

2 minutes and 41 seconds to spare

2007-10-31T13:43:00.000+01:00

Trains in Western Europe are marvelous. They are truly amazing, because they are always on time . . . you can actually set your watch by the train arrival and departure! It’s nothing like where I live in the Hairy Armpit . . . after living most of the last 13 plus years in Russia and the Balkans . . . where anything closely resembling on time is acceptable and expected. If it is a half hour late . . . well, that is really on time here. Western Europe is just the opposite; 10:04 departure means 10:04 depart 999 times out of 1000.

So if you are running late getting to the airport or train station here in the Hairy Armpit, no one panics or has their blood pressure shooting higher . . . the chances are better than even that whatever mode of transportation you are going to get on, will depart late by Western standards.

On the other hand, if you are running late in Germany or Switzerland . . . oops . . . guess what? You are going to miss your train. And this is where I found myself on Saturday . . . after a blessed week in the West, where everything functions in a predictable rational manner . . . running late because the regional highway into Basel, Switzerland from Germany was closed for repairs . . . so we had to take the scenic route . . . along with thousands of other motorists . . . and we are seriously late.

I really hate that O.J. Simpson style of of running through the airport or whatever transportation hub you find yourself, racing to catch your train plane or automobile. But once again, here I am doing just that. I am too old for this crap!

I decided to take my chances with the train steward and race directly to the train without a ticket . . . who knows if they will throw me off the train, charge me some ginormous penalty, or what . . . I just figured that getting on the train took precedence over a ticket to ride said train. Remember that I have a plane waiting for me at the end of this train ride, and if I was to make the worship service next day and lead worship . . . well you get the picture; get on the train!

I got to the train with exactly 2 minutes and 41 seconds to spare! Before I got my bags into the racks above, and sank wearily into one of the seats, the train began to pull out the station. Whew! That was really close.

Oh, the ticket? Well the smiling and ever so polite Swiss ticket agent came through my car about 30 minutes into the trip and listened to my whole spiel with a smile on her face and then sold me a train ticket at normal fare. That was a pretty good deal with 2 minutes and 41 seconds to spare.

Locked in the parking garage!

2007-10-29T20:10:00.000+01:00

It was the first time that we had seen each other in several years, and so Tim and I had spent several hours getting caught up on all that we had been going through recently. We were sitting in a dive off the walking square in Lorrach, Germany.

Since we both had had a long long day, we called it quits about 9:00 pm and headed back to the parking garage off the side street. We paid for our parking in the automated machine and then got into the car and headed toward the exit. Imagine our surprise as we turned the corner and discovered a heavy duty fence covering the exit!

“What are we going to do?“ Tim asked me. ”I have to catch the train at 5:50 am!“ he said. And I responded, ”Yes and they lock the doors to the dorm I am staying in at midnight.“ Tim asked me again, ”What ever are we going to do?“ It was the question of the moment.

I wasn’t overly worried . . . since Tim is one of the best troubleshooters I have ever met in my whole life, I was sure that we would resolve this eventually . . . and . . . I have been known to solve a few problems myself. Still, being locked inside a parking garage far from where you need to be, is no small challenge. I decided to walk around and see if the entrance was also fenced shut and it was. Then I told Tim that I was going to see if I could raise the fence in some way, and he said that he would try to find someone who might be able to help us.

I had no luck at all raising the fence . . . although I could lift it, I certainly could not get it high enough for the car to pass underneath. While I was practicing being Mr. Hercules, Tim had found another person who needed to escape the confines of the parking garage as urgently as we did, with the added bonus that she also spoke English (which is rather rare in this part of Germany). She approach the fence just as incredulously as we had, but then she burst out laughing.

The sign on the fence, which neither Tim nor I could read although we speak and read several languages between the two of us, read ”drive your car to the edge of the fence and it will automatically rise.“ We did and it did.

What a real picture of the spiritually lost. They are locked into a place they cannot escape from on their own, without outside help from people who understand what is really going on and who can read all the signs. We need to be the ones showing the captives the way out.

Food Miles

2007-10-26T10:47:00.000+02:00

Yesterday while traveling from Berlin, Germany to Basel, Switzerland, I was reading the Euro-perspective of Green Skiing. Western Europeans are far more eco-focused than I find most Americans to be. I don’t particularly have an opinion about that fact, but for my purposes here, am just stating the data. And so the big deal of the moment is skiing and snowboarding (Europeans as a group do far more of that than do North Americans) and which resorts are eco-friendly, burning bio-fuels, saving the environment (although snowmaking machines are notorious energy hogs and water abusive), and all that jazz.

So now that I have told you far more than you wanted to know about what I read on airplanes, and have since put you completely to sleep I fear, there was one line that jumped off the page that I was reading as we jetted into the sky spewing ginormous quantities of pollution into the dark early morning air of Berlin. Food miles. There was this concept of food miles . . .. It is the idea that transporting food costs the environment and world, resources that it can ill afford to expend. Thus the article suggested eating local, in-season fruits and vegetables to reduce the food miles spent getting said food to your table. This one actually makes sense to me, and we do this as a rule. But what if you live in a part of the world where there is little locally grown food, or what if it is stuff you can’t stomach? (pun intended)

Then the article took off on carbon footprints. No, this is not a new discovery of dinosaurs locked into some type of carbon dating fiasco. This is the carbon emissions that come from you living, eating, breathing, and traveling in the real world. So if I eat local produce that has not had to travel a billion kilometers to reach me and fuel my body, the logic is that I have reduced the carbon footprint that my life is costing the world’s resources. The irony was not lost on me that I, at that very moment of carbon footprint awareness, was leaving an astronomical amount of carbon emissions in my wake as we flew far above the sleeping German countryside.

I wondered how many locally grown peppers and tomatoes should I eat to offset one flight to Western Europe? What about a transatlantic flight!?

All of this eco-conversation reminds me that it is far easier to see a problem, than find a real solution. Some real problems that have plagued me lately, and to which I have no solutions are 1) why do organizations almost always control people rather than enable them? 2) why does God not give people more opportunity to see, hear and experience the Gospel of Christ before they die? Six people connected to our church in some manner have died recently. Most without Christ. Perhaps this is more of a question of me/the church failing them, rather than God not giving opportunity? On the other hand, why am I trying to exonerate God? 3) Why do I think I have to find some spiritual significance in every bad thing that happens? 4) When am I going to make these changes in my life rather than just think about them? Why am I so paralyzed about taking the risks to switch careers or something? 5) When will Jesus be King and satan completely vanquished? 6) Why do I say I believe in a loving caring God that is reaching out to the world and wishes to save it, when most of my actions show and tell that I am focused on me. The incongruency of that makes me itch and twist! 7) How do I set people free to reach their potential? 8) why do I continue to do live in the place and job that I do, yet pee and moan about it all the time? Why not do something about it? 9) Where is the good in pain and heartbreak? 10) Why do I spend so much mental effort asking questions that have no answers?

I think I will go eat some locally grown German corn while I ponder my carbon footprints.

I don't understand God and neither do you-

2007-10-24T15:57:00.000+02:00

It has been more than a month since I have posted a blog on this site. Tragedy struck in September and I haven’t had the heart to write since. For those who may not know, we are building a significant building which will house both a local church and National Seminary. In September we had two workers who were buried when we had a deep trench collapse on top of them. These two friend’s deaths were powerfully troubling for me. Then it got worse; the police arrested two of my friends and placed them in prison as the responsible persons for the death of the other two friends. So two friends dead, two friends in prison (although one is currently out). This tragedy has forced me to review a number of assumptions that I have about God.

I have always assumed that God was there to protect me from harm. Now I am afraid to drive my car some days.
I have assumed that God was there to prevent tragedy from happening to believers. Now I am wondering when the next tragedy will occur.
I have assumed that God wanted His plans to go smoothly. Now I wonder why a project so important, can be in such a precarious situation.
I have assumed that God wished for love and mercy to rule the earth. Now I worry about the two small boys without a father.
I have assumed that God’s highest goal was me and my concerns. Now I understand that I don’t really understand God at all.

What happens when your child is raped, or a young father is killed, or when a project that could change a whole country is endangered? What happens when tragedy strikes, death comes early, evil occurs? Does anyone know where the love of God goes . . .? Like I said, I don’t really understand God at all, and this has made me question many of my previously rock-solid convictions about God. On the other hand, where else do we turn? Who can rescue us us? And isn’t that what all this is about . . . that we all need to be rescued, yet sometimes He doesn’t? And that damned “why” question keeps popping up.

So I don’t have any answers for you, and I almost never can answer the why question, but through these events in life, one will either stop believing entirely, or have a permanently damaged faith, or grow stronger faith. I have no idea which one of the three I will end up with, but this one thing I know for sure, I don’t understand God, but hopefully, He understands me.

Life with a pickaxe

2007-09-14T12:47:00.000+02:00

No I am not talking about my wife. She is a sweetie. But my other girl these days is a pickaxe. She and I have been spending lots of time together. There is nothing like swinging a pickaxe all day, to put most other things in perspective. Pickaxe perspective is a reduction of life to the basics, the simpliest point of view.

When you never have the chance of working extra hard physically, you never get a chance to get to this point, when pain and hurt and sore muscles reduce everything to several key points in life.

Sometimes in life, I simply spend too much time thinking. You can't think much while swinging a pickaxe into semi-concrete earth. The soil is so hard here, that honestly, it seems that the cement slab is softer. It rattles your bones and vibrates your insides in a very painful way. But nothing compares to the next morning. You need a crane to help you get out of bed. Every breath hurts. Who would have thought that each joint in your hand could possible cause so much pain so constantly? And then the blisters! And then an actual blister where you had yesterday's blister! A blister on the blister!

Now wearing two gloves, you return to the work site, hoping that your body does not shatter into a 1000 pieces the first time that you swing the axe again. But you don't break, and then 10 hours later, you have finished another day of swinging a pickaxe. Now you can return home to email, church meetings, music practice, and normal church work. But you fall asleep soon, and the computer runs all night. And you dream of more pickaxes chasing you all night long. This is my life with a pickaxe right now.

Temporary Staying

2007-09-07T23:22:00.000+02:00

That is what the sign in the police station read, where I was waiting in line for hours. OF course my business there would take all of 3 minutes, if I could ever get into the office. Temporary staying, is what they call it, even though I have been here for eight years!

That phrase got me to thinking . . . that temporary staying is how I should view life in this world, but in fact, just the opposite usually happens. I live each day as if I will be here forever and always. In fact if I look deep enough, I am pretty sure that I would like to stay here forever on planet earth. Let's face it, it is the only life I have ever known.

But if I am to be or becoming or stay a Kingdom person, then I need a new perspective. I need a temporary staying perspective. True life . . . my eternal life . . . is somewhere other. This stop on earth is just a temporary staying.

The bloody razor edge

2007-08-30T20:33:00.000+02:00

The rip went all the way from my shoulder fading away into my back as you can see in the photos. This is how we ended a great afternoon of playing in the lake. It was an accident. No one intended any wrong or hurt. No one had malice on their mind. But it still really hurt. The kind of hurt that leaves scars. Scars are great conversation points after the pain fades, but they sure hurt like the blazes at the moment of injury.

We are still hurting from the death of our Muslim friend who died two weeks ago. On Saturday I will be speaking at his memorial service. It cuts like the razor’s edge too . . . it leaves scars on my soul. As I have sat here this day and thought carefully about the theological quagmire that I find myself in, it just hurts like the ripping fingernails that made the cuts in the photo above on my shoulders.

I have decided that death should hurt. The hurt increases my sensitivity to how Christ must have felt on the Cross with the potential deaths of all of humanity upon His shoulders, and His own imminent physical death. Too, I wonder if death makes God as angry as it does me? The end of all that potential, all that fathering, all that son-ing, all that husband-ing, all that creativity, all that loving, all that giving, all that laughing, all that potential . . . ending. Robbed by death’s unexpected arrival.

I too am going to die. It may be today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, after retirement, whenever, but it will happen. I wonder now, if I am squandering all my potential in LIFE, in worrying about the razor edge that is coming? It is inevitable . . . death is coming and that right soon, but is it not today that matters? This moment? I think I will go hug my daughter right now.

You can not smell the roses

2007-08-28T17:46:00.000+02:00

We discovered a wild phenomena on Sunday as one of the families were departing our house after our big Sunday BBQ bash. One of their kid’s had his nose stuck in one of my red roses, and I told him, “don’t waste your time with the reds, they don’t have any smell at all to them, try the yellows.” The boy then looks at me strangely and said, “but these reds smell wonderful!” I responded, “you are kidding?” and I was thinking “dude, what have you been smoking?” I continued, “The reds have no smell at all unless you crush the leaves, only the yellow roses have a sweet fragrance throughout the blooming cycle.”

Then the boy’s father came over and smelled the yellows, and then the reds, and he informed me that the reds had a much stronger and sweeter fragrance, than did the yellows! Now I am starting to think that they are jerking my chain and loading my wagon, because I have been growing (and sniffing) these flowers for longer than three years. So we started asking people which smell was better, and which rose was stronger. About 65% of the people asked, thought the red rose had a stronger and sweeter fragrance, and about 35% swore that the reds had no odor at all (as in zero!) and that the yellows smelled like . . . well, roses.

Hhhhmmmmm. Just to make certain certain, I just had Wendy my assistant, go out and smell the roses . . . she came back and confirmed that only the yellows have fragrance.

The bottom line is that not all roses can be smelled by all people. That is what makes us all different at some fundamental level, i.e. individuals. Unique creations of God, that are special and one of a kind (OK at least yellow roses and red roses kinds), with no two of us exactly the same. What is there about this infinite variety that God loves so much, that He insists upon it within the creation? Am I (and even you) that special and one of a kind with Him? It is a breath-taking thought, even if I can’t smell red roses.

The stretching of time

2007-08-27T19:04:00.000+02:00

Time must stretch, because we are constantly challenged to do more and accomplish more, and since no one gets more time, then I have decided that time must stretch. Today is a perfect example of what I mean. When I got up this morning at 6:30, there were only two items on my agenda for the day (and week actually). All I needed to get done this day/week (progress today, completion by week’s end) was preparing our worship set for Sunday and writing the sermon for Sunday. Normal, everyday work for the pastor types, right?

Remember my Muslim friend that was killed almost two weeks ago, well, now we are to have a memorial service for him, and the widow wants me involved. This is really tricky, although I have agreed to participate, because he was Muslim, she is rather agnostic, but I am the only vicar-dude she knows . . . but when am I supposed to prepare this? And of course every pastor can tell you that you need to prepare ahead, in case of emergencies just like this. Anyhoo, this negotiation took a fair amount of my morning mental energy.

Then a friend came over this afternoon to get some resources I had pledged toward an evangelism project he and his organization are doing this week. That hand-me-the-money-moment turned into a typical Balkan 2 hour brain blitzkrieg, that left me mentally brain-dead for the rest of the day. I hadn’t even got the music set done, much less looked at the sermon passage for the week. We talked about Board meetings, evangelism strategies, Home Assignment (he will be coming with me for a few weeks as a National Representative), and we discussed his personnel challenges, and then he wanted me to commit to a leadership conference for him this Fall, and then to do some monthly training of his staff on leadership principles (and all of this followed a discussion where I told him how busy was going to be for the next four months!) and then he was wondering when we could just go out and have a coffee! Yikes!

Now the day has filled up with so much more than I started it out with . . . proof that time stretches. But isn’t this typical for everyone? It sure is a typical time stretching day for Dave.

The deaths of a thousand goodbyes

2007-08-24T13:17:00.000+02:00

The first time we did this, she was only 7 years old, a second grader at boarding school. We gathered as a family of five in a dark corner of a dirty airport in Rostov-na-danu Russia, and we put Heidi on an airplane and watched her leave us.

That was the flash-back in my mind as I drove home from the airport in Skopje this morning, having put the very same girl an another airplane in a different country and watched her leave us. Oh yes, she is a 19 year old college sophomore now, but it still makes me die a little inside every time we go through this. In 36 hours I will have to do the same with Jake as he heads out for his senior year at boarding school.

These little deaths have a cumulative affect. My soul shrinks each time. My care and concern for people here diminishes. My desire to stay here falls. My sense of powerlessness to protect my children grows. My feeling of isolation from them seems to overwhelm me. My weakness is evident for all to see. If not for the mercy of God, all would be lost.

Somebody out there must be praying for me today.

The world at my door

2007-08-20T15:35:00.000+02:00

There were people from Tanzania, Mali, Ireland, Macedonia, England, Iran and Alabama here yesterday. A veritable smorgasbord of nations, all sitting down at our table and having lunch with us. You should have heard their stories. You should attend our church! There we have 11 nationalities represented . . . it is a little bit like I imagine heaven to be: multicolored and multi-ligual. Life together as a group of internationals just has so much more taste to, than the monochrome experiences I had in North America.

All Nations, represented around the throne is the way that heaven is described in the scriptures. But it is so rarely how our churches are here on earth. Especially here in the ethnic-hatred capital of the world, this is so true. In fact I have been party to keeping the ethnic churches/groups separate from one another. Why?

Because in this fallen world, you cannot grow churches up the social scale. You can only move down the social scale. In other words, we began a Gypsy church in Bitola, because Gypsy families started attending the Macedonia services. But when the Gypsy families started attending, the Macedonians stopped attending (I am generalizing here to make a point, not all families stopped coming because they had Christ in their hearts) and so in order to plant the Macedonian congregation, we had to get the Gypsy families out.

We are having a similar problem in Bosnia. The high class folks won’t come to church with the low class folks, and thus it seems to be everywhere in the world. I wonder what Jesus thinks about all of this silliness? I imagine that His heart breaks a bit every time this stuff happens within His family. I hope the joy He has in the multi-cultural International church offsets His sadness in the most segregated hour of the week.

how to tell a 5 year old that her father is dead

2007-08-17T21:07:00.000+02:00

Her father was a Muslim (officially). He also was one of the kindest and most compassionate people I have ever met (in truth). Today I tried to explain to his five year old daughter why he is never coming home ever again. I guess I was also trying to explain to his wife the same concept at an adult level. He was tragically killed in an automobile pileup on Wednesday afternoon.

This muslim fellow was an amazing person. He lived in the moment, embracing everyone who came into his path, especially children. All the children loved him. Interestingly enough, he and his wife are well surrounded by folks from the International church, and we were loving back on him . . . and he was joyful, but not at peace . . . and he and I were starting to dialogue about truth, spiritual things, God, the differences between Islam and Christianity, and why there are so many arrogant people that call themselves christian.

All those conversations are now finished. He was killed almost instantly on Wednesday just as his wife and 5 year daughter were getting on an airplane in England to return here to the hairy armpit after a two week holiday. Folks from ICS had to meet them at the airport to give them the tragic news. And then she asked me to come and explain to the child why daddy was not coming home again.

I am way out of my comfort zone. Because I am little like the man we are discussing here. Kids don’t love me, nor am I compassionate and kind. I am much more the snarly kind of pastor (or vicar as they call me). I am the kind that thinks he has most of the right answers, but has little of the character that should come with it. I am the kind that teaches the bible and theology as pretty much black and white stuff, while life itself is only shades of grey. I am the kind that talks lots and lives little. The 29 year old father/husband we are discussing was a better man than me. And all his wife wants to know, is this, “is he OK?” “Is he alright?” “Will I see him again?”

These are not questions that I can answer since I am not God, but I suspect I have answers that she would rather not hear. The other questions I have are about us as a church, and should we have been more direct? More pushy? More shark-like in our evangelism? And I come up with the same answers every time, that you have to be relationally close enough to bear the weight of discussing eternity and God. It just can’t happen any other way. We were getting there, but in the end we were too late.

Life has been tremendously sad since we received the news of his death. There is little hope that he embraced our God in the manner that we believe God must be embraced. And we certainly bear some responsibility here. That salt, was burning in the wound today, as I tried to explain why daddy wasn’t coming home again ever.

my spiritual stomach

2007-08-15T17:17:00.000+02:00

This great phrase was used by Dragan, a new believer in the International Church. During the month of August, we have cancelled all formal church services, and instead are having Sunday Dinners together. We are knitting together the body of Christ in fellowship. And it is working out great.

So this week Dragan and his girlfriend were on the schedule to be at our house for Sunday Dinner. I called him up and invited them over for Sunday, and unfortunately, he and his girl were leaving town for holidays, and that is when he told me how torn he was, about whether to come to our home or to go on vacation. He said, “David, my spiritual stomach is hungry!” What a great statement.

I find that my spiritual stomach is not always hungry for God and His children. I find that I can easily take for granted all the scriptures and fellowship that we have, and become spiritually obese.

Dragan encouraged me much with his heartfelt statement, and I suddenly found that I wanted to be with him more too! Please pray for your new brother in Christ, as his father died Sunday afternoon and was buried on Monday. This was completely unexpected, and Dragan’s heart is filled with pain. But may he never lose his spiritual hunger I pray.

they took my car 2 - Spider Sector

2007-08-15T03:20:00.000+02:00

That is exactly how the sign read, where the city keeps your hijacked auto, until you pay all said fines and penalties. Spider Sector is a relatively friendly place, since they have all the power (they have your car under lock and key) and the only way that you can retrieve your car is by paying the bill. Jake and I asked around and while there was some disagreement about where this place was actually located, the majority of taxi drivers, believed it to be at the train station.

So we hopped in one of the taxis and headed the train station. Jake spotted the car before I did and sure enough, we were directly under the train tracks. And the spider trucks were busily going in and out, all loaded with cars as they were going in, and empty coming out. They were doing some hot business there.

So we get in line with other unhappy people, paid our fine of $45, and the man gave us our receipt which allowed us entry into the compound so that we could drive our car away.

All cities formerly under socialism have huge parking problems, and they are being compounded daily by more apartment buildings - more cars - no new parking places, but I am not sure that grabbing people’s auto’s off the street is a way to resolve this problem.

But my lesson is learned, I am going back to taxis and walking.

they took my car!

2007-08-13T19:02:00.000+02:00

When I parked the car, it was in a fairly normal parking place, and we were only planning to be 5 minutes at the most, as we were searching for a new meeting place for the International Church. Well 5 minutes turned into 20 as it typically does here, and when we returned I say to Mark, “the car is gone!”

And it was. As in no where to be found at all. At first I thought that it had been stolen as was our co-workers car last year in Bosnia, but then I quickly discarded that idea, as our car is not worth being stolen. It is old, with tons of miles on it, and frankly it is pretty beat up and not sexy in any fashion . . . i.e. not stolen car material. Plus the final proof that it had not been stolen, was the fact that I had the key in my pocket (but I checked to just be certain).

No, what happened to my car was that the spider got it. The spider is how we refer to the machine that comes and lifts your car off the street up onto the back of the truck and then it is carted away and placed under lock and key. So now we have to go search out where they keep the spidered autos here in the city. Tomorrow I will let you know how this goes.

six coins, three earrings, one key

2007-08-09T23:26:00.000+02:00

In the 13 years since we went to Russia with our parent organization, I have learned that certain things are more difficult to live without than certain other things. For instance, electricity is far easier to live without than is running water. In fact, in my humble opinion, nothing is more difficult to live without for any period of time, than water. The same formula applies to appliances.

The last couple of months have seen us without air conditioning and that is hot sometimes, but not critical. Then the fridge/freezer went out again and they came and got it and kept it for a couple of weeks, but again, not a big hairy deal really. But when the washing machine stopped working 10 days ago, and I called and called and called, trying to get a meister here to repair it, and the clothes piled higher and deeper, (six people generate a lot of dirty clothes in 10 days!) I have come to appreciate a washing machine that works, right up there with running water!

When meister Pero arrived, he greeted the other two meisters who were here working on the fridge/freezer, and they talked shop for a while, (we were having sort of a mini meister convention yesterday), I finally got Pero upstairs to look at the washing machine.

“When is the last time you cleaned the filter?” he asked. “You mean I am supposed to clean the filter?” I responded. “Every month” meister Pero said. “Well meister, this filter has never been cleaned” I boldly informed him. He played with the settings and bit, and then showed me that the pump was not working. Little surprise seeing that the filter had not been cleaned in 6 years.

Long story short, he had to take the entire pump apart because our missing house key was wedged inside the pump along with 24 denars in coins and three earrings and a ton of completely unidentifiable other stuff. We had looked everywhere for that key . . . well except inside the pump in the washing machine that is . . . .

The last 24 hours has seen load after load after load of wash go through the newly cleaned pump. I told each member of the family, that if they planned to see their next birthday, that coins, keys and earrings and other stuff better not show up in the wash any long . . . an essential death threat . . . that is how important a washing machine is to a family like ours.

Today was very calm meister-wise, except the fridge/freezer compressor will not cut off and everything inside is all frosted up, so I turned that off and just called the meister again. I wonder how long it will be before they actually show up and we have a refrigerator again? But who cares as long as we have clean clothes.

The sad affair of the professional christian

2007-08-08T00:51:00.000+02:00

Professional Christians are those who put bread on the table and a roof over the heads of their families via the church. They may be the senior pastor of a large multi-staff church or a worship pastor or the solo pastor of a small fellowship, but if you receive your wages from these churches or any type of ministry/mission/NGO or such things, where you are expected to be on all the time, regardless of the actual condition of your soul, then you are by my definition, a professional christian.

No congregation in the world is going to be very understanding if you as the worship pastor, or as any other kind of missionary/pastor, stand up on Sunday morning and announce that, “you know what, its been a really tough week, and I am struggling in my walk with God” or “this week I am having real and genuine doubts about my faith in God” or “I have sinned so badly this week, and instead of preaching today, I think I will just confess my sins instead” . . . or a hundred other such potential statements . . . you will simply lose your job, and find it extremely extremely difficult to find another one in a church.

No. As a professional christian you must appear to enthusiastically and genuinely worship (if you are a worship pastor/leader) or you must as a professional christian get up and preach a theologically correct and emotionally powerful and memorable (at least until the end of Sunday lunch) sermon . . . and this must happen week after week after month after month after year after year. Regardless.

Regardless to the actual condition of your soul. Regardless of the struggles you may have (they may not be allowed to interfere with Sunday services). Regardless to how true and genuine any of your actions actually may be on any given Sunday, the expectations are clear. Regardless of practically all circumstances, temptations, wrongs, passions, hurts, struggles and sins . . . the show must go on. This is the life of a professional christian.

The end result for any professional christian is that sometimes (oftentimes?) we are performing instead of praying, acting instead of worshiping, talking instead of preaching. Sometimes these fake actions force us to turn to God week after week, and that is a good thing. Sometimes though, a habitual process of faking it can take a calling and turn it into a job. Then you may well find yourself faking it all the time.

Of course the solution to this is a vital ongoing daily living relationship with God Himself who can and does renew us and our weary souls. He wants us far more than we want Him and it shows . . . He has made all the arrangements for us to enjoy and benefit from Him, while He takes all of the abuse and difficulties on Himself. A professional christian is pretty useless to the King and Kingdom, unless he/she realizes the act of faking it, repents, and rejoins their soul to the Spring of Refreshment, Jesus Himself and do it for Him, and not a paycheck.

The sweet sweet rain

2007-08-07T05:17:00.000+02:00

Our street is flooding, my car is leaking and I have a big ole’ puddle in the passenger side floor, and the bang of the steady dripping of water in the drainage pipes throughout the night kept my niece awake and sleepless for much of the night, we get soaked everytime we have to go to the market for food, the rain has caused the internet to stop working, and the washing machine is still not working though that has little to do with the rain. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it?

It is. After two solid months of no rain, raging wildfires, unbearable heat, scorching winds, and brown everything, the rain is wonderful. Nothing sweeter, no air can be cleaner, no smell is better than dry parched ground soaking up the richest nectar on earth - rain. It is supposed to rain all day, and may it be so!

We need the same in our spiritual lives. Rain from God, it most satisfies our parched souls. I think rain from God is found in relationships. Instead of church services yesterday, we cancelled formal church services, and got together in four large groups across the city and just had fun being together and eating and talking and laughing and experiencing God’s rain. It was sweet sweet.

Jellyfish goo

2007-08-03T20:47:00.000+02:00

While swimming innocently in the pristine waters off the Greek coast recently, I was suddenly shocked, literally. Followed immediately by burning on my leg, ankle, and all of my back. Burning which would not go away . . . apparently I swam into a school of jellyfish, and they left their mark on me. It is not uncommon for jellyfish to swarm in the late afternoon, early evening - exactly when I was swimming. These Mediterranean jellyfish are often known as mauve stingers.

It is amazingly easy in life to run into painful, stinging problems that bring much discomfort into our lives. Even in the most ideal settings like a holiday on a Greek beach, can bear difficult situations and hurtful experiences. In fact, the very last time we were at this exact beach, some 7 years ago, Helen stepped on a spiny sea urchin, and you do not want to even imagine how painful it was digging those spines out of her foot!

Sometimes life/work/spiritual life seem to be like the jellyfish experience. I can be mindlessly swimming along, enjoying the atmosphere, the ambience, or the view, the sparkles on the water, when all of the sudden there is a painful burning feeling at work in my life. I have swam into a school of jellyfish. And let’s face it, the jellyfish was not out to get me, it was just being a jellyfish . . . so the why question is mute here, there is no why, stuff just happens.

I only wish that I could respond in life, the same way that I can respond to the burns from a jellyfish. With the jellyfish, I was able to discern what had happened, realize that it was an incident that tomorrow would not be so painful and would fade away in significance, and to go out with my family and have a nice meal, even though I was in some pain physically . . . I knew it would soon pass.

When I run into schools of jellyfish in life though, I often feel overwhelmed and overrun and in too much pain to function! Even though there is often no blame to be laid (remember stuff happens), and even though in the great scheme of things it probably does not mean all that much (especially tomorrow it will be better, less intense, etc) I can still react far too much in relation to what the situation calls for. I need to develop a life perspective that matches my medical perspective, then I will handle the stings of life in a more mature, and Godly way.

Some people may react to this post with a “just stay out of the water man!” kind of attitude, but where is the adventure in that? You could choose to take no risks and have a life of no potential pain, but then again, that’s not living, that’s existing. You have only one life, live it!

Fuzzy Water

2007-07-30T23:46:00.000+02:00

“Can I have some more of that fuzzy water?“ my niece asked. That would be ”bitter water“ in the local vernacular. Gassed water, bubbly water, mineral water and a half a dozen other names, but never ”fuzzy water“. But Rachel calls it just that. Of course, we all are calling it that now.

But the not only is the water fuzzy, but so is life sometimes. I have been trying to work though to some mega-thoughts and challenges recently, and they are all still fuzzy. But here is how far I have gotten so far . . .

. . . lots of people are living outside apparent reality, or under the radar of observable behavior, or stealthily having a double life is what more and more people seem to be doing. Or they do what I do sometimes, think entirely opposite of all said and stated beliefs . . . thinking that is completely and totally in contrast to all that I have worked for, with, and toward for the last 27 years.

How can this be? Well perhaps it is simply an anomaly with me, but I think not because it seems that I am running into more and more people my age that are living two lives, or at the very least thinking two lives. The why of this has puzzled me greatly . . . especially about myself and my thinking. These two worlds are fighting against one another and they ultimately lead to completely opposite directions in life.

The fact that I can even be having these conversations with myself points to a great dilemma; is anything I have believed for the last 27 years even valid?

You can chalk this conversation up to six or seven possible apparent reasons, but they all fall short in the end . . . I know, I have been thinking about this stuff lots for the last 4-6 years. One side of me, the pastoral side, wishes to help people resolve the two-thinking dilemma. Another side of me, the self-righteous arrogant person, wants to shout at all such people you are double-minded and an enemy to the Kingdom! There is another part of me, the opposite-side-of-all-stated-beliefs side, that wishes to just walk away from it all . . . the conflict, the controversy, the conversation, period.

It at the very least shows me how fuzzy life can be, and how deceitful my heart can be. In the end though, I have complete confidence that Jesus can see to the heart, and the heart of the matter . . . His discernment has no fuzziness at all.

how the church pimped my ride today

2007-07-29T22:27:00.000+02:00

After church this morning, as I finished pronouncing the benediction, Ray stood up in the back and asked everyone to be seated. He then proceeded to come to the front and treat Brenda and I to some great meal tickets for some super eating spots in town. But then the kicker was what they gave me to drive for the day! Look at this photo and drool! I drove this thing at obscene speeds, and I gotta tell you, from zero to 60, it’s faster than the angels of God! This qualifies as the nicest gift a church has every given me as their pastor, period.

In the Greek Kitchen

2007-07-25T16:47:00.000+02:00

When the Greek waiter asked Jake and I to follow him into the kitchen, I thought he was joking. But he was more than serious . . . he took us back to the fresh catch cooler and let us pick out our own sea-bass for dinner. But the ruckus and looks our walk through the kitchen caused, deserves to be blogged about.

We were in the employee only sections of the fish house. And all these Greek gals were slaving away in the kitchen and you could feel their animosity that Jake and I were invading their domain! But the fish were what Jake and I were focused on, nothing more, nothing less. But it was interesting to see the inside the kitchen area.

Anyhoo, Jake and I selected the fish that we wanted grilled for dinner that night and made our way back to our table. There we enjoyed our family, a spectacular sunset, and eventually, Mr Sea-bass himself. I think I will tell the rest of the story in pictures.

Racing the butterflies

2007-07-24T16:49:00.000+02:00

The smoke from the wildfires outside the city is choking the air with smoke and ash. It is like a terminal haze laying over the air, gray, polluted, even direct sharp sunlight is having trouble getting through it, and we haven’t had a cloud in the sky in weeks.

So this morning as I was riding my bike up the mountain to the South of the city, and finally getting above the worst of the bad air, I found myself racing the butterflies. There were all kinds . . . Purple Shot Copper’s, Small Coppers, Large Whites, Bath Whites, Wall butterflies, and Small Tortoiseshells.

Butterflies can only fly if their body temperature is above 86 degrees, and consequently the butterflies are usually sitting on branches and such, sunning themselves, but today all were in flight. And an amazing number of them seem to be racing along with me as I poured sweat while pedaling uphill. It was a magical moment in the good air.

When I sit and think of all the elements that had to come together to have this five minute moment this morning, it is more than a little mind-boggling. Life is complicated! And it is too often just a series of nows, the this moment’s of life that can not be duplicated nor repeated. I wonder if that is a gift or a curse for the Western Mind which is centered around planning and individualism?

Stuck in the ruts

2007-07-06T02:21:00.000+02:00

When I was a kid, there were loads of dirt-roads around . . . no asphalt or cement to be found at all. And these roads often had huge ruts! When I was a little whiper-snapper I thought they might swallow my dad’s truck whole and that we would never get out. Some of them seemed to have teeth and lips, just waiting to suck us in.

I am discovering that those ruts of my childhood were the easiest ones in life. The pot-holes and ruts of adult life are feelings of being trapped, or stagnant in the sense of not moving nor making any progress, and feeling irrelevant and life having no meaning . . . this is what I mean by being stuck in a rut. Bob Walker asks the question, “If you could do anything you wanted, if God told you that you were free to choose, if you had all the time, energy, money, staff and education you needed, and you knew that you could not fail, what would you do?” (This question came to me via B. Biehl)

What a question huh? And as I understand it, most people love this question and find themselves set free as they try to answer it and then start baby steps toward reaching it. This is the question that often leads people toward their dreams. It helps them in many ways, but especially in discovering the next step. But what if your answer is “nothing”?

Either my rut is way deeper than Dr. Walker ever anticipated or ever seen, or I am a hopeless case because I have no answer to this question. Does that mean I don’t want to do something? No it means that I don’t know what that something is. This is more than a rut; it’s a crater.

Some folks tell me it’s mid-life whatever, and I tell them that I have already passed mid-life number one and two, I have never heard of mid-life crisis lasting for years on end. It’s a hole so deep that there is no light coming through either end. It smells of despair.

Pink and Jesus

2007-06-30T02:26:00.000+02:00

I guess you could say its been a week of lessons, first the woodpile, now the rock concert. In one sense, as usual, I am actually doing research. I am researching people and what they value and trying to discern the whys. As rock concerts go, this one was actually pretty good, i.e. excellent musicians, minimal effects and the volume just right (would stop your pace-maker, but doesn’t really hurt your ears too bad).

Alecia Moore, better known by her stage name of Pink (or P!nk depending on your source) is a sassy, spoofy, goofy, snarling, hysterical artist that doesn’t take herself too seriously. She says of herself, “I decided at 15 that I didn't want to be one of those artists that gets up and sings love songs they don't mean. I decided that I was going to be me to the fullest extent, that my songs were going to reflect relationships I've had, things I've been through, and even the stuff I'm embarrassed about.” In that sense music is to Pink, as blogging is to David.

The amazing (and disconcerting) thing about going to a rock concert, is that you see the depth of influence that a pop star has on people and culture. You get to see first hand what people want in entertainment. You can see what really moves people in their hearts and souls.

Now I was arguably the oldest paying customer at the concert last night . . . several people thought I was with the band . . . and I only know one song that Pink sings (which I think we should start singing in church!), so I am in no way a typical fan of Pink, nor was I even a typical rock concert attender last night, and several young folks from our church just about swallowed their tongues when they saw me there. But while surrounded by several thousand teenie-boppers, I realized quickly that they knew every single song by heart and they were singing along with her . . . on every single song. The crowd loved her energy and her wild sense of style . . . in a word Pink is authentic and real (or at the very least gives a super strong impression of being that) by the culture’s definition of authentic.

And here is the rub for the church and those of us who are members of the Kingdom . . . that authenticity which was apparent in droves at a rock concert, is sorely lacking in the church. We don’t inspire trust, followership, commitment, nor deep emotion because at some level we appear to, or actually do, lack authenticity.

I see this sharply both in me and in the people in the church I pastor. I have one group (my group) who view and live faith as an intellectual exercise -- it’s about what you know (thus the person who knows the most or best “wins”) and I have a second group who view and live faith as name and claim whatevers - it’s about what you decide God wants to bless you with (thus the most positive pollyanna on spiritual steroids wins) and these two groups dominate the church.

All the real people are in the middle and they can’t compete with the seemingly intimidating knowledge of intellectual group, nor can they identify with NIACI (name it and claim it) group in their everyday lives. To these people caught in the middle, neither expression of the Kingdom seems authentic or real. No one seems to be just comfortable in their own skin within a Christian context. We are essentially asking God to undo what we have made ourselves to be . . . and where is the authenticity in that? Perhaps I will get fired, but I think Pink was having a flash of real Jesus in her life, when she said that “I am going to be me to the fullest extent.” Jesus wants us to be us . . . that unique expression of His creative genius is lost every time we force someone into our particular mold (pun intended) of Christianity.

“I coming up, you better get this party started!“

Lessons from the woodpile

2007-06-28T20:10:00.000+02:00

One of my most recent activities is chopping wood for the dirty old man next door. Let’s face it, I need to exercise and he is 86 years old . . . and completely utterly and totally lost. Did I mention he is 86? Not too much time left, but then again, who knows how much any of us have?

So for the past week or so, when I get back from my daily workout, I am already sweaty and stinky, so what better time to split some wood for Uncle Lybe? I have been learning some lessons in the woodpile.

1. He owns an axe that is older than me! And he is darn proud of it. I have listened to lots and lots of “when I was your age” stories these past 10 days. It has given me some perspective and understanding to what makes this guy tick. And he is having a ball telling all his old cronies that he has an American splitting wood for him (for free of course).
2. Lybe is afraid of dying and he doesn’t know what to do about it, yet he refuses to talk about it. I continue to gain credibility as I chop wood, but I also am spending more of that credibility as I am starting to push because I am not remotely certain that this man will live long enough to burn the wood I am chopping for him. Eternity is urgently calling him.
3. I have also learned that I would rather do something for him, than be with him. Shows you how American I still am even after all these years in the Hairy Armpits. Mind you that Lybe only wants to drink beer or moonshine and talk about young women and their many virtues . . . and while I can do that appropriately and chastely, I can’t at 8:00 in the morning. My weak American frame cannot handle dirty jokes nor alcohol at such an early hour. Am I making excuses?
4. I am learning too, that a world view without God can only chase after the most insignificant things in life . . . and that even armed with that certainty and knowledge that I still can be tempted to do the same. Crap.
5. Today as I sat with him an had a glass of water after our chop session, he wanted to know if there were other people in the world like me? I barked with laughter and told him “I sure hope not.” “I am serious!” he said. “And so am I” I told him. “Why do you cut wood for me?” he asked. “Because I can and you can’t, because I like you and think you have real potential for such old guy, because I need to learn from you and you need to be more like me (in the sense that he is placing his trust in the Savior), and simply because we are neighbors and I want to show you that not all Americans start wars and cause problems.” I said to him as I was leaving.
6. The final lesson that I learning so far is that I need far more wisdom than ever before to help a 86 year old blind guy with a really dirty mind, to place his simple trust in a Savior. Leading the young is simple in comparison, and I have this terrible feeling in my heart that Lybe is going to choose to not believe in the end . . . his whole life and his complete understanding of it is pulling him one direction, and on the other side is just one foreigner. Man, I am praying that Holy Spirit is cutting loose with this guy, and soon.

100 in the shade

2007-06-26T21:24:00.000+02:00

There is hot, and then there is hot. Right now it is 100.2 in the shade! This is our 5th straight 100+ day, but it is the first day that our shady thermometer reads over 100 degrees. It is difficult to get anything accomplished. Heat inertia has taken over unfortunately and that is super bad, because as always there is tons to accomplish . . . always more work than time or energy allow. I wonder how hot it will eventually get today . . . they were only calling for 105 or so. Man!

An 8 hour drive north of us, it’s 20 degrees cooler! A 2.5 hour flight going north to Berlin Germany, the temp is 40 degrees cooler!!! Thus one can conclude that this is not a Europe-wide heat wave that we are experiencing, this is more of a local phenomena.

It’s usually quite hot here in the summer, but this is hot hot even for us. This morning I was chopping and splitting wood for my 86 year old neighbor, who kept trying to give me moonshine to drink “to combat the heat” he told me. On an empty stomach, I doubt that whisky would have cooled me off much and I begged off, spouting work reasons and the very early hour.

It is difficult to function and be effective in extreme temps like these . . . and it is difficult to function and be effective spiritually when we find ourselves in extreme situations and extreme challenges. But that is when the spiritual is supposed to kick in, right?

Well I am not so sure. It seems to me that spirituality needs to be something we exercise daily and expose daily to the stresses of our lives, rather than thinking of it as some kind of magic carpet or blanket designed to get us out of the toughest situations. But usually it seems, that the people I know and person that I am, perceives spirituality to be something I have rather than something I am. Thus when it is 100 degrees in the shade of life, way hotter and more difficult than I am comfortable with, I falter. It’s like I am looking for a way out, instead of steadfastly working through it. Clearly I need to remember that my connection to the Father is something I am, not something I have.

The boyfriend chronicles 2

2007-06-25T18:12:00.000+02:00

The news gets even better. Jelena (read about her here) was not content to just rag Bilijana about her new boyfriend, but she too decided that she needed a Savior! There have been more people come to Christ in the last months, than we had in previous years. We heard about this one on Saturday while we were baking in 100+ degree heat, building a new church building in the city where Jelena, Bilijana and Vale live.

Saturday there 13 of us out there dying in the heat and merciless sun, building frames for concrete walls, and digging out a wall in the stone-like soil. Here are some photos of our guys working in the Sahara-known-as-Kymanovo.

These gentlemen all attend the International Church in the Hairy Armpit and volunteered their time and money and sweat and blood so that people like the three girls mentioned above can find a Savior. Why don’t you get involved too? Write me and I can list the ways that you can make a difference. Is it time for a revival in the Hairy Armpit?

"Do you have a new boyfriend?"

2007-06-20T23:27:00.000+02:00

Jelena was teasing Bilijana. “You are just beaming” she said, “Have you found a new boyfriend?” Bilijana’s smile did not falter at all, but her answer was unexpected, “No boyfriend; I found a Savior!”

Bilijana is the result of two years of steady weekly investment and work by my wife Brenda. People inch toward Christ here and have huge social and cultural hurdles to cross in order to embrace the Savior. Thus Bilijana’s statement is all the more powerful. And frankly we don’t hear these things very often here in the Hairy Armpit. Bilijana came to Christ twice as fast as the average believer here!

Then I was talking to a powerful businessman today who attends the International church where I pastor and he was telling me about some folks that he has been cultivating for two solid years! They inch forward and then take two inches back, three forward, two back. It is difficult to have the patience for these kinds of investments in people, and even more difficult to see God’s big picture in the whole process. But in the end, as Bilijana discovered last week, a Savior is far superior to a new boyfriend.

The ruined harvest

2007-06-19T17:41:00.000+02:00

There is little good to say about the Hairy Armpit in general. We are far from those we are closest to, live in homes that do not belong to us, work with people who do not look, smell, think or speak like we do. But the food is usually the best in the world, so there are some good things. The number one export for the country of the HA is wine. That also means that we have some of the best grapes in the whole world. Except this year.

Last summer was too cool, the winter too warm (no snow) and now the Spring too wet! So as you can see from this photo this is what the grape harvest is looking like this year. 70% of the grapes are ruined on every bunch (this one is actually better than most of ours.

The spiritual harvest can easily be ruined as well. If we and the churches we lead don’t have the right climate and balance required to produce a healthy harvest, it is way too easy to ruin all the potential. It can be done by focusing too many resources on ourselves, or by having an inward focus, or by overcrowding the new believers (then they fall away because they can’t develop their own roots) or by not nurturing them carefully and faithfully as they are finding Christ . . . and probably a million other ways. But most of all we lose the harvest, simply because we are not farming most of the time.

This year, millions of dollars will be lost in the Hairy Armpit because of the imbalances in the weather. Many will be hungrier than usual. Many will not have work at process time. Barrel makers are going to lose most of their contracts, seasonal workers who live off the money they make from picking and processing grapes, better start looking for new jobs. And the church, and especially us as leaders, need to be completely and totally intentional about the climate in our fellowships.

It's people I can't stand

2007-06-18T19:10:00.000+02:00

Mark preached a great message Sunday morning. His point about spiritual indifference was powerful. Jesus and His agenda, Kingdom, plans, desires -- all need to move me and motivate me. But sometimes they don’t, and that is what Mark accurately nailed as spiritual indifference.

As I have tried to examine my heart these last 24 hours and look at the causes, reasons and cycles of spiritual indifference in my soul, I think I am starting to see a pattern. It’s people I can’t stand.

Don’t get me wrong, I like most people and most people like me. Those aren’t the ones that I am talking about. No, I am talking about the people who are immune to the wisdom and influence of others. I am talking about the people who do their own gig at the complete expense of the rest of the group. I am talking about people who attempt to hold everyone accountable, while never being accountable in any way themselves. I am talking about people who negotiate and politic their point of view behind the scenes, and erode people’s confidence in their leadership.

I so wish these types of people were bloggers! Get their ideas, perceptions and points of views out there for everyone to see . . . rather than leaving me feeling like I am fighting phantom ghosts that negate all things potentially good in life, church and relationships.

Many are the days that I wish I could stay buried in studying God’s word, and quietly communing with Him, and have little to no contact with people like these phantoms . . . but unfortunately this is a people business, not a function of solitude. These are the days I want to be a mechanic rather than a pastor/missionary.

"A beer drinking club with a running problem"

2007-06-15T03:56:00.000+02:00

This is The Hash club. It is quite the group of expatriates. Hash clubs exist in most major cities around the rest of the world. It is in many ways, the church (small c) of the International community. There are currently almost 1500 hashes around the world. You can see the Hairy Armpit Hash site here.

One of our church folks attend the local hash and has invited me to join in with them. It’s a natural place to meet non-praying folks. Again as I stated in the paragraph above, this is the church of the International Community. They have a Hash Bible, and also The Religious Advisor and believe it or not, the Hash Hymnal.

Penetrating clubs like this for the express purpose of being spiritual whatevers to them, with them, for them, is not what I am suggesting. Instead I am suggesting that we join in with them for the simple reason that we love people, because God loves people -- winning people in 2007 involves lots more caring it seems, than in previous decades. Perhaps I am wrong since I have only 4.5 under my belt thus far, but that is the way that it seems to me.

But in the super-superficial world of expatriate relationships, it may be a real road into people’s lives, and a fine way to see how God wishes to utilize us for His best purposes in the lives of Hashers. Their twisted motto listed in the title of this post sounds like a great place to meet real people, not the make-believe kind. What do you think?

LifeWork

2007-06-13T16:04:00.000+02:00

BB describes lifework as “Your LifeWork is the activity that is worthy of the time, energy, and money you have left in life.” The standard Catholic stance on this subject is that only working for God is worthy of this category of lifework. Evangelicals often have echoed that position. I am not so sure that the Catholic/Evangelical position is the correct one.

It all but shouts that my lifework as a religious Kingdom worker, is inherently more valuable than my father’s work as a mechanic. The problem with this line of thinking that elevates vocational, paid, full-time ministry workers as doing a worthy lifework, is that implies that God values His church drones more than His other creations. That seems patently wrong.

It is called by Oz Guinness the Catholic heresy, that clergy/ministry workers are the ones really following God. But what if God ordained my father to be a mechanic? (And just for the record, he has performed far more miracles in his life as a mechanic than I ever will as a minister). What if God in His throne room deemed the most important work for my father to do, was keep people’s automobiles running and on the road? That is certainly his lifework then, is it not? But where is the spiritual element, many ask me?

Well when I do what I do well, that is about as spiritual as life ever becomes. Excellence reflects God, far better than my passionate or eloquent words might ever do. In my father’s handiwork, I see my Father’s Handiwork.

Here in fact is a photo of one of his recent projects or two . . . but of course this is just for fun, it couldn’t be a lifework could it? By the way, happy Father’s day Daddy, I am very proud of your lifework.

Leading the band

2007-06-12T23:53:00.000+02:00

There are few things more gratifying, and fewer still more terrifying. Leading the band. Leading what is not your top skill level, striving for what is beyond you and beyond your abilities, and doing it as a group. That frankly is a recipe for constant stress and struggle. That is where I am at.

It is gratifying to learn new skills, or greatly improve those basic skills you might have, but it is altogether another thing to place them in front of the band at practice and the larger congregation on Sunday. Now amplify it . . . literally . . . where every mistake and mis-strum can be heard in vibrant Fender amplifier quality, and there you have it, the ultimate humbler. Miss a chord, or sing the wrong verse, two events which occur regularly I might add, and then you know what it is to eat crow every Sunday. Now add to that mix of beyond-your-skills reach, 7 other band members, and most of them reaching for the very edge of their abilities as well, and the result can be chaos. Or it can be a miracle.

Making miracles week after week is anything but mundane . . . leading the band to worship . . . is perhaps the most overwhelming and awe-inspiring part of walking along with God each day. Now if I could only find the unbreakable pick.

The spectacular death of the fly

2007-06-11T22:06:00.000+02:00

It must be full moon soon or something. We seem to be the epicenter of the strange, difficult and unusual. People in the church acting downright strange too. Maybe I am paranoid and strange myself . . . it is a mystery that I cannot seem to solve at the moment.

Anyhoo the spectacular death of the fly was just that. Brenda is cooking breakfast this morning since the kids are freshly arrived for the summer break (hooray!) and of course it smells deadly, and proved to be so for the fly in question.

So as Brenda is taking the bacon off of the hot burner, I mean it is glowing red, the doomed housefly buzzes around and around and around . . . and then lands on the red hot burner, all but instantly burned to a crispy critter. We had never seen a fly commit suicide before. But this one did.

It gives new meaning to the axiom, if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!

Cockroaches in the church

2007-06-07T21:01:00.000+02:00

There are few critters in the world that cause stronger reactions in people than do cockroaches. My worship team got to church on Sunday at our usual hour before the service to do a final run-through on all the songs. And we discovered a big fat live cockroach on the church floor near the front where the worship singers stand. I ignored it as I do most things in life that don’t interest me very much. But Wendy went over there and pick the cockroach up in her hands to take it outside before she killed, so that we would not have its eggs left laying around in the church for more cockroaches to come in the future.

Now the cockroach itself had caused varying levels of shudders and eeeckks out of different people, but when Wendy picked in up in her hand, that caused a much larger reaction in most everyone! People were totally grossing out about the idea of touching it with the bare hands. Personally I thought it was hysterically funny, especially about how matter of fact Wendy was about the whole thing. She did the right thing, no matter how distasteful.

I did not do the right thing. I was ignoring the cockroach. In fact I had saw it earlier when I first arrived (I was the first person there) and it was a big mama - hard to ignore. But I did, just hoping it would go away. Wendy did the right thing. As I have thought about this whole incident this week, I have come to realize that we rarely do what is right in the church when we have people-versions of cockroaches, i.e. problems. Problems that need to be dealt with in straight-forward, matter of fact ways, that lead to the right result.

Too often I think most leaders are like me, ignoring the problem until there are too many to ignore any longer. If we had only picked up the first problem and took it outside and dealt with it properly, it would have laid no eggs for your future terrorization.

hacksaws, Diplomats and motorcycles

2007-06-05T23:59:00.000+02:00

Whatever could those three items have to do with one another? I am not remotely certain to be perfectly honest. But it happened like this: I had been biking early Saturday morning up the mighty Vodno mountain that the capital city lays against to the South. I was wringing wet from sweat . . . it’s 10 kilometers to the end of the asphalt and 9 of them are uphill. I finally reached the end of the asphalt, took a short rest, guzzled water, put on my helmet and glasses, and started back down the hill.

The going down hill part is my favorite part of this particular exercise route, as it is serious downhilling! Very fast. Finally I get to the bottom of the mountain and then I swing West toward my neighborhood. As I am riding past the U.S. Ambassador’s home, out of one of the neighboring drives comes a scooter tearing out of there.

Now scooters are more common than grass here, but this one arrested my attention for three reasons: 1) the man riding it was uncommonly large (the vast majority of people here are very thin), 2) the scooter had diplomatic plates!!!, 3) the man was carrying/holding a hacksaw.

This is a puzzle that I have not been able to figure out to save my life! Why a diplomat on a scooter? Diplomats can afford cars - nice cars. Moreover, why a really big guy on a scooter - dressed up for work in dress clothes and shoes no less!?? Why the hacksaw? And why not take the car (or a taxi if your car is not working!) if you need to carry tools into the office?? And I have about 35 other similar questions that I will not bore you with at the moment. My point is simply this, what am I missing from this picture? What am I not seeing and understanding properly for this encounter to make sense to me?

I preached on the incarnation and the Trinity on Sunday. I will confess that I don’t “get” either one of them either. I was sweating bullets on Sunday as I confessed my problems and struggles in understanding what God is, and has done. As C. was saying last night, it’s as if I think I can almost get it, but then it flies away. I just don’t have enough brain power to get my hands around this Divine Reality. No harder to understand I guess than hacksaws, Diplomats and motorcycles.

No you can't yes you can no you can't yes you can

2007-06-05T03:14:00.000+02:00

This is life in the Hairy Armpit. It is all about who you know. It is not a competence model, it is a relationship-connection-good-old-boy system. It’s actually like heaven functions. Heaven is no democracy! Heaven is a who-you-know system. It’s not fair, it’s not equal, it is not democratic.

Today was a perfect example of how this works here in the HA. I have been having Internet Connection problems for the last 6 months, and about 4 months ago, I even had a secondary system put in so that when the primary ISP went out, I would have back-up . . . which I have had to use extensively.

Well I finally had enough this weekend. After finally forcing these guys to come and work on my system, they were here all Friday morning getting my system all souped-up for steady, consistent, stable internet service. Yeah right. It worked for about two hours after they left. It was down all weekend. I cut the cord this morning. Even though we had a contract that still had 10 months remaining on it, they let me go without a whisper. I am on a first name basis with not only all the technical support people, but their wives and children and gynecologists as well. I think they were almost glad to see me go. ☺

Then I went to the cable internet company, those folks who were my back-up system for the last four months. Now they were about to become my primary system. Oh yeah, stable internet! Yes!

Well she told me “no!” “It’s not the end of the month. You can only make changes at the end of the month.” My heart sunk. It’s only the 4th of June, and I had already exceeded my monthly allotment of internet data with these folks . . . what was I going to do for the next 26 days? I cajoled, I asked really really nicely, ok, . . . I begged. She did not even begin to budge. The line behind me got longer and longer. I did not care. Communication with my parents and children was on the line, I was just about to get on my knees and offer free baby delivery services (I was an EMT at one point many years ago) and free weddings for all her children and grandchildren, when the man walked in.

The man is the cable company’s CEO. I had met him while having a coffee with Ray a couple of weeks ago. Since I defy categorizing, Mr. CEO was more than a bit fascinated with me. He recognized me instantly. He pumped my hand and asked me how my life was motoring along? I told him that I was in internet hell and needed a savior. He asked, how can I help? I told him that this little gal behind the desk was tenaciously following company policy that he should give her a raise in pay! But I also was desperate for a internet intervention and what could I possibly do to get one??

He told the girl to change my account status. And my status instantly went from “this cannot be done” to “no problem.” Who you know in the HA matters for more than anything else. I am so very glad that heaven is like the HA and not North America where we live and die by the law.

Ants on the strawberries, grubs in the lettuce

2007-06-02T00:02:00.000+02:00

Washing your vegetables in the hairy armpit is far more important than what you might encounter in North America. Unless eating ants and grubs of various sorts does not bother you at all, this is a prudent course of action. Today while washing a pile of strawberries, the rinse showed quite a few ants in the sink afterwards! And I think I crunched a few while eating them (strawberries) after music practice with the girls. I have also noticed that clear-body grubs love to camp out in between the leaves of lettuce on every head! It behooves you to carefully wash each and every leaf.

Probably the bugs and insects under discussion here, would not actually hurt you if you ate them, in fact since I have eaten so many over the years, I am certain of this truth. Yet it is the idea of eating raw, uncooked insects that give me the willies! I am such a girl I know, in fact I wrote about that yesterday and you can read that here.

I need to develop the same problem with bugs crawling around near my heart and soul. Unfortunately, many times those bugs (sin, demons, temptations) don’t give me the willies at all! In fact I often welcome them . . . the more the merrier it seems. I am not bothered at all about how they are swarming around and crawling all over. I need to get out the spiritual insecticide and clean house. Every house needs that occasionally.

Thinking like a woman

2007-05-31T22:25:00.000+02:00

As I was trying to explain to Louisa why I had taken a particular direction with a person in the church, I had her undivided attention. Because one person in the church was attacking the both of us! According to the attacker, I should be a defender of the Truth! I should be the pastor who corrects everyone else’s tiniest deflection on (her definition of) the straight and narrow! I should be smart enough to detect and correct every hint of heresy! Why did I not challenge the heretic!!?? Why did I not immediately go on the offensive when this person got a bit derailed? Why!?

Why indeed? Well, because I think like a woman . . . at least according to Lousia. I will admit this news unsettled me quite a bit. I have never been accused of such a thing ever in my whole life! My sensitivity range is somewhere between a stone and a crocodile. My capacity for feelings is generally in the pit-bull to cockatiel range. My patience for wordy expressions is deeply in the negative numbers. I think like a woman?

Needless to say I wanted to hear Louisa unpack this thinking like a woman thing quite a bit more. It was making me nervous. I was afraid I was breaking out in hives or something. Perhaps soon I would catch the vapors! Maybe I needed a new wardrobe I know I know, I am thinking like a woman again . . . but heck even manly men get curious sometimes!

So as Lousia explained why I did not instantly correct this minor heresy that was floating around the room, (this is the explanation of why I think like a woman) was because I was understanding and intuiting the pain that this person was feeling, and that I did not want to correct her in front of others.

Hmmm. There is a fair amount of truth and accuracy in that statement. Though I have never thought of thoughtfulness as being a feminine characteristic. The church can certainly use more of this . . . perhaps we all should think more like a women.

Clarifying outcomes

2007-05-30T22:26:00.000+02:00

Probably the hardest leadership (or even personal) task to accomplish with skill is clarifying outcomes. What exactly are you trying to accomplish and why? What does the final product look like? Every successful business works hardest at these questions. The church is not a business, but we are in business . . . the people business.

Measuring outcomes is tough enough, but often just deciding which outcomes the church/kingdom is looking for can drive you bonkers. If you are involved with knowledge work which most church workers are, then this is the most critical skill. We need to hone and define over and over and at multiple levels what exactly we are trying to accomplish! This is a primary weakness in most church-related organizations.

The reason this is so critical is that unless we know exactly what we are reaching for, what we are trying to produce, what we are about, then we never know where to reallocate resources, and we never find a sustainable level of efficiency. Producing anything becomes incidental and occasional.

David Allen quotes Lily Tomlin who said - I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific. Tomlin has the gist of what I am trying to point out about the church, or rather point out about its leadership. If we are not very very specific about what outcomes we are expecting/wanting/searching for, then our possibilities of getting them are correspondingly small.

So do we want big churches? Lots of churches? Are we seeking multitudes of converts? Lots of money? Deep people who challenge their worlds with skill? What are we trying to build and for how long? What legacy are you leaving? Do you even know? Go cat go, and clarify those outcomes!

God-smacked!

2007-05-29T22:41:00.000+02:00

As Ray was describing for me how G. came to X, he used this word, “Godsmacked!” Now G. is probably one of the dangerous men in all of the Hairy Armpit . . . his local connections read like a resume for mafia connections. When G.’s asks me “should I kill him for you?” he is probably serious. So when Ray used this term, it really drove home how radically G.’s life has been impacted by God Himself.

I asked Ray what was the most pivotal moment in G. coming into the Family, and without hesitation Ray said “you”. I informed Ray that I was not a moment first of all, and secondly that I can’t pivot worth crap. After Ray finished howling, he unpacked what was pivotal in my encounters with G.

1. “I drank a beer with him.” This was one of those classic cultural moments when you need to do what the non-praying person is doing. G.’s previous interaction with Chr*st*ans was extremely narrow and moral policemen focused. Those members of the Family spent most of the time telling G. what he must give up in order to become a Family member. G. said that I told him to read the Scriptures and listen to God. The fact that I was a religious leader and made no judgement calls on him in those initial meetings was huge.

2. “I listened while drinking a beer with him.“ G. relates that 99.9% of his encounters with Family members thus far, had been G. being given all this information and answers (about questions he did not even have). It was like the person with the most knowledge was the really spiritual person. G. stated that I did not try to teach him anything, only telling him my personal story about how God pursued me, and how I believe God is pursuing all of us. Even more important was patient listening, as G.’s story unfolded for me.

3. ”I did not have all the answers.“ Westerns overload people with information and knowledge. We value competence over everything. People in the Hairy Armpit value relationship over all. But our competence model brings a ton of arrogance along with it. I really have to agree with G. on this one. Most Westerners here have an instant answer for every question -- even ones that aren’t being asked. Doctorate or not, G. says it was really important that I said, ”Hey I don’t know.“

4. ”That I involved lots of other Family members in the process.“ This is a critical part of thinking that says we should ”fish“ with a net, rather than a pole. It is something we really do together, not as individuals. I do remember that actual moment when G. asked me ”who else believes like you do“ and I pointed to the people he was surrounded by at that exact moment as said, ”we all do.“

It was encouraging and good to hear that we are joining in what God is doing, in God’s way, not the North American way. But I am thinking that at least some of the things we are doing, would work well in a North American context? I don’t know, whaddya think? Regardless let’s pray that more and more people get Godsmacked! Alright!

The problem with healing - by someone who has been healed

2007-05-24T20:21:00.000+02:00

I got all kinds of questions and problems with the way we handle and approach healing within the Body. Last night I was at a small group meeting that started out well and then degenerated into a “heal me” session. Now let me clarify this upfront . . . I am for healing. I believe healing happens today, because I myself have been healed spectacularly, with before and after photos even! I am for healing.

Ok, but demanding it bothers me much. Way much. I know that the book of James tells the sick to call for the elders, be anointed with oil and that prayer of a faith-filled person accomplishes much (which BTW was never done last night). But when people start demanding that God heals, insisting that God heal, naming and claiming that heal . . . I can hardly stand it. I am for healing. I have been healed, but it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Honestly, I am not sure that I even asked for healing!

The group last night was asking for the kinds of healing that greatly increase one’s life span. This type of request bothers me the most . . . because these people are in their 60’s, and they are experiencing the aches, pains and challenges that typically come at that stage of life, and they are insisting on healing from God. These are the people who consistently state that they are the most holy people in our church. These are the one’s who are now asking for a healing that effectively will keep them out of the direct presence of God for a much longer period of time. There is just something wrong with that.

As I said earlier I don’t even think I asked for healing . . . I was too worried about my wife and three little kids to think about healing, since the doctor said that I was to die within the next 36 hours max, it was time to get my house in order. To make matters, worse, I can not tell you one single definitive reason why God healed me and not . . . a 12 year old boy of my friends who died a few weeks later, or my neighbor who died a few weeks after that . . . and a thousand other people that were more worthy, needed, loved, or had potential far exceeding mine. Don’t you dare spiritualize this! My point is that the healing I experienced had nothing to do with me and everything to do with God. He did it because it pleased Him to do so and no other reason that we can be sure of.

In my line of work I have prayed 1000s of times for various people to be healed. To my knowledge never has a single one of them been healed. Do I believe God can? Certainly! Do I believe that God does sometimes? Certainly! Do I believe we can force God or have a magic structure or formula to get a healing? Not one bit. I still have no idea why God healed me and not that 12 year boy of my friends. I would not have done it that way were I God.

When the “heal me“ prayer meeting showed no signs of finishing, I headed home. Who knows when it ended. Last thing I was told that one said was, ”I came to get my healing tonight, and we are going to keeping praying until it happens.“ I think God is immune to such pressure. He is God. A God who definitely heals (I am a living breathing example of His healing power) but He does it on His terms, not ours.

The chicken's toes

2007-05-22T21:12:00.000+02:00

Language is a funny thing. We went to a little food dive called Byre and sat down under the canopy to have a bite of dinner after Brenda’s big women’s conference that she was leading. There were three of us sitting there and getting ready to order. I ordered a special Breaded Chicken dish and the waiter said, “Oh you want chicken toes.” Brenda said, “Chicken toes????” “Yes chicken toes.”

This caused no small amount of conversation at our table while we waited to see exactly what I would be getting for supper. I imagined the worst it could be would be something like chicken feet that I have had at many an Asian dive . . . and although they have little (read none) meat on them, they are still considered a delicacy. I will admit freely that I don’t get it when it comes to chicken feet, but then again, I am not Asian.

So when my meal arrives, they clearly are not chicken toes, but in fact are chicken fingers (which chickens also do not have). Interestingly enough, Macedonian language uses the same exact word for fingers and toes, thus our confusion. I wonder why we never have a dish called ”chicken feathers“ or ”chicken skin“ or ”chicken beaks“ all of which a chicken actually has.

The moral of this story is that you can frame any subject with any number of positive or negative words that actually have little to do with the substance. I hope that I never do that in relationship to spiritual things. Perhaps that would be called sin.

uuuummh, that smells good!

2007-05-21T20:01:00.000+02:00

While he may only be 8 and a half years old, Stefan has a keen nose for good food. And here he was, hanging onto my fence, breathing the intoxicating smell into his lungs as deeply as he could. “Did you know” he said to me in his very grown-up manner of speaking, “that the smell of roasting peppers is probably the best smell in the entire world?” I could not possibly agree more. That is why I almost always roast peppers when I have some meat marinating nearby. The smell is divine.

Three times Stefan came by and said to me, “wow that smells good!” In fact just writing this story down for you is making my mouth water for more!

I so wish for my life to be that kind of “wow that smells good” kind of life. I wish that my life were the kind that had that effect on people. That they would come back over and over again, just for another whiff, and to say, “wow that smells great.” That people would want to be with me, because the anticipation of what is to come is irresistible. I think those are the kinds of people He wants us to be. Make me so Father, make me so.

the roar of crickets

2007-05-19T00:38:00.000+02:00

It is just like a sonic buzz. You can’t hear yourself think. You can feel the vibration in your bones. It is the chorus of millions of crickets singing to one another, unfettered by the concerns of who might be listening, who might be near by, what hour it might be, what anyone else thinks, how comfortable or uncomfortable they may be, or even where they find themselves.

They are doing with enthusiasm, what they were created to do.

The results were a roar.

This was my experience as I rode into the animal preserve. Often it seems like my life is more mouse-like. There aren’t many roars. It is not a volume thing, . . . I have a built-in amplifier. I sing loud and preach louder. It is much more that often all those other elements are missing. I am not unfettered by concerns of who might be listening. I am too concerned about who is nearby. I am too sensitive to what hour it is. I am way too concerned about what others think. My comfort levels often rule my life, and most of the time, where I am, controls my actions.

“But you are not a cricket” someone may observe, and right you are. I am far far more, yet less too, because I have these unneccesary concerns that make me too self-conscious to really be free in any action.

I want to roar about the power and majesty of God. I want to roar about His love for us - even in all our unloveliness. I want to roar about the grace that He gives so freely and that gives us such an amazing life. And I want to roar about Him! Its what we were created to do!

Perhaps my new motto in life should be, Not to be outdone by crickets.

Cherry pickin'

2007-05-17T16:28:00.000+02:00

“Uncle! Uncle!” the girls called out to me, “can we take some of the cherries?” “Sure you can” I said, even though the cherry tree does not technically belong to me. . . it belongs to my neighbor. But about a third of it is in my yard, and Mladen, the neighbor, gives me complete access to it. Here is a photo of a bunch of cherries.

I have been baking cherry pies and such pretty much non-stop this week.. But it is the pits, getting the pits out! In fact cherries are a pretty good metaphor for life. No matter how sweet and juicy and wonderful they/it are/is, there are still those darn pits to deal with!

Sitting at my kitchen table de-pitting these piles of cherries always gives me a crick in my back. And even the anticipation of a cherry cobbler does not lessen the pain always. Removing the pits in my life causes me pain too. Especially in the patience it requires.

Patience to get to the fruit, patience to know when the ripe moment has arrived, patience to see the cobbler in what I am doing everyday! Cherry picking seems like lots of fun, but unless you keep a sense of wonder about it, like the girls in the first paragraph, it can be the pits.

The depressing smiling american

2007-05-16T00:51:00.000+02:00

You can generally spot an America here from 5 blocks away. And you can often hear them before you can see them. But when you see them (them being American Christians fresh off the boat, er . . . plane) they usually are smiling like nobody’s business. The problem is that in the East, people don’t smile, especially in public.
Even missional people can fall into the “I-have-to-have-a-Jesus-smile-on-my-face-if-I-am-a-real-christian” syndrome. Recently I had one of my Croatian students address this issue in one of her papers that she was writing for me. Renata said:
I need to point to the most common question American missionaries ask "Why are people so depressed here, and how come they are spending so much time in cafes?“ I have a contra question for the missionaries "How can you be smiling all the time, apparently showing interest in people while remaining so reserved?"
Renata saw right to the heart and truth of the matter, that we Western Christians are apparently happy and living correctly at the surface, but that we rarely share what is going on inside of us with others - in other words, we rarely if ever live in true fellowship with others, i.e. no koinonia.
Christians in this part of the world find this to be very depressing. The lack of depth in our Western relationships is an anathema here. Far better to be sad, depressed, down and real than to be smiling and outwardly happy with no true friends.
Of course this is a generalization of Westerners, but one we all will agree has deep substance. Anyone who has been a pastor for any length of time, will quickly tell you that the number one problem with most folks is that they don’t have deep and significant relationships with others outside their nuclear family. Christians here find such persons to generally be the depressing smiling American.

Sleeping in the fast lane

2007-05-14T20:44:00.000+02:00

While accomplishing that most usual and standard missionary behavior, i.e. making an airport run, I was racing along as usual and thinking about all the things that need to be accomplished today before I lay me down to sleep. That daunting list took all of my focus and energy until I saw him lying in the fast lane, under the overpass.

Him being a dog, might make this more believable, but I am here to tell you that I have never seen a dog lay down in the road on the highway before. On my little street yes, all the time, but where cars are coming at you regularly at 85-90 miles per hour, never. But there it was, in the shade of the overpass, lying in the fast lane.

I suspect that it is now in doggy paradise/hades depending on your canine-ology . . . they are all going to hades in my view, but nevertheless I had to stop thinking about my overwhelming day, and contemplate why this animal would stop and place itself in the utmost danger.

The conclusion I reached was that like me, it probably did not acknowledge the danger, or perhaps it thought that it need rest and shade more than life (literally), or that (unlike me) everything worth living for had past and this was a fairly quick way to doggy eternity.

I find that when I lay down in the fast lane, I invariably get run over. I need to spend more time praying for, and practicing, wisdom in life. After thinking about this today, I have decided I would rather go in my sleep.

Frog inertia

2007-05-05T02:06:00.000+02:00

The dead ones are like a carpet on the road. You can’t imagine how many we are talking about. It was flabbergasting . . . I mean how could so many die? I assumed that they all were mainly killed in the evening and night, because until today, I really had not seen so many during the day when I am out biking and getting my daily exercise.

But I did see a number of them today, and darn, if I did not almost run over them too! I began to see that the frogs either did not see me coming in time to leap away, or they processed the danger so slowly mentally that they were in mortal danger from my not-so-fast mountain bike.

I call this newly observed phenomena, frog inertia. I seem to have it too. I process too slowly when I am in a tempting situation, and then just when I am about to get run over, I almost always leap to safety at the last possible second.

I process too slowly when I am under pressure. Life seems like a runaway freight train and there are too many near misses. I can’t see the danger of going my own direction, and I am especially vulnerable to fast moving wishes and wants, that will flatten me if I don’t make a heroic jump out of their path. Frog inertia can get you killed.

Will God send someone else?

2007-05-04T00:29:00.000+02:00

Jovan argued that if he did not follow the call of God on his life to go to the unreached people group, that God would then send someone else. I asked, “who says so? what do you base this on? how do you know?”

Does God always have a second plan? Then why are there over 6000 unreached people groups listed on the Joshuaproject website? Does God have a second or third or fourth plan for them?

Needless to say, this led to a loud and intense discussion in the classroom. There clearly are few second plans in God’s design . . . He is calling . . . people ignore that call . . . people perish into eternity without God, and we sit back expecting God to have a second and third and fourth plan. Well God may, but then again He may not.

I find this sense of universalism growing in the church today. “God will accomplish it.“ ”He will find another way if you don’t go.“ The class was clearly reluctant to agree that most people are hell-bound. Shoot it even sounds harsh to my not so politically correct ears!

It seems to me that God does have a plan . . . you and me. And if we don’t do it, then who is to say that there is someone else to be sent? If you won’t go, who will?

Mayday Mayday!

2007-05-02T01:24:00.000+02:00

It is my very favorite Communist holiday of the year! It is the day of nine-hour picnic’s, close interpersonal conversations, grilling out, eating and drinking heartily and in general one of the most relationship-rich days of the year.

Today was a very unique May Day for me, as I am currently at the Seminary in Croatia . . . so this May Day was one of languages . . . we were constantly switching from English to Macedonian to Serbo-Croatian and back to English (with Russian throw in occasionally too, as Lujdimila is from Ukraine). In fact it felt like we were actually speaking some new foreign language that was all four, yet one.

It was also a day of being human. No professorial clothes or attitudes, just kick back and chillax as a human being. The conversations ranged from marathoning to biking to BMI’s to diets to organizational restructuring to which Mission does what best to nursing programs to children and spouses, to what form the assignments are due in tomorrow.

But it was also a day of hanging out and getting a head start on eternity. Heaven has to be like this, cause these were all gifts from God Himself . . . a cobalt blue sky, perfect 70 degree temperatures, the luscious smell of meat grilling, no insects (well not many yet) and good friends. Can you think of a better description of heavenly? It is May Day!

Danger signs - literally

2007-04-30T15:02:00.000+02:00

There are all kinds of danger signs . . . here is one for you in this photo. I bet you are wondering how (better yet why!) I am so close. We rarely pay attention to warning signs. I don’t know why. Some people say that it’s just human nature to ignore warning signs and to believe that it could ever happen to you . . . or me. My brother was just telling me how close he came to being blown up by one of these things when he was stationed in Croatia after the war!

This sign says, “Do not walk here, there is a great danger of unexploded mines!”

So why am I standing so close? It’s a good question and for the life of me I don’t have a good (i.e. rational) answer. These signs are everywhere around Osijek, Croatia where I am currently hanging out, teaching at Evangelical Theological Seminary. I must admit that teaching Missiology pales in comparison to mine fields . . . is this a guy thing? huh?

This sign is in English, so you can read it for yourself ☺

So why are these signs up all over the airport in Zurich? Smoking is going to kill you, and so I want to be sure and tell you that, and then provide a special room where you can commit incremental suicide with my assistance. That is what the warning signs really seem to be saying.

So when I read similar warnings in God’s Word, why is it any surprise that my lack of concern for the warning resembles my lackadaisical response to these other warnings? Are there too many warnings in our lives today? Do we not really believe the warnings that are given? Or do we have that fatal human tendency to believe that it can’t happen to us? I don’t really know, but I working through taking God’s warnings more seriously than I do the mine field warnings.

What the cars have been drinking?

2007-04-28T02:07:00.000+02:00

She said “Let’s wait for the light, because of the holiday you don’t know what these cars have been drinking!” Drinking indeed! Well contrary to my wife’s misspoken words, the car’s aren’t drinking anything in the Hairy Armpit, but most everyone else does.

It is used to entertain guests, to stimulate discussions, given to babies in their bottles, to give honor to those who have achieved status by doing good in the community, it is in fact the center of practically all social activities in Slavic culture . . . it is impossible for people here to understand a society where drinking is not the center of life and relationships . . . just ask the two fellows I passed this morning at 7:35 am who were having their morning beer at the cafe. They greeted me warmly, and I them . . . passing on their offer to share a beer with them. But since I was not close to them relationally, they were not overly insulted by my refusal to drink with them.

But in most of Europe drinking is the context of social discourse . . . and social discourse is the foundation of relationships . . . and relationships are the foundation of sharing the Truth.

There are certainly people here who abuse alcohol as there are everywhere in the world. The wrecks left in the wake of abuse are heartbreaking and frankly awful. We all have seen them. Many of my friends around the world are working right in the middle of these addiction- wrecks . . . and they can tell you horror story after horror story.

But the reality that we Evangelicals ignore is that those lost in the desperation of addictions (any addiction) are generally a minority . . . the majority partake in social discourse responsibly. Too many people in my line of work lose vast opportunities and access to these relationships because their cars aren’t drinking anything either.

50% of my church relationships are conducted in a completely alcohol-free environment. 95% of my non-church relationships are conducted in an alcohol-included environment. (John 2:10-11; 1 Tim. 5:23; 1 Cor. 9:22-23).

While the cars aren’t drinking, and honestly they aren’t☺, those that Christ died for are . . . and there are already so many barriers to them hearing the Gospel, should we build one more wall for them to climb? What will the wine-making Christ say about that, when we stand before him face to face?

Privacy - interruptions without permission are unwelcome? (Completely present 2)

2007-04-26T22:52:00.000+02:00

Promptness can be defined by a clock, only in monochronic cultures. In our western monochronic culture, we have placed values on units of time . . . seconds, minutes, hours, etc . . . . and we place high value on these units . . . therefore you show others that we value them by valuing their units as well. Promptness (clock promptness) and schedules are those things which lead us to live efficiently . . . but is that good?

Polychronic cultures see time as the point where you are at the moment and not something that can be divided into any types of units. Thus time becomes almost irrelevant by the western (monochronic) definition. How you handle time (the place where you are at that moment) in synergy with relationships, determines how you value others. So promptness is not a clock event. Instead the result is multilevel, simultaneous involvement (no one excluded because of time) . . . interruptions are simply part of the rhythm of life.

When all promptness is defined by the relationship rather than the clock, it is actually possible to be completely present. I wrote chapter one of this concept and you can read it here if you wish, but being completely present in this moment, and in no other, is beyond the grasp of most monochronics.

I am currently teaching at the seminary and I can say with authority that 99% of the students here are culturally polychronics. They have no sense of time (in a monochronic sense) and consequently they also have no sense of privacy and respecting my time (in that monochronic sense) because they are not monochronics. They are polychronics. You know you are loved, when you are interrupted constantly, because life (and time) is about relationships. Maybe polychronics have it right after all.

A Marvel of Western Ingenuity

2007-04-25T19:37:00.000+02:00

It took me a total of 13 minutes from the moment I arrived at the airport, until I was completely checked and ready to fly. Thirteen minutes! You can’t have this in North American because we are over-challenged in our ability to manage freedom responsibly. This system that allows 13 minute check-in’s, requires a certain attitude to accomplish. It requires everyone to be willing to follow the guidelines ruthlessly. It requires everyone to value everyone else’s time at least as much as they value their own. In fact, if you have no check baggage, it requires exactly zero minutes to check-in, because you can do it all online up to 60 days before and then proceed directly to the gate!

Did I happen to mention that you don’t have a seat number with this airline? So not only did check-in take 13 minutes, but we seated an entire aircraft with almost 200 people in less than 10 minutes. That is right 10 minutes. Because you get on the plane and take any availible seat, moving as far from the aisle as possible to make it easier for the next person to sit. Now if you have ever seen or experienced the 45 minute boarding process used in my least favorite airport in the world for instance, Dulles . . . a 10 minute boarding event is breath-taking!

Oh, did I happen to mention that it is the cheapest airline in the world? Yep, all this speed and for beans!! So how do they do it? Well they pack us like sardines onto the plane ☺. The seats are closer together than a standard airline. So they get more people on per flight than a regular carrier. Also they strongly encourage you to carry on the heaviest bag you can manage to carry. That’s right, they want you to carry your own baggage, rather than they managing your luggage for you.

All in all it was a marvel of ingenuity . . . unless you love the comforts . . . me, I wanna get there and cheaply.

What a day!

2007-04-24T17:36:00.000+02:00

I wrote this a few days again, but I think you can handle that . . .Today was about as perfect a day as anyone could have. Today I got to see my son play soccer in a high school game for the first time ever. I imagine that sounds like some small matter to those who get to see their kids play in various sports all the time, but when you live 1200 miles away from your kids . . . it is exceedingly rare for such a thing to happen.

In fact, most missionary parents never get to do what I did today. And I not only cheered for Jake, but also Christine from Macedonia, and Josh from France, and Becki from Russia, and Yoel from Turkey, and Ellen from France, and . . . well you get the picture . . . I was yelling for all the parents that could not be there ever and watch their kids play in a simple game.

Jake was the General out there . . . making sure every person was covered and that the team was safe and protected as well as his defense could make it. They creamed the opposition!

Its great to see him rise to the top . . . especially in light of his challenges in the past. He is becoming quite a man, and I was thrilled to get to see him play today, and see what he is shaping up to be. One thing is for sure, he is becoming a man to be reckoned with, and God has wired him just for such a task.

Once long ago, a psychologist told us that we were the perfect parents for a boy like Jake. But he got it all wrong . . . Jake is the perfect boy for parents like us.

Prop planes over the Alps?!?

2007-04-23T17:32:00.000+02:00

Yesterday's flight over the Swiss Alps in an ancient prop plane was over the top . . . just barely. I wasn't sure we were going to gain enough altitude to clear the tallest peaks. In fact I wrote this post while actually looking out this small airplane's window and it seemed to me that I could reach out and grab some snow right off the mountain below us at this moment! Here is a photo for you.

Ok I admit it . . . flying is way overrated. There is just something about being inside a tin can 5 miles above the planet surface . . . that is unnatural. On the other hand I love the speed of air travel, while hating the hassles of airports and especially security in our terroristic world.

The lady sitting beside me was freaking out because she had never ridden in a prop plane before and the extra noise and vibration was scaring her. She fretted with her seatbelt the entire time and was hyper-ventilating some as well. I had to help her get it on in the first place and she seemed to be afraid that I will go to the bathroom or something and then we might start to crash and she not be able to get out of it.

The one-handed child across the aisle is a poster boy for the ADHD society. The person sitting in the seat directly in front of him is currently getting pounded as the boy kicks the chair repeatedly. I think his mother is close to the point of seeing if he can fly with one arm. I feel like I am caught in a Shakespearean comedy, or at least a Mexican soap-opera (which my wife loves to watch).

Now the stewardess is coming through offering us a sandwich. My seatbelt-challenged seatmate asks the stewardess a typically Balkan question about the sandwich . . . "Is it ours?" The implication being that no one else's food products are worthy of consumption. Hopefully the beer she is drinking will relax her a bit and at the very least slow her Croatian down . . . I am having a hard time following her, she speaks so rapidly.

Now to add even more excitement to this overly exciting trip, the stewardess just escorted a passenger into the cockpit . . . at least that made my excitable seatmate stop talking . . . but it put a more worried look in her eye. And I too wonder what is up with three in the cockpit . . . ?

Prayerfully I will survive this trip to Zagreb . . . prayerfully someone will actually be there to pick me up . . . prayfully I will be awake to teach class tomorrow . . . I guess if you are reading this at least we made it over the Alps.

Conflict resolution (my recent experience)

2007-04-19T20:26:00.000+02:00

due to a flaming post I wrote recently . . . .

it was interesting to see how different people wanted me to, or thought I should resolve the apparent conflict (although I did not see it as a conflict). But since someone was supposedly offended (no one actually ever wrote me and said "David you offended me"), then I must surely do my part to resolve the conflict (which may have never actually been a conflict). What lots of people did write me was that "IF you had said these things to me, THEN I would have been terribly offended."

Which actions were then expected of me were determined by the point of view (POV) of the advice-giver. Amazingly it was like they fell into two camps . . . the “collectivist” or “individualist” POV of the reader/advice-giver. Missionally these designations are usually used to explain cultural differences, like the difference between North American culture and Thai culture. But I experienced both coming out of North America! Here are the two basic Points of View:

What I found clinically fascinating (it was not experientially fascinating nor pleasurable) was the fact that the POV of the person chiding me or cheering me, determined their suggested next course of action AND each side (POV) used scripture to back up their instructions to me!

While everyone agreed that I was either stupid or brave (again depending on your POV) the fact that scripture was used to support both collectivist's and individualist's POV taught me something very important: that we often read and use and see scripture from our POV, (i.e. our POV informs our understanding of scripture) rather than Scripture informing our POV. This is dangerous, especially in a world that makes Truth very personal and non-absolute. I think I want to be more careful to let the Word of God say what it says, rather than using it as a instrument or weapon for my purposes.

The wisest 8 year old

2007-04-16T03:28:00.000+02:00

“You are not like the foreigner that lived here before“ was Stefan’s opening line. He must have been really bored to have come over and begin talking to me. Stefan is 8 years old, but he speaks like an adult. He is extremely frank, especially for someone from the Hairy Armpit. I mention that he and I arrived in the Balkans about the same time. We came here the year he was born. He thought that was hysterically funny.

”Sometimes Janice allowed me to come inside the yard“ he said, referring to the former tenant. ”She was from Holland“ he informed me. ”Where exactly are you from?“ he asked. ”We are sorta from all over“ I told him. ”I was born in Georgia, Brenda in the Zaire, Heidi in Florida, Jake in Canada, and Helen in PA.“ ”And you can come into our yard anytime your parents or grandmother allow you to“ I added. ”Really?!” he asked.

And he ran away to ask if he could come into our yard and help me pull weeds. Seconds later he returned and said that his aunt gave him permission to come into the yard and he did. I showed him which weeds I was targeting and he went at it with a vengeance, all the while telling me that I had to make certain that I got the roots up, or that we would be doing this again in about 2 weeks! Indeed, he was pulling them up, roots and all.

This little 8 year old guy who was helping me pull weeds today, understood more about weeds and roots than most adults. That to really remove those weeds from our life that we need GONE, we gotta get the roots too. I am suspicious that most days, Stefan is wiser than me.

Completely present

2007-04-13T16:17:00.000+02:00

I think this is a state (country, universe) where few of us ever visit. I know that I rarely get there, even though I have been working to do so steadily for years and frankly I am closer now than I ever was before my brain aneurysm 12 years ago.

Mark Van Doren describes it this way, There is one thing that we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can . . . give all our attention to the opportunity before us.

Those who cannot find this place of being completely present, in some fashion will wither away from destination disease. They are always looking around to the next thing. There are always thinking about tomorrow, next week, next month, next year . . . they never are completely present.

For them, life is not about this moment, this breath, this relationship, this child, this spouse, this hour, this God, this life . . . but rather everything seems to dribble away into a means and never an end. Yet if I never have an end, then I never have a present, a now, a this moment.

Sure there are deadlines, and projects, and work. But there is also the present and I want to more and more be completely there ☺

the cost of tease

2007-04-11T16:34:00.000+02:00

Can you live without TV? Can you live without cable? Can you live without constant films or shows that you are addicted to?

I have been completely fascinated by a post that my Google Reader brought to my desktop yesterday. It was a financial blog promoting the idea of getting rid of cable. According to them, you can save $60 per month, which comes to $720 a year by getting rid of cable! Save that for a few years and you can buy just about anything you want, including a car!

Or you could invest that money in something other than entertainment. Like world evangelism (half the people in the world cannot freely go to church). Feeding the poor (if you have food in the fridge and a roof over your head then you are in the top 25% of the world’s population). Or you could give more to your local charities that assist all sorts of challenged folks.

What was most amazing were people’s answers about why they could not give up their TV. Their favorite drama was the most frequently given answer. They would be bored, was the second most common answer. I find it a bit hard to comprehend either one of those answers. So when do you exercise, read, pray, study, talk, relate, learn and do if you are watching TV all the time? The cost of the being teased/entertained is high, financially and productively speaking. If only one family in each of our 2000 churches would give up cable for the year and direct those resources to the GCF, it would equal 1.44 million dollars! And think about how many books they might read as well :-)

A disclaimer is in order here . . . we have cable ourselves! Then again I don’t watch it at all (but lets remember that I do have three teenagers!) and plus it costs $7 a month. Does that make me a hypocrite?

fishing rabbits out of the ocean, and hunting fish in the forest

2007-04-10T16:12:00.000+02:00

This is about how backward our world has become. How Muslim can the Muslim remain and still be in the Kingdom, and belong to the King? How Hindu can the Hindi be, and yet actually be an inheritor of the Kingdom? As we grapple with missional/contextual issues, these questions are pertinent for those in the West as well.

How rich can a rich person be before they can no longer pass through the eye of a needle? How sensual can a sexy person be and still be a part of the Bride of Christ? How much skin must one cover to be a model of Christ? How much food can a person eat a day and still be Holy as Christ is Holy? How secular can we be and still be in? How much prayer must a holy person offer each day to truly be holy? How much scripture must we read each day to have appropriately have had our quiet time? How much money can I spend on me and still love Jesus? How much time must I devote to evangelism to please Jesus? How much do my small sins (is there such a thing?) hurt me and Jesus, compared to the BIG ones my neighbor is doing? Is how much a person spends on entertainment important to Jesus? Just how much dying is required in this “crucify the flesh“ deal?

Ok ok I have started getting facetious ☺ But I think for the most part these are pretty valid questions (and I have dozens more!) . . . and questions that pertain well to lives that most of us are living. Too often we are hunting for fish in the forest and rabbits in the ocean - Bulgarian Proverb

Egg Dumping - the Easter problem

2007-04-09T22:31:00.000+02:00

We have egg problems again this year. My neighbors are all coming by and giving me eggs. Laboriously, carefully, painstakingly painted and colored eggs Here is a photo of some simple ones.

Literally my neighbors are walking around the neighborhood giving and cracking eggs. The traditions connected with this practice are tough to talk about in the context of Christ’s death and resurrection . . . so let me explain some of the thinking behind this practice. People get these eggs blessed by the priest and then the blessed egg is buried in the vineyard to have God’s protection from hailstorms and to try to get God to bring a good harvest . . . some even claim that the egg is still good to eat a year later? In Serbia the first colored egg is kept until next Easter as a guarantee that the family will be healthy and secure. The rest of the eggs are used for Egg Dumping. It is an egg hitting tradition, where you hit everyone else’s egg and try to break theirs and preserve your own from cracking. I always lose at this game as you can see my effort in this picture.

According to the internet a 100 million eggs will be colored in Bulgaria, they will have special paint and designs in Croatia, and in Greece they will mostly just be red . . . signifying the tradition that Mary, the mother of Christ placed a full basket of eggs at the feet of the crucified Jesus and they all turned red from His blood.

As you can see, there is some truth mingled here with lots of fantasy and tradition. My coffee drinking neighbor (read post here) came and gave me four eggs . . . one for each member of my family that is at home at the moment. I just finally point blank asked him, “why the eggs, what is the significance for you?” To which he replied, “I don’t know, you need to ask the women folk.” We chuckled and then on impulse I said to him a standard Christian phrase for this part of the world, “Christ is risen!” and he answered me back, “He is risen indeed!” So in the middle of swapping eggs, we can still spout good solid theology and significant theology at that.

What does all this mean? Well it means that the reason for missional work in Orthodox countries is valid (and difficult) work. A different sort of egg dumping has occurred, in that eggs of Truth have been placed in a basket - eggs of fantasy, magic and culture, and then the whole basket was dropped (dumped). Now try to sort the Truth-egg from the other eggs and see what a quagmire you find yourself in. That is a pretty solid picture of what Truth faces in this part of the world. Sorting it out takes years . . . maybe a lifetime.