Jim writes this.

Book of James

2012-01-29T12:06:00.000-05:00

The barber finishes one man, and the chair opens. Another man, young, too young to be here, too young to have hit bottom, has been sitting impatiently, bouncing his knees, tapping his feet, and elbows another man out of the way to get into the chair first. The barber shrugs and dutifully, carefully buzzes away while The Dentist on the microphone welcomes them, announces birthdays, thanks volunteers, shares prayer requests. When the barber finishes, the young man gets up and pulls a women's compact from his pocket while another guy sits down in the barber chair. He looks at himself in the tiny mirror, turning his head back and forth, checking the fade in front of his ears, furrowing his brow, noticing something isn't quite right. He still has his vanity. There's pride, intensity, don't-mess-with-me in his eyes.

The Dentist prays, and the barber has his head bowed, but the young man starts to elbow him. He looks at the barber, tries to get his attention, then looks at his fresh do in the tiny mirror, then at the man trying to get him to shut up while The Dentist prays, then back at the barber, then back at the man trying to get him to shut up. The Dentist finishes and the barber silently makes an imperceptible fix on the young man's sideburns. He whips out the compact again, and nods approvingly.

Volunteers hand out meals to all the men and women at the tables. The rule is, you don't get clothes until you've eaten. No more clothes at seven. But the young man with the fresh haircut comes, stakes a claim on a pair of shoes before he's had his meal.

Don't give it to him, Jose. Because soon, they'll all be up here.

Jose hands him the shoes he wants.

Crap.

Soon, there's a crowd. Clothes start flying, in all shapes, shades, sizes, just like the addicts here.

Big ones, with beer on their breath. Size 38 waist please.

No tenemos 38.

I shuffle through the pile of pants.

Aqui, 40. Pero no hay 38.

The words I'm most comfortable with come out in that lispy, cut-off Puerto Rican accent that I'm trying not to pick up. He rejects the pants for now, but comes back for them later.

Another one, with no voice, no teeth, lips curling over his gums, holds up nine fingers and points to his feet. This is a language I can understand. I dig for size nines in a shopping cart. They're already gone.

Lo siento, señor, no hay nueves.

Another one, so very skinny, asks for size 30 pants, makes his request with gravel in his voice, it's rough and jagged like volcanic rock, the roughest I've ever heard. It's a wonder he can still use it. I fish him out some 29s.

Size 29 jeans?

There are women, too. One was up front, for her birthday, they sang her at least three variations of the birthday song, as Puerto Ricans like to do. Big bandages on her arms in three places, three places where there was pain, and then escape, and now healing. Someone told me the puncture wounds get infected and they often leave them untreated and the skin rots away, down to the muscle, to the bone.

For some of the people here the symptoms are obvious. You can smell them on their breath, hear them in their voice, see them in the wounds on their arms, on their face, so clearly struggling, sitting on the bottom of society, providing examples of "At least I'm not..."

For some of them, the symptoms are not clear. They're clean, they're getting by with clean clothes and fresh haircuts, you wouldn't know it by looking at them.

Here, they're fed, they're clothed. Their wounds are treated, they're bandaged, welcomed back whenever they want.

Christ is followed here.

Enlightening the American Teenager

2012-01-11T21:54:00.000-05:00

Every class has that one kid who makes everyone else groan when he raises his hand to ask a question or speak.

I was Skyping with my friend Kendra's Spanish class last week when that kid raised his hand to ask a question.

"What's the technology like there?" he asked.

"Ohhh my God!" escaped from the lips of some poor, embarrassed girl in the second row. No doubt she was vastly more culturally aware and knew the obvious ridiculousness of the question. She was probably a few social rungs higher than the kid who asked it, and he had clearly violated some protocol asking about technology. But Middle and High school social hierarchy aside, this scene underscored the divide between our cultures, and the value of what we were doing.

I appreciated the question and I didn't laugh at him, like I did to the kid who asked if there was anything to do here. At least he asked something.

"Well," I said, "Technology here is really similar to what you guys have there. I'm Skyping with you over the internet, most people here have the internet in their houses. A lot of kids have PS3s and Xboxes like you guys. There's a Gamestop in pretty much every strip mall. Kids have cell phones and iPads like you guys."

A few times now, I've had the privilege of using Skype to talk to a class of kids thousands of miles away in Michigan. I probably don't make for a great Spanish language lesson, but I hope they at least enjoy the chance to talk to someone in a far away place and learn a little bit more about a different culture. There's always a little bit of nervousness on my part because a kid in an advanced high school class just might have a better grasp of some grammatical rules than I do, or they may ask a question I don't have a good answer for. Luckily, nuanced rules of Spanish never come up.

Instead, it's typically a variation on the same set of softball questions. What's the weather like? What do kids do for fun there? What kind of fast food do they have?

That last one always comes up, and I think there's a quintessentially American perspective behind it. I've asked it too. Our love for greasy, cheap fast food aside, it's a pretty good gauge for a place's standard of living. Or at least we think it is.

I've had a number of conversations with Puerto Ricans who've met Stateside Americans who always ask the same dumb questions, and it annoys them.

I understand their offense. Many of those questions come across as, "do you have what I have?" If you can imagine an annoying kid from down the street coming over to compare toys and being shocked when yours are just as nice, it's kind of like that.

Don't get me wrong, Americans are terribly blessed. The United States enjoys a great standard of living and a great deal of freedom, but they're not the only ones with nice toys. Or the internet, or PS3, or movie theaters. Or fast food joints. Besides, having McDonald's in your country is hardly an indicator of economic stability.

Puerto Rico, like much of the world, has a middle class with some disposable income. In Puerto Rico, like much of the world, there are lots of people who can speak flawless English or another second language. And Puerto Rico, just like the rest of the United States, has a large lower class that has embraced a potentially unsustainable and unhealthy consumer culture. Kids here may have iPads and XBoxes, but that doesn't mean they need them or can afford them comfortably. It's no different in the States.

That was something I discovered myself telling the high school kids over and over again, and I hope they got the point - kids here are just like you. The biggest divide between the States and Puerto Rico isn't how different they appear, but how little one side realizes they're the same.

Time to go back

2012-01-02T23:15:00.003-05:00

Okay. Power blog. It's getting late and I need to go to bed because

I'm flying back to Puerto Rico tomorrow.

This was my third trip home, and it will be my fourth flight to Puerto Rico. It never gets easy to say good bye, but I think I do understand them a little better.

It's good to come home. Good to be around family and friends and snow, and separate from the pace of life and work in Puerto Rico, from salty air and daily routine, so I can go back and approach it anew, refreshed. I saw lots of people here. I missed many more. When you have finite time (and it's all finite, isn't it?) you just can't plan it all. That's no break. That's no vacation. That's not refreshing. So - sorry if I missed you.

The inevitable question people ask is - how much longer will you be there? If you've read this blog in the last few months, you may have sensed that I won't have a very specific or concrete answer. There are times when I'm sure I'll be finished there this fall, and there are others when I think - I'm doing good work, I feel useful, I'm growing, why ever leave?

It's a tough decision to make. It's almost certainly tougher than the decision to go there in the first place. It's not one I've got my mind fully made up on. I know I'll be there at least through this fall. Maybe longer. Maybe not. Professionally, I should stay. Personally, I'd like very much to return here, to normal.

But of course, "normal" is gone.

The decision to stay or go (or what to do or where to move or when to go or what to wear), in my unprofessional, non-seminary-trained opinion, is not the same as following or abandoning the will of God. To stay there, I can see where He would use me. To go home, I can see where he would use me.

It would be easy to obsess over it. Regardless, It is good that I have been there, and it is good that I am going back now. There's a lot to do.
Lots of camps to plan
Staff to train
Kids to reach
Places to explore
Stuff to learn
Advice to follow.

Let's go back.

Building stuff

2011-12-19T16:02:00.001-05:00

It dawned on me a few weeks ago that I might like a coffee table for my living space, so I decided to build one.

I don't yet consider myself especially handy, but I've built stuff before. I built myself a functional but ugly desk a few years ago. No screws, no glue necessary. Just interlocking pieces and a back that screws in. (Oh, I guess there were some screws involved. Regardless...) I've got some experience, I know how to cut wood. I don't hold a circular saw at arm's length and wince and tremble like it's dying to hack me to pieces. Anymore. Wood glue, finish, polyurethane, this guy has at least a cursory understanding of what goes where and when.

I like working with my hands, building stuff that will last a while. They say you get your best ideas when you're building, tinkering, when your hands are busy, not when you're deliberately trying to think up brilliant stuff. Everyone should be able to do that somehow. And if I can have a lasting piece of furniture and build a skill in the process, it's an even better use of time.

I'd like to one day reach a level of comfort with woodworking so I can build stuff that looks at least passable, or even "kinda nice, in the right light," as opposed to that desk I built. The finish was nice but - what's the saying? A face only a mother could love? Yeah, that applies to that desk I built, I'm sure. Also, camp has all the tools I need, so I figured now was the time to do it while I have easy access to them.

So I started looking for woodworking tips and found ana-white.com, which is full of easy-to-make stuff and helpful ways to make it without hurting yourself. It's noobie-friendly. I found plans for this so I decided to build it.

We had some old broken trolleys (4x4 logs with ropes attached, used for team-building exercises) that couldn't be used anymore. I wanted to use those for legs. It gives the table a little bit of history. I bought the rest of the wood at Home Depot. I dropped about $40 on wood and screws, all said and done. Stain, foam brushes, and Polyurethane ran about $20 more. So I sunk about $60 into the project.

Once upon a time, those were building teams. Now they're holding up a coffee table in my living room. But first, they went through this progression. (there were more, but my Droid X2 likes to mess up/lose pictures for some reason. What gives?)

[this is where pictures my phone ate would go...]

Ta-da!!!

A real, live presentable coffee table. Took me a few nights of work spread over about two weeks. It's not too shabby, really. I learned a bunch - this thing is definitely not perfect. If I built another one (any takers?) I would build it better. I might build myself a matching end table next month - who knows?

falling water

2011-12-16T16:30:00.001-05:00

Rain patters on the windshield of the van, making me nervous. We've been driving for 90 minutes, the last 20 of which on roads the locals will later tell me not to take. If the locals say the roads are bad, listen to them. There's some uncertainty, we've made no phone calls, no reservations, nobody is expecting us and, at the moment, nobody is coming to greet us at the gate.

I've talked this place up. I've sold it to them. We better get in. I don't have their phone number, no way to contact them. I honk the horn. After a minute, a young man comes bounding down the driveway under and umbrella. He greets us with English that leads me to believe he knows how to speak it. He doesn't. I think my Spanish is better than his English.

He knows why we're here - this piece of property lies adjacent to Rio Fajardo, which spits out of the rainforests of El Yunque toward the Atlantic. This is a base camp for a short hike to a sort of natural waterpark a quiet, secluded spot where the water falls down a chute like a waterslide, pools up under rope swings, with high rocks on all sides, deep so you can dive.

A rainy day means a surge in the river, which can make this place dangerous. We navigate a brief conversation about the rain, that it's not a good day to use the upper spot with the high jump and the waterfall, but the pool with the rope swings is fine. He sends me off to park the van up the hill.

We tumble out with stiff knees into the damp coolness of the rainforest, the canopy overhead cancels out the rain. It smells like Spring and rain and - and wet dogs. A sign nearby warns of perros peligrosos - dangerous dogs. They sniff us and leave us alone. Their only danger is their odor.

Another older man comes out, greets me in English, except he really does know English. I hand him some cash before he can ask for money, hoping he'll just accept my lowball offer. It's their property and they like you to pay to park and have the mud washed off your feet when you get back. He takes a quick head count.

Two dollars each. How many are you?
Fourteen.
I hand him some more, overpaying just a little. We'll keep coming back here; we want to curry favor with them.

He and I have another conversation about not using the waterslide or the jump next to it. He tells us to stay at the low part.

If there's a sudden surge, he says, stay off to the safe side and don't try to cross. Each year we have some bodies wash up here below. If you're stranded, we'll send a helicopter to rescue you.

The warning fills me with more curiosity than worry.

The path up through the jungle is rocky and uneven, slippery, lined with thick layers of thriving green plants of all sizes, and a few abandoned structures that nature hurriedly reclaimed. Waterfalls tumble from out of sight, birds and coquis chirp all around us. Soon, we descend the rocks toward a landing in the river.

Here.

This is the place, the quiet spot in the jungle where it's just you and the birds and the trees and the water and the rocks, the place you'd be stupid not to drive 90 minutes to, the place some people would drop everything to fly to, the escape, the place by which all other future escapes might be judged. It's rainy, the very worst of conditions save for a hurricane, and still - it is near to perfect.

We slip into the cold water, and clamber over the rocks and dive and jump and splash and play for hours. The sun falls behind the mountain and the light starts to fade.

I dive in, deep, wondering how long I can stay there, until I return slowly, reluctantly to the surface. There, I draw a deep breath and lay back as my arms and legs and torso float on top of the water. Everything slips away, and I stare up at the treetops and the waning daylight. My ears drop below, and I hear nothing but the distant, muffled roar of a waterfall.

Until

2011-11-26T10:04:00.001-05:00

The nature of spiritual growth is such that you have to learn things again and again that you thought you already knew.

For example: "You have to trust God."

Amen! Yes, of course!

Or if I'm being honest: Duh.

I've been hearing that since life got real, since I was confused and self conscious in Jr. High, since I was in High School, since I was in college, since I graduated, since I decided to move to Puerto Rico. That last one, especially.

I remember speaking at our service retreat shortly after I moved here last year, about finally trusting God with three things when I decided to come here: Relationships, finances, and my career. And I believed it and I thought I understood it because I had been hearing it for so long and by now it had just become common sense. Leaving life behind was a leap of faith - I was abandoning any hopes of establishing a career path in my 20s, or erasing any of that big dark cloud of debt that (still) hangs over me and my wallet, or keeping up with others who were getting married and establishing families. Also, I was leaving my immediate family again. Double-whammy on the relationships.

I said to God, "You're putting my life on hold, and I'm okay with that. Sure I'll go." I knew he'd provide. I knew that if I had no money, there would be food. I knew that if ever I felt unqualified or unprepared, things would be okay. For the most part, yes, I trusted him.

But trusting God is no temporary thing.

"...You're putting my life on hold."

No. That is not how this works. No matter how big or crazy or different or life-altering your decision might be, it doesn't work that way. Obedience and trust to God are not temporary things. You don't put your life on hold.

You abandon it.

And so every time I sit here and plan my next move, and consider what job offers might come up, and daydream about Sunday football with my family, and start to silently spend the imaginary money I'd make at my imaginary job, and wonder why I'm not on the normal schedule as I see my friends get married,it shows that I am still missing something, that there is some little or big piece that my sinful little heart does not yet believe God can handle.

God has not brought me here to be normal. Normal was gone a long time ago. Stop expecting normal. If you want normal, you might as well go home now.

I read a verse a few years ago that shook me. I thought I understood it then but apparently I didn't because I'm still discovering it, and I'm still working on it.

Psalm 71:18: Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, O God, until I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come.

That "until" in there, it's significant, it's heavy, it's bold, it's scary.

Do not forsake me

Until

I declare your power

Until

I've done your work.

Then, I guess... do whatever you want with me. If I'm reading the Psalm correctly, forsaking is on the table. You don't owe me anything. Totally up to you.

...And how could anyone ever believe the Creator of the universe owes them anything? He has no debts. We're the ones with debts.

In the very least, David's asking God not to let him get feeble and old and gray and useless until he's totally spent (broken, spilled out) doing God's work.

In recent weeks, I've spent a lot of time deliberating my future, wondering how long I'll stay here, how long I'll stay in camp ministry, or in ministry in general. If you'd have asked me a few months ago where I thought I was going to be in a year, I'd have told you I'll probably be in Grand Rapids working, paying off debt, back with my family and friends and life will be...

Normal.

But enough people have pushed me to question that, some on purpose, and some not. And I think there are enough people praying for me that God must be having mercy on my soul and teaching me, again, those things that I probably should have known by now, that no one could ever have told me, in ways no one else could have taught me.

And so now I don't know where I'll be in a year. But I believe that I am nearer than ever to genuinely trusting God. I picture myself with my face hidden, covering my eyes, having long held stubbornly to my own neat ambitions and plans, holding one hand aloft offering the last of them to God, the fingers one by one losing grip on them as he gently takes them, takes my future, and in doing so allows me to truly live as he has planned all along.

I haven't left life behind. Relationships, careers, finances... I've begun to see that being single has allowed me to be free. I thought I abandoned establishing a career path but it's more accurate to say I've started one. I have known very little hunger or need since I've come here, and that cloud of debt is shrinking ever-so-slowly.

While accepting this goes a long way to calm my present anxieties, the greater comfort comes in the realization that God is calling me to greater trust and deeper faith.

Iowa

2011-11-23T12:07:00.001-05:00

It's flyover country and I love it.

I once had a teacher who ripped on Iowa, saying there was nothing to see there, nothing to do except drive through it. I came to its defense, said there were wonderful things there but you just had to get off the interstate.

I'll stand by that. For me, I can't have a Thanksgiving and not think of Iowa. I'm in a bit of a different setting this year, just as I have been a few years. But when I was a kid, it was an annual pilgrimage.

Exciting, far away.... Iowa.

About this time each year, my parents corralled four kids into a station wagon or minivan and headed west to Tipton, Iowa where my Grandma lived. To me, it was exciting - far away, different, exotic. For Dad, I know it holds a particularly special meaning. Enough to tolerate the freeway around Chicago and the endless straits of freeway over the Mississippi River into his home state. That's where he was born, where he grew up. And because it's part of his history, it's part of mine too. So I can't let anyone rip on it. And I have to support the Hawkeyes, unless they're playing the Spartans.

I can picture all of it:

Tipton, the island of a small-town in the middle of nowhere. Grandma's old house on 2nd Street, with its unplaceable, inimitable smell and the football player wallpaper in the bedroom upstairs. The enormous old library and its huge yard right across the street where we'd play baseball. Her little church a few blocks down. The butcher behind her house, where every so often they had an animal awaiting its conversion to meat. The Tractor Dealership where we'd go and stand inside the huge tires. The gas station where somehow we were could still get Pepsi and Mountain Dew in glass bottles. Happy Joe's pizza. The mile walk to Walmart when we got bored.

And Thanksgiving Dinner, with the gathering of all of the cousins, aunts and uncles we usually only saw that time of year. Turkey, Rolls, Stuffing, Jello Salad, the usual, the bubble bread, and Aunt Helen's turtles (I don't suppose those would survive a shipment to Puerto Rico?) The seemingly eternal devotion from Our Daily Bread after breakfast. A rousing game of Chinese Checkers. Dated toys. That weird, aged exercise bike. A newspaper from 1903 that I kick myself for not asking Grandma for.

The occasional trip out of town to Mechanicsville, where Uncle Joe lived. Or Center Point, where Aunt Carol and Uncle Larry live. The admittedly more exciting trips to Iowa City and the University of Iowa, where we wandered onto the field at Kinnick Stadium or the court at Carver Hawkeye Arena, where my soft spot for Iowa Athletics was born. The way there on roads surrounded with outstretched fields and demarcating trees, and the farm houses and silos and barns, and small towns where everyone just has to know each other.

You get off the freeway, and Iowa's not so bad.

The world has seen many wonderful ladies. I'm just not sure any of them stack up to my Grandma Gamble. She did what Grandmas are supposed to do, always overflowing with kindness, you couldn't not love that lady. She sent a birthday card each year with a one-dollar bill in it. She had a little sign on her door that said, "In this house, you can sing and pray, but please don't smoke and swear." She was a gentle woman but an aggressive Skip-Bo player.

You know what? Grandma was awesome.

Thanksgiving, Iowa, Grandma Gamble, they're all neighbors in my brain.

CDC Men's Retreat 2011

2011-11-21T10:58:00.001-05:00

Here at CDC this weekend, this happened:

We hosted our first ever Men's Retreat and some of the guys went on an Iguana hunt. No, we didn't eat them, but we would have tried if we could have gotten the meat off the carcass. And before you cry foul for killing off ugly but exotic animals without getting some protein from 'em, they're an invasive species and you're supposed to shoot 'em. In case you don't know how big an Iguana can get, that shows you the scale. Each of those is about five feet from head to tale. They're heavy too.

Also there was some of this:

But it wasn't all high-flying chess action. There was also some of this:

That ball probably weighs at least 30-40 pounds. Look at the next picture and you'll see Lawrence Trumbower, who has been a missionary here running the radio station for nigh 40 years. He's rocking Air Jordans. I've also seen him jump into a creek from a 30 foot cliff.

But of course, we had to get fed, and since we couldn't have Iguana, we had Pinchos. They're really just deliciously grilled meat on a stick. And what's a men's event without consuming burned meat? We thought, we have 20 guys, 50 pinchos oughta be more than enough. Not necessarily.

You cook 'em like this:

Taaaan sabrosa.

But we had to get fed in other ways:

Pastor Miguel Ortiz from Iglesia Biblica Juana Diaz spoke about being Men of Power.

...and we had some great discussion.

It was a great weekend. Men's fellowship is really important, and is overlooked far too often. We got great feedback from the guys who attended, and we'll definitely do it again, even better, next year.

The way to Bayamón

2011-11-14T14:03:00.001-05:00

Saturday was one of those rare days when the skies were clear enough over the mountains so you could see the peaks and the radio towers and houses, and could be reminded that people actually live up there in the clouds. I drove up to San Juan, and the highway there keeps the mountains on your left and the Caribbean on your right until it veers left and juts right up into the hills.

I know the way up to San Juan by now, but I was headed to Bayamón, another metro area just to the west of San Juan. Never been there. As I left, I wondered - should I have brought someone along? I don't really know where I'm going.

I replayed little sound bytes in my head of Julio and others talking about places you're not supposed to go. "What if I accidentally go there?"
"You won't."

"Well. Okay..."

They left it at that.

Also, the radio wasn't working* and the drivers side door of the pickup no longer closes. So I drove with my left arm out the window holding it shut, up to the crest of the mountains and then descended into Cayey, then Caguas, and into San Juan metro area.

There, 52 becomes 18. You take 52 to 18 to 22 West to 2 West to 176 south. Not far down, on the right, there's a little purple building where they'll fix my projector. I know the numbers in my head, but I don't know the exits and I've never seen anything past 18. I had seen the map, and could actually visualize it in my mind. Years of pizza delivery helped me develop this skill.

52 to 18: check. Done this before a hundred times.

18 to 22: check. Now into new territory.

22 to 2: Oops.

There was a sign for 2 north, but nothing for 2 west. Well, crap. I know how the freeways here go. Like most places, it's easier to take the earlier exit and get back on if you're wrong, rather than pass the correct exit and have to double back a long way down. I dropped off early, directly into new territory with unrecognizable streets.

A note about streets in Puerto Rico: All the urban roads have numbers and names. Most maps have the numbers, but the signs have the names instead of numbers. Locals know the names. Also, this is not a flat island. There are no straight roads here. So while I can usually navigate pretty well, it becomes really tough when the road you're on winds all over the place and very soon, you might be heading the wrong way.

Here, I found myself on just such a road. Fortunately, even windy roads go somewhere. So if you stay on them long enough, you'll find your way to another busy road, which will probably take you somewhere recognizable.

I like to say that I'm never lost, I'm just in a new place. And you really aren't lost as long as you know how to backtrack. Which is possible, but not easy, on windy roads.

I took the road to another major road and worked my way toward what I knew to be the general direction I wanted to go. But I didn't trust my instinct. I stopped at a gas station and went in to ask the clerk for directions. I wanted to be on highway 2. I didn't think I was. I asked the clerk if he spoke English and he said no. "No problema," I said and plopped down my map. "Yo quiero ir pa alla," ("I want to go there") and pointed on my map. "Donde esta carreterra 2?" (Where's highway 2?) He pointed outside to the road I'd just gotten off. That didn't seem right. I'd been on the right road all along? "Este calle aqui es carreterra 2?" (This street here is highway two?) I pointed out to the road. "Si!" he said. "a la derecha" (to the right.)

Well. Okay. I got into the truck, held that door tight and wheeled out into traffic. Now, highway 2 goes all the way out of the city, to Arecibo and beyond to the northwest corner of the island. So when after one stop light this street, which the clerk had told me was highway 2, ended at a T, I knew there had been some communication breakdown somewhere. I took the T to the right (because why not? I had a 50-50 chance) and soon found a strip mall with a starbucks and a few cafes and a convenience store.

Two boys at the intersection out front were selling muffins and pastries. I asked if they knew where carreterra 2 was. They said no. Of course not.

I pulled into the parking lot and immediately found myself in one of the more nightmarish parking lots traffic jams I've experienced in Puerto Rico. After about 15 minutes, I parked. My transition from naive explorer into frustrated traveler was now complete. I went in and to get directions from a patron there. He spoke English. I handed him my map. He said, "Go out, take a right, take a left at the second light, go over the hill, and you'll be there at highway two.

"Great!" Sounded easy enough. "Thank you!"

I pulled out, took the right, saw no stoplights, and quickly found myself on a freeway on-ramp.

Welp.

I recognized this freeway. I was going the wrong way, but I recognized it. I turned around at an exit, backtracked, found highway 2, and followed it to highway 167. After about 15 minutes, I landed at the small purple building.

Now, I know where I went wrong in all of it. But the odds were in my favor. Had I driven around long enough, I would have found my way. I'm sure there's a lesson on stubbornness in here somewhere. But I can't find it yet. So for now, I leave you with:

This is why men never stop and ask for directions, and why we don't need to.

*The radio works. The rear speakers don't. Someone had the faders turned to those non-working rear speakers. I only discovered this today. I spent all day on Saturday driving without a radio, with only my thoughts to listen to. Sometimes that's not so bad.

One Year, Today

2011-11-08T15:52:00.000-05:00

A year ago today, I arrived at CDC alittle after midnight, tired and sweaty, with no soap. Dave gave mesome, and today that same bar is sitting on the sink in my bathroom.Bachelor move, I know.

It's smaller now, cracked anddiscolored. But it still gets my hands clean and I think it'll bearound for a while longer. I don't know how long a bar of soap issupposed to last. I swear I've been using it regularly. But thingslike that – the longevity of a bar of soap – make you realize ayear really isn't all that long.

It looks a lot longer beforehandthan afterward. For most people, it goes by and life changesimperceptibly. Not much is different when it's over. Your age is +1and there are new songs on the radio and your nieces are talking alot more.

Life kind of plods forward. That's truefor the people back home who must think I'm living some crazy, exoticlife, and it's true for me here. It's not everyday that I'mswinging off ropes over waterfalls into jungle pools. That was lastTuesday. It's not everyday that I'm rescuing baby sea turtles. Thatwas a few weekends ago.

Leaving home is a sacrifice, no matterwhere you land. There are trade-offs. I would trade jungle waterfallsfor just one afternoon of lazy football-watching with my family.

I still consider Grand Rapids my homeand I'm realizing that, though I've only been in PR a year, I'veactually been gone a lot longer. In 2008, I was in Africa. In 2009, Ispent a summer and fall at Grace Adventures then moved to St. Josephto work for Whirlpool. In 2010, I left St. Joe to go back to camp andthen moved here to Puerto Rico. For much of the last three years,I've been away.

Gone.

Sometimes I get the feeling that whileeveryone back home is putting down roots and getting married andtaking big, giant steps forward in life, I'm missing out onsomething. Most of my friends and family are back there, and most ofthe people I'm close to here are married or in a different stage oflife. As a result, there have been some lonely days.

“Lonely,” for the record, is aterrible word. Just saying it, confessing it, affirms and exacerbatesthe feeling of it. But if I'm going to be honest, it's been a realityfor me here that has colored my experience. I don't like being gone,being alone. But, you ask...

“How do you like Puerto Rico?”

Puerto Ricans ask me this all the time.It's usually a question rooted in pride in their island, especiallyfor the older ones. I can tell that “You just love it, don'tyou?!?” is on the tip of their tongues.

Sure, I like Puerto Rico. I like 85 inFebruary and never having to worry about icy roads. I like frappesand festivals and salsa and merengue music blaring from oversized speakers pretty much everywhere. I like waking up with the Caribbean lappingup just beyond my back door. I like exploring and the unpredictability and relaxed pace of island life. I like the creativity afforded me bya job that is directly related to impacting people's lives.

But there's still this big part of myheart that's stuck in Michigan, with its seasons and icy roads and –it's just home for me, and I've been gone for a long time. I can'thelp but look forward to returning someday.

My life hasn't synched up very wellwith everyone else's since I graduated from college. I've taken adifferent path, one with more miles traveled, more debt, less dollarsearned. But I have to remind myself – don't take this for granted.These are good years and I'm hardly missing out. Someday, I'll missthe Caribbean and the salsa and jungle waterfalls, and I'll curse thebiting wind and cold of Michigan in winter.

Tell ya what, I won't take this forgranted if you, wherever and whoever you are, won't take yours forgranted.

Scattered thoughts and furtherreflections on one year:

I thought I would know Spanish by now. I don't. Learning a language is a long and difficult process.
Top five frappes, in no particular order: Strawberry Oreo, Banana Oreo, Strawberry Cheesecake, Chocolate Coconut Banana, and Strawberry Kiwi (if the strawberries and kiwis are sweet.)
I really don't mind public speaking anymore. At least not when I'm flanked by a translator.
Dreaming and pitching new ideas is fun, but following through is far more difficult.
I will never stop hating plyometrics, but I'm slowly growing more and more fond of P90X. Thanks, Tony.
I cannot overstate the impact a package or letter has on me, no matter what's inside it. I've gotten a few from Michigan, one of which had a Tigers playoff towel that I will cherish and enthusiastically wave whenever the Tigers are playing or when I miss baseball, and a few letters from India. All of them were wonderful.
Nobody is perfect. Not even missionaries.

conTRAculTUra

2011-10-25T23:01:00.000-04:00

(props to my brother Jon for the art)

Saturday morning, around 11 am, I boomed out Nicki Minaj's Superbass to a group of 54 high school kids here at Campamento del Caribe. I then showed them a clip of Sophia Grace Brownlee singing the same song perfectly, belting that catchy chorus just like Ms. Minaj. It was the cutest thing ya ever did see.

But those lyrics... they're kinda nasty. In the very least, they paint an odd picture of what an ideal man should be. (Nicki's take: "He pop bottles... he's always in the air but he never flies coach, he might sell coke") And that's where we took our ensuing discussion. It's just a little weird having a discussion about naughty English lyrics with a group of Spanish speaking kids. Many of them were bobbing their heads and shot their hands in the air when I asked if they knew the words.

Discussing the dangers of pop music officially ushers me into one of the stages of adulthood between "permissibly cool grown-up" and "please stop, Dad, you're embarrassing me." I think the one I'm at the post-plateau coolness plummet. My trajectory is negative, no doubt.

But my own coolness aside, it was all part of our Contracultura retreat.

The point we were trying to get across was: Be different. Romans 12:2 tells us not to conform to the powers of the world, and we wanted to find some cool ways to get that point across to the campers. Part of that was our discussion that morning, dubbed "THE VOICE OF TRUTH." We compared various takes the entertainment industry and media have on subjects like men, women, God, Good and Evil, Success (we never got to sex and relationships, dadgummit) with the Bible. The format worked well - Clip, introduce topic, discuss in small groups, hear from a few groups, look at what the Bible says.

That discussion was one of the hardest things for me to plan - it only came together a few days before the retreat. Also tough: coming up with a name. Julio gets credit for that. He clearly has not plateaued in coolness, as I have. We kicked around a bunch of ideas, almost settling on a few others, until he pitched Contracultura. It was like, "Bingo." And it stuck.

Our high school camps have been really, really encouraging to me. Before the summer, Jon gave me a capacity number, and I looked at the previous summer and said there was no way we'd hit it. And somehow we did. We had a full camp, and the kids had a blast. And the energy at the end of the week was amazing.

So they seemed to carry it over into the retreat this weekend. Good numbers again, up from our last retreat in February. On Saturday night, Julio spoke and gave an invitation, and at least four kids went to talk to their counselors to accept Christ. Praise God for that.

I got to speak Sunday morning. I'm not nervous about that anymore, not here anyway. It helps when you know what you're going to say. And when you speak through a translator, you get a minute to formulate your next thought. Which really disrupts your flow, if you have flow. I am not a person who has flow. I don't think, anyway. But I was glad to get the chance to speak, if only for 20 minutes. It went well - I told an embarrassing story, shared a funny clip, and used a good illustration I learned from Francis Chan.

I really don't like to dwell on numbers, but it's a special thing when camp is full. Once again, parents were dragging their kids away from CdC. God is doing big things here.

I got to leaf through some of our evaluations from the retreat today, and the most common suggestion for improvement: Let us stay longer. The thing they liked the most: The teaching times.

That's why we do these retreats. It's great that they have fun and want to come back, but for them to leave with deeper understanding, strengthened in their walk... That's huge. Pray for those 54 kids, that they really would keep at it, and truly be Contracultura.

The things you find on the beach

2011-10-16T23:12:00.000-04:00

Living on the ocean, you're at the edge of the world, it seems. So when garbage washes up onshore, I like to imagine it could have come from anywhere.

Glass bottle? Dropped in the ocean by a sailor decades ago. Obviously.

A barbie leg? A little girl somewhere in Venezuela is tailoring special barbie pants.

Plastic car parts? Some freighter from Hong Kong lost a crate overboard en route to Brazil or Detroit or Latvia.

Clearly I have no idea how the gulf stream works.

In reality, when the rain falls, it flows down the mountains and through the city streets and sweeps all the debris into the river and out to sea. And shortly thereafter, it washes up on our beach. So while the barbie legs and bottles and plastic debris - and a mountain of bamboo and sticks - could have come from a long way away, odds are they're from down the street in Pastillo or Juana Diaz or Santa Isabel. There are lots of familiar objects in there.

Yesterday, a number of kids were here at camp to pitch in and clean up the beach to earn a discount for our retreats the next few weekends. It's really more for them than for us. We even feed them lunch. We don't, however, give them swim time when it's all said and done, something that made me lots of enemies as I drove them home after we ate.

I spent most of our two short hours of work dragging a few of them back from the water cooler in the shade and encouraging them to keep helping while the others kept working. A lot of them haven't quite grasped the benefits of hard labor in the hot sun.

Builds character. Grunt.

I'm 27 and still working on my attitude towards this kind of thing. So I don't know why I would expect an 11 year old to joyfully sift through all the junk on the shore.

You never know what you're going to find.

Almost immediately after we started, one of them found a syringe.

She jokingly asked if it was mine. That's the brand of humor I expect from this particular girl. I shrugged it off and assured her it wasn't.

A minute later, she found a tiny baggie. She knew it had held drugs, and again asked if it was mine. I again denied it with a smirk. She explained to me with a few gestures and some basic Spanish what had been in the bag and what someone would have done with it, then threw it in her garbage bag.

Had I found that baggie, I'd probably have thought nothing of it. And had I found the syringe, I'd have quietly dropped it in my bag and then washed my hands for twenty minutes. It's the kind of thing you don't want kids to ask you about, that you'd rather them never know anything about. You'd like to protect them.

I stood there for a minute and spaced out. Here was a 13-year-old girl who lives right next to a drug point and has had far more exposure to drugs than I have. And she was making jokes. How do you protect them then?

When I was 13, I just wanted to watch Animaniacs and eat cereal.

The ALDS

2011-10-07T10:21:00.003-04:00

Last night I stayed up in the office watching the Tigers beat the Yankees to advance to the ALCS.

I settled in the office because my wireless reception was a little sketchy from my house, and I'd rather sit in an office chair to watch the game without interruption than recline on a couch and watch the game freeze and stop up every other play.

Take the first inning. I get the game going, kick back, watch Austin Jackson strike out (no surprise there) to make the first out of the game. Then - connection goes down. A little tinkering and I get it back up. Now the Yankee crowd is silent and we're suddenly up 1-0. I missed Don Kelly's solo shot. I do a fist pump. Sit down on the edge of the couch to watch Delmon Young bat. Ivan Nova goes to his windup and -

Connection down again.

Nope. Not doing this. I pack it up, move to the kitchen where my wifi signal is a little more reliable, set my projector and computer on my table and get it going again. Now we're up 2-0. Still one out, nobody on base. Delmon hit a solo shot too? Another fist pump. Miguel Cabrera strikes out and there's a murmur from the crowd. Victor Martinez grounds out. End of the first inning.

I sit there at my kitchen table and watch Doug Fister mow down the Yanks on my wall. This might work out fine. And then-

Connection down again.

No question, I'm not gonna put up with this. I migrate to the office, where I sit for the next three and a half hours in an office chair. It's not the ideal comfy setup but it'll do.

The Yankees trot out six more pitchers after the first inning, and each one of them is effective. The Tigers only get one more run and never establish a safe lead.

But to me the story is the Tigers pitching.

Throughout the game, they let lots of guys on base, but strand 11 of them. Sometimes three in an inning. It's exciting and terrible and scary. I sit, shaking, heart palpitating, hands over my eyes, peering through the gaps like a child in a scary movie. I text my brother - "Can't. Watch." A thousand miles away, he's doing the same, I think. "Sickening," he says.

Scherzer gets Russell Martin to swing like the tinman at a pitch he clearly doesn't want. Joaquin Benoit loads 'em up and walks in a run, but leaves the bases loaded. In the 9th, Jose Valverde closes it out and gets Granderson and Cano to pop out. Then he strikes out Alex Rodriguez who, for the second straight year, ends the Yankees season by striking out. As a Tigers fan, it's beautiful.

I clap, and shout "YES!" - I can do this in the office without fear of disturbing anyone else. At home, the windows are always open and certainly Julio and Beth would hear me and think I'm ridiculous.

Maybe I am ridiculous.

Soon, all my fellow Tiger-fan-friends are texting me and littering Facebook with Tigers-related statuses. This might be one of my favorite things about Facebook - it gives people far away from each other the chance to celebrate together. Otherwise, I'd have no idea just how many people are out there enjoying and celebrating this along with me.

On Baking Cookies

2011-10-03T15:27:00.000-04:00

I'll make no secret about my ignorance in baking cookies. I may have done it before... I know I've made brownies. I do have a sweet tooth, and odds are that at some point I baked some out of desperation.

Now, of late I'm doing my best to watch my figure as I creep toward 30 years old and the inevitable demise of my metabolism. So I'm trying to avoid unhealthy things. And yet, someone left me some butterscotch chips, a true rarity in these parts. And I'm on an oatmeal kick - oatmeal, brown sugar, raisins, check. What more do you need for cookies? Eggs? I've been known to fry or scramble them. Flour? I keep that around in case I want to fail at battering and frying something. Salt? Check. Butter? Obviously. Despite my bachelordom, I know these are essential for baking and I keep them all on hand anyway. I started thinking - cookie-baking is a skill I can further develop in my spare time here, and it just so happens I have the majority of the necessary ingredients. Gotta start somewhere.

And so it came to pass that I decided to bake some oatmeal cookies.

I located the following Betty Crocker recipe:

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
2 cups quick oats
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts

blah blah 350 degrees blah blah combine ingredients drop dough 2 inches apart on an ungreased baking sheet, bake 9-11 minutes blah blah cool on a rack.

I don't have a cooling rack. I didn't think about this until the cookies were actually in the oven.

What I had to start with.

I had to plunder the Marshall's house for the remaining stuff. Since this was my first time baking since moving here, there was no way I was going to have vanilla on hand. I didn't have any baking soda that hadn't been sitting in a freezer for less than a decade. Also, I didn't have a mixing bowl. Also, I was out of eggs for some reason.

me, plundering the Marshall's house.

Everything you need for a breathtaking baking adventure

Dial it up to 350 for fun. No digital clock ovens in this house. Analog, baby. That's how I roll.

There they are. No turning back now. That's butter and sugar - essentially frosting. The butter, for the record, smelled and tasted a little funky. Not enough, though, for me to think it was unusable. A more experienced cook might have turned back at this point. But like I said - no turning back now. We're doing this.

Add eggs and vanilla and stir "until light and fluffy." I guess this is light and fluffy. Then combine all the rest.

Artist with art. Taking self-portraits and not looking like a doofus is very difficult. Poor framing. Meh.

That's definitely not the prescribed two-inches apart. No big deal, though, right? Who cares? It was at this point that I realized - what in the world are they supposed to cool on? My mom always put them on newspaper. I don't read newspapers here. Bare on the table? Nope. I had something:

Paper towel, baby. A few of them got a little close together and turned into squares. No biggy. I'll fast forward to the end here:

They really don't look too bad.

Now. Finished. I can enjoy a few of these, but I'm going to have to give a lot away. I tasted ~~one~~ ~~two~~ a few. I should have added more raisins. I don't think the butter-funk played a big role. A few taste testers will tell.

All in all - not a bad experience. I followed the recipe. They look like cookies. They taste like cookies. I can chalk this one up as a success.

I have to talk about baseball

2011-09-29T16:58:00.002-04:00

I can't imagine what it must be like to be a Red Sox fan right now. Last night was probably one of the most incredible nights in baseball history, but the nature of professional sports is such that for every incredible play, game, win, whatever, there's a loser on the other side. All they have today is heartbreak. They collapsed historically, wiping out a huge cushion with a horrible September, and then needing just one out - maybe one pitch - to make it to the postseason.

Look for the headlines from their papers at the start of the season, and you'll see they had lofty expectations. "best team EVER" one of them says. Not just the best BoSox team ever, but the best team. Ever. Then they started 2-10. And they finished 7-19. They bookended their season playing .237 ball. In between they played 81-43. If they had played that way all season, they'd have won 105 games and would have the best record in baseball.

But today their season is done.

Luckily, I am not a Red Sox fan. I can almost empathize. But not quite.

Like most Tigers fans, I've been waiting almost five years for tomorrow when we play a postseason game for the first time since 2006. Our hope is different - get us to the postseason and we'll see from there. When we miss the postseason - and we've done that a lot - we get to thinking about next year. It's always cautious optimism. We're not arrogant enough to publish a headline like "best team EVER." We've been humbled by some awful, awful decades.

We collapsed, hard, in 2009. Like the Red Sox, we blew a big lead in the division and let someone catch us. Unlike the Red Sox, we actually made it to the tie-breaker. That game, number 163, forever ruined the number 163 for me, probably. But it's one of the best games I've ever watched. Extra innings, a bunch of lead changes, it was incredible. We just wound up with fewer runs in the end. Season done. No playoffs, no world series, nothing.

Enter 2011. I'm living here in Puerto Rico. With my tax return, I spoil myself with MLB.TV. Suddenly, I can watch every. single. Tigers game. Ask the people here, they'll tell you I was often found in my man-cave, watching the Tigers projected up on my wall. They might remember the day I emerged and told everyone that Justin Verlander had just thrown a no-hitter. I know I do.

From the beginning, I had a good feeling about this season. And, thus far, some amazing stuff has happened. Justin Verlander threw a no-hitter and is a cinch for the Cy Young, even played well enough to force people to explain why a pitcher shouldn't be an MVP. Could still get it, for all I know. He'll definitely get votes. Miguel Cabrera won the batting title. Actually, that was kind of a big surprise. Our closer was perfect - everytime he came into the game with a close lead, we won.

But on top of all of that, we get to play tomorrow, in primetime, against the Yankees. There is nothing like seeing your team in the playoffs. (Hasn't happened with the Lions in a while but... who knows?)

And I like our chances. And I suppose I ought to make a prediction.

I favor: Us.

How could I not? I didn't watch all summer just to abandon hope in the postseason.

I honestly think our lineup can handle any pitcher out there. I think we'll get by the Yankees, then the Rangers. In the NL, I'm going to pick the Cards over the Phillies (This is just a gut feeling. Philly has incredible pitching, but they won't get enough offense) and the DBacks over the Cards.

I'm picking the Tigers over the Diamondbacks. Sorry, Tram and Gibby.

Not Just an Event

2011-09-28T18:12:00.000-04:00

It's hard when your faith becomes your job.

The other day I was sitting there, just thinking. I do that sometimes, just sit there and zone out as my brain follows some long train of thought. Usually, just on the verge of some brilliant epiphany, I realize I've been sitting there zoning out and I snap out of it. I never reach that epiphany. Just a long string of thought, and often one that doesn't bear any fruit. That's okay. It's how guys defrag their hard-drives.

But as I sat there, I was thinking about my involvement in ministry. How did I get here? Why am I here? Why am I planning to be done with this in a year? How can I put a timeline on this? How am I qualified for this?

Most of us are unqualified, actually.

There are days when I get up and go back to the grindstone. I try to make decisions about new things, wait for people to call me back or email me so I can move forward on a project, or prepare stuff, or try to be creative by myself - am I the only one who sucks at this? Projects and budgets pile up and I stall on making decisions about more abstract things. Why does this feel like work?

We plan retreats, camps, and other events directed at reaching kids, in the hopes that they might go and be disciples. And there's a lot of work that goes into it. From coordinating artwork for a mailing to planning a menu to booking a speaker to updating a database full of names, it's easy to get overwhelmed with tasks.

You start to ask yourself - is this ministry, or is this a job? Couldn't anyone do this stuff? Is my faith really tied into this, or am I just an event planner?

As I was thinking, I started to consider some of the people who inspire me. Ministry doesn't usually look like work to them. They're so sold out to their cause that all they need is the fuel of the Holy Spirit to propel them forward. They run on It. They always love what they're doing so much that they would never dream of backing out of it, right? Why don't I feel that way? Here I am thinking my time here will be done in a year and I'll move onto something else. Why am I not surging happily forward in ministry, energized as though the Holy Spirit was coursing through my veins like caffeine? Shouldn't I love every minute of this?

Yeah, I don't think it happens that way. I think that whole utopian pipedream feel-good thing is a big lie, especially when it comes to ministry. The Bible definitely never paints that picture. Nowhere does Christ say "abandon your family, and it will be smooth sailing." Ministry is hard, and I suspect that the people for whom it appears to be so easy have days of drudgery too. Sometimes it's the work of the Holy Spirit just to get me out of bed and put me back at my desk.

We'll be doing our first men's retreat next month. It's new territory for me. Yesterday, I went to meet with Pastor Miguel, who will be our speaker, to pray about it and work out some of the planning. We prayed, talked, had a few good ideas, and as we wrapped up we prayed again. Though he didn't when we opened, He prayed in English this time, and I was glad because he used a phrase that stuck with me. "May it not be just an event..."

May it not be just an event. I grabbed onto those words and repeated them, rolled them over in my brain. They fit so well.

That is exactly the attitude I need to have.

It's not just an event.

background noise

2011-09-18T14:15:00.001-04:00

Chickens are clucking, roosters are crowing, and dogs are barking around the barrio.

The breeze comes in with no walls to stop it. Fans above rotate slowly and help it along.

Javier stands up to read Psalm 23, in "a strong voice, like David."

From inside the house, a child erupts, crying.

And it sets the dog off, and he starts barking and howling.

And a car rolls down the street with a deafening sound system, booming dirty lyrics for all of us in church to hear.

And I am the only one who seems to notice.

Maria reaches

2011-09-13T17:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I pulled the aluminum covers off my windows, protection from the threat of Irene a few weeks ago. She's long gone, and though hurricane season isn't over yet there doesn't appear to be anything upcoming. I want a breeze through my apartment. And Maria - she's heading north of the island, presumably to get lost and fizzle out over the Atlantic.

But ya see, hurricanes and tropical storms have these wings or tentacles that stick out well beyond the eye of the storm. The eye can pass close by, and the storm might not do a whole lot. But those darn tentacles can do damage all over.

So with Maria cruising up the Atlantic, away from Puerto Rico, I went to sleep with a little drizzle outside of my window. By 1 AM, I felt just a little spray coming in my window. The wind had picked up and the slow, distant rumble of thunder had become decidedly less distant. Now it was flashing and crashing all around. There was a howl - not the freight train people tell me comes along with a real hurricane - as the wind began to blow in a constant. I began to wonder if something was kicking up. Probably, though, it was just a big thunderstorm.

If I had I left the aluminum covers up on my windows, I wouldn't have to worry about any rain getting in. But since I'd taken them down, just a little bit of mist was getting through. Outside the window, they were standing carelessly up against my washer. I got up and closed the shutters tight and laid back down.

A big gust of wind, and

WHAM

The sound was huge and unmistakable. They fell over and started banging and clanging around on the ground as the wind pushed them along the concrete beneath my windows. Roughly five feet from where I was sleeping, just a concrete wall with some tightly closed shutters was between me and them and the storm that pushing them effortlessly around.

I briefly thought I probably ought to go tie them down or something. Then, another crash of thunder.

Nope.

I rolled over and slept until, around 4:30 am, it all kicked up again. And it rained non-stop for several more hours.

When I emerged from my house from my apartment, I was met with this:

There used to be an awning covering the walkway to our dining hall. You can see the poles bent over, not knowing which way they're supposed to point. The thing they held up is way over there resting against that palm tree. On its way there, it roughed up our playground even more than termites and time already had. It needs a replacement. That's not the sound I heard. But you can imagine, that awning weighs several hundred pounds, thrown more than 100 feet.

This was more than just a little thunderstorm. Beware the long reach of Maria.

It's good to be a Tigers fan

2011-09-09T17:12:00.000-04:00

I don't blame people for not being baseball fans. Unless you've got a dog in the fight, you really don't have a reason to watch. I could not sit down and watch a Padres/Astros game start to finish (This, I think, precludes me from the top tier of rabid baseball fans). But since I'm a Detroit fan, and I know all the players and keep up with them, I actually enjoy watching them play. It doesn't hurt that they're playing well and are very much in control of their division, about to claim their first championship in 24 years. It's an exciting time to be a Tigers fan.

Lots of baseball fans – ones more rabid than I - have ambitions of seeing a game in every single Major League stadium. For me... maybe one day. But for now, I'm going to try to check out all the parks within a few states of Michigan. I've been to Comerica a few times, as well as U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago and the more distant Turner Field in Atlanta (where the atmosphere will go a long way to convert non-Braves fans). I've been to a few retired parks too. I took in a game at the Metrodome where the Twins played until moving into Target Field last year. Several years ago, my dad took us to a game at Milwaukee County Stadium where the Brewers used to play. And of course, he took us to Tigers stadium too.

With Progressive Field just a few hours away in Cleveland and the Tigers playing well, my friend Josh and I drove there Wednesday to see them play the Indians.

Cleveland, it turns out, doesn't look too far away on a map but is still a five hour drive from Grand Rapids. That's twice as long as driving to Comerica in Detroit and it's not a drive you want to make very often, and it's definitely not one you want to make just to see your team lose. I had never been to Cleveland before, and I'm all about going to places I've never been before just to say I've been there.

Across from QuickenLoans Arena where the Cavs play, Nike had hung a massive banner that said “We are all witnesses.” It had a picture of Lebron James angelically throwing powder in the air, like it was magic or something. You may not have heard, but he quietly left them last year to play for the Miami Heat. They took the banner down and in its place there now hangs one that says, “Our home since 1866. Our pride forever,” and it has a picture of the Cleveland skyline lit up at night. They would rather have their identity in their city than in a guy who plays basketball really well. I respect them just a little bit more because of that.

Don't stake your hope in guys who get paid to play games.

We found a parking garage a few blocks away with parking for $10. We pulled in and the attendant at the counter was sleeping with her head against the window. The gate was up, so we pulled through, expecting that maybe someone else would be waiting for us to throw money at them while their coworker slept. Instead, there was another woman, standing, who just waved us by. We parked, a little bit confused, and left the building no poorer than when we'd arrived. Unfortunately, we took no notice of the level on which we parked. When we came back later, we had it a Seinfeldian parking garage search.

Progressive Field is a pretty nice stadium. I like Comerica better – it seems a little more spacious and open, where Progressive has a little more of a condensed, closed-in feel like U.S. Cellular where the Sox play. (Here, I'd like to point out that the Tigers recently swept the White Sox and effectively crushed any of their dreams of reaching the postseason.) The Tigers – I'm admittedly biased – are blessed with a beautiful ballpark.

For the record, I think Comerica is a little cheaper too. Not by much, but it is. The vendors at progressive will sell you a hot dog for $5.50, which the guy who sat next to me balked at but later caved in and paid. A jumbo hot dog is $8.50. They'll sell you a 24 oz can of Honey Brown Lager for $9.50. A two beer/two peanut combo is $27.

Don't do it. I can't imagine there are many people who deem this a worthy investment. Josh and I smuggled in ziploc bags of peanuts. Mine were gone before the first pitch. We tried to smuggle in Dr Peppers but they didn't make it to the gate.

I'll be as brief as possible reporting the goings-on of the baseball game because anybody who cares to know about it already does. And, as much as I might want to, I'm not gonna turn this into a sports blog. Verlander pitched. You ought to know his name because he's having an historic season, and doing it as a Tiger. Everyone in Detroit loves him, and there will probably be a lot of kids named Justin again. People drive a long way to see him play and pay lots of money for shirts with his name on them.

But he gave up a few runs. And the Tigers struggled to hit the Indians pitcher. Until the sixth, down 4-2, they loaded the bases, scored a run, and then Victor Martinez hit a grand slam to put the Tigers ahead 7-4. Even in the Indians stadium, there were enough Tigers fans there to be just as loud as the Indians fans. Justin Verlander won his 22nd game.

The first Indians fan that we saw that day was a guy who walked by us and said, “Good luck in the playoffs, guys.” We, of course, marked ourselves with Tigers gear, as any good and brave fan does in an opposing ballpark. We told him thanks and talked to him a bit, he was actually a really nice guy. All sports fans ought to be good ambassadors like him. We met another lady walking into Five Guys later on who said, “Sorry about your shirts.” But even she ended up being really nice too, and we admitted to each other we'd rather see the other team in the playoffs over the Sox or Twins. I'm still deciding whether or not that's true.

Regardless, it looks like it will be my team that will be in the playoffs. And since we got to see them win, the drive home was considerably more enjoyable.

Some heroes of the day:

Victor Martinez

Justin Verlander

The Upper Peninsula

2011-08-31T15:11:00.000-04:00

I love the UP. A few years ago, I decided I hadn't been up there in too long and flew solo, going through the Pictured Rocks and the Porkies, before taking a route of questionable directness home through Duluth and Minneapolis. I saw no bears. Last year, I went up with my friend Josh and brother-in-law Jon. We again hiked the Pictured Rocks, but spent the remainder of our trip tooling around in the beautiful Huron Mountains northwest of Marquette, finding waterfalls and swimming in them. We again saw no bears. But I did come home with poison ivy.

And this year, it was Dad's turn to accompany me on what has now become an annual pilgrimage. Let me start off by saying we didn't see any bears. We did, however, see a coyote trotting off the road, and got a pretty good view of a bald eagle.

Dad, I think, had never seen one in the wild before and he was thoroughly impressed. I'd never seen one this close, but at camp a few years ago I saw one come flying in from a long way away, all glorious and majestic, wings flapping beautifully, soaring in the Michigan breeze, only to be annoyingly buzzed off by a couple of seagulls. It was beautiful, then disappointing. This time, though, we walked along the beach, pausing every few steps to get a closer picture. They really are beautiful birds.

The UP seems like a place where nature generally wins the battle. We stayed at Fort Wilkins, up at the tip-top of the Keweenaw Peninsula. If you take the road to the west, you can creep up Brockway Mountain and on a clear day see Isle Royale 50 miles out (we hit it on just such a day.)

(this view from Brockway Mountain does not show Isle Royale, which for the record is where I want my next venture to da UP to be.)

At Copper Harbor, they started a fort to protect the miners in Copper Country during the copper boom back in the 1840s. But it didn't last long and they shut it down. Everyone, it seems, got pretty bored. You get a real sense of this walking around the restored buildings on the fort grounds. The area is beautiful, but only if you're into that whole beautiful nature thing. There's not a whole lot else to do up there. The reputation of Michigan Tech, 50 miles to the south of Copper Harbor, and the rest of the UP for that matter, is that people drink for entertainment in the wintertime. They drink to stay warm too, I guess. This seems to have been true for the troops at that fort, judging by the stuff on the historical markers at the park. Yoopers have embraced it.

Apart from Marquette, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of commerce. The only thing to live on is what has been there for a really, really long time - natural resources. In the 1800s they mined copper. In the 1900s it was the iron industry and logging. Now, there's still a lot of logging (and paper mills to coincide) and tourism - people who pretty much just want to see nature. And lighthouses. (I still don't really see their appeal. Sorry, lighthouse apologists.)

The UP, I've heard, has 33% of Michigan's land and only 3% of its population. That means 97% of Michiganders are trolls (who live under the bridge.) You get a real sense for this as you drive the highways. First, there aren't all that many. There are huge tracts of land away from the highways that most people will never see without a snowmobile or a 4-wheeler. Second, the highways are lined with ghost towns, many of which have dead tourism efforts. And these, actually, are some of the most fascinating spots in the UP. Why did people ever live here? Where'd they go? What did they leave behind?

No question, I love the UP. As dad and I drove around, we realized that we were visiting some places that most Americans - and even most Michiganders - will never, ever see. I don't know many people who've been as far north as Copper Harbor, or as far west as the Porcupine Mountains, or hiked the trails of the Pictured Rocks. And that's kind of a shame because they're some of the most beautiful places in our wonderful state.

You should go see them.

Anecdotal evidence

2011-08-18T15:21:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I got a call from Pastor Gary at Rush Creek Bible Church, the church I grew up in and the one I still consider my "home church," though I've been gone for years, it seems. Since tonight is the Men for Missions Steak Fry, they asked me to come and share a short story about what God has been doing in Puerto Rico. I told him sure, I'd be happy to - After all: Public speaking is no longer a big deal for me. (Sidenote: Public speaking is still a big deal for me.)

And so I immediately started to think about what I would share. I get one story, one anecdote from the summer, and I need to make it count. And as I cycled through my memories from my time so far in Puerto Rico, I started to realize that most of my big impressions have to do with my personal growth. I need to get up in front of these guys and share something about the ministry, a story about where I saw God doing big things in the lives of the kids, counselors, others around the ministry.

And the thing is...

I'm struggling to come up with one.

That doesn't mean God didn't do big things. It just means I didn't see a lot of them firsthand. Maybe there's a disconnect somewhere. I know our counselors have some big things they would share, and I wish they could be here to do it. As a program director, especially in my first year, I spent a lot of time planning, putting out fires, preparing the next thing, processing the last thing, recovering, sweating, cleaning, thinking. And that doesn't leave a lot of time to be actively involved in the present. In other words, not a lot of time in direct heart-to-heart perfect-for-a-story-back-home ministry. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure everything was right for others to do that, but not a whole lot doing that myself.

To some extent, that is the job of the director - you're supposed to make sure that the goals are met, let others handle the tasks. I would be a terrible micromanager. But I still think that somewhere along the way, I would have gotten a pretty good anecdote to share.

There are anecdotes. There are naughty kids, crazy games - and confusing ones, the kid who puked during Fear Factor, the darnedest things kids said, and other summer camp anomalies. Generally, the stuff that goes wrong makes for better stories. It's low-hanging fruit when it comes to reflection. But it doesn't always make for inspiring stuff for the folks back home.

And so I think, in the 2-3 minutes I get, I won't be sharing just one small touching anecdote, but one big one - that we had a good summer, that kids learned that they need to live fearlessly as followers of Christ, that a few made decisions to turn their lives to Him for the first time, and that they had a lot of fun doing it.

And, of course, that nobody got seriously injured in the process.

While home

2011-08-16T13:51:00.003-04:00

I wondered if there was going to be significant culture shock being back in Michigan after being in PR for 7 straight months.

I am happy to report: Not really. Not that bad. I've been enjoying the lack of humidity. Michigan in the summer is a good place to be, though everyone tells me it was wicked humid a few weeks ago before I got here.

I have yet to get into Lake Michigan, and enjoy a body of water without salt creeping into all of my nicks and cuts and flavoring my lips.

I've been able to visit my home-away-from-home at Grace Adventures. And in so doing, pitched in at Unityfest where I manned the Gaga pit and did some belaying at the climbing wall before I saw the Newsboys. I almost met them afterward, and would have were it not for the fact that to meet them, ya gotta have some merch in hand for them to sign. Still, great show.

I also saw Willie Nelson in concert, and though that wasn't on my bucket list or anything, and I hadn't planned on it until the day before, you generally don't pass up an opportunity to see a legend in concert, especially when it's free. Willie Nelson, for the record, is short. And downtown Grand Rapids made for an almost-perfect venue on a nearly perfect day.

I shot 9 holes with two good friends yesterday. It my first time on the course in, I think, two years. I might have gotten out once last year. I crushed my first drive and finished with a 50. For the record I cannot remember ever shooting under 50, so I was pleased.

We went over to one of their houses after and watched the Tigers game. I'll be going to at least one and hopefully two while I'm home. This is a good year for them. I can't wait to see them in person again.

I'm trying, at the advice of a friend who has been overseas and come home for a month, not to do too much in the time that I'm home. I need some rest. Some me time. Some get-fed time - I'm going to have to make sure to spend some time in The Word. So this week is primarily an open book, get up when I want, get a little bit of work done - not too much - hit the bicycle to pedal around Jenison.

I've had the chance to answer "how's Puerto Rico?" about 100 times. I have a script in my head now. But being home, being away, gives you a chance to reflect on things in a way that you can't while you're in the thick of it. You only get really good perception after the fact. I added up my hours the other day for the month of July, just thinking about how much I worked. I figure I worked a 70 hour week, an 80 hour week, and a 95 hour week in there. I think I got two real days off that month. And I was wiped out at the end of it. It's no wonder our counselors were too. The hours, though.... That's part of the gig and you can't escape it. By design, summer camp is a crazy, busy season. I think I bankrolled a few days off in that time.

And so now, I'm taking much needed time off with some people I've missed. Just being at home at night, doing nothing... I think that fills me up.

Travelogue: August 9, 2011

2011-08-10T12:39:00.004-04:00

Yesterday ended up being a rough day of travel, and I guess this is the sort of thing you're supposed to blog about. It definitely could have been a lot worse, but I don't know if the day could have been longer. So here's a timeline of my day:

5:30 am - Rise n' shine. I had wisely packed everything the night before, but had some trouble sleeping. When the alarm went off I got right up.

6:00 am - Hit the road. The drive to the airport from CDC usually takes about an hour and 20 minutes, but with San Juan traffic you should budget at least two hours.

8:00 am - Arrive at the airport. I promptly received a phone call that one of my flights had been cancelled, but no worries - they'd rerouted me through Detroit and would actually get me into Grand Rapids sooner. I passed through security pretty quickly - was treated to the full body scan - and on the other side, called my dad with the good news.

9:45 am - In the air. Open seat next to me = legroom. They showed Water for Elephants and, being the huge Robert Pattinson fan I am, I was riveted.

1:45 pm - Land at JFK, where they have this:

That's a Best Buy vending machine. I could have bought an iPod from one vending machine, taken a few steps, and bought a Fanta from another. I guess this makes sense as a business model. I mean, Best Buy wants an airport presence, but doesn't really want to staff it or pay a lot of rent, so cram a few things in a vending machine and let the disposable income roll in. I felt like a total hick standing there taking a picture of a vending machine, marveling at the technology and novelty of it. Of course I didn't buy anything from it. Turns out the JFK airport is a pretty expensive place.

2:30 - Lunch time. After surveying all of my options, I chose a meal at Wendy's. Cost: $10. Had I wanted a Snapple, that would have been an additional $3.69. I think it's the perfect storm of having a captive audience and being in a place where the cost of living is ridiculously high.

Also, JFK airport - at least the Delta terminal - is crowded and short on seating. Not a great experience for the average traveler. They're going to redo the terminal, and I think they're doing it with Snapple profits.

3:00 - I rest my eyes for a little bit in an empty corner of the terminal, but not for too long. Better to stay awake, lest I conk out and miss the boarding call.

4:50 - Original departure time for Detroit.

5:30 - Revised departure time

5:51 - Revised departure time again.

6:27 - Final revised departure time. All that while, I really could have left the airport. But how was I supposed to know? I spent those hours wandering around the terminal, watching my departure time get later and later, thinking that it was increasingly clear I'd never make that connection from Detroit to Grand Rapids that was supposed to get me into town at 8:40. Also, one thing they don't have in Puerto Rico is good brewed unsweetened Iced Tea. I found it at Starbucks for $2.40 which, compared to a $3.69 Snapple, seems like a steal.

6:35 - We actually board the plane. And we do it out on the tarmac. Walked out there, up the steps, not using some fancy gate apparatus. That's fine with me, though, because it gave me a chance to feel for the first time in a bunch of months an atmosphere not saturated with humidity. But then, even after almost 2 hours of delay in the airport, we spent the next two hours sitting on the runway, waiting for fuel and for traffic to clear up. The guy in front of me said this happens all the time at JFK. He was flying with his little cousin who kept asking if we had taken off yet, if we were there yet, that sort of thing. Finally he told him "We're not actually going leave today. We're gonna take off tomorrow morning."

8:30 - Lift-off. Finally, we're in the air on the way to my beloved Michigan. Not a terribly long flight, at an hour and a half. But had everything gone according to plan I would have been descending on Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids right then.

10:00 - We land in Detroit. DTW, for what it's worth, has a really nice Delta terminal. It's clean, wide open, the stuff there isn't quite so expensive, it's laid out pretty simply, and there are lots of seats. And they have a neat fountain. I've decided I appreciate DTW. Since I didn't have much time to make my connection, I sprinted to a monitor and found out that the last Grand Rapids flight, which was supposed to leave at 10:25, was departing from another terminal. More sprinting.

10:10 - I step up to a gate where everyone is just standing around with no sense of urgency. What I hadn't noticed on the Departure screen was that this flight was delayed until 12:10 am. They had a seat for me. I ask the lady if I can score a meal voucher because of the delays. She says no, they don't give them out if it's weather related. I won't hassle her. There were tons of delays on the day and I don't want to be the grumpapotamus demanding she put right what Mother Nature was largely - but not solely - responsible for screwing up.

10:20 - Suddenly with lots of time to spare, I find a customer service rep at another gate and give him a more detailed account of my day - cancelled flight, delay at the reroute, delay now here - and he was more than happy to give me $12 in vouchers for meals. The McDonald's employee encourages me to use every last dime of it, so I walk away with a full meal, two apple pies, and a Diet Pepsi for the road. Forgot the napkins, though.

12:15am - We board the plane to Grand Rapids. I'm in a sleepy kind of funk. I've been up for 19 hours. Just get me home.

1:00 am - We take off. They announce the flight is 19 minutes.

1:05 am - "Flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for landing."

1:19 am - We land. The terminal smells funny. It's a familiar smell, not a good one, but not too offensive.

1:30 am - Hello mom and dad. Lots of hugs. No balloons, no crowds, no singing, just a perfect little moment.

1:40 am - bags in hand, we walk out to the car. The air is cool. It's been more than 20 hours, and it's good to be home.

Excited to fly

2011-08-08T15:28:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow, I get to fly the friendly skies, and I'm excited.

I get to visit the airport and witness the spectacle of thousands of people dispersing out into the world. Oh, the places they'll go! Where did they come from? Where are they going? What brought them here? What takes them there? (answer: airplanes. Airplanes do that.)

Check-in is super easy these days. Their friendly staff will keep the lines moving - all I need is my confirmation number.

The views from airplanes are always fantastic. On the first leg, I'll see Manhattan as I land at JFK. On the second... Cincinnati. Cincinnati, Ohio. Yessir, the 'nati. On the third, the fine, familiar streets of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I'll ride in mild luxury, my mind at ease as the trusty folks at Delta carefully and respectfully ensure that my luggage makes all of its connections. They'll bring me my complimentary beverage, maybe some peanuts or pretzels, and I'll drift off to sleep.

Maybe I'll get bumped up into first class!

Maybe I'll sit by someone famous!

Of course, all of that excitement will come crashing down tomorrow when I confront the reality of flying.

I'll rise at 5:30 am, shower, scarf down some breakfast, and hit the road with Markus and my bags, fight San Juan rush hour traffic to get to the airport by 8. After the check-in, I'll be at the mercy of the TSA agents. (I'm a big, bearded guy. I don't foresee any... problems.)

Once I'm through, I'll wait until we all bum rush the plane to claim overhead bin space. I'll crouch down in my seat - window seat, otherwise there will be people crawling over me to use the potty the whole way to New York. There won't be a lot of legroom, you have to pay extra for that now.

I'll visit four airports, two of which I have no business being in except for the fact the Delta says I can save $74 if I stop there.

The layover in New York is three hours. That's just enough time to go mad in the airport, but not enough to leave it. I'm gonna find some overpriced food court food. Airports have done away with free Wi-fi. I guess I'll bring a book.

If I start at 6 am tomorrow and count my two hours on the road, I'll spend 16 hours traveling, just to get from the Caribbean to the midwest. (For reference: A direct flight from San Juan to Chicago takes about 4 hours.) When I land in Grand Rapids, I'm going to be exhausted.

But you know what? At the end of the day, I'll see my family for the first time in more than seven months. And for that, I would glad endure tomorrow a hundred times.

I'm coming home.

Emily Disappoints

2011-08-03T20:56:00.004-04:00

One of the things I hope I'll experience here is a hurricane. The locals, I assume, think I'm stupid. Hurricanes are bad, they're disasters. Don't wish for hurricanes. Don't wish for disasters.

I'd also kind of like to see a tornado. I've had lots of dreams about tornadoes. I rate them scarier and more unpredictable than hurricanes, based mostly on my experience with them in dreams. One minute, you're whitewashing a fence with your buddies from your little league team, then there are some raindrops, then you're driving home for shelter, watching the thing take shape in the sky, then you stop to see some people from your Biology class and, oh yeah, that tornado, gotta go guys, and it's bearing down on you from behind and you get to thinking - I'm finally going to see a real tornado in REAL life and it's not a drea-

Dang it.

Still haven't seen a real tornado in real life. My dad has, I think, but he grew up in Iowa where tornadoes grew on trees. So of course he has.

Tornadoes sneak up and destroy things, lots of things, whatever things they please. They'll devour a whole block of houses and leave a single one untouched. Because they can. Then they disappear. They're phantoms. They're loco, ese.

Hurricanes, they give you plenty of warning. (So I hear.) They start, get huge, then wobble a little bit and head toward land all big and dangerous. They wreck everything, stick around for a few days then burn out somewhere over Georgia.

If tornadoes are the crazy junkies of the weather-world, hurricanes are the big, depressed lumberjacks.

I guess.

But anyway, living in the tropics, the prospect of a hurricane roaring up on shore - I sleep about 40 feet from the Caribbean - before I head back to the Midwest is pretty intriguing. I picture it sounding like a freight train rolling through camp, everyone huddled inside playing monopoly by candlelight, bonding. Living through a hurricane would make a great story. People in Michigan don't know nothing bout no hurricanes.

So I really want to see one. And this storm showed up on the watch list, far away, 90% of the way to a tropical storm before reaching the Lesser Antilles - those little Caribbean islands people take cruises to, the ones that curl down to South America - with plenty of time to turn itself into a hurricane and find its way onshore here. I got my hopes all up. People poo-pooed it, saying it would most likely miss us. They usually do. Still, I knew there was always a chance. No telling what a depressed lumberjack is capable of.

She became a storm and got her name, Emily. They don't name boring storms, do they? This should be good.

She stayed down, crossed all those tiny islands and spilled into the Caribbean. So far, so good.

Then she stayed right out there to sea, almost out of sight, not doing anything remotely interesting. Her clouds brought us rain, but she didn't blow down any palm trees or anything.

Had I not had my ears intricately attuned to the scuttlebutt at the local watering hole (AKA El Frappe) and had I not been keenly watching the NWS Atlantic loop, I probably would never have known that whatever passed over us/by us was a tropical storm. Sure, we only got her slightest, farthest reach, but I saw enough to know that this was a supreme let down.

And so my thirst lives on. Hurricane season is yet quite young, and though I'm heading back to Michigan for a month next week, I'll be back for much of September and October.

I'll be waiting.

Watching.

I took this picture while PR was under a Tropical Storm warning (clicking makes it big):

Loss of power

2011-07-29T22:26:00.009-04:00

There's lightning over the Caribbean almost every night right now. I had never gotten a picture of lightning before so one night I went out and opened the shutter for about 30 seconds and behold: lightning, captured digitally. Lightning sure is pretty and all, but it's the thunder I really like. You see the lightning flash, and you can stand by the shore and picture the shockwave coming at you over the water until the thunder rolls up overland and echoes off the mountains. The good ones shake your bones and make everyone stop for a minute and look. I love it. Thunderstorms are premier entertainment.

They're no surprise right now. At the end of summer, the atmosphere gets all agitated and active. It's hurricane season, after all. I set my homepage to the National Hurricane Center and curiously look at the map everyday to see if there's anything interesting out there. Today, there is:

That red circle out there will probably become Emily, and Emily may or may not become a hurricane, and that hurricane may or may not visit us in Puerto Rico. As a midwestern boy, the prospect of experiencing a hurricane is exciting. But ask me again in a week.

Earlier last week, following an afternoon thunderstorm, I was in my apartment when the power went out. Not a surprise, not a big deal, it will come back. Get on with life. A little while later, I stepped out and saw that everyone was gathered around something. I had apparently missed some hubbub or something. Dave was sitting in the backhoe, in front of a snapped power pole, with wires draped over his roof, and over the top of The Big Van too. He'd hit the power pole, but we won't go there. He and the passengers of the van were stranded.

It was a holiday. I don't know why, but it was. So it took a long time to get the power company out to do anything. Eventually, the cops came out, and some other people too, but it was Pam and Jon who freed everyone from their electrical prison by rolling up in Dave's cart and letting them step out onto it.

They didn't get the power back right away. It was just our little camp that went on without it. Luckily, summer camp - especially a day camp like we were running - runs mostly outdoors, so during the day all you need is sunshine and a breeze and everyone's fine. Let me understate something immeasurably: sleeping at night in humid 80 degree weather without a fan is uncomfortable. I'd rather not need to do it. It is not the ideal sleeping situation.

I heard cheering when the power came back yesterday. Had my fridge had anything worth saving in it, it would have gone bad. But after four weeks of summer camp, it was like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of fridges. Some old eggs. Condiments. A bunch of cheese slices. A pitcher of water. All very replaceable. I restocked it today. But then there's that whole potential-hurricane Emily thing on the way.

Let us hope Emily stays away, but let us be thankful she waited until camp was done.

On Sickness

2011-07-18T15:36:00.004-04:00

It didn't take long last week for me to lose my voice. It was probably Tuesday when I started getting hoarse. It never really left, not to the point where I had to whisper and gesticulate everything, but I was noticeably lacking in the vocal faculties.

One thing I was able to squeak out was when I told Theresa that this meant I'd probably get sick. Theresa rightly argued that it wasn't the lack of voice that would get me sick, but stress - it was stress that made me lose my voice, and it was stress that would probably get me sick.

That, and germs.

Kids bring germs. We probably ought to have biohazard suits. Even then - who knows what kind of crazy bugs they're bringing with them. We take whatever precautions we can, to stop colds, flu, lice outbreaks, what-have-ya. But stuff gets through.

By the time Thursday came, I had the runny nose, and that lasted through Friday into Saturday. Congestion. Cough. All that.

Let me amateur-psychoanalyze this thing out for you. When a full-blown cold takes my body over, I eventually start to lose my mental and emotional balance. To a certain extent, the spiritual balance too.

I think that when you're sick, and your body has begun to divert energy from your brain to fight the illness, the first thing to go is humility. When you are visibly sick, everyone suddenly thinks they're a doctor and you've lost all sense. And it gets really, really annoying.

Now, I'm a grown man. I've had many, many, many colds that have done many awful things to me. I've also dealt with more than my fair share of allergies. In fact, I spent the better part of my Junior year of high school with a box of kleenexes in my backpack.

So I know how to medicate myself. The last thing I want is everyone giving me medical advice. Actually, the last thing I want is everyone telling me how horrible I look while I'm trying to look decidedly non-horrible. And this always, always happens when I stagger out of my house, usually with most of a bottle Dayquil in my system, mustering composure, propping up my eyelids, trying not to look like a zombie as I wander out for food or some such basic need. Not an easy thing to do clutching a roll of TP.

I especially don't like medical advice from teenagers. You are 15. I know Vitamin C is good for me. Don't tell me to go to bed.

On Saturday morning, I emerged for the debriefing meeting for the week. There was going to be pizza after the meeting. After weeks of rice and beans and chicken, I wasn't about to let some stupid old cold keep me from delicious pizza. And then there started a long succession of people telling me how horrible I looked while dispensing unproven medical advice.

I've already been sick a day and a half. I'm coming out of it. Already took my Airborne. I have more DayQuil in me than I should.

Back.

Off.

Of course, I was more diplomatic than that. At least I think I was.

I went to the meeting. I got my pizza. And I was miserable. I became, I think, a very unpleasant person. Any humility had long since departed. Anything I'd put into the schedule that wasn't well received, I took personally. My patience was gone, I really just wanted to be out of there. I definitely couldn't handle listening to anyone speak Spanish. "Just tell me what they said and let's move on." Jokes were no longer funny - there went the sense of humor. I can't say what all else disappeared.

We piled in the van and drove back from the Laundromat and Domino's. I don't remember saying anything, just thinking that the pizza wasn't good enough to warrant me being out of bed right then. It was Domino's, after all. So when we got back, I handed off the keys and walked away from them all before anyone could tell me what to do. It was my way of saying, "I know. You were right. Shut up. I'm going to bed."

The first leg

2011-07-06T19:40:00.003-04:00

...of the marathon.

Yeah, as I'm starting to write this blog, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be one of those life update posts where I don't get on a soapbox or anything. I don't think.

Starting in early June, I started to be busy. Staff training was a few weeks away. Lots of teaching materials to write, lots of schedules to make, details to figure out, people to call, camps to keep marketing. It's weird to have to plan to plan. With all of these details in my head, it's challenging to put this whole mental mess of summer into some kind of sequential, logical gameplan. Especially for a summer you've never seen.

But every summer in camp is one you've never seen, I guess. But that first one, it's a real bugger.

Even as I write all of this, from the lobby of a McDonald's, basically pushed out of camp by those I'm working with to preserve my own sanity, I have about 70 billion little things in my head.

Still gotta plan the games.

Didn't get out the chiquicampa flyers.

Fall retreats aren't that far away and NOT A THING IS DONE FOR THOSE, OHMY-

Stop it.

My brain needs a break. Let it rest. Camp will happen regardless. The big stuff is taken care of. The staff are here. The campers are signed up (around 90 right now, but a lot of them just show up without calling.) The devotional booklets are printed BUT THEY STILL NEED TO BE STAPLED.

I'm learning about delegating responsibility. My first thought with every task is just to do it. I used to feel guilty about delegating. Or at least, nervous about passing stuff off to newbies. Doing everything yourself is never good though. It gets messy. Overwhelming. Stressful.

Especially that last one. If effective delegation were an artform, I'd be a four year-old with finger paints, helplessly hoping to grow into a Picasso.

And so staff training started on Friday. And pretty much since then, I've been running, with this constant noise of to-dos in my head. OHHH, FORGOT ABOUT THE STAFF TRAINING EVALS-

No. Cut that out.

And today is day six. We've covered a lot of ground, and skipped over a lot of ground that, I hope, we'll come back to later. Our staff stays over on the weekends, which means we have some duties on Saturdays as well. Not really a day off in the whole month. So you've gotta pace yourself. If you're not careful, you can crash.

So they kicked me out. And to think, on a night when the Tigers had already played a day game.

The other side of service

2011-06-28T19:33:00.004-04:00

Last night I had garbage duty in the dining hall. It's a pretty simple set up, really. You stand behind a table, people come up and drop off their plates, napkins, utensils, cups, and extra food. You sort all of that out so it fits into one garbage bag. Feeding 200 World Changers can lead to lots of bags of garbage if you're not careful.

I'm careful. I'm also good at Tetris, so I'm a pretty good at dropping stuff in place as it comes in. And I was a dishwasher a bunch of years ago, so I'm pretty good at arranging food waste and getting covered in filth. I have a system, and I stick to it. It's more refined than I care to admit.

So garbage duty isn't a big deal to me. I actually like doing it, it's a chance to serve other people and bless them. All they have to do is set their stuff down on the table. I handle everything else. And blessing others blesses me. So I get to stand there with a smile on my face and talk to people as they come up, and I make their life just a tiny bit easier.

Sometimes, though, people ignore the system. Even though I am standing there wearing my gloves and handling everyone else's garbage, they still choose to come up and take care of it themselves. Usually, it's the adults.

They mean well. I know what they're thinking:

"I don't want to be a bother."

"I can do this myself."

"Don't worry, I got this."

They'd hate for some poor missionary guy to have to handle their garbage for them. So they come back behind the table and place their stuff in the wrong bins and get in my way and - come to think of it, steal my blessing.

I am there to serve, but they don't want to be served. They take my service away.

Sometimes people would just rather not be served.

Take footwashing, for example. It's far more awkward and uncomfortable for the person allowing their feet to be washed than for the person doing the washing. Your feet stink, and they sweat, and that's terribly inconvenient for anyone getting close to them. But Jesus did it. Imagine Jesus washing your smelly, nasty feet. Now there's an image for you.

It's uncomfortable to let somebody serve you. It can be uncomfortable to need to be served. "I don't want to be a bother" and "I don't want to be served" are not all that different.

Are you good at letting people serve you?

I'm not. Some people - Christians in particular - are very eager to give, but would rather not receive. After all, we're told 'tis better to give than to receive.

But receiving service is different. After all, becoming a Christian has an awful lot to do with recognizing that you need help.

Sometimes, people genuinely want to serve you.

And there's nothing wrong with allowing someone to serve you. So let them do it. Don't take away their service.

So the next time you see me in the garbage line at CDC, with my hand out...

Don't worry, I got this.

The Lanyard

2011-06-22T20:27:00.011-04:00

Many moons ago, in my first summer at Grace (2003), I was given a lanyard. It was a cherished gift, an in-crowd thing, for the in-the-staff-at-GYC-crowd, given to us all by Chad Saxton. At least, that's how I remember it. I've had it for a long time.

By some miracle, it survived being one of my possessions. I lost it many, many times, but it always came back. It was subject to some pretty serious perils - dangling off my neck over starting campfires, unscrubbed toilets, plates of food, lots of dangerous situations. We had some good times together:

(together on a hiking trip)

(during my short lived blue-glue-hair punk, eat potatoes from Styrofoam cups phase)

(Worn completely unnecessarily during the eating contest at Mangames. Shoutout to Jared and Tim.)

(As an aquatic observer, complete with required AO whistle, on the raft. Shout out to Dave and Paolo)

The lanyard was a beautiful thing. At first, it was just a very convenient way of holding onto keys. At Grace, I only needed two keys. One got me past padlocks, and another got me into everything else. (Note to self: Come up with a clever joke about how the keys didn't just get me into doors, but trouble too.) It maintained that cause when I brought it down here to Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, now I have a bunch of keys that I carry everywhere and now I walk around with saggy shorts. I think they're affecting my posture too. I couldn't carry them around my neck, so I kept them off the lanyard and used it just for the whistle and the house key. But anyway.

(see. I told you: Lots of keys.)

But it became more than a key-holder. It became a treasure of sorts. It said "Grace Youth Camps," something no lanyard is likely ever to say again because it's Grace Adventures now. Only people from way-back-when could have one. It was a part of my history, a symbol.

Also, it had a little clip so I could detach it and let people borrow my keys without having to endure the enormous inconvenience of removing the whole lanyard from my neck.

So it was disheartening when I lost the lanyard and the house key and whistle it held two months ago. I had loaned it to someone to use the whistle - the same one that had been attached to it for years, probably. When camp ended, I realized all the counselors had gone home and I didn't have my lanyard. I called around to see if anyone had it. They didn't. One guy said another guy had it last, that guy said another guy had it last. I worried, just a little, but held out hope it might turn up on camp someday. It had my house key on it too. For the time being, my house went unlocked.

Then.

One day.

I was picking up some trash outside by our firepit.

Dave was riding around on the lawnmower by the firepit.

And I heard

an awful clink-clang-clunk-thump of some foreign object being run through a lawnmower.

And I don't have to tell you it was my lanyard, whistle, and house key.

Dave shut off the mower and held up the pieces. He asked if it was mine. My heart sank.

A little shred of my history had just been demolished by a lawnmower. The whistle was gone. The house key was somehow still intact, just a little scraped and bent. The cloth of the lanyard was chopped into pieces, so one of them said "Grace Yo" and another said "-th ca" and still another "mps." I held them in my hands and wanted to sob a little bit.

"So you've been here the whole time. I've been missing you." It seemed like a such a tragedy that this thing, this cheap little thing, could endure for so long, could narrowly escape death or separation so many times, hang around my neck for so many memories, and sit outside waiting for me to find it only to meet its doom in a split second in a lawn mower. I held my composure. I didn't sob or anything, but the disappointment was displayed on my face nevertheless.

I'm sentimental, I guess.

Markus was there, and he took the pieces from my hands. He said, "I can tell that this meant a lot to you. I'll see what I can do."

Markus sews. Sometimes I make fun of him for it.

And so it was that this week, Markus called me and told me he had a gift for me. He came over and knocked on my door. I opened it, and he held out his hand with the lanyard hanging from it. He had fixed it. I was kind of speechless. He stitched the whole thing together, and even re-embroidered the missing letters back on it as best he could. It's a little crooked in spots but that's no big deal. Actually, it gives it some character. It gives it even more background story.

(peace)

This concludes the story of how the lanyard, a symbol, was lost, destroyed, found, repaired, returned. Redemption is a beautiful thing on every level.

Night sky

2011-06-15T23:23:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, the night sky looks like this:

Big pic here

The Great Equalizer

2011-06-10T22:24:00.005-04:00

One of the drawbacks of my job is that it can, on occasion, require me to spend precious time playing lots of fun games with kids.

And often, I am better at the games than the kids are. This gives me an exercise in humility because I often want to display my dominance, put them in their place, and make known to all my vast superiority in whatever game we're playing. Especially to cocky 10-year-olds.

(Note: Sometimes they are better than me at certain games. I will not be addressing such scenarios today.)

Generally, I have to tone it down and remember that the playing field is not level. I have been gifted with a decade or more of additional experience and, to a lesser extent, a more athletic frame and larger brain. But mostly the additional experience. I typically temper the walloping I hand them based on the disparity in our skills. That's fair.

And yet, there is a flip side to that coin of justice.

Not every game is fair. Not every game needs to be fair. Sometimes, the result is important and hard work and preparation and skill and talent should be rewarded, and one team should be crowned a champion while the others are given something to aspire to.

Like little league baseball. And athletics in general. For me, it was high school marching band.

But 4-way Beach Ball Soccer is not one of those times. Camp games don't often require preparation and practice by the participants, and the reward is often inconsequential or candy-related. Justice, in camp games, really just means that every kid has fun.

Hence, it is often my role as a self-moderating participant to become the Great Equalizer.

My team is getting pummeled, and kids are losing interest? Better help us catch up and keep it interesting.

We're way too far ahead and kids on the other team have started to wail in embarrassment? My defense might suddenly tank.

A few kids are dominating and need to be neutralized? I'm on it.

It's pretty gratifying to become an instrument of justice. When I put a kid in his place, there might be a fist pump or two and I might walk a little taller, with a little more swagger. And yes, it might be just 4-way Beach Ball Soccer, but justice has nevertheless been served.

And that, friends, is what it's all about.

Points of View

2011-06-01T22:33:00.003-04:00

I've been reading Rob Bell's book, Love Wins.

Where was I two months ago, right?

I often attended Mars Hill and typically appreciated Bell's teaching style, as well as the laid back atmosphere of his church, and the band's unique infusions of popular Rock/Indie/Disco/Funk tunes with modern worship songs. Also, the services started at 11. That goes a long way when you're delivering pizzas until 2 am.

I had a Love Wins bumper sticker on my last car, and still have one on a music book. I also have a Jesus Wins bumper sticker put out by another West Michigan church to contrast it.

Maybe love wins, but publicity definitely does. I heard buzz from plenty of Puerto Ricans (and Americans, and news outlets, and blogs, and relatives, and... yeah) about some unorthodox ideas from a pastor I knew fairly well, through many church services over many years.

They were saying all kinds of things
about what he was saying,
and what he was saying
didn't seem to be in line with
what
others
had
always
been
saying.

Questioning Gandhi's eternal resting place?

Universalism?

Must investigate.

I visited a Universalist church once. Didn't care for it. Their congregation was surprisingly aged, but the building was beautiful. I really couldn't see how embracing every religion and worldview gave them any kind of framework to make sense of God, the world, sin, death, anything. Their syllabus was far too open, kinda like taking a class on "Stuff." What are we going to learn about today? "Stuff." How do you study for that? How do you leave and go home and ponder that and come back the next week seeking something deeper, something concrete, something to stand on? How does that change your life? They had pagan verses in their hymn books. The sermon was self-helpish. It was Oprah church. I could have stayed home and watched Oprah.

A Christian church, on the other hand, has a framework. There's a Bible, there's tradition, there's a refined approach with a limited swath. You can gauge the Pastor's teaching against the Bible. Is he right or wrong? Why? It's in the Word. Go read it for yourself. At a Universalist church, you just kinda have to decide if the pastor is smart and take his word for it.

All that to say: Rob Bell isn't that kind of Universalist. I don't know what he is. He still uses the Bible as a framework, he still says Jesus is The Way. He just says it with a twist, one that I can't really refute, support, or explain. I'm not convinced he's a heretic or anything, though I do think there are some questions a laymen like myself can ask that a Christian pastor with a wide following probably can't, at least without complications and blowback. It's one thing for me to be at home, watching TV, wondering - What am I going to eat for dinner? What if God lets everyone into heaven anyway? Where are my socks? It's another for a pastor to write a book about it.

His book is okay, as far as readability goes. I'm about 80% of the way through it and mustering motivation to finish it. Some of what he says, I like. Some of what he says, I don't really have an opinion on. Some of what he says, I don't agree with. But for covering such a controversial topic, the book is pretty boring. Maybe that's because I often read it when my eyelids are already heavy (*Not a good state in which to read your Bible, btw.) He devotes a lot of it to asking questions, many of which he doesn't answer. And I think that's what he set out to do - ask a lot of questions. I'm cool with that. I'm all about getting to the bottom of why we believe what we believe.

We were riding up to church in San Juan on Sunday and I had the book in my lap. A friend was riding shotgun and asked me about it. He's pretty opinionated. He'd admit this. So he asked me about the book...

I articulated Bell's point of view as well as I could and diplomatically said there were some things about it I like and some that I don't. He went on to aptly debunk most of what I said, at least as he understood it, quoting scripture along the way.

I found myself defending Rob Bell's point of view. Which is interesting because it's not one I particularly agree with. I do this a lot, it turns out. In this instance, my inclination was to back up Rob Bell's book because the person debunking it by their own admission hadn't read it.

I don't consider myself very argumentative, and I don't really care about winning an argument or being especially convincing. I just like discussion. I often take a centrist viewpoint. Maybe that makes me wishy-washy. I've been accused of that before.

Or maybe it's just more fun to argue with someone you agree with. That way, they defend my point of view, and they typically do it better than I could.

Fear and Snorkeling at Playa Santa

2011-05-29T21:23:00.005-04:00

I grew up in Michigan, where we have no oceans.

We have Lake Michigan, a deep, blue, cold body of water you cannot see across. Might as well be an ocean, right? Actually, I often think of it as better than an ocean. From mid-June to early September, when it's swimmable, it couldnt' be more pleasant. No salt, cool but comfortable and always a relief from hot sand. You can stand at its edge and picture Wisconsin just over the horizon.

It can be vast and intimidating and rough, but it is finite. It is, at least generally, safe.

You do not get the same feeling standing at the edge of the ocean. The horizon is somehow more distant; the water is deep and dark and swimming with untold, unfound creatures; it is unfathomable, infinite, dangerous.

I've stood on rocks on the north shore of this island and watched the waves swell and recede, swell and recede, picturing myself being helplessly tossed in their wake. Crushed. Powerless in their grasp. I have new found awe and respect for the ocean.

Which is why it takes me at least a little bit of courage to step off land and wade in, even where it's calm, even where it's shallow.

There's a beach an hour west of camp, called Playa Santa. I drove there on my first long solo trip here, with snorkeling gear in my backpack. I parked the truck, staked out a spot on the empty beach, and awkwardly high-stepped my flippers into the water.

You do not snorkel alone.

The last time I went into the Caribbean, I took a jellyfish sting to the back of my knee. This was more than 12 years ago, and I had been 14. So with that in mind, I glided cautiously out over the sea grass, with the coarse sand and sea cucumbers drifting by beneath me. I looked warily around, for fish, for jellyfish, for anything. This was not some sane, sterile place. Anything could be here. This was the ocean, vast and supremely unknown to me.

I was afraid and alone. Anything that grazed me there made me jump. This was hardly leisure, so I didn't stay long. I didn't even make it out to the reef, 100 yards offshore. I turned around and went back and spent the rest of my time near shore.

Recently, I went back to the same beach, this time with friends.

We donned our masks and snorkels and high-stepped out into the sea. Harmless sea cucumbers, coarse sand, sea grass drifting by beneath us. Us. This time I was less afraid, with some more experience and company in tow.

Out, floating on the water. Out, over the beer cans the locals and tourists have donated. Out, over the meager makings of a dying reef. Out, to the real reef.

There was a leak in my mask, salt water seeping into my nose and down my throat, sitting on my lips, stinging a scrape on my knee. Lake Michigan doesn't do this.

Lake Michigan also doesn't have coral reefs, tropical fish, and sea urchins.

There might not be a thing in nature less appealing than a sea urchin, black spines as clear signs they're best left untouched. They're novel from the shore, but old news in the deeper water as it becomes clear they're everywhere, from baseballs to basketballs, black and unfriendly.

I swam out, looped around to the back of the reef, saw a few pretty fish, but nothing new or exciting. I decided to head back in, through the middle of the reef. There were openings, a path.

But in the ocean, depths can be deceiving. Spaces are not nearly as open as they seem, and from the surface to the reef, what looks like a few feet can quickly become just one.

One foot to navigate the stinging brain coral and sea urchins and whatever else God has put there. I found myself in such a space.

Open water above me, my back and snorkeling tube above the surface, unfriendlies beneath me, no room to maneuver, no way to turn around, no space to get by, nowhere to put my hands, the surge of the waves pushing me involuntarily back and forth.

It is a scary thing to be in a space like this, water you can stand in, no apparent way to stand in it. In this, I understand panic. I understand claustrophobia.

That urge to panic comes, and you can accept it, or you can reject it as it wells up in your throat with the salt water. I pushed against it, kept as cool as I could and slid back. I spotted just enough space in the rocky coral to set down my feet and stand up and put five feet of me above the water and just one below.

When you have no place to put your feet, you have no way to shift your weight. So the small surge of the waves was just enough to push me over. I stumbled down and by some miracle found some urchinless real estate, millimeters from the spines of one. I've never been stung, and I was doing my best to keep it that way. I searched for another place to move my hand, but instead got back to my feet and took a few steps, quashing a few urchins under the rubber of my flippers, careful to keep them off my heels.

A few more steps, slowly, wobbly, patiently, shaking. Very soon, I saw a path in front of me. I slid down into the water, gliding cautiously over the coral and the urchins, to a narrow pathway back to the grass, back to the shore.

All of that fear over a few things with stings that are, for now, still mysteries to me. The ocean can get so much worse than a few urchins and coral. It's vast, scary, and people take lifetimes to learn tiny slivers of it.

This was enough to further deepen my respect for the ocean, but not enough to keep me out of it. I'll go again.

But ask me again if I prefer Lake Michigan to the ocean. No salt, no urchins, no coral.

I am definitely a Lake Michigan Man.

Unichallenge 2011

2011-05-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

There was this event.

"It's a big deal," they told me. "People get, like, really into it. This is serious."

I had seen the pictures and I had heard some stories. I knew it on paper but - as with all things camp ministry - I didn't quite know what to expect until I saw the Unichallenge happen.

When I was at Grace, we created Mangames, a half-day competition testing the various aspects of manliness - among them strength, agility, wisdom, creativity, survival skills, the ability to put large quantities of food away in a short amount of time - all to crown the manliest of men on the Grace Adventures summer staff. Mangames saw a second official incarnation last summer and, I'm hoping, a third despite my absence this summer. I dream of international Mangames chapters. Maybe someday. All of that to say: I have a deep appreciation for skills competitions on the grounds of Christian camps.

Unichallenge has been happening here for a few years now. This may have been Unichallenge V, I don't know for sure. But it is far and away the most hyped thing we do. And with great hype comes great responsibility.

The problem with having responsibility for something you've never done before is that you inevitably leave out many, many details that you would never in a million years dream might be necessary. Everything works on paper. We planned our events with a few new ideas, and a few weeks ago got to work building what we needed. We did not leave ourselves adequate time to get certain things done. And so in the days leading up to Unichallenge, I worked some very long hours finishing big and little things, from building rafts and shields to tying up loose ends and picking out trophies. Actually, one event was finished literally minutes before it was put into use.

I don't know how much of this was evident to the participants of Unichallenge. All of our staff, despite all of our stress, sincerely believe that Unichallenge V was a success. People had a blast, and the feedback was all positive.

And this, I think, lends us a poignant example of God doing good and perfect things despite his imperfect servants. It's a beautiful thing that we are not solely responsible for the success or failure of our ministry. God does a marvelous job shoring up our mistakes and failures. Which of course doesn't give us a license to be sloppy, but it does remove some of the pressure to be perfect.

The whole point of this event is to get church groups to come together and compete, yet be unified. The focus is so heavy on sportsmanship that a team can win every event but not win the overall championship. After lunch they all spend time in community, praying, and at the end of the day, we have praise and worship time before we hand out the trophies. If nothing else, it's our hope that some bonds are formed that will last beyond the day, beyond the boundaries of camp, and beyond the life of a trophy.

That, and that there are no serious injuries, of course.

Pictures: (All from the opening presentation ceremony. None from actual competition.)

On Public Speaking

2011-05-06T09:57:00.005-04:00

I got asked to speak at a church.

Or maybe, the program director at Campamento del Caribe got asked to speak at a church.

Or maybe, the guy who was sitting in that desk at that time got asked to speak at a church.

Either way, I was the guy sitting in the desk, the program director at Campamento del Caribe, the one in the right place at the right time.

Pastor Michael told Theresa he needed someone to speak for the National Day of Prayer yesterday. And since I was right there, he asked if I'd want to do it.

"Like, speak? For how long? About what?"

"About Prayer, dummy." (He didn't call me a dummy. But I probably should have guessed the topic.) "About 30 minutes. With someone translating, you'd need to speak for about 15 minutes."

"I... I guess so." I tried to stammer, to sound non-committal and give him time to give me a chance to back out. I'm not a pastor. I don't really speak, like a public speaker or a motivational speaker or a pastor or something. Only to crowds of 8 year olds in chapel at summer camp, and they're decidedly easier to impress than grown-ups.

He didn't give me the way out I wanted and when our conversation was over, I had pretty much committed to speaking to a crowd of grown-ups at a church service.

This is not the kind of thing most people go out of their way to do. Many people are genuinely terrified at the thought of it. And indeed, there were flashes of terror.

I would be lying in bed, in that beautiful moment between waking up and deciding to get up, when everything and nothing is fantasy and serious all at the same time, and I would think, "What do I have to do?" and the reminder would come, usually sounding something like this:

OHMYGOODNESSONTHURSDAYYOUHAVETOSPEAKINFRONTOFABUNCHOFGROWNUPS
ANDNONEOFTHEMAREGONNALIKEYOURTHEOLOGYBECAUSEYOUDIDN'TGOTOBIBLE
SCHOOLWHATMAKESYOUTHINKYOUCANDOTHISANYWA-

Does that sound panicky enough? Because it was panicky. And it happened pretty much every morning between when I committed to speak and when I finally spoke. It didn't last, though, and I'd eventually snap out of it. No sense in being terrified. You've got time. Man up. Get out of bed.

Some people have brains that can stay on topic, that can just pull a bunch of stories by category and fit them together neatly with a nugget of wisdom, and they make great public speakers. My brain doesn't do that. I don't know if it can learn to do that. It was my acceptance of this that led me to say: If I'm gonna speak, I need to write it all out. My mind wanders too much. In fact, at any given point in time, I am probably not paying any attention to anything. I think I have a screen saver or something that lets me think about nothing. So I had to think about it all ahead of time.

And so I thought. No, I didn't go to Bible school. No, I don't give sermons. No, I don't feel qualified for this. But I do have a set of experiences, which at least gives me something to say about prayer. So I wrote it all out, word-for-word. 2200 words worth, from "Buenas Noches, everyone" to the well-worded final sentence that adequately summed up my point and sounded very much like an ending. Starts and endings are hard. It's the middle stuff that's easy.

Of course, I wrote it all a few days ahead of time, so I had plenty of time to second-guess it. Is this me? Or is it God? Is this deep enough? Is this what they want? If I'm worried about being embarrassed or failing, does that mean I have a problem with vanity and that I'm not letting the Holy Spirit speak? In the end I decided that, unless God gives me something else, what I put on the paper must have been from Him already. I told Him that he could change it if he wanted to.

Last night, I spoke it. Spake it. Unto them. I even ad-libbed a joke at the start. The one about speaking to 8 year-olds. Yeah, already re-used it on you. It was that good.

Once you begin, you wonder what all the terror for public speaking is about. Forgetting your lines? Not having enough to say? If you have a piece of paper and can read it without sounding like you're reading it (I'm not saying I did) then you should be fine. Of course, that doesn't shake the curiosity of whether or not everyone in the audience is scrutinizing your every word, harumphing at your foibles (am I nose-breathing into the microphone?) and breaking down each element of logic in your argument (that didn't sound heretical, did it?). I understand on a much deeper level now why Pastors ask for amens. It pumps them up and affirms them. It shows that they're not just standing up there alone, appealing to a bunch of skeptics or, even worse, a bunch of bored church-goers. Don't be afraid to give the guy speaking an amen.

I have no idea how long I spoke for. Something like 30 minutes. Before I started planning it out, I wondered how I was going to occupy a half hour with what little wisdom I had. But it evaporates quickly with all of those eyes on you. When I was finished, people told me it was good. The pastor gave me a thumbs up. I felt relieved.

I'm glad I did it. I could have said no, could have backed out or deferred to someone else, but I didn't. Next Sunday, I'm visiting a church in Guaynabo where I have "1-2 minutes" to speak about camp. No problem for this guy.

No Conviction, by Peter Rollins

2011-05-03T22:06:00.001-04:00

I came across this today and thought it was worth sharing.

No Conviction, by Peter Rollins

A parable about you and your potential future...

In a world where following Christ is decreed to be a subversive and illegal activity, you have been accused of being a believer, arrested, and dragged before a court.

You have been under clandestine surveillance for some time now, and the prosecution has been able to build up quite a case against you. They begin the trial by offering the judge dozens of photographs that show you attending church meetings, speaking at religious events, and participating in various prayer and worship services. After this, they present a selection of items that have been confiscated from your home: religious books that you own, worship CDs, and other Christian artifacts. Then they step up the pace by displaying many of the poems, pieces of prose, and journal entries that you had lovingly written concerning your faith.

Finally, in closing, the prosecution offers your Bible to the judge. This is a well-worn book with scribbles, notes, drawings, and underlings throughout, evidence, if it were needed, that you had read and re-read this sacred text many times.

Throughout the case you have been sitting silently in fear and trembling. You know deep in your heart that with the large body of evidence that has been amassed by the prosecution you face the possibility of a long imprisonment or even execution. At various times throughout the proceedings you have lost all confidence and have been on the verge of standing up and denying Christ. But while this thought has plagued your mind throughout the trial, you resist the temptation and remain focused.

Once the prosecution has finished presenting their case the judge proceeds to ask if you have anything to add, but you remain silent and resolute, terrified that if you open your mouth, even for a moment, you might deny the charges made against you. Like Christ, you remain silent before your accusers. In response you are led outside to wait as the judge ponders your case.

The hours pass slowly as you sit under guard in the foyer waiting to be summoned back. Eventually a young man in uniform appears and leads you into the courtroom so that you may hear the verdict and receive word of your punishment. Once you have been seated in the dock the judge, a harsh and unyielding man, enters the room, stands before you, looks deep into your eyes and begins to speak,

"Of the charges that have been brought forward I find the accused not guilty."

"Not guilty?" Your heart freezes. Then, in a split second, the fear and terror that had moments before threatened to strip your resolve are swallowed up by confusion and rage.

Despite the surroundings, you stand defiantly before the judge and demand that he give an account concerning why you are innocent of the charges in light of the evidence.

"What evidence?" he replies in shock.

"What about the poems and prose that I wrote?" you reply.

"They simply show that you think of yourself as a poet, nothing more."

"But what about the services I spoke at, the times I wept in church and the long, sleepless nights of prayer?"

"Evidence that you are a good speaker and actor, nothing more" replied the judge. "It is obvious that you deluded those around you, even deluded yourself, but this foolishness is not enough to convict you in a court of law."

"But this is madness!" you shout. "It would seem that no evidence would convince you!"

"Not so," replies the judge as if informing you of a great, long-forgotten secret.

"The court is indifferent toward your Bible reading and church attendance; it has no concern for worship with words and a pen. Continue to develop your theology, and use it to paint pictures of love. We have no interest in such armchair artists who spend their time creating images of a better world. We exist only for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christ-like endeavor to create a better world. So, until you live as Christ and his followers did, until you challenge this system and become a thorn in our side, until you die to yourself and offer your body to the flames, until then, my friend, you are no enemy of ours."

The Hip Church in Puerto Rico part dos

2011-04-09T10:31:00.002-04:00

(I wrote about a recent church experience HERE and this post is a continuation of it.)

The service was over and my feet were hurting me. We started to file out and a friend asked me an inevitable question: "What did you think?"

I'd have asked the same question if I had brought a guest with me, so I knew it was coming. But they didn't realize how heavy their question was. I had already begun to feel a little bit guilty about forming all of these reactions to a church service. I certainly hadn't gotten what I hoped out of it. And from that came this deep self-examination - yes, it matters what I thought about church, but that reaction says a whole lot more about me than it does about the church. I hate the thought of me being a church critic.

Such a simple question really didn't require us to jump into a discussion where we'd probe into my cynicism and spiritual guilt. So naturally I told them it was difficult for me because of the Spanish. This wasn't a lie, but it was a cop-out. I told him I'd been to services a little like this in the States.

He said this was a brand new concept in Puerto Rico, that they were changing what people think about church. Kids here, they don't really want to go to church.

Boom. Confirmation that my whole blog-about-how-uncomfortable-and-cynical-I-am-in-church-thing is entirely misdirected. It might be amusing, but it is misdirected. I was humbled. I had thought plenty about how the church was trendy and trying hard, and that churches shouldn't be concerned with trends. But that whole time, it wasn't the church that was concerned with trends. It was me.

Here was a place that was meeting people where they were at, moving with the Holy Spirit, connecting and transforming people in a place where they felt welcomed, comfortable, alive. And I had spent my time there thinking about communion cups and Raisinettes and my sore feet, drawing comparisons between this church and others I'd been to years ago.

My friend painted a picture of a Puerto Rico for me where the kids don't want to go to church. It's boring, it's traditional, it's stuffy, and as a result they don't have any interest in Christianity. But this place was new, fresh, appealing. And not far away from a college. I thought about how youthful the church was. The pastor was young, the band was young, and the majority of the congregants were really young, too. Something good was happening here. Puerto Rico needs more places like this.

As for me, I wonder what I'm supposed to do with myself when I bring my exhaustion into church with me. All I wanted to do was sit down for a while and hear a preacher, but I didn't get it.

On the way home later on, I made a comment about how tired I was and that I never really got to sit down and hear preaching like I had hoped. I sounded like an old man.

"This was a worship service, Jim. The whole point is to pray and worship. There's not supposed to be a lot of preaching anyway."

Yup. I definitely didn't get it.

The Hip Church in Puerto Rico

2011-04-08T14:48:00.002-04:00

"Is this going to be one of those three hour services?" I ask. My feet hurt and I'm sunburned and not especially interested in a marathon church session.

"No, probably just an hour and a half."

Good. I'm not one for lengthy church services, even in English. I feel a little guilty about it. Shouldn't my soul always be up for praising Jesus, listening intently, singing whole-heartedly, ever an empty sponge for soaking up the Holy Spirit? A long church or worship service shouldn't be a big deal. Still, I can't seem to muster the enthusiasm for them.

We're going to be late, probably by half an hour. We'll miss the bulk of worship, get there for announcements, I'll settle in and hear a preacher speak in Spanish and, if anything, give my ears a little practice hearing Spanish but probably not get a whole lot else from the teaching. Then another song. Shake some hands. We'll leave. Simple and painless.

It takes a while to park. Jon drops us off at the door and we go in to the old theater where they meet. There's a sign with a non-church-sounding name and a table where they're handing out Raisinettes and bookmarks. I think back to the days when I was visiting churches in St Joe, where they wooed people with gift bags and coffee mugs. Church-searchers should never run out of coffee mugs. I take my Raisinettes and bookmark and we go in.

I survey the scene: Pretty simple set-up, Movie theater seats, Blank canvas by the stage with markers where people can come up as the spirit leads and write stuff. There's an over-qualified band on stage leading a worship tune. The lead guitarist is a gangly guy in skinny jeans, Vans and a plain V-neck tee. He has an underbite and a messy hairdo. He's probably in another band. In my experience, most hip churches have this guy. I've seen it all before. The come-as-you-are, hip church might be new in Puerto Rico, but it emerged as I was in college (at the height of my hipness) so I knew it well. They were trying hard to break out of the stuffy church mode, and actually doing a pretty good job of it.

We wait in the back for Jon while he parks the car. I'm hungry and they gave me Raisinettes, so I try to get them open, but they're in the sort of plastic-packaging that cannot be torn. There's no sawtoothed edge at the top. It's gonna be a fight between me and the packaging to get to the candy inside. It would be ideal to get this done now instead of later when the preacher is speaking. But after a solid effort at tearing them, I'm getting nowhere. So I stuff them in my pocket and picture myself futzing with them during the sermon, pulling hard until they tear open and I throw an elbow at some poor person next to me, and the candy goes flying, rattling noisily down the floor, interrupting the pastor and drawing all attention squarely on me, the guy who couldn't wait for the Raisinettes, instead of the pastor and His Boss.

Jon arrives as they end the song and we find seats next to some friends of theirs. Someone comes up to pray for Libya and Syria. She prays for a long time as they flash images of destruction on the screen and the band plays ambient, serious-sounding chords behind her. I'm trying hard to pay attention and focus on prayer, but the Spanish makes it tough. I think and translate about every other sentence, trying to keep up.

Then, another guy gets up and preaches a little, but we're all still standing and the band is still playing behind him, so it all has this kind of brief, temporary feel to it. This isn't the real sermon. He's saying something about family problems. Lots of people go forward, then people from the band and more established congregants go up to pray with them and lay hands on them. One guy puts his hands across the backs of people's necks and I feel like it's kind of weird. My feet are starting to hurt.

He finishes and the band starts playing a Spanish version of a David Crowder Band song I know. This gives me a little bit of energy, and I sing the parts I know in English. They get to the chorus, and it takes on this improvisational, long, emotional feel to it, and people are singing it over and over again. Eventually the PowerPoint person gets lost and puts up a 360 degree pan of the cross at sunset. This goes on for a really long time, and the lead guitarist drops to his knees and begins to weep while the band and congregation sing the chorus over and over again. All said and done, the David Crowder song probably lasted about 19 minutes.

My feet are really sore now and I'm starting to feel kind of exhausted. We've been there about 45 minutes it feels and they still haven't wrapped up this whole integrated worship-prayer thing they're doing and gotten to the preaching. It's not going to be a 90-minute service. I think about sitting down but I convince myself that if I do, people will think I'm having some intensely emotional and spiritually repentant experience, crying out to God for mercy and compassion, when really I'm just tired and starting to disengage from it all. Instead, I stand and start to think about blogging about all of this.

Then, the preacher comes up. The band steps away from their instruments, except for the guitarist who keeps playing ambient chords and mouthing lyrics while the pastor speaks. People sit down. Phew. I get out the Raisinettes because now I have a plan. I poke a whole in them with the threading of a key-ring in my pocket. I'm in. Sweet sustenance. No flying elbows, no noisy distraction. It's good.

The speaker talks only for a few minutes, and gives an invitation. I don't know if it's an altar-call or just an invitation for prayer about something, but lots of the same people come up again, and lots of the same people who laid hands on them before come back up. Throughout the service, I always knew pretty well what they were talking about, just not what they were saying. There was some standing and sitting and raising hands and stuff. Since I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, I went with the status quo to be safe. I didn't want to commit to something, to identify myself with something that wasn't true. I'm a little confused, and it's a humbling thing to be confused in church. People who come for the first time probably understand that fairly well.

They serve communion in little pre-packaged juice cups with communion wafers shrink-wrapped into their lids. It was very convenient, moreso than breaking bread and pouring wine (or Welch's) and having to pass two plates. We all stand for this again.

When he finishes, the band returns to their instruments and the worship leader says something about "a final song." I am cautiously optimistic. And as they launch into this last worship hymn, people around me start to gather their things. The end is near. Sweet relief. They wrap up, but not before one final encore tag-ending to the last song.

(Continued tomorrow)

Authentic Puerto Rican wildlife

2011-03-25T16:54:00.004-04:00

I'm no longer fighting the war on ants. They're the little sugar ants, "Crazy ants," the ones that will take anything but a straight path on a flat surface, that invaded my kitchen a long, long time ago. I've seen them on my dishes so many times that, not only do I no longer care about them being on my dishes, I'm no longer disturbed by the possibility that I am regularly eating many, many of them. They win, man.

They win.

There's an enormous dead cockroach sitting underneath my table in my kitchen. It's lying on its back with its legs up in the air, just like the "Dead Bug" we used to do at roller skating parties. I noticed it the other day. You're supposed to handle these sorts of things immediately, I think. But in my defense, it's kind of tucked back in a corner, out of the way, not harming anything. It's slowly getting buried by dust bunnies. I would need a broom to get at it.

It's still there.

I left a loaf of bread out on my counter. I prefer not to put it in the fridge because it quickly firms up and gets kinda stale. So today at lunch, I went home to make myself a sandwich. Got out the turkey. The mustard. A head of lettuce. Some peppers. Went for the bread: Found a gaping hole in the plastic bag, where some mouse-like creature with mouse-like teeth had chewed through. He also carved himself - ya know, I shouldn't assume he's male, females are generally just as capable of such atrocities - a cave in the bread. I hope he liked it. This wasn't no bottom-shelf bread. This was top-shelf whole-wheat 9-grain stuff.

It was good bread.

Today I saw Dani (a golden retriever/lots of other things I think mix) running in front of the comedor with a large iguana in her mouth. Right as a group of girl scouts arrived for the weekend, she ran in front of them and dropped it on the sidewalk, dead, missing most of its tail, lying on its belly with its big hind legs splayed back like a frog mid-swim. Julio took it and buried it.

It was big.

There's a pair of Puerto Rican parrots nesting in the trees between the staff housing and Dorm B. They're rare and endangered, so I hear. Critically endangered. So I better not make any parrot-eggs-for-breakfast jokes. What little research I did since starting to write this paragraph leads me to believe that these are, indeed, the same parrots, not boring less-endangered ones. Puerto Rico, it seems, doesn't have any other parrots. Just those. And those are parrots. And they look the same. They squawk a lot. But, as I have demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs, I typically leave wildlife alone.

So they're safe from me.

tapon

2011-03-11T13:54:00.006-05:00

Driving in a foreign place is an impressive feat. As I've slowly started to figure it out, I've grown increasingly satisfied with myself. When I first got here, the streets and the culture of driving were a mystery to me. Rightfully so, I think, as San Juan is supposed to be one of the worst cities in the world to drive in. People down here on the southern side of the island have taken to calling it Tapon - Traffic.

Yeah. People who live here call San Juan traffic.

Traffic makes me a little nervous anywhere. I'd rather not have to make multiple lane changes at 70 miles per hour - or 80 if dictated by your fellow travelers - in order to narrowly avoid missing my exit and consequently flying who-knows-where too far down the freeway to find my way back. Doing it in a 15 passenger van should require a special license. Doing it a 15 passenger van in a foreign land should earn you a medal.

Luckily, in modern times we have the GPS unit.

And I sort of hate them. Hated them.

Sure, it's nice to know when your exit is coming up, and it's nice to know where you'll be able to find a Coldstone along the way, and the GPS is great when you're trying to find your way around a big or unfamiliar city. But it becomes troublesome when you become dependent on it, when you answer to it. "The machine knows where it's going" are famous last words. Ask Michael Scott. I would much rather just know my way around than have to futz with the GPS everytime.

But then, of course, I was driving back from the airport late last night - creeping right up on 1 am - when I knew caffeine would help perk me up a bit. I'd rather not ever have a "I fell asleep at the wheel" story. So I stopped where I thought I would be able to find some Dr Pepper - a rarity here in Puerto Rico, unless you know where to look. With a crisp, refreshing Dr P in hand, I hopped on a road that ran parallel to the freeway, thinking it would bring me back. It didn't. It went from nice, straight road right next to the freeway to windy, roller-coastery mountain thrill ride pretty quickly. Luckily, the GPS was suction-cupped right to the window and got me out of that mess. And it brought me through a presumably beautiful part of the island.

So I've learned to stop hating the GPS.

For the most part, driving around down here isn't nearly as complicated as you might think. Still, people seem impressed when I report that I get around on my own somehow.

Over the last week, I had multiple opportunities to drive some Grand Valley and Grace Bible College kids around. At one point, we met a traffic jam in the middle of the barrio, of all places. That's another thing - there aren't many alternate routes. So I had to backtrack, went way out of the way but probably avoided a pretty nasty traffic snarl. And of course, once we were nearly back on course, we found another even worse traffic jam. It was backed up farther than we could see, and had spilled over into another intersection. Of course, drivers from all directions staked their claim in the intersection trying to get through it, effectively turning it into a parking lot. Naturally, when a vein opened up, I crept through it with a full load of nervous, unacquainted college kids. I stepped right out there and made some maneuvers that would get you tickets or jail time in the states. I think I heard whimpering from someone in the seats behind me.

But we made it through okay. It wasn't an easy trek by any means, but I kept my cool. I'd seen this before.

And therein lies the key to successful driving in a new place: Familiarity.

Knowing the culture of driving, going places you've been before, that's how you figure it out. That takes time. That takes experience. A GPS is a nice temporary substitute, but I'll take the experience - even with the errors at 1 am - over one any day.

Satisfy us in the morning

2011-03-03T20:10:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago, I found myself not-so-strangely curious - and just a tinge excited - about what that night's dinner was going to be. There may or may not have been some curiosity about breakfast and lunch the following day, too. And as I wondered, there crept up this suspicion that, once again, I was thinking a little too much about food.

I think about food a lot. Too much, I admit. Grocery shopping has been exciting ever since I was charged with feeding myself. I feel empty without food. Okay, that's normal. But it satisfies. It delights. There are some people in the world who eat because they have to, and there are many who eat because they enjoy it. I am, without question, in the latter category. I'd venture to guess most people reading this are too.

As I realized that I was looking forward to dinner just a little bit too much (Except for Thanksgiving, a meal probably shouldn't be the culmination of your day) I was convicted that food was becoming an idol for me. Food is a good thing, but when something becomes a central source of comfort and satisfaction, it probably needs a closer look.

So I thought it was time for some good old fashioned fasting. I had only ever fasted one time, mostly just to see what it was like. I went sundown-to-sundown and nearly died of starvation. You're supposed to be able to last 40 days without food, I hear. I didn't make 40 hours. At sundown that night, I made a beeline for subway and got myself a spicy sandwich, devoured it on an empty stomach, and paid dearly the following day. Fasting, like most things, will take some practice.

One couple here fasts every Monday. They've been doing it for 40 years. They're warriors. Not me. I'm not about to give up a full day every week. One day is a good enough start for me.

I fasted. Sunday night through Tuesday morning, right through my day off. There's nothing specifically holy about a full day's fast, I don't think, but it's a tolerable time period that poses a challenge and shouldn't drive you insane. And it's called breakfast because you're breaking your fast. Instead of devouring calories at mealtimes, I went to the Bible to read a Psalm or two. David cries out to God, asks Him where He is in his time of trouble, when enemies are bearing down and have him cornered in a cave and want to kill him, when he's betrayed by friends and depressed and lost and infuriated. I was going to ask where God was when I wanted a sandwich.

At first, it wasn't so bad. Get up. Drink some water or Gatorade. Read a book. Try to feel busy. I tried to do some writing. Early in the day was the worst. 10 am, and you've got a rumbly in your tumbly and a whole day ahead of you. I began to plan a feast the following morning - bacon, toast, eggs, fruit, hash browns, apple juice, me drooling over the whole thing - not realizing that this pretty much defeated the whole purpose of fasting.

Lunch time came and went. More water, a little more Gatorade. Then there was a dog fight and I tried to break it up and A DOG BIT MY HAND. Yeah. So, hunger disappeared as there was blood streaming down my fingers and worries in my mind of rabies and who-knows-what-kinda tropical dog diseases there are down here. Pretty sure it was the camp dog that bit me, and I know she's up to date on her shots. Thus far, I have yet to foam at the mouth. Except when there's a toothbrush in it.

Maybe it was the extenuating dogbite circumstances, but I didn't have an issue with hunger the rest of the day.

It is no coincidence that I came across this Psalm that day:

Psalm 90:14 - Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives.

How very strange and cool to come across such a verse on a day of fasting. Satisfy us in the morning, and we'll sing forever, for eternity. Only God's love provides true, lasting satisfaction. I knew this. But there's something powerful about reading it with an empty stomach.

There's a reason we fast over and over again. We need to learn and relearn the necessity of delighting one's self in the Lord. Let Him feed you, and it lasts forever. This is worth revisiting.

The following morning, I got up and immediately thought about that breakfast smorgasbord I'd planned the day before. But I didn't really want it anymore. I just wanted breakfast. Not some enormous feast that I'd earned from a day of righteous fasting. So I fried a couple eggs, made some toast and ate a normal breakfast. After all, it's the most important meal of the day.

More cowbell

2011-02-21T13:50:00.005-05:00

Monday, blessed Monday.

I must have the greatest job in the world. I get Monday off. I get tomorrow, my birthday, off as well. Today, I cleaned. Tomorrow, I chill. That is a worthy reward for working the weekend.

This was a weekend I'd been thinking about and looking forward to and planning for months, all without having any idea what it was going to look like. I knew just little enough to have an excuse for it to tank, but had just enough responsibility to feel some ownership for it. It's a weird position to be someone new in an ongoing ministry with all of its traditions, patterns, relationships, and unwritten rules. They bring you in with fresh eyes, to improve things and make changes and see it like they don't. But you have to be a spectator for a while - after all, some things are untouchable.

This weekend was our 9-12 year old February Retreat. It needs a better name than that, I know. We did our marketing, mailed out lots of brochures and hung posters all over the place. A few signed up ahead of time, many didn't. That's an ongoing challenge here - you never know just how many are going to show up. As of Friday, we had 15 or 16 on the list, guessing that "maybe 30?" might come. By 8:00 Friday night, there were 32 or 33 kids here, which was just a hair above my lofty expectations of "maybe 30?"

That's enough to make traditional camp large-group games fun and have a diverse bunch. Enough to drown out my amateur guitaring in chapel and to make defending in Gold Rush a challenge.

Highlights:

- Kids asking me again and again for Mosquito tag. They would just come up and demand more Mosquito. Come to think of it, all the games seemed to go over pretty well. Oh, and kids cheated. But whatcanyado?

- Francisco telling me he learned English from Cable TV. I didn't realize how effective that was.

- It is never not funny to wake kids up with a cowbell. Ever. My quote: "I've got a prescription.... Dang it, I messed the line up. I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell." Cue Julio on cowbell, mostly right in kids faces.

- Kids had fun, heard about Jesus, and no one got seriously hurt. That sums up a successful retreat fairly well, I'd say.

Lowlights:

-Me picking the same girl, with the unpronounceable name (for me, anyway), twice as a demonstration for mosquito tag. Went something like this:
"You have to say their name three times while giving a double high-five to a partner over their head. What's your name?"
"Uluaualsamar" (or something)
[long pause]
"Okay, Ulaammaman, Ulauslubauar, hem-mm-hmm-mmm-mmr."

-My fingertips dying a slow death at the hands of the rusting strings on my guitar. I haven't played it regularly in months, so the ever-important callouses are kaput. Which leaves my tender fingers raw and hurty today.

What is going on here? This might have been Bible Study. I'm not sure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiYL0zQjPSY

barrio (part 2)

2011-02-13T15:54:00.004-05:00

A barrio is not a city. It's a neighborhood. It's not necessarily a bad, depressed, ghetto neighborhood, it's just a neighborhood. That's what barrio means. This is a diverse place. There are a few really nice houses, and a few not-so-nice ones.

Proper cities in Puerto Rico have a town center that always has an open plaza and a Catholic church. Barrios don't. There might be 10,000 people living in the same area, but it's not a city. There's a highway on the edge of it that has a few bakeries, gas stations, cafes, and other small shops, but other than that it's just houses and people - in the case of this one, packed in between the highway and the sea.

From what I hear, a lot of the barrios sprung up around factories or farms. This side of the island used to produce a lot of sugar cane for rum. The Puerto Rican sugar cane industry isn't what it once was. But they still make a lot of rum here. There's a Don Q factory down the road where they distill it, and it is one of the most awfulest smells you can imagine. A long time ago, everyone lived in the barrio right by the place they worked. But now, all of their descendants are living in the same places long after the factories and farms are gone.

I can't begin to guess what they all do for a living today. I know a lot of them commute to a "proper" city nearby, like Juana Diaz or Ponce. I heard rumors of a guy who makes the daily 90+ minute commute to San Juan. There are fisherman, I know that much because I see them standing out by the highway holding their daily catch in a plastic bag for passers by. You know, "for your consideration." I've heard the story of one of the bakeries, that they started making bread in their house and selling it under an umbrella by the road. They made money, invested it in their panaderia and now it's a successful, family business. One that has really, really good fried chicken.

On the whole, this is not a wealthy place. People here may never leave. Literally, some of them might stay here their whole life without making the 20 minute drive down the road into the big city. Barrio people are different from city people in the same way that back in the States, country folks are different from city folks. They live "out there." They might not get out much.

This was demonstrated to me last week when we took the youth group from John's church in the barrio to a talent show at a big church in Ponce. The scene there was much like any bigger church with a healthy youth group - lots of people, a few apparent cliques, many kids dressed to impress. They dress better than me, but I'm far enough removed from high school not to see that as a threat. We sat down, and all the barrio kids huddled together, hunched over, buddied-up. There were seven kids in six seats, with a seventh chair open right next to them. They were safer together.

Theresa had to point this out to me, otherwise I might not have noticed. I asked what the big deal was, and she told me they saw themselves as different. They were uncool barrio kids. It's kinda like putting yourself in that country bumpkin category. Like showing up to a club in overalls and a flannel shirt. (And what's wrong with that?)

Like I said, I didn't immediately notice the difference. I still ignorantly slap a very general Puerto Rican label on everyone here. But the barrio kids - they stayed isolated, safe like that. Clearly, there are some differences. I don't get all of them. But they're there.

We drive a van through the barrio to pick up kids for Club on Wednesday night. This drive takes us to two points where drugs are regularly exchanged. Beautiful spots, owned by dealers, right on the sea, right by these kids' houses. More often than not, they pass it off right in front of us.

How can you grow up in that and not have it affect you? I often wonder - how many of these kids are going to make it? And what is "making it," anyway? Not dealing drugs? Getting out of the barrio, as if it's a place you need to escape? Economic success? Becoming a pastor or missionary? I don't know the answer to that.

If you can't know if they'll "make it," maybe there's no sense in asking the question. Maybe you just show up everyday and let God do what he does.

barrio part 1

2011-02-13T15:21:00.003-05:00

Sometime around 4 am, the roosters start.

It doesn't stop until sunset. Sunset. But they're at their worst around 6:30 am, right as I get up. Then, it's a constant stream of cock-a-doodle-doos.

There's a freshman rooster in one of the yards behind us. His goes more like, "Cock-a-doodle! (doo)" like the doo is an afterthought. He'll get it someday. When I'm first waking up, it's kind of funny.

I moved in here on Tuesday to stay for a week while John and Kerry, the missionaries here, are away in The States. The first night was restless, mostly on account of the roosters, but also the heat and a new mattress. But I'm getting used to it now. Having a whole house and a car for a while is nice.

I'm also taking care of their dogs, Jeb and Maggie. They're two golden retrievers that show me that dogs do, indeed, have very different personalities. Jeb is a moose who is big and clumsy. He's always having to back out of spaces, and dogs are typically no good at this. His brain is attached to his stomach. Maybe it's in his stomach. All he ever wants is food. Maggie wants nothing to do with food. I have to sit with her and force her to eat. I think maybe she fills up on bugs and lizards while I'm out.

The first day I came back from camp to get stuff ready for Club Alas (think Awana) and Jeb and Maggie were inside the gate to the driveway waiting for me. I had an armful of stuff (read: pair of athletic shorts, bag with a donut, keys, books, ice cold soda-pop) and had to creatively maneuver the key through the bars into the padlock. I popped it, slid the gate open, and Jeb immediately bolted down the street. He stopped close enough to lure me without trying to put all my crap down. When I got close, he bolted again. And again. Not funny. I kept a few choice words between my mind and my tongue. He ran into a fenced-in-parking lot and darted between the cars while I chased after. He's got technique. He's done this before. I finally caught up with him and dragged him back by the collar, telling him along the way just how uncool and unacceptable all of this was. I wasn't sure how to punish a dog so I simply withheld petting him for the rest of the day. That'll teach. He was constantly begging for it before. Naughty dog.

Living in the barrio changes my perspective of it. It's this noisy place full of people and their dogs and chickens and horses and radios and cars and houses. I had ideas about it before I came, mostly gleaned from TV crime dramas and movies. And I had been to the barrio before. But living in it for a week, I'm starting to understand it a little more. And at the same time, I realize there's a ton I don't know about it.

tres meses

2011-02-08T15:24:00.003-05:00

Not that this is a hugely momentous occasion or anything, but today marks three months since I left home. That gets a teeny-tiny asterisk because I went home for Christmas, but it's still three months since I left home. "For good." For the record, it's also been three months since my last haircut.

I say "for good" not because I'm done with Michigan, but because it's for the foreseeable future. Living abroad gives you a perspective on home that you can't get from within.

I live in paradise, yet I miss home. I know there are people dying to get away from the snow and the cold of winter in Michigan. I can't really blame them, I felt the same way each of my past 26 winters. Okay, maybe it's only been 10 or 11 that I really wanted out of the tundra. Up until that point I was happy to sled away the winter. But I understand the urgency with which we want Spring to arrive. Curse that awful groundhog.

There's warm sunshine falling on my desk through the shutters of my window, and when I stop hunching over the keyboard, I can see the Caribbean. But what's on my mind? I wonder what's for dinner tonight. I miss my family. I need to fold some laundry that's sitting in a basket in the middle of my kitchen. I think I threw away a plate when I tossed out the seafood salad someone gave me - I just can't motivate myself to eat more octopus than I have to. I hope they don't ask for the plate back. There are a million things I need to do for work, yet I'm sitting here blogging. There's a pile of thoughts nagging at my mind, not a one has me lying on a beach somewhere.

It doesn't feel like paradise, it feels normal.

When you visit a place like this, you ache when you leave because it's so sun-shiney and warm, but its beauty is really in its temporariness. Things that are fleeting often are beautiful: A sunset, a certain piece of music, youth, abrupt memories, vacation. They are things that are not to be missed, but can't be bottled up and saved. For me, it would be beautiful to go home and see my friends and family for a few days. I got to hear my niece on the phone the other day, and it gave me a big, silly smile.

I know that I have it really good here - I would say that I love it here. But that doesn't shake the thought that I miss my family, I miss Michigan, coming in from the cold. It bugs me that I'll miss a Michigan summer. I wonder if its just our generation that constantly wants to be somewhere else. We don't want to settle, we're hesitant to say "I love it here."

But inevitably, you do settle. You adapt. Wherever you land, you stay who you are. If you are laid back, you will be laid back at home and in paradise. If you are neurotic, you'll be neurotic at home and in paradise. If you are content, depressed, crotchety, at peace, curious, compassionate, hilarious, careless, adventurous, dangerous - that's what you'll be wherever you go. Where you are has little to do with who you are. You don't ever get away from that.

And so I'm here, loving it, but thinking often of home and family. Odds are, I'll stay longer than the year I first signed on for. I think that's the way it's supposed to go. The mission here makes a lot more sense if I can be constant, consistent, see it through to the end and make my contributions.

Day in life

2011-01-30T19:28:00.003-05:00

Today started with me lying in bed, as most days do. Jon Marshall was at my door. He told me through the shutters "We need to leave by 8:30 because we need to be at Second Union Church in San Juan to make an announcement by 10:00."

Information from that statement that was new to me:
-Leaving by 8:30
-Going to Second Union Church in San Juan
-Making an announcement
-Ten O'Clock.

It was 8:15, and I was still half asleep. I said "Okay. I'll be ready," and I said it with tone that clearly said "I'm still in bed but I'm going to try to sound like I'm not." Being confronted with the information that you're going to address a large crowd of strangers in about 100 minutes helps wake you up fairly quickly. I sprang to life. Scarfed down a bowl of cereal. Took a lukewarm shower. Checked the email and the Amazonmp3 deal of the day, and bolted for the office to get some literature to share with the fine people of Second Union Church.

We didn't leave at 8:30. This wasn't entirely my fault, but I certainly didn't do anything to help. We go to San Juan most every Sunday for church. It's a great church, one with a big building, a fairly diverse English-speaking population, and a pastor I already think is pretty cool. That's not new. Stopping at a church to promote an upcoming retreat would be new.

Jon dropped us off in front of the church. Theresa laid out the details. She'd talked to someone earlier in the week about the possibility of us coming to make an announcement but never quite connected to solidify it later in the week. They may or may not know we're coming. This didn't bother me too much. Roll with it. It's much easier to not make an announcement and just hand out fliers and a poster. Easier, but not more effective. And so we met our contact (This makes it sound like we're spies) and she introduced us to the youth pastor. We handed over our promotional materials. They said they'd make sure everyone knew about it. Thusly, I was saved from making an announcement.

We went on to our church. I told you I liked the pastor there. I do. Not that he blows my mind every sermon, he doesn't have to. It's because he has nothing at all resembling pretentiousness. He's just humble. He's not a stage pastor, he speaks off-the-cuff, almost to the point of awkwardness. But he's not awkward, because awkward people make everyone uncomfortable. This guy puts everyone at ease. He's been there for years and years, and he stops mid-sentence to tell you stories and throws songs in there that no one is expecting, sometimes ones we already sang. I wish more pastors were like him.

We went to Little Caesar's for lunch. This is probably the cheapest way for missionaries to feed multiple kids. We waited a while, and I broke out The Dot Game to play against Ben, who is 11 and a boy and lacking social grace in all the places an 11 year-old boy should. Logan, his 5 year-old brother, literally crawled over my chair and dug his elbow into my forearm as he watched our contest with great interest. He always does this. It's annoying, but it's funny. Moments before, I shocked him by removing and reattaching my thumb. Eli, their 8 year old sister, wanted a shot at me in The Dot Game. She beat me.

We made our way back to camp, an hour-plus drive that takes us up into the mountains and back down along the Caribbean. There's one spot where you round a bend and see the sea in the distance, far below you, and the sun shines off it it looks like glass. If you catch it at sunset, it's amazing. You need to come see it.

I craved a nap, but I'm no good at napping, so I watched a few episodes of Community. This is the most ridiculous, clever, hilarious show on TV right now and you should give it a shot.

I went to work out. I started P90X four weeks ago. I'm amazed that I've stuck with it this long because I didn't feel terribly driven when I started. I just knew I was out of shape and hoped I could change that at least a little. P90X has a pretty bold reputation of being quite the butt-kicker. It is. But you just keep showing up and hoping they get easier. They do. Today was Core Synergistics. It works your core. Synergistics is a big word that means it works all of it. I think. It involves types of push-ups I can only assume were invented in prison yards or by drill sergeants and something called the "Superman Banana." You pretend to be Superman. Then you pretend to be a banana. It's harder than it sounds.

After that, dinner. I didn't really feel like cooking. And I wasn't about to go out. So I stuck some chicken tenderloins in the oven and baked 'em. Not bad. Dry. If you know how to get around this, let me know.

Then I started writing this blog. Can you tell I've run out of gas by now? After this, I need to call my parents. I do that most Sundays.

Trees and Choices

2011-01-20T16:33:00.005-05:00

I ran into this question the other day, about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

"Why would God keep Adam and Eve from consuming knowledge?"

It came in a dialogue with an atheist. It's a fair question, one I hadn't thought about before. And having already been convicted to know The Word better - a lot better - I saw it as a perfect opportunity to probe Scripture a little more deeply.

Before this question came up, there was another - how many people did Satan kill in the Bible? This often gets paired with "...and how many people did God kill in the Bible?" It's a question I think is usually intended to bait us into realizing that God did some disagreeable, some would say nasty, things in the Bible. Satan didn't outright kill anyone. God was smiting all the time, 24-sev, it would seem. But Satan helped ensure long before we were born that we would all die a very real death.

Long and short of it: God gives Adam a beautiful garden chock-full of tasty fruits.

"Go, children, run amok! Except... That tree over there in the middle, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it's got special fruit. If you eat it, you're gonna die."

All things considered, it was a reasonable request. I think I could have lived with it.

Satan comes and helps Eve out a bit with some crafty wording. "Pshhaw," he says, "God knows if you eat it, you'll be like him. You'll know the difference between good and evil."

And what could possibly be wrong with that?

Eve bites it. Shares it with Adam. Just like that, models number 000000000001 and 000000000002 have blown it fairly quickly. Fast forward a few thousand years, and the world is a really messed up place. Clearly, eating the fruit had some consequences.

But - death? For knowing good and bad? Aren't we supposed to know that anyway? To a skeptic, it's all pretty harsh, Bro.

I like talking to atheists because they ask "Why?" where I never thought to. And then I need to go read the Bible. Which I clearly need to do a lot more. So I read Genesis 1-3. Again. umpteenth time.

God gave Adam everything. Nice spread, tasty fruits like I mentioned. He was sufficient. Adam was one happy, naked dude. Blissfully ignorant too, I think. And yet - there was another tree there, a choice.

"Eat whatever you want. But there's a tree right over there, and if you eat its fruit," - here, I think, God issues a warning, not a threat - "It will kill you."

The death comes not so much from God's smiting, with Him being bent on destroying his woefully curious and skeptical underlings, but from the choice of separation from Him. You can trust Him and enjoy Him, be satisfied by Him and find yourself whole in Him. You could eat the fruit forever. But to eat fruit from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was to want to be like Him, to call Him insufficient. It was arrogant, it was prideful, it was rejection. And that rejection bringeth death.

Pursue God, and things fall into place. (...He will make your paths straight.)
Reject Him, and everything falls apart.

Israel did it over and over again. Adam and Eve did it, too. God kicked them out. Their garden and its tasty fruit were gone forever. But - lest you doubt that God is good - he hooked them up with some clothes before they left. I love that.

You can't come back. But you're gonna need these...

Culture Day: Arecibo

2011-01-19T10:13:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, I went with Julio, Jon, and Jon's kids to Arecibo for a culture day. I shall henceforth refer to the Marshall kids as a single entity, known as Benellogan (Ben + Eli(zabeth) + Logan).

Along the way we stopped at Cueva Ventana again, which Julio and I had gone to back in November. Great view from up there, and it's always fun to see how other people respond when they see something you already know is beautiful.

In Arecibo, we went to check out another cave, Cueva del Indio, this one right on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Two culture days so far, and three caves... I'm garnering some advanced spelunking skills. It's kind of a non-descript place, like something that might have been on Route 66. Pay $2 to park and see something kind of neat. This place, which I think is legitimate, has carvings in the rocks from hundreds of years ago, put there by Taino Indians who lived here before the Spanish arrived. There's a sort of sand/dirt/gravel parking lot and a bunch of palm trees with spray-painted imitations of Indian carvings on them. The guy who collected our money was lying in a hammock, and barely slipped off his headphones when we greeted him. There was a little open-air shelter next to him, and the ground was littered with beer cans. There was a table of coconuts with shoots growing out of them, ready for planting. I think he was selling them. It wasn't the most tourist-friendly welcome scene. It feels weird to notice this. Normally, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to that sort of thing. But on culture days, I guess we are sort of tourists.

The cave itself was pretty cool, but only for about a 5 minute diversion. Far more interesting was the coast around it. I haven't spent a lot of time in the Atlantic Ocean. Not far off Puerto Rico's northern coast is the deepest part of the Atlantic, the Puerto Rico trench. On shore, the waves were huge, and they came crashing up against the side of the bluffs. Watching them was more fun than diving into the cave. A little down the road from here was a much cooler spot, where the surf came up over 30 or more feet of rock and trickled down in a foam onto a sandy beach, where it streamed around the rocks back into a cove with a private beach. There was no one there, just lots of signs advertising beer. It looked like the kind of place college kids go on Spring Break. It might be busy in a few months.

Anyway. Watching the waves crash, simple as it sounds, was a ton of fun. When we left, we all were pretty sure we'd waste no time in coming back.

One wave was particularly huge. Check it out, but wait til the end: (Couldn't find the song without dialog. Kind of annoying, deal with it.)

Someplace Else

2011-01-10T21:49:00.004-05:00

We were in Mississippi a few months before Hurricane Katrina hit. There was a big group of us led by a friend of mine, with our trip commissioned by Campus Ministry at GVSU. We had been doing work in a neighborhood in a small city, painting houses and shingling roofs and laying tile floor for some nice, poor folks. One day, a few of us drove far away from the freeway to a small farmhouse where an elderly couple lived. A car or two that had lost a battle with nature were sitting in their yard, along with a few bags filled with thousands of beer cans. There were steps without a railing leading up to the porch, which was lined with a tattered screen with several holes that let the bugs in. Inside the house, a wood-burning stove filled the air with smoke and lined the walls with soot. It looked like the sort of house you picture people living in during the 30s, in the Great Depression. They had closets with dirt in the bottom where a floor used to be. In their living room was a small TV and an ancient couch, and propped up in the corner was a musket that stood at least half a foot taller than me. When the owner wasn't looking, we took pictures with it.

We did what we could in a few hours. We put a railing up on the steps and patched the screen around the porch. We put a floor in the closet and put boards over gaping holes in the side of their house. When we were finished, we drove back through the countryside, to the freeway, to the city of Jackson and back the camp where we were staying. Along the way, we rolled through some beautiful suburbs and stopped for groceries at the world's largest Walmart. There were neighborhoods like any other back home, people of the same social standing, the same religious conviction, much the same as me. (Except they call pop Coke.)

I wondered how it was that people could live in such strange, desperate poverty near people just like me, how people who lived so close to each other could have such glaring differences. I wondered why we had to drive across the country to help them when there were people right nearby who were fully capable of helping out.

Naturally, I thought about West Michigan where I lived. I wondered if there were people living in poverty like that near my home. I know there are. I know there are kids in West Michigan who sleep without blankets on cold nights.

I went on Spring break trips each of my four years at Grand Valley. And I'm pretty sure that on each one, we all went home swearing up and down that we were going to get involved and be missionaries back home, too. Some of us made really good efforts at it. Some of us didn't. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. I've learned and forgotten the importance of being a missionary at home several times.

One of the best ideas I ever heard was when a friend of mine took his youth group on a mission trip from Hudsonville, Michigan all the way to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Round-trip, it's about 20 miles. I can't say I would have been very excited about it had I been in the youth group. Actually, I'm certain I wouldn't have been. In college when I chose my Spring break trip destination, the order of preference was: 1: Warm; 2: Big crazy city on my bucket list; 3: Wherever my friends were going.

Our generation dreams big. We want to fix the world. We love the causes with the most buzz and the ones that, hopefully, no one else has heard of yet. We'd love to get out and go somewhere far away and exotic and just serve – they don't have to pay us! Seriously, Just get us somewhere far away from boring old here and we'll do whatever they want!

There's nothing wrong with wanting to help people in far away places. But I wonder sometimes if the reason that the world stays the crappy, broken place that it is might be because we're all too busy dreaming about fixing someplace else. We all want to fix hunger and save souls and bottle-feed orphans someplace else, even though there are hungry, lost, and hurting people at home too. While we dream about finding a way to make a difference someplace else, we neglect to find our mission field at home.

The irony of me saying this from thousands of miles from my home isn't lost on me. I'm glad I'm here in Puerto Rico. I'll do my best to serve around what is, for now, my home. But if nothing else, I hope that when I go home, I'll be a better missionary there, too.

Thoughts on Soda.

2011-01-08T22:14:00.003-05:00

I describe the end of the tour at the World of Coca-cola in Atlanta as the greatest room I've ever been in. After being steadily indoctrinated with Coca-cola propaganda you paid to see, including a cheesy "4-D" film and awkward brushes with the Coca-cola Polar Bear (is he a mascot?), you're given a plastic cup and set loose in a room with several fountain stations, each representing a continent of our fine planet, and each has several different kinds of soda from that continent. You're encouraged to sample as many as you'd like. As I've already told you it's a dream for me, but it's a nightmare for dentists and recovering sodaholics. I have never seen so many wide-eyed kids running around, elbowing grown-ups out of the way to fill their cup yet again with every bizarre soda pop from Poland, or Cambodia, or Suriname. But on the Africa station: Tangawizi. The finest, most delicious ginger beer in all the world, straight from my beloved Tanzania. I would pay the admission and have awkward brushes with the bear again just to regard it with my taste buds.

I have done worse for soda. I drove across the country for Dr Pepper in college. Not just any Dr Pepper, Dublin Dr Pepper. I would do it again. Here in Puerto Rico, Dr Pepper is incredibly difficult to come by. If I were to find out there was a place in San Juan that maintained a regular supply, I would happily drive across this tiny island for it. I would drive to Cuba for it if I knew it were there. Dr Pepper is good. Coca-cola is no slouch. My main beef with Coca-cola is that they've successfully convinced everyone living south of the mason-dixon line that every kind of pop should be called Coke. It's as though Coca-Cola was the original and all else are imitators. It was called "The Real Thing," after all. But 7Up is not a type of Coke. 7Up is a crisp and refreshing lemon-lime based beverage. Sierra Mist can probably be called 7Up in more vulgar, less refined circles. But neither one is Coke. It's not cola. In fact, 7Up is Uncola. Not all pop is Coke. Even in parts of the world where Coke is pretty much the only option, they call it soda. Come on, American South, you can figure this out. But I digress.

Like all good things, Soda pop must come in moderation. After all, it's no good to bathe your teeth in acidic sugar every day. So recently, I severely cut back my intake. No pop, Monday - Friday. I've given up pop in the past for a month or more at a time. But I always come crawling back to its crisp, cool, refreshing sweetness. So I thought it was a good idea to not cut it out completely, but continue my relationship with it in moderation.

For the last week, I've gone each day without it. And the weird thing is, I didn't miss it that much. Sure, there comes a point each day, often in the late morning or early afternoon, when I need a pick me up and my taste buds cry out for something cold, sweet and bubbly. Soda pop, for the record, is only to be consumed in its coldest form. Warm soda is like swill, the sweetness and bubblyness is only good when the coldness is there, too. But at those times when I want to reach for a pop, there really is no substitute. Not tea. Not kool-aid. Not Tab. Not crab juice. The only option is to say no. You can't really be creative. You just have to say no.

And that concludes my thoughts on the matter. Somewhere in there is an object lesson. I don't know where. I didn't put it there. That's just how it is.

2011, so far

2011-01-01T18:55:00.002-05:00

There's something unjust about leaving on a flight at 7:45 in the morning on New Year's Day. It's not good planning, especially if you're going to try to ring in the new year the night before. And it's after writing this sentence that I realize it's 2011.

The whole New Year celebration has lost considerable meaning in the last few years. People make New Year's resolutions because they open another calendar and it's a new chance to start over, a fresh year, a fresh start. We all get a do-over. Somehow, the first few hours and days are loaded with opportunity and meaning. But for me it feels like New Year's Eve is really just another midnight, another excuse for a social gathering. I used to take it more seriously, used to marvel at how my parents could sleep through it, could go to bed before midnight.

A few years ago, I was moved as near to rage as I can remember. It was following a year when I had rung in the new year in a Grandville family's home, waiting for a mom to sign a check. The kids were devouring then unpaid-for pizza, oblivious to the ball-drop in the other room. I informed them that it was 2007. They said, "Cool," and continued grazing while mom handed me the check. Five dollar tip. Not bad, but I wondered what the sacrifice of my social life was worth. So the following year, I told my boss that I would work but I wanted an early shift so I could be out in time to enjoy the reveling with my cohorts. At 10, when I was supposed to be released, we were too busy for me to even consider leaving. At 11, I started having car trouble. At 12, I was in my car, on 28th Street, cursing my fate of searching for a house and hearing someone on the radio count down the new year while my friends partied on. At 1, my car broke down a mile from my house. I walked the rest of the way.

It was the kind of night when so many buttons are pushed you can't help but surrender to its awfulness and wait for it to end.

Now I don't think New Year's is such a big deal. Maybe this year it was because I had more on my mind, that early morning flight. I was on a schedule the night before. That's never a great way to get rest. I had a few things to pack, so I left them out and set the alarm on my iPod for 5 AM and went to bed. I would wake at 5, pack, eat, hit the road by 5:45 and be at the airport by 6:15, the recommended 90 minutes before departure.

At 5:55 AM, I woke up and looked at my iPod. There was no way 5:55 was right. In my confusion, I refused to consider that I had overslept. Was there a time change? Was my clock wrong? Surely mom and dad would have woken me up if it was actually almost six. As I finally fully emerged from sleep, I saw the truth that I had, in fact, overslept. (Turns out, lots of people relying on an iPhone/iPod touch as an alarm had the same issue today.) And had to shower. And eat. And pack. And be at the airport in 20 minutes. Not gonna happen.

I power-showered, stuffed my belongings into my bags, and plopped down at the breakfast table. I shared the news with Mom and Dad that we were gonna be late. Looked for DVD that had come to Michigan with me in my drive. (Sorry, Julio, we should get It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia disc 2 from seasons 1-2 in the mail in soon.) We left for the airport at 6:25, arrived there close to 6:45. The lady at the check-in desk told the guy in front of me to get right in the TSA line because it had been long.

The line was indeed long. It wound its way back into the waiting lobby and up towards the check-in counters. I had about 35 minutes before they shut the doors at the gate. As it turned out, there were 34 minutes of line there. I was the last person to make my flight. Several people behind me didn't make it.

As I write this, I'm sitting on a plane flying directly over the Bahamas. We've got a stop in St Thomas, then we backtrack to San Juan. The first flight was brief, and my layover afterward wasn't even long enough for me to stock up on overpriced Dr Pepper at O'Hare. Right now, this is the first chance I've got to reflect on today and this young year. To summarize it: So far, looks like there will be a lot of oversleeping (something I almost never do), bidding a good-bye to my parents, waiting in long lines, and narrowly making flights. I'm not sure what to make of it if these first few hours are any indication of the year ahead. If everyday is like this, expect me to be bald next time you see me.

Tim Team

2010-12-31T14:17:00.006-05:00

I figured I'd share this video with the world. I enjoy it. No one was seriously injured in the filming, although our wipeout was pretty serious.

I spent much of yesterday at Grace Adventures, hanging out with some Tim Team-ers from this past summer. It was great to be there, as I'm a big fan of those kids, each and every one of them. And besides, it's a blessing to my soul just to be there. I have many fond memories there, many that are with me everywhere I go, and some that only seem to pop up when I'm on the grounds. I don't know if there's another place on earth that has such an emotional context for me; just being there is an escape, in a way. I could drone on sentimentally with my whole history, but I won't. I wrote an article for their newsletter a while ago (find it here, page 4) that sums it up fairly well, if you want to read it.

Tim Team was a huge part of why I came back to be on staff, and why I'm involved in ministry today. I can't remember working harder or seeing the value of service more than I did my first week of SALT camp in 2000. It was an honor last summer to be involved in the program, and I hope these kids will come back to be on Tim Team again, and eventually on staff. If not at Grace, somewhere where they'll grow.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T23:11:00.004-05:00

It was about a month ago when I decided that I needed to come home for Christmas. I had been planning to put it off until later in January, just to come home for a visit. But it's an odd thought to think of your family, thousands of miles away, incomplete, eating homemade waffles for breakfast and later devouring a Christmas feast without you, reading Luke 2 before getting to the gifts. And so it seemed a much better idea to fly home and be there for Christmas. I didn't tell my parents.

Well, I sort of did. There was a bit of deception on my part, for which my parents have already forgiven me. I think. I told them I'd be home in January - check, cuz I'll be here until January 1. I told them I'd come home on the 21st. I flew into Grand Rapids December 21st. No harm done. Jon was my inside man, he picked me up at the airport. He also ran an errand to fetch my credit card about a month ago. I tried to be vague in phone calls leading up to my return, but even so, I assumed they must have suspected. But that wasn't the case. Mom and Dad were shocked. My sisters and brother-in-law were surprised. My sister-in-law sorta suspected because she sorta overheard a phone conversation with my brother that sorta alluded to it.

When I returned, I held my niece, Mae, and she just looked at me and smiled, and it looked like there was disbelief in her 18 month old eyes. I can't say whether or not she fully understood what was going on, but she filled me with joy. When I saw Elli, my other niece, she was tired and cranky and overwhelmed, and she screamed. She seemed to feel a little better today when I saw her again.

Today, my Christmas stocking is somewhere in Puerto Rico, in a package my parents sent for me. That's okay - it will be waiting for me when I return New Year's Day. It was worth it to be here, to hear Luke 2 (which is much shorter now than when I was 9), to make annual use of the family's waffle iron. We sat and played Balderdash and Uno, and frustrated as I was with the new rules that either I didn't catch or they didn't explain, it was a lot of fun. There was a huge blast from the stereo in the living room, with Mae sitting in front of it, suddenly terrified and bawling, having found the volume knob before the power button.

I've got another week here, with some time planned and some time blessedly open and empty, which I intend to keep that way and which makes it, in a way, planned. Then next Sunday, I'll board a flight and head back to Puerto Rico, away from the cold and (sparse) snow. And this time, I really have no idea when I'll be back here, when I'll see my family again. It's much easier for me to get here than it is for them to get down there. But that, I guess, is the tradeoff of doing good work in a beautiful place.

Christmas in Puerto Rico

2010-12-20T14:23:00.002-05:00

Doesn't feel like Christmas here yet. Something about 85 degree weather everyday makes it hard for a native Michigander like myself to get into the holiday spirit. I don't have any decorations up, no lights, no tree, nothing of the sort. (For the record, my lack of decor isn't indicative of my grinchy-ness, it's mostly due to, uh, budgetary constraints.)

I, however, am just one sunburned Michigander on an island full of people who love Christmas. Puerto Rico is mostly Christian (and most of that demo is Catholic), so Christmas is kind of a big deal here. Just because I'm not decorating doesn't mean everyone else down here isn't. Downtown Ponce is decorated with beautiful Christmas lights. Lots of houses in the barrio put some Stateside displays to shame.

Like the states, Black Friday was a stay-offa-the-roads kind of day that left the retailers trashed. Even now, Walmart is a zoo and must be avoided at all costs.

There are all kinds of non-English alternatives for carols. Ever wondered how Silver Bells sounds in Spanish? Come visit. This means that I have not heard the usual barrage of Christmas classics since Thanksgiving like the rest of ya's. So I can still handle me some Perry Como.

Actually, Christmas here goes beyond Christmas in the states. It officially starts with Thanksgiving and goes until Three Kings Day, January 6, which corresponds with the Feast of Epiphany. I didn't know anything about Three Kings Day until I got here. The town of Juana Diaz, just up the street, is Three Kings Day central, apparently. Crowds from around the island come for the spectacle, and I heard they send people to Rome to meet the Pope in preparation for it.

No Comprendo, part dos

2010-12-11T19:37:00.004-05:00

It's all good when I'm trying to buy groceries and the lady at the check out and I can't have a conversation. All she has to do is scan 'em and bag 'em, and I'm outta there with another week's worth of grub.

And it's not so bad when I order something off a menu without knowing exactly what's on it, because my taste buds have gotten used to making the most of mystery meals. (Sidenote: I am currently paying the price for an experimental meal from Monday, the leftovers of which I finished on Thursday and subsequently banished my appetite thenceforth. I'm too embarrassed to tell you what all went into my mac and cheese remix.)

But when you need to relate to someone, to help them feel engaged and at home and comfortable - and this is a big part of my nature, to make people feel included - lacking language skills poses a problem. This weekend, we had our service retreat, and one guy showed up who didn't speak English. He was the first to arrive, and I had a nice enough conversation with him in my broken Spanish, but we couldn't really understand much of what the other was saying. When you can't understand their words, it's nearly impossible to read a person. That whole "90% of communication is nonverbal" thing flies out the window when there's a language barrier. Think about it: You hear someone's words, and only then do you start to gauge their tone, their sincerity, their comprehension. (Hey, that General Communications degree is starting to pay off!) When you're not getting the words, you're not getting much of anything that goes with 'em. Or against 'em. Reading people is something I think is a strength of mine. But I cannot read people when I don't understand their language.

I spoke to a (small) group today for the first time, and had to use a translator. I talked about submission to God and trusting Him fully to meet your needs. I had a few pages of notes - read that as "a meticulously wordeed transcript." I knew when it took us a whole minute to get past the first paragraph that the transcript was gonna have to go because we'd be there for an hour. So it flew out the window. Also, there was the smell of a wet dog coming from a cage behind me, and really loud salsa music coming from next door, and that whole mac and cheese remix thing that I had to contend with. When you have to stop yourself to wait for translation every sentence, you can't find any rhythm, and neither can your listeners. I've never been very good at feeling out an audience though, so they may very well have gotten what I was saying. I think, though it was tough, it was a success.

The hardest part about learning a new language is listening. We get the urge to translate things, but I don't think you're supposed to do that. It's not efficient. We think in English, but to truly speak another language, you need to find a way to think in it instead. It has to do with this:

Words aren't really things.

Wha?

Words are symbols of things. What we call an orange isn't really an orange, it's a thing we symbolize with the word "orange." It's the same thing that Puerto Ricans call a "china" or a "naranja." Since I think of things as English words, when I hear spanish words I try to put them into English so I can understand them. Bilingual people take that step out. I told Julio that it was hard to speak with a translator and he agreed. He doesn't like translating. He thinks in English when he's talking to someone in English, and he thinks in Spanish when he talks to someone in Spanish. I'm not there yet. I need to learn a lot more words before I get there. This, I think, is why vocabulary is important. I can think in little Spanish phrases and words. "Yo creo que" - I think that... "Hola" - Hi. "No necesito..." I don't need... Those are little things that I don't need to put into English to say.

This concludes the cognitive science lesson for today.

How about a video of me getting bitten in the ear by a lizard:

Ministering in Culture Shock

2010-12-05T17:13:00.004-05:00

Over the weekend, we had scheduled a service retreat for college aged kids to come, serve, and pitch in by helping some people in the barrio.

had.

scheduled.

This was to be my first sponsored program, my first gig on staff. I wouldn't really be running the show, but it was still a big deal because I hadn't seen us put on a retreat yet.

The week leading up to it, I asked Teresa if we knew how many people would come, but nobody had RSVP'd yet. That's typical, she told me, people usually don't RSVP but they show up anyway. So we made our preparations - booked a band, assigned times to speak, lined up some projects in the barrio. The cooks bought food. And Friday came.

From whenst this feedback came, I'm not sure, but I think it was largely through Facebook and word of mouth that we discovered "Lots of people have finals can't make it. A few said next weekend would be better."

Oh really. Huh. How many do we know for sure are planning on coming?

One. For sure. And the band.

Sooooo.... We maaaaay have a lot of people, we may not. Our team put our ears to the ground, er, phone, and did some digging. Lots of calls were made and a conveniently consistent picture was painted that if we moved the retreat to next weekend, people would come. And maybe bring friends. Hopefully bring friends.

Gametime-decision.

We decided to hold off. We made more phone calls, sent a Facebook message (how did anyone get the word out about anything before Facebook?) and an email. We canceled with the band, and put off the work projects. As for anyone who didn't get the memo and showed up anyway, they would learn a valuable lesson about the importance of RSVPing, particularly for service retreats.

In the end, one person came that night (not the one we knew about before), took the news pretty well as I understand it, and just went home with a little extra free time. We lost our band, and we need to find a new one, and soon. There will still be yards in need of cleanup and fences in need of painting this weekend. And we'll be there, ready to serve.

On Friday, when this whole thing went down, I wasn't really shaken by it. I'm usually pretty steady and chill, unless there's a microphone in front of me. I assume that displacing a retreat in the states would probably take an awful lot more string-pulling and rearranging. People plan more. College kids have too much going on. High school kids - actually, all kids - have soccer and ballet and band and debate and winter ball and theater and tutors and all kinds of other stuff. They have some of that here in Puerto Rico. But there are far fewer pieces to rearrange here. It's more laid back, more chill. Like me. In that sense, we fit each other quite nicely. People tend to deal with things as they arise, which means they often wait until the last second for things, as well. I'm guilty on that one, too.

And yet, this poses some serious challenges for long-term as well as short-term planning. Not every retreat will be so easy to reschedule. We can't always allow our plans to align with the uncommitted, and we can't always hope the plans of the uncommitted fall our way. This is one of the clear challenges of ministering in culture shock.

When I figure out how to handle that, I'll let you know.

Tonight's sunset, put to two different musical styles:

Living with open windows

2010-11-30T19:34:00.006-05:00

Category: Things Jim hasn't figured out.

Turns out this is a broad, broad category with many, many things of various shapes, sizes, and importance. Importances? That can't be right. Add basic grammar to the list.

One of these things is Puerto Rican weather. It's still very hot. It is the tropics, after all, but I don't know if this is going to last forever. Maybe it gets comfortably cooler someday. In Juana Diaz, the average high drops from 91 in summer to 87 in winter. Apparently, that's enough of a change for Puerto Ricans to shy away from the beaches and buy jackets at Old Navy when they put 'em on the racks. But: I'm learning what it's like to live with your windows open, all the time. I sleep with the windows open, the atmosphere creeping in through the shutter slits.*

When people nearby are burning things, I smell campfire. When someone starts their car in the morning just outside my window, I get a deep breath of exhaust. And each morning, there comes this point shortly after I come out of deep sleep but long before I need to get up, when my sense of smell brings me out of my dreams and back to the reality that I'm living by the ocean, and as I lay there I can smell the salt in the air and there's a peace about it. And I hear everything: The ocean, the cars whizzing down PR-1, cats fighting mere feet away from my sleeping ears. Turns out the Marshall cat is a bully.

Add Going to the Movies in Puerto Rico to the list. Yesterday, Julio and I went to see Unstoppable. Fantastic movie, by the way. A timetable:
2:05: We sit down, and there's nothing on the screen. iPod touch time.
2:15: Posted showtime. Still nothing on the screen. No music. Nada.
2:17: Commercials/previews begin. They're mixed in with each other.
2:48: AFTER 31 MINUTES OF COMMERCIALS AND PREVIEWS THE MOVIE FINALLY STARTS. I thought maybe something was wrong. I wanted to go find someone and ask them why there was no movie, why we were only seeing previews and commercials when I had paid $3.50 to see Denzel Washington race against time to stop a runaway train carrying toxic chemicals in this non-stop thrill-ride also starring Chris Pine and Rosario Dawson. All the while, we were freezing. You would people living in a tropical culture would prefer keep the thermostat a little higher, like out of the 50s. People bring sweatshirts and coats to the movies. Maybe ones they bought at Old Navy. Also, it was too loud. But I don't want to complain.

Really, I don't.

I am not a curmudgeon. It's a Grace Adventures-ism to choose your attitude, because when you begin to be cynical and skeptical, you can only view the world through that lens, and everything gets flavored a little more sour than it really is. I feel compelled to tell you I like it here a lot. But it's the peculiar stuff that is worth mentioning. After all, no one wants to hear that I spent Sunday afternoon lying in a hammock between two coconut trees, reading the Hobbit. Without a fruity, frozen beverage.

People who get to come here for a few days or a week usually can only take a handful of reactions home. A few that are easy pickins': The people are really crazy, dangerous drivers. They only eat rice and beans. It's so hot. There are lots of fast food places, and they're not fast. There are lots of bugs, and some of them are really big. The movies start late and they crank the AC so you freeze. There are mangy dogs everywhere. Some of the cats are mean.

Those might very well be the first things on kids minds when they return home and are asked about their mission trip. But I hope they've had much deeper reactions than a few natural and cultural oddities. That's not why they come, that's not we host them, that's not what missions are about.

Hm.

Missions.

Speaking of things I don't have figured out... But that's a topic for later.

*Not to be attempted as a tongue twister, ever.

No comprendo

2010-11-24T09:49:00.007-05:00

I have lived here for two whole weeks and I still cannot speak Spanish.

Before I came, people gave me mixed advice as to how well I'd get along here with my level of Spanish. I know a little bit. Not a lot, but enough to be dangerous. And little enough to be dangerous. A guy from the Dominican told me I'd be fine.

Lawrence, a missionary who's been here for a long time, told me you're never lost in Puerto Rico. There's always another English speaker around, no matter where you are. All of the government documents are supposed to be in English and Spanish. I think they're supposed to provide an English translator if you have official government business. That's not always the case, though. At one government office, Lawrence was told "We speak Spanish here."

Kids learn English growing up in school. So anyone who's been educated should, in theory, be able to speak it, at least a little bit. But there's a reluctance to pick it up. People don't always admit it when they do know it. They would rather speak Spanish than stumble through a conversation in English, and I can't really blame them for that. I've had a few encounters which begin something like this:

Me: "¿Hablas inglés?"
Them: [shakes head]
Me: [unintelligible, grammatically barren Spanish mumbling]
Them: "Jeez. I guess I can help you with that."

Now, this doesn't always happen. I actually can get a few thoughts across. I'm getting pretty good at telling people, in Spanish, that they need to speak slowly because I'm bad at Spanish. Hablo muy terriblé. And when people speak slowly and deliberately, I can pick up what they're talking about and usually formulate a response.

But.

When I'm all alone, and someone says something to me in Spanish, my brain's first response usually isn't to translate, it's "Holy crap, Spanish. Whaddaya gonna do?" And so even if they say words I know, I don't hear them. The other day I was at the mall in Ponce looking for some flippy-floppies (I was in my swim trunks.) The clerk behind the counter said "Buenos Tardes." (Good afternoon.) I panicked. "Bien, ¿y tu?" (Good, and you?) The next thing she said was, in English, "You don't speak Spanish, do you?" I hung my head and said no. It's simulataneously hilarious and humiliating. But I do. Sort of. I can read it, I can hear it fairly well. I just can't hardly speak it.

There have been a few interactions in which I, much like a Puerto Rican who'd rather just not mess with an awkward conversation in the wrong language, just confess I don't speak Spanish. Someone will rattle off long, mumbly phrases that I don't understand. "No comprendo," I said, once.

I've heard that before. It's kind of the cliché phrase you'd hear in the States from an immigrant, often from Latin America. "No comprendo."

I haven't always handled it well. It's frustrating to hear when you're trying to convey something. Oh jeez. another non-speaker. If you're gonna live in the country, ya better learn to speak the language.

But there's something really humiliating about confessing that. I live here and I don't speak the language. I'm suddenly something people have to accommodate. When I first said "no comprendo," I immediately thought about immigrants who have to say that in the States, and how they must share my humiliation. I can never, ever, hear that again without feeling great empathy.

I've never been one to rage about the fact that you need to press one for English and extend your phone call for another 3 seconds. Some people throw a fit over that. This is America. We speak English here. Most of us do. Some of us don't. We all probably should eventually, but it takes some time.

Either way, language is a huge barrier. If I'm going to live here and serve people, and relate to them, I had better be able to speak their language. My job requires it.

In other news:

They have Black Friday here, too.

Speaking of Thanksgiving-related chaos, here in Puerto Rico they have the Turkey Run. Like our lame-duck day-before-a-holiday school days, kids show up to school and don't really do anything. They eat breakfast. Then they have a race and the winner gets a Turkey. I went this morning to check it out at the school down the road. And since I still can't figure out how to embed the video and have it fit right, video is HERE.

How I came to have a dead roach in my sink.

2010-11-18T13:45:00.007-05:00

I don't consider the following to be a particularly harrowing tale, nor do I consider my foe to be a particularly harrowing foe. He (she?) is but one of many roaches I will encounter here in Puerto Rico, and I suspect I should encounter larger, stranger bugs under even more precarious circumstances later on. But the roach in this tale has the distinction of being the first living roach I encountered. So he (I'm going to make assume for the purpose of brevity that it's a male) gets his own blog entry.

I was cleaning and reorganizing my kitchen a bit. I had just replaced the liner in my garbage can. It was pristine and unblemished, its mouth stretched wide, the plastic pure and white and clean down below. If you happened to, say, deposit the last bit of toast or fruit inside, one could still retrieve and consume it without much apprehension.

My dishes and food items had heretofore been somewhat intermingled between kitchen cabinets and open hanging shelves. I had decided, for wont of avoiding insect-related contamination, to place the dishes in the cabinet and the food items (properly sealed, of course) on the open shelves. Time would tell if this was a wise decision or not, but at that point I'd shuddered at the idea of dishes out in the open, crawling with the massive bugs I'd been warned of by those who'd journeyed here previous to me.

I had seen bugs. Why, just that day I'd encountered more than a fair allotment of mosquitoes, whipping weeds as they ignored my exposed and Off!-greased limbs, penetrating to my shoulder blades through the defense of a single t-shirt. I would later inspect the damage and find each shoulder blade tragically festooned with dozens of bites. And of course, in my weed-whipping I'd made enemies of several fire ant colonies, effortlessly lopping off the tops of their habitats and watching as they gushed forth to repair the destruction I'd left. I'll stop short of promoting the theory that all bugs are in cahoots. But I have my suspicions. I have reason to believe that a certain cockroach was sent my way.

There, behind a humidity-crusted Gatorade can left by an intern who lived here before me, he lay in wait until I began my domestic duties. I began to transfer the goods. And as I moved the can aside he emerged, bold and surprisingly mobile, shocking in his agility. He skittered off behind the nearest defensible position, an empty tupperware container. I leaped back.

I stood there for a moment. This is it. It's going down. Me and him. At least, I hope it's just me and him. He better not have friends. Don't roaches always have friends? How many am I dealing with here? Assess the situation. One small cupboard. One small roach. It's time to move.

I approached the cupboard. I removed everything from the left of his position. Then everything to the right. I searched nearby for a non-cooking-utensil that was blunt and capable of flattening a cockroach. I settled on a broom. And then: Quickly snatched the tupperware from the cupboard. He fled to a corner and stopped.

I stared at him. He stared back at me.

Get the camera. No, he'll be gone.

I stood there for a minute longer. Not time to smash him yet.

How do roaches like fire?

There was a lighter nearby. I flicked it again and again, increasingly closer to him, illuminating the cupboards. He cowered. I was clearly the one in charge here. He'd gotten himself in way over his head. Barring some last-minute death-defying heroics on his part, I was going to win.

With a sharp jab of the broom handle, I squashed him into the corner, and he fell to the bottom of the cupboard. Victory. I jabbed him again. There was a stain of roach goo on the wood behind him.

Those who have encountered roaches before will know it's far too early to call this match.

Very soon, the roach popped up again, skittering in a circle, less agile but every bit as quick. I leaped back again.

I cannot say how he did what he did next, only that he did it. In his limp, half-smashed condition, he managed to get up over the lip of the cupboards and get airborne. Flight, blessedly brave, courageous flight. Now, when a thing manages to get itself launched like that, it is beyond the realm of reason and nothing can be assumed about his capabilities. As his flight carried him downward, I instinctively stepped back and tried to guess what his trajectory would be upon landing. He came to a hard landing on the lip of the sink, and stumbled clumsily toward the drain.

And there he stayed, exhausted, his antennae waving in the sultry Caribbean air, waiting for me to end it.

Very slowly, I raised the handle of the broom, and brought it down with a crunch, halving him over the grate of the drain.

And that is how I came to have a dead roach in my sink.

I fished him out with a plastic bag and tossed him into the garbage can. And there he presently rests, wrapped in a plastic bag, the sole occupant of an otherwise pristine garbage can.

Cueva Ventana

2010-11-15T20:58:00.007-05:00

We work Saturdays. We get Mondays off.

Yesterday, Julio and I drove up through the mountains to Cueva Ventana in the northern part of the island. Along the way, we stopped at an oft-visited spot called The Jump, where you can dive 25-35 feet into the water. I was man enough for the 25-foot jump. Not the 35. Yet. Afterward, we visited a roadside stand for some Domplinas, which are like meat pies. Mine was chicken, and it was amazing, and I want another one. Then, onto Cueva Ventana. The picture and the video won't do it justice, but here they are anyway:

[click to embiggen]

Find a video here.

This is the first video I ever put on YouTube. It's kind of a big deal. Now, if only I can figure out how to fit the video into this template....

jim

Abrupt

2010-11-12T17:02:00.004-05:00

The ground here has been saturated by recent rainfall. When I arrived, there were puddles everywhere. And Campamento del Caribe sits near a big swamp (maybe a few big swamps) so when the rain comes, it swells. There's another bog that overflows and streams across the road, around camp, and finally into the Caribbean. So there's a lot of water. And there are a lot of mosquitoes. They are particularly bad today, enough that I need to run from my apartment to the office.

Julio told me putting on bug spray would be part of my morning routine – shower, dry, deodorant, bug spray. I resisted at first, but he was right. Even when I put it on, I find myself covered in bites. They're persistent too. There's no sense in wearing multiple layers, it's too hot. And these bugs are very capable of biting through a single t-shirt. So you can overdress and sweat through the tropical heat, or you can underdress and hope to avoid the bugs. I favor the bugs over the heat. For now.

Tropical life is a whole new reality. I'm not nearly so enamored with the palm trees as I was when I came here for a week 12 years ago. The ocean right out my back door is nice. But it doesn't feel like paradise, doesn't feel like vacation. It's not vacation, it's not paradise. It's life. It's work. It's permanent. And that's not a disappointment.

I haven't had an “I'm really here!” moment yet. Moving somewhere on an airplane is so abrupt.

You start in an airplane terminal in a major city. You step into a tube with wings and semi-comfortable seats and a whole bunch of other people and complimentary beverages. The tube leaves. A few hours later, it lands. You leave the tube and find your suitcase, just as you'd packed it (in theory). And then you step out into a new world. So just like that, in a matter of hours, your reality distinctly changes. There's nothing gradual about it. If you drive, you see the landscape subtly transform. Your route lets you see where you've come from and where you're going. It's gradual. And gradual is nice, it lets you take your sweet time and observe and muster your courage and test things out a bit. Gradual is safe.

But you can't drive to an island. You can't get here gradually. You have to jump in. You don't get to test things, to observe. You're confronted with things that take some getting used to.

There's spanish with a lisp - “Como ethta?” There's the constant sound of fans, as long as the power is on. The other day, the power was off because of a recent thunderstorm. Julio said he laid down on concrete floor to cool off and fell asleep and Evi, his dachshund, came and licked his fingers to make sure he was okay. I'm used to a morning routine, but here you end the day covered in sweat and bug spray and sun block, and nobody should crawl into their sheets in that condition. So now it's pm showers only. Then there's Reggaeton. I brought distaste for it with me. I sat next to a reggaeton production supervisor on the airplane. People here love it, apparently, but I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't seem to hate it.

None of this, of course, is insurmountable.

TRAVELOGUE NOTES: GRR TO ATL TO SJU (NOTES TO SELF)

2010-11-09T10:21:00.003-05:00

Note 1: Travelogue. Hmm. What is a travelogue? Figure this out because whatever this is, it might not be a travelogue. Maybe it's “travel log.” That makes more sense than tagging on the -ue and making it all frenchlike. I have no love for the French. Well, travelogue or travel log, gotta write something useful.

Note 2: I used to like airports. I used to be fascinated with them. Less so, now. Too big, too busy, too anonymous. Less enamored with the fact that these people, unified by geography, are about to splinter out over the globe. Exotic locales are a little less enticing when you're about to move there for a year. It strikes me that I've done a lot of traveling alone in the last few years. That's good and bad. Bad because there's no one to watch your stuff when you need to make a trip to the can. Erm, garbage can. You're essentially tied to your stuff, one all-inclusive unit. I am my guitar. I am my bulky backpack. How new-agey. On the other hand, traveling alone is good because there's no one to wait for, to decide with, to argue with over where you buy your overpriced airport lunch. Today, it was Au bon pain. Au Bon Pan? Maybe. Upon finishing my meal ($13 for Mountain Dew, chips, and a sandwich. Yikes.) I wished it would have A) Tasted better and B) Cost less. Nothing I can do now, except make better budgetary decisions.

Note 3: Mom encouraged me to bring my guitar. I hesitated at first, I'd just assume leave it behind and borrow one from someone else when I get there. But she said she'd pay for me to bring it and it ended up being free anyway as a carryon. Now, there is something cool about walking through a crowded airport with a guitar. People can only assume that you're an accomplished musician. Really, I can play half of blackbird and a passable version of Vincent, and if I had a chord book I might be able to play some camp songs. But nobody knows that. I am the ultimate poser. And posing, it turns out, is kind of fun. But I learned one lesson: If you are going to bring a guitar and stow it above your seat, you had better make an attempt to be one of the first people on the airplane. Since they charge for bags now, everybody stuffs a carry-on bag to the point of herniation with a full suitcase worth of clothes. As a result, all the overhead bins are full, without failure. So, while everyone is seated, waiting to leave behind the airport and its overpriced sandwiches, you're fumbling to stuff a guitar case into a bin above someone else's seat waaaay at the back of the plane. I broke a sweat and just barely (I hope) maintained my composure. Awkward city. When I boarded, there was one flight attendant who said, “Try to put it up above and if you can't we'll see if we can fit it in the closet.” I thought, and if you can't fit it in the closet? I didn't ask this. I was the last one to sit down. One flight attendant, who was either in charge or on the bottom of the totem pole because she was the only one willing to assist me, at least came over and offered some suggestions. I believe I was the last person to sit down. We took off ten minutes late. Whether or not it was my fault, I do not care to find out.

Note 4: Uncapitalize the title thing if you're going to blog it. You could do it now.... Eh, do it later.

Note 5: ATL to SJU. There's nothing remarkable to remember about this flight. Which is a good thing. The guy next to me assumed possession of the armrest early. They showed Salt, which is exactly the type of movie I guess I expected to see on an airplane. In all of the flights I've been on, I've never been any good at sleeping. Or reading. I mostly look out the window and count down the minutes until we land. Which, when you're flying over the Atlantic at night, there's not a whole lot to see. So this was a boring, slightly uncomfortable flight.

Note 6: San Juan. The first thing I saw next to the airport in San Juan: The Golden Arches. Turns out Puerto Rico has every single fast food joint West Michigan does. So, if comfort food is how you cope, you're going to be fine in Puerto Rico. Julio picked me up. I stepped out of the air conditioning of the airport and into the sweltering, thick, nasty air of San Juan. I will not leave this behind, night or day, save for an occasional cold shower, for the next year. We stopped at Wendy's. Because they don't feed you on three hour flights. Puerto Rican Wendy's is the same as Wendy's in the States except you order things from the English menu to people who (claim they) don't speak English. And it seems to take longer for them to get it done. As we drove south, up into the mountains to cross the island, I saw countless Burger Kings, Wendy's, McDonald's, Church's Chickens, and Subways. Puerto Rico remains very much unique and separate from The States, but like us they have embraced the Dollar Menu.

I submit:

2010-11-03T14:57:00.003-04:00

I can reach way back into my childhood and find the first little prompts that I should become a missionary. Our church hosted missions conferences, and the missionaries who were home on furlough would tell stories and show videos of their exotic, exciting foreign lives. I latched onto the sorts of things that any kid would - images of crappy roads, rustic churches, big bugs and palm trees... being a missionary would be awesome.

Or I can look back at my family history and see that more than a few of my aunts and uncles were missionaries at some point, a point driven home by some of the missionaries I was with in Zambia. "It's in your blood" they told me. Maybe it is. Maybe this whole thing precedes my birth. It's exciting when I think that God had these plans for me long before I was born. Before my family was around. Before the world was around. Okay, I guess I need to reach back to the dawn of time.

Before God created the world, He knew what He'd have me do. It's like, part of His master plan. It's like, cosmic. It's like, whoa.

Okay, let's not get too excited here. But God did have this in store for me from the beginning. It just took me a long time to figure it out.

I considered Bible college when I was in High School. But there was this persistent voice from inside and outside that said: you're smart, get a job, make money. I honestly thought, I love missions but somebody's got to stay here and make money and give it to missionaries. So I went to a big school, and then another big school, and spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars trying to figure out what I was gonna do with my life for a career. I spent my summers at camp. Then I graduated and tried to find a job. And I still spent my summers at camp.

Five years ago, I went to Africa because a friend told me to talk to a missionary from there. Two years ago, I went back again because some missionaries from there invited me and it would have been rude to turn them down and besides, I wanted to go anyway and couldn't get it out of my mind. I think I went for the adventure, to be honest. When I was there, that was when missionaries told me that it was in my blood. When I was there, that was when I realized that the yearning to be a missionary had been in me for a long, long time. When I was there, that was when I decided it I would go and be a missionary for longer, someday.

Someday.

Even then, even when I knew I'd go back, I still had reservations. I was going to go home for a while, keep the crazy missionary pursuits in the "Somedays." There were three things that held me back.

First, a career. If I was going to be a missionary, I would need a trade. I didn't have formal training in missions or evangelism or even ministry. I wanted a trade, a way to make sure I'd feel helpful. A way to justify my being there, a way to feel qualified. Like, I could be a teacher or a builder or a radio guy or a doctor, except not a doctor because that would take a long time and would involve cutting people open.

Second, money. Again, five years of college adds up, and I wanted to be unshackled from that debt. Taking time to pay off debt would allow me the opportunity to stay stateside, to stay safe, to be around my family and, just maybe, work on that third thing - find a wife.

Maybe it's just me, but when you are 24, 25, 26 and single, people start to worry for you and want to hook you up with their friends and start posting Greek Mail Order Bride links on your Facebook wall. You might not feel concerned at first, but the worrying that others do on your behalf is contagious, and you begin to do the math and envision scenarios where you're 40 and alone with cats. I can't have that. I'm allergic to cats.

All three of these things are legitimate concerns. A career, financial freedom, and a spouse are examples of the need to feel useful, to feel free, and to feel companionship. There's nothing wrong with any of these. But naturally, I placed the burden to meet those needs squarely on myself.

I'll go someday, I told myself, but I can't see how I'll ever get along once I come back unless I have a career to come back to.
I'll go someday, I told myself, but I want to pay these bills first, because I can't see how I'll be able to do that when I'm out there.
I'll go someday, I told myself, but I can't see how I'll be able to find a wife if I'm a million miles away.

"I'll go someday, but I can't see how...."

What a thing to tell yourself when you're thinking about working for the kingdom of God! You can't serve God while building up your own safety systems in case he doesn't come through. Either He is sufficient or He is not. Jesus sent his disciples out with nothing. How can you trust Him to do big things in other people's lives if you don't trust Him to do small things in your own?

It dawned on me about a year ago that I was struggling with faith. I believed that God was there, sure, but I wasn't so confident that he'd take care of me. I wanted to take care of myself before I went. Of course, that hasn't worked out too well for me over the last couple years. I got a start to a career to pay down debt. I don't need to go into details, but it was a mismatch and I often felt miserable. And I'm still single. But I'm gonna go anyway.

This summer, I submitted to give up the search for a career and any worries over my debt and single-tude, and consented that I would indeed go forth and serve in ministry. The funny thing is that this specific opportunity centers around camping ministry, the thing I did to fill time in college. I've heard the saying for a loooong time that God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the called. And that was my prayer when I submitted. I'll go. I'm not ready, but you are who you say you are and I trust you with all the other stuff.

Paradi

2010-10-15T14:06:00.005-04:00

I'm on vacation, sort of. I have a few weeks of beautiful transition time, which I think is what I've needed for a long time. A month off does a lot that a day off, or even a week off, cannot do. Until I take off for Puerto Rico, I will sleep late, read, write, hike, photograph, deliver a few pizzas to tide me over, and play Euchre. You can't, and shouldn't, live like this forever. But transition times - Sabbath times - help you get your soul back.

Today I went to McDonald's. My cup, with its missing (read: losing) Monopoly pieces, offers me the chance to WIN a Beaches Resorts Caribbean Vacation* and take the family to paradise! (*Collect IL, IN & KY to win a trip to Turks & Caicos or Jamaica for 2 adults & 2 children 15 yr or younger, ARV $7,000, for the record.) I didn't win, and that's fine. I'm going there anyway. This is where I would insert a "suckers!" if I were the sort of person to rub it in. Which clearly I am not. Also I'm not going to Turks and Caicos wherever in the Caribbean that is anyway. I don't know the first thing about Caribbean geography. Actually, I don't know a whole lot about the Caribbean.

Most of what I know I've gleaned from TV commercials and magazine ads (and, I guess, McDonald's cups), pretty much all of which describe it as a paradise with sugar-white beaches, palm trees, and fruity drinks with umbrellas. I've only been to the Caribbean once, in 8th grade, on a mission trip to the very same camp I'll be living at for the next year. I got stung by a jellyfish, painted a dorm, and ate lots of rice and beans. It was hot and my antiperspirant failed me. It was not paradise.

But there's a lot of the Caribbean I haven't seen (like Turks and Caicos) and it's a huge vacation destination. I'll confess, there comes a point each February when the frozen snow mounds and perma-gray Michigan sky get to me and... I want to go to there. And seek shelter under a palm tree. On a sugar-white beach. With a fruity drink with an umbrella. It's just the sort of place people crave when they're miserable. People take trips or cruises to the Caribbean for a week or so of much needed relaxation, escaping their cubicles and day jobs. For them, it's a happy place, one they associate with joy, rest, simplicity and fun. All good things. But like all vacation destinations, or paradises (paradi?), there are people living there who think it's anything but.

I think that's one of the weird things about vacation spots. We have these limited interactions with them when we go there, and we only get one side. It's a mirage. There's a myth attached to every getaway place, because behind the curtains there are a whole bunch of people who work hard so others can enjoy themselves, and most of them aren't making a whole lot of money. It's a rare person who works in paradise and gets to enjoy it.

Your favorite restaurant is probably full of miserable employees. I don't know anyone who has given a good report about working at Cedar Point or Disney World. Oceana County, MI brings in more than a million people each year to cruise the dunes and jet ski around Silver Lake. But it's also one of the poorest counties in Michigan.

Buzzkill, right?

That's not what I'm going for. Vacations are good. Cruises are good. Restaurants and sand dunes and jet skis and amusement parks are all good things. It's important to get away sometimes, and it's even more important to relax. But all of these things are temporary and fleeting, because real life is going to drag you back eventually.

When I lived in Orlando for a summer, I realized that there are some places that are great to visit and some places that are great to live, and few places that are both. To me, Orlando is a great place to visit, but not necessarily a great place to live. West Michigan probably isn't a great draw for visitors, but I think it's a wonderful place to live.

I've always scoffed at the idea of "Stay-cations," where people stay home and spend their vacation dollars around town rather than dropping the money elsewhere. But maybe the idea has some merit. Living here, right now, with lazy mornings and leaves changing color and skies like paintings... this is pretty good.

And it was time to learn Spanish

2010-10-05T22:55:00.004-04:00

I'm moving to Puerto Rico.

The hugeness of this whole thing has yet to dawn on me, because for now I'm not scared, not grieving the departure from my family, not savoring sweatshirt weather. I'm not packed. I won't for a while. I'm not ready.

But that's okay, because there are lots of things you just can't be ready for, least of which would be moving to a different country*. You can't know what to expect, you can't coach yourself through it. Packing my bags is about the only thing I can do. I can't mentally prepare for this. The best analogy I can think of is jumping into cold water, like I did last week in Upper Silver Lake. Something about being in an inland Michigan lake in October is very very wrong. Made me realize I never, ever want to go Polar bear-ing. I'll try almost anything once, but that's one thing I don't feel the need to ever do. I've heard that when you jump into icy water, your body does crazy things without you telling it to. Like, you lose control of your limbs because all the blood rushes back to the center of your body to keep it warm. And I can't begin to guess what my poor lungs would do. I really see it as a worst-case scenario: no control of limbs, lungs exhale, I sink, you all wear black to my funeral. Hence: Never gonna try it.

Anyway. At camp last week, I stood on the shore, knowing the water was cold but that I had to go in it, and eventually the point came where I had to just go, and accept whatever chills might follow.

Splash.

Oye!

Any remnant of comfort was soon supplanted by cold, penetrating deep to my bones. And: It really wasn't that bad. Soon, after shivers and shouts, I was pretty much accustomed to it, and went about my business of removing The Blob from the waterfront (and thenceforth, draining, deflating, inflating, mopping, drying, deflating, folding, and stowing it.) I could have stood on the shore forever, thinking it through, trying to get psyched up, analyzing, and weighing the circumstances. But that wouldn't have changed anything.

And that's kind of how I'm going to Puerto Rico. It's a big adventure, one I'll love and hate, but I can't really wrap my mind around it for now. There's not really a whole lot that I can do to be ready. Of course, I have to pack.

And I need to brush up on my Spanish. But then again, I've always heard the best way to learn a language is to need to learn a language. And I've got three semesters (college semesters, mind you) stowed away somewhere in the back of my brain.

*Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm struggling with how to say this, because Wikipedia tells me that Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States. Yeah. So, not a different country. But if Alabama seems like a different country, I can certainly refer to Puerto Rico that way. Also, I don't need a passport. And neither will you.

There is no God like You, Part two

2010-09-12T23:22:00.003-04:00

(continued from before)

It doesn't jive with that whole "conversation" thing very well. I know a lot of people who embrace diversity, especially in regards to religion. For them, other faiths and approaches to God or god or gods or the deeper meaning of life are fascinating indicators of the brilliant spectrum of people and ideas on our planet. Buddhism is cool. Baha'i is cool. Islam is cool. Everything is cool. And yet, Christianity - specifically American Christianity - is too accessible, too status quo, too passe. It's decidedly uncool. We've had our moment and - it seems - it must be time to let the others in.

Having grown up in West Michigan, I was raised in a Christian world. We were the majority, even in high school and college. Either I didn't see it or I surrounded myself with enough Christians to be ignorant of it, but it turns out this world is not a Christian one. Once I entered the workforce, I was suddenly surrounded by people who definitely didn't have a Christian worldview. I'm surprised at how much of a surprise it was for me to meet people who not only weren't Christians, but who outright rejected Christianity.

It also might be surprising that none of this has really had an influence on my faith. In many things, I'm apt to second guess my own standing in the midst of opposition and dissent. "Well, all these people can't be wrong," I tend to tell myself, and as a result I've lost a lot of arguments when I've been right. But here's the thing: the popular opinion on something has little to do with the reality or legitimacy of that thing. In other words, Christianity should be neither accepted or rejected because of its coolness.

If Christianity is embraced because of its established-ness, or if it's rejected amidst the diversity of competing faiths, then its core has been sorely missed. There is only Christ crucified and resurrected. That is the one narrow gate through which any evaluation of Christianity has to pass. If the resurrection happened, and I believe it did, the whole world can be wrong and it doesn't matter. His resurrection remains.

Of course, I want the world to be right. It's just that we can't all believe different things and still be right. And there, again, is that pesky, intolerant worldview.

There is no God like You, part one

2010-09-12T21:59:00.003-04:00

I made the drive back to camp tonight with the radio on. Sometimes, music is perfect for the drive; other times, I need some dialogue, another human voice in the car. Tonight it was the latter. I love radio preachers. So at first, it was Dr. David Jeremiah, telling me about mercy - mercy is God withholding what I deserve. And grace - Grace is God giving me what I don't deserve. I like that summary. I'm a big fan of grace.

His sermon ended, they teased me with a Chuck Swindoll promo. I love that guy. But the next show wasn't his, and they moved onto something else less preachy. So I moved onto another station: NPR.

Sunday nights, they broadcast Speaking of Faith, "a conversation about belief, meaning, ethics, and ideas." I'm a fan of this conversation. So I listened. The show is about to change its name, so I guess it makes now a good time to play some snippets from its last epoch before the big change. Over the years, they've spoken to lots of people about lots of things. Buddhists, Yoga Instructors, Desmond Tutu, all part of the conversation searching for some deeper meaning to life. I'm sufficiently convinced that the meaning of life comes from Jesus Christ, God's son. All of these opposing viewpoints point out just how strikingly intolerant my worldview is. But then they played a clip of a Kenyan woman singing a Swahili song with some lyrics I recognized. "Hakuna Mungu kama wewe," was the line - they would sing this while they were planting trees, the woman on the radio said. It was a refreshingly beautiful, enlightening moment, hearing how someone raised from a different culture would worship. She sang it again and again, unwavering, confident. I'll break it down for you:

Hakuna - If you've seen the Lion King, you've know from Pumbaa and Timon that "Hakuna Matata" means no worries. Hakuna means "No," as in, "There is/are no"
Mungu - God
Kama - like
Wewe - You.

There is no God like You.

As in, You're the only one.

What a strikingly intolerant worldview.

(to be continued. Soon, I swear.)

after the long silence

2010-08-29T20:58:00.002-04:00

Let's see.

[looks back at previous blog posts.]

I haven't blogged since May. Silence since then. Big silence, long silence, full of learning and big stuff and important lessons and millions of other things. So it's okay. Sometimes things are overtaken in importance, blogging is one of them. Especially when you haven't done it regularly in a while. It was easy to push blogging aside in favor of the constant labor and noise of summer camp and the required rest that goes with it. In the last few years, my topics have slowly shifted to more poignant, serious matters - an honest pursuit of truth, I guess - though that doesn't necessarily reflect a shift in my demeanor. I have no interest in ever taking myself seriously or becoming an adult, or anything like that. Still, it was hard to find something to return with, some all-encompassing, amusing, back-and-better (read: wiser) perspective on life, the world, etc.

And so I've had to ask myself just what I want this blog to be. The first one, and everything after this, too, I guess. I've never wanted it to be an extension of Twitter - what I did, with who, when and where. I don't want it to be a proving ground for my creative writing.

And yet, I have to come back to blogging, to writing things that people - people I know, people I don't know - will read, and will want to read through. And so I've had to ask myself just what I want this blog to be. I guess these are essays about my life. I never thought I'd do that - write essays for fun. But that's what this has been for a while. What with that whole overstated honest pursuit of truth thing I just mentioned, this has always just been my way of making sense of the world. I think I started blogging in 2002. I just haven't done it a whole lot lately.

So here I am. Back, sorta. Not sure where I'm going, how often I'll be blogging. Maybe I have more to say after the silence, maybe not. Like I said, it was a big silence, long, important, full of lessons learned and millions of other things.

The Number 26

2010-05-28T22:45:00.003-04:00

Last Tuesday, I sat on a coffee table in Josh's apartment and gave him a formal schooling in Dr. Mario on the Nintendo. I dominated. The TV was sitting on the floor, in the corner, one of three in the living room for Fred's upcoming Midtown Tetris Challenge. I wouldn't be in attendance for the Tetris Challenge, but I had thrown my full support behind it. Later, Fred came back and proudly showed off his new Fender Rhodes electric piano, a relic from the 60s or 70s on which Radiohead's Everything in it's Right Place can be perfectly replicated. We tinkered around on it, they made me sit down and forbid me to play chopsticks, but nothing else would come to me. A few years of piano lessons and I couldn't locate anything but chopsticks and a few pretty chords. Don't tell my piano teacher.

When I was a kid, if you had asked me how I saw a typical night for me in my mid-twenties, I'd have pictured grown up things. Paying bills. Wife. Kids. Coffee. Harder crossword puzzles. Then I'd have gone back to the NES. And tinkering with a Piano.

Didn't work out that way. I think that when you're growing up you see a few discrete lines between childhood and adulthood. A driver's license, high school graduation, and a few big birthdays officially usher you into the land of grown-ups. You get bills, kids, coffee, and you suddenly know how to handle more stuff.

At 26, I've got the bills, but no kids, still can't stand coffee, and I still have questions for mom and dad about how to handle stuff. And I've lost the piano lessons. The world is every bit as perplexing as it was when I was a kid. Actually, it's more perplexing. It's weird to have time for Nintendo, and have friends who sponsor Tetris tournaments. So I still don't feel qualified for the whole grown-up thing. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up and I still shudder at the thought of big responsibilities. Not in a worrisome way, but I'd rather not be the last line of defense between order and chaos.

And yet: Age has to carry with it some innate and automatic growth, despite my perceived lack of preparedness. I'm more grown up than I realize. I know some stuff. For instance, that the way I used to see growing up - with the clear, dividing lines between kid and adult - was wrong. It's a gradual spectrum, a gradual ascent (descent? assent?). We've all got some grown-up and we've all got some kid. Some of us spend it on video games, some of us - all of us - still have worry, some of us carry our love for high-school drama with us. Having time for the Nintendo and piano tinkering does not restore my adolescence, even if I wanted it to, but it's still a good time.

Leaving

2010-05-17T16:06:00.003-04:00

This morning, I went to the park to run. I stretched, did some sit-ups, and after the final one laid on my back and looked up at the trees, the sunlight breaking through, blue sky shining down, green grass tender on the back of my neck, my hands. It was 11:00 am.

You cannot do this at 11:00 am if you have a real job.

I did this at 11 am because I do not have a real job.

But Jim, you have a real job, you work at Whirlpool.

No I do not.

What? Explain.

Gladly. I'll share what I can.

I took a job at Whirlpool in October, last year. They found me - actually, Aerotek found me on Grand Valley's careers website and called me, the door opened without my doing. I interviewed, they offered me a job and I took it. I'm more impulsive than I realize. Whirlpool, it turns out, is a pretty good place to work. I'm not sure what all I can tell you about the workplace. Most companies, especially big ones, would rather you didn't blog about work. They don't want people divulging their trade secrets. Being a low-level support rep, and a contract employee, I wasn't privy to too much of that anyway. So they're safe. And I don't have an axe to grind or anything.

I'll tell you a few generic office things: they have a cafeteria in the middle of the building where nobody actually eats. Not once did I eat the cafeteria food. I mostly bought Lipton iced tea there. There are a few blind corners around the building, and some people walk like they have urgent messages for the President. More than once I rounded one of said blind corners nearly to collide with a staffer on a mission, and narrowly avoided a flurry of papers and awkward excuses. It took me a few months to realize that there are rounded mirrors to avoid exactly that situation.

It didn't take long for me to decide that this job was not one I wanted to spend these years of my life doing. But, I know that lots of people have to pay their dues at the bottom in order to work their way up, so I stuck with it. My brother told me he couldn't see me working in a call center. I kind of agreed. But, 40 hours a week in Michigan is nothing to forsake. I stayed for the opportunities and the money, hoping there might be something for me later on down the line. People would ask me how work was going. There's no good way to answer that question if you're not happy. And for whatever reason I couldn't just answer it with a polite, "Great, thanks." So, for future reference, don't ask that question unless you're sure they love what they're doing or are prepared for brutal, quasi-depressing honesty.

The past seven months have brought a lot of introspection. I thought a lot about being a grown-up, about who I am and who God is and why he brought me there. But you can analyze things to death and never understand them any better. So maybe one day I'll have a better idea of what happened in the last few months.

But going off my own gut reactions, I was lonely and unhappy and not ready to spend a lot of time in a cubicle. Even though I could do the job, and do it well with people I liked, there was something more I wanted, things that I need to get out of my system before I can settle down.

I hadn't planned to go back to Grace. Even when I saw that they had need for another core staff position, I was pretty sure I wouldn't pursue it. I was settling in at Whirlpool whether I liked it or not. I'd developed rapport with people in the office, had found opportunities on other teams, began to build relationships with some coworkers outside of work. Leaving would actually involve leaving something behind. But I knew I had to at least consider it. My aim for the next few years is to get back to overseas missions, to find an opportunity abroad. You need money for that. But experience is equally valuable. So as I weighed the opportunity at Grace and shared my thoughts with friends and family, the counsel was pretty consistently to follow my heart, which I discovered was increasingly leading me back to Grace.

I told Grace I wanted the job. I called work a few days later to put in my two weeks notice. Some co-workers were surprised, people were mostly supportive. I put in my last day on Saturday and moved home yesterday. This morning, I laid on my back at the park, looked up at the trees and the sky, and felt thankful that I wouldn't spend a glorious Michigan summer in a cubicle.

Benton Harbor Meijer Time Machine

2010-04-05T21:26:00.005-04:00

It is the night of the NCAA national championship. It's opening day for Major League Baseball. The regular seasons for the NBA and NHL are drawing to a close, with their respective playoff races heating up. In times like these, I need to do what any red-blooded adult American male would. I'm going to write about grocery shopping.

For those of us who grew up going to Meijer, a visit to the Benton Harbor Meijer can be like a trip back in time. Every other Meijer in the world seems to have been updated and outfitted to modernity, with the accouterments to make grocery shopping feel like an event: Low lights, exotic fruits, rustic-looking muffin carts. For me, grocery shopping is an event, but not because of the rustic-looking muffin carts. I think it has to do with having an excuse to spend a bunch of money on food. I don't need accouterments. Which suits the BH Meijer fairly well, because it has no accouterments. It might not know what accouterments are. I'm not sure I do.

A few months ago, I was going to buy a TV. But I couldn't find them at the BH Meijer. I assumed they didn't have them, because they were nowhere near the CDs. A few weeks later, I found them. They were by the jewelry and houseplants. They still cram all their TVs into one narrow aisle, so you can't spot them from across the store and wander zombielike toward their warm, motherly glow. You have to take in the grandeur of a 50" Plasma screen from three feet away with a hook of coaxial cables digging into your spine.

The BH Meijer has the layout that every Meijer had before focus groups told them not to put the milk by the shoes. It's not pretty, but you can still buy a whole lot of stuff there. I would like to recommend that they conduct a focus group about the music they play. It's really terrible. Honestly, I know they haven't updated their floor plan, and that's fine, because I can still get great deals, but they can update their music.

Today, I started at one end with the frozen foods and meats. I realized as I began my cart-fillery that, depending on the direction I went at the beginning, I was choosing the people I would either be consistently stuck behind or crossing paths with once an aisle. In the end, this really doesn't make much difference because I inevitably skip whole aisles - mostly the ones with household cleaners and healthy stuff - and spend a long, long time debating which cheese I want, or whether or not the tomato sauce will make an acceptable pizza sauce.

The ice cream aisle tonight could best be described as a clusterphooey. Someone had been charged with rearranging the novelties - probably at the urging of a focus group - to a more modern arrangement. The Skinny Cows should not be with the Dippin' Dots. I thought, as I maneuvered my cart between tall stacks of hurriedly melting pints, that this was the sort of thing they should do when there aren't people around, like how they do road construction at 3:00 am. They should not be doing this at 8:00 on a monday, prime bachelor ice-cream buying time.

On the tea aisle, there were two women speaking with English accents. Whenever I hear someone speaking in an English accent, I get the feeling I am somewhere significant, where people from all over the world need to go for some reason. And I desperately wanted to ask these foreign women where they were from and what they were doing in the BH Meijer. I was genuinely curious. I also wanted to try to talk to them in my English accent and maybe get some pointers on how to improve it. But this is exactly the cliche kind of American thing to do, especially if you get it wrong. "Scuse me, gov-nah, ah you from Australia?" They would inevitably dismiss me as a stupid American. Of course, these two women were having the most cliche English conversation they possibly could be, berating American tea habits. "They drink it cold here," one said. "I don't like it cold," the other replied. I moved on.

The rest of my grocery shopping experience is pretty uneventful. I bought a mango. I saw the English chicks again, and there were a couple other foreign dudes buying a whole lot of booze.

There's one thing that the BH Meijer has that needs not be improved: The parking lot slopes gently down, away from the entrances. This makes it prime cart sailing territory, and with a good shove, you can easily coast right up next to your Honda Civic.

Just an average piece of fish

2010-03-17T13:29:00.006-04:00

I don't eat much fish. But amidst a flurry of motivation to include more healthy stuff in my diet, while eliminating unhealthy stuff from my lifestyle), and in keeping with recent attempts to learn how to cook, I found a frozen tilapia filet at Martin's for $1.00 and decided to cook it.

The internet is full of useful and useless recipes. Not having much of a natural gauge (as yet) on what cooking tips are practical and impractical, I googled "Easy Tilapia Recipes" and did my best to condense them into one average method of cooking a piece of fish in a hot oven. This may not work with all things. Apparently, as you will see, it works alright with fish. Other things - like, say, how to cook a pastry, might not work so well. I wouldn't debate the tastiness of a hodgepodge average pastry, but it probably wouldn't be easy or marketable. Apparently, though, you can average the sum of all tilapia recipes into a passable fish-dish.

The internet seems to agree that if you're going to bake a piece of fish, you'd better do it above 350 degrees. And you had better do it for several minutes. In my limited experience with baking chicken (three attempts, all of which produced edible but rubbery results) you have to cook it for 30-40 minutes. For a single chicken breast. In those 30-40 minutes, you have plenty of time to debate just how worthwhile it is to devote so much time to a mediocre piece of chicken, decide against it, and drive to a place that will fry it and put it on a bun for you relatively cheaply. This is a debate I am prone to lose. This is where fish has an edge. A narrow tilapia filet - again, the internet agrees with this - can be baked in 10-15 minutes. This does not leave a lot of time for second guessing and debate.

Fish does not, however, have an edge in the category of fishiness. Tilapia, fortunately, is not a particularly fishy fish. No, wait... by that I mean to say that it doesn't have a terribly strong fish flavor. In my cursory tilapia research, it seems consensus that tilapia is a blank canvas of a fish, one with which a chef can show off a complementary sauce. I, however, am not a chef, and thusly am not into sauces that do not come in cans that say PREGO on the side. So I'm not about to flex my anemic culinary muscles.

So I went to Meijer and bought some lemon-pepper seasoning. This made the situation disappointingly easy, and therefore difficult to exaggerate into a witty blog post. To prep the fish, all I did was put down a piece of foil, rinsed the fish (and patted it dry because the internet said to), seasoned it and threw a few lemon slices and a pat of butter on it. I put it in the oven for 12 minutes - again, the law of averages. When it was done, I put it on a plate with some steamed rice and veggies, the kind that comes in a bag that you never have to open, just put in the microwave for five minutes. I think this is how the pioneers did it.

And the finished product (picture way down below): A surprisingly attractive, average piece of fish.

It actually tasted pretty good. This is somewhat of a disappointment because the whole point of me blogging about cooking is to be self-deprecating. And when something like this happens - I produce a plate of well-seasoned, juicy, healthy fish - it's not the car-accident that makes for good blogging. So, my apologies, but the fish was pretty durn good.

Scouring the interwebs for fish-cooking advice.

My extensive spice rack. That's right, Kosher salt. You may recognize the Drake's from my chicken-frying disaster. It has not been used since.

375 degrees. Also, that's a Whirlpool.

The setup.

Healthy stuff. For a buck.

I find that the healthier the food is, the more difficult it is to open.

Sushi.

Slightly less sushi-like.

Not sushi. Sorry for the obstructing oven rack. No, actually, I'm not sorry.

Finished product.

Me: Emerging cook, non-scientist… Hero?

2010-02-11T22:13:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, new experiences can reveal your ignorance in delightful, tasty ways.

Lesson learned: If you let chicken get hot enough, for long enough, it will inevitably reach an edible state. It’s science. And science is proven.

For the record, the last science course I took was biology, and I got a B-minus.

I’m sure there’s a science out there that helps you get chicken to a tasty, edible and aesthetically pleasing state. This makes Rachel Ray and Martha Stewart scientists. Of that science. And I would fail in that science. Case in point:

I told you it did not go well. But how did I get here? Ooh, storytime:

Now, I hesitate to put all these pictures up because you’ll just look at the pictures and skim over all of my carefully chosen, meticulously crafted words. Oh, what the crap, you’ve already stopped reading and looked at all the pictures below. I don’t know why I even bother to write.

This is how it starts. Virgin chicken breast: Blank canvas, just begging the artist to craft it into a masterpiece. Except, I’m no Picasso. I’m more like a four year-old with a couple half-crayons, which will end up in couch cushions or up my nose, and a vague idea of what my final product might look like. No, as you already know, this poor chicken breast isn’t destined for a masterpiece. It’s most certainly doomed.

I would use flour. But the goose is so familiar and comforting. Besides, I didn’t have any flour. The box told me to put the chicken in milk.

Something about this doesn’t look right to me. But the box has ordained it. Also ordained by the box: repeated dipping in milk and Drake’s crispy fry mix. For the record, that is a very fat chicken breast, and this comes into play later. I’ll skip ahead to the frying pan. You’re just looking at pictures anyway.

Immediately, the chicken turned a pretty golden color. I swelled with pride. This whole cooking thing is pretty easy. I don’t know what I was so worried about.

I think 30 seconds went by between that first picture and this last one. After lots of probing and stabbing, I determined that the chicken had acquired a delicious cindery shell and maintained a raw pink center. I had chosen a poor method for cooking a very fat chicken breast.

At this rate, the inside would probably never cook. I decided that this was a failure, turned the burner off, and plopped the charred chicken on a plate.

I walked away with my head hung in shame. I reached for my cell phone and began to search for some pizza coupons, but something inside me whispered to me.

“Don’t give up,” it said. “This thing you’ve started: It’s bigger than you. This is a crossroads in your life. You’ve got a choice, Jim. You can whimper and retreat to a corner with a pizza box, and for the rest of your life approach a raw chicken breast as a mystery meat, leaving its mastery to others all the while growing increasingly dependent and subservient to those more culinarily inclined. You can let the chicken win. Or… Or you can overcome it. You can go back and… you can be a hero, Jim.”

Not being one to ignore inner voices that urge me to heroism, I set my cell phone down. I went back to the chicken and turned the burner on again. Breading be damned, I would get this chicken to an edible state.

And so I did. It took a long, long time. But as I flaked the charred coating of failure off the chicken, and each successive layer of burned shell thereafter, the meat did indeed reach an edible, thoroughly cooked state. Actually, that was kind of inevitable. It’s science after all.

Not pretty…

But edible.

Cooking for one.

2010-01-27T20:39:00.003-05:00

Whoa. It's not often that I get a brilliant idea that begs to be shared with others, but every now and then my brain does me a solid and presents me with something useful.

I am living on my own and, for the first time in my life, I'm entirely responsible for every meal I eat. Actually, I spent a summer in Orlando and sort of cooked for myself, but I also had a job at Papa John's out of which I creatively effected 10+ meals a week. (See? Effect can be a verb. Sup.) The remaining meals were spread across toast, cereal, and various burrito places.

There are a few people I go to for cooking advice. My family has given me a few pointers. My friend Phill has seen, I think, every episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown and has a compendium of odd food-related knowledge. I would watch the Food Network more, but every time I do they bring out some cooking utensil I've never seen before, or a yucca plant, or something else that used to swim in the ocean. I get to feeling I am far more likely to fly a space shuttle than do whatever it is they're doing. I just want to make some tacos.

My tastes have changed since college. I am not content with a can of soup, or ramen, or microwaved - microwaved anything, really. So I've been trying to expand my repertoire. I intend to escape this period of my life with at least a few decent culinary assets on my resume. This experimentation has generally produced subpar meals and lots of dirty dishes. The buffalo chicken quesadillas were undercooked and floppy. Generally, omelets become "skillets" of burnt veggies and unevenly cooked egg.

It's all very funny and embarrassing.

Which brings me to my idea: I want to blog about it and share it with you. I'll take pictures. You'll like it. So in the weeks to come, look for me to expose my culinary ignorance to the world.

Conan, Jay

2010-01-12T21:37:00.004-05:00

Far be it from me to say anything about late night television. In the past few months, I've found myself going to bed at an increasingly early hour. I demand to get my allotted eight hours of nothingness, and since I gotta work a 9-5, scratch that, 8:30 to 5, I have to retire before 11:30 to allow myself a proper morning primping. Which means, I haven't been watching Conan on the Tonight Show. I also haven't been watching David Letterman.

But Jay is on at ten now. So the whole going-to-bed early excuse goes out a very large, very early window. So forget that whole first paragraph. Except the part about ensuring myself a proper primping, that's key. Actually, forget that part too. Yeah, forget the whole first paragraph.

What I'm lining up here is the premise that you should not listen to me when it comes to matters pertaining to late night funnymen. So don't read any further. Go watch the new OK-GO video.

For those of you ill-suited to follow instructions, I'll embark on my late night rant.

Conan is great. Or at least, when I was watching late night television, he was great. He's comforting in a way, because he's a natural. Ever watched an open-mic comedy night? Then you know just how awkward and uncomfortable it is to watch an amateur on stage. I could never, ever tell jokes in front of people. But Conan is funny. He's an expert salesman, especially when the material is lackluster. He was born to be funny on TV. He belongs on the tonight show.

This is where you might expect me to paint Jay Leno as a foil, an anti-Conan. But he's good too. He's not quite as good a salesman as Conan, but he's miles beyond passable. He's a pro. He's good. I read an interview with him that won my respect a while ago. Leno strikes me as an honest guy. He's not nearly as unfunny as Conan fanboys might want to paint him. Conan's getting screwed, yes, but it's not Leno's fault. I don't know whose fault it is. I know it's not my fault.

Conan wrote the world a letter. Really, he did, he addressed it to the "People of Earth." This immediately hooked me. Because I am a people of earth. Person of earth. Anyway. It was eloquent, it was probably the right thing to do. And when you have to clear things up, you write letters. He's standing his ground. And apologizing for his hair. Godspeed, Conan. I'll watch you, wherever you go.

But really, this is the best thing to happen to NBC's latenight lineup since they, uh, messed with their latenight lineup. People are going to watch now. Controversy is great advertising. People are talking about it. Bloggers are posting about it on their lame blogs. NBC is kicking themselves for looking like a bunch of screw-ups, sure, but people are interested now. They're going to tune in. Just watch the ratings go up.

If I can add just one more thing, it's that Craig Ferguson is the best thing in latenight right now. Unfortunately, he's buried behind Letterman, next to Jimmy Fallon. He gives the same odd comforting feeling that Conan does, but with a hint of Scotch.

But what do I know? I go to bed at 11:30.

Conan's take on how The Simpsons should end:

On Paper

2009-12-29T21:54:00.003-05:00

It came to my attention in a loud and unmistakable way that I have not been blogging. For the few of you who have been on hunger strikes, you may dig out your forks and knives and abstain from nourishment no more. My sincerest apologies to everyone, and not just the seven people who read this, everyone. In the world. Why not apologize to the world?

I used to blog a lot. Somehow, I mustered weekly inspiration to scrape out some bit of truth from my everyday life. Lately, that's been tough. I'm still writing. Usually about how hard it is to write, and everything else pertains to what I ate for dinner/how tough work is/what free cable is like, and it usually gets placed in my journal. C.S. Lewis, so I read or heard, never liked journaling, he didn't see the value in it. I kind of like looking back at my thoughts from, say, sophomore year of college. I like having a few books squirreled away that chronicle my life from 2003 on in a naked, vulnerable way. Which reminds me, I need to destroy them before I die. But I like having them. Anyway, I'm writing, mind you.

It’s tough, though. It’s not that I don’t have much to write about. It just turns out there’s less I know about. And that’s not as postmodern as it sounds. I bet most people find that the older they grow, the more stuff they don’t know about.

Consider this: I went out and got myself a job and I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing here. A few people have asked me how it’s going (which is a frustratingly general question). And I have to tell them that, no this isn’t my dream job, but it’s going fine, and it’s far too early to conclude anything about it. It’s far too large a life move to tuck my tail and head back to Grand Rapids to comfort and familiarity. (And to think, I’m just an hour or so down the road. Do come visit.)

I like budgeting. When I got a job I thought, I’ll be making more money than ever before. I’ll get to buy junk I’ve always wanted. When I delivered pizzas, I never knew how much money I’d have. But with a set income, things always seem to work out on paper. And I’m learning: Things do not always work out on paper. I’m still behind, financially. I have no idea where my money goes. I know I’m not spending it. There’s no way I’m going to pay for cable. I am, however, considering a YMCA membership.

But forget the stuff I want. I have a list of things I “need.” Every time I go to the store and hold one in my hand, I tell myself I can go without it. I have on three different, nonconsecutive occasions stood in the aisles at Meijer holding the very same letter file, thinking about how disheveled my desk looks with all the bills and papers and letters in a rumpled pile of chaos. And then I think, this rumpled pile of chaos may not look nice, but it is free. And the letter file is not free. I usually put the letter file back until I go grocery shopping again. This, I think, describes me better than I ever could with my own words. Next time someone asks me to tell them about myself, I’m going to tell them about this, and they’ll really think I’m crazy.

The truth is, I would rather go places. I don’t want things. Forty hours a week makes it hard to go places, that’s my biggest gripe. I went to the bank in Dowagiac after a snow storm the other day, I’d never been there before.

I told God while I was driving there that I didn’t get it. I never asked for this job, never aspired for a life on the lakeshore in Saint Joseph. I like to think that this has been a life move put upon me outside of myself. I have always asked Him to make the moves, while I would watch or follow. So as I drove on slippery white roads stained with gravel for traction, I told him that I didn’t get it, but I would give it a year.

2700 words about 1/2 of Kilimanjaro that I dug out of an old journal

2009-12-09T16:37:00.003-05:00

It is five a.m. and the workers are up, and the kitchen is clattering with pots and pans and dishes. I don’t need to be up for another two hours, don’t need to start the biggest of days in a long, long time, so I stay under the blanket and mosquito net and try to forget the noises, just outside my door. As the kitchen comes to life across the hall, I fade in and out of consciousness, dreaming short and forgettable dreams. On the other side of my room, beyond the wall, is the dining room. Hungry hostel patrons arrive when it opens at six, eager to start a day in the Serengeti, or Ngorongoro, or Lake Manyara, or – like me – Kilimanjaro.

I roll out of bed at seven, with butterflies in my stomach. At least, I hope they’re butterflies. When your stomach feels upset for any reason in Africa, it is cause for some concern. Last night, we ate at Arusha’s finest fast food, McMoody’s, named and decorated to imitate McDonald’s. What better than greasy, suspicious fast food before six days ascending and descending the highest peak in Africa.

I shower – no flip flops, even in a dirty hostel. I decide, as I dry, that I have the worst room in the place, situated between the workers quarters – where they rise and fall at all hours of the night – and the kitchen – where the day begins long before I want it to – and the dining room – where patrons stay and talk right outside my window long beyond my bed time. The walls are thin, they keep out the noise no better than my mosquito net would. This is the kind of hotel/hostel/stopping place you are eager to leave to go climb a mountain.

I eat a good breakfast in a lamentable dining room, food prepared in a lamentable kitchen. The butterflies begin to feel like sickness. My stomach is, for one reason or another, upset. Amanda’s is, too. Elizabeth, Amanda’s sister and the third member of our trekking trio, feels fine. We eat. We pack. We wait for our bus ride to Kili.

It comes expectably late. Our guide, August, is riding shotgun. We toss in our bags and leave the hostel with excitement and butterflies and bags full of warm clothes.

We roll through Arusha, a nice city with a few big buildings and lots of vendors. It sits in the shadow of Mt Meru, an hour down the road from Moshi at the base of Kilimanjaro. Before we are out of town, we stop and an unassuming little duka (shop) to rent gaiters. It does not fit my prior notions of a mountain-gear outfitter. There are shelves with tea and toiletries, and a clothesline with peanuts and candy and condoms, and crates of soda in the back. A man comes and buys two individual cigarettes while we wait for the woman behind the counter to find us some gaiters.

Then, we drive. The rains fall, and I think of how I have not seen rain in two months in Mumba. The landscape, if it weren’t for the Maasai and the meager shacks, looks a little like the Midwest where I live. It is flat and neatly apportioned for farmers, strips of trees to segregate their land.

It’s cloudy, and though we’re near the base of the mountain, we see nothing but a vast slope upward and out of sight. The road is straight until it bears left up toward Marangu, the starting point. Then it winds and weaves and steers blindly into switchbacks up the mountainside. There are lush green trees, banana trees, bushes, all wet with fresh rain. The base of Kilimanjaro is a rainforest though all the surrounds it is dry thirsty savannah. I tell the girls this is what I think Congo must look like, and I beam as they agree. They lived there.

While we wait at the gate, peddlers offer us hats and cigarettes, and we decline thoughtlessly. By the time we pass though the gate, my butterflies – or whatever they were – have faded. Still, I beeline for the restrooms. Our guide, August in his broad-rimmed Aussie sunhat, distributes lunches. Porters divide our things. We climb only with backpacks, small ones.

We sign in at the gate, and there are prospective climbers all around us. My first inclination is to evaluate them, to thin the ranks and find people who make me look svelte by comparison. There aren’t any. Some are old, some young, all in reasonable shape. There’s a flock of Japanese people decked out in extensive gear and taking pictures. In the sign-in book, under “Address,” where everyone else has simply written their country of origin, I want to write my extensive contact info. But the line is long and the mountain is waiting, so I write only “USA, Mich.” I miss Michigan. We turn past the headquarters, beyond the gift shop with expensive candy and t-shirts and “I did it” certificates, and walk up a short path to an archway. As best I can tell, it serves simply to be the official official starting point, the spot at which people can really say, “Now I’m climbing the mountain,” even though it’s at an altitude of almost 2000 m.

August waits at the gate and sends us on with the assistant guide. He tells us there are six porters and himself and the assistant guide and, I think, a pit crew, doctor, firefighter, basketweaver, and phrenologist, all of whom we’ll have to tip when we finish. August stays behind to sign paper or some other official business. We climb for an hour before he catches up.

The first day of the climb is short and breathtakingly beautiful. It’s a gentle walk up through a vibrant jungle with few mosquitoes and abundant plant life. Not a square inch of anything is without an abundance of biodiversity. It’s a biology teacher’s dream. We go up for two hours, and it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s damp and I sweat, a lot. It’s hot today, but the rain is done for now. We stop for a bit, where our road nearly crosses that of our porters. They climb a steeper, shorter way, where trucks can go if need be. At our stop, I get my picture taken with a great big slug. So far, so good. We go again.

There are waterfalls and the forest canopy is thick and the path is well-trodden. A few people pass us going down. Some are successful (I ask them) and I’m in awe, like they’re celebrities. I I can’t yet include myself among their ranks, as I am unsure of why my body can and will do. A group of people with various handicaps passes us, too. One is pushing himself, determinedly, in a wheelchair. I think he made it. Then, a man rolls by on a stretched with an oxygen mask. I don’t ask him if he made it.

Soon, the forest begins to change. Green broad leaves fade away, the waterfalls are gone, and gnarly trees with yellowish/tan lichen beards come to dominate. We hear monkeys, I see a colobus. They’re big and white with bushy tails.

My sweat continues to pour, off two months worth of beard, down onto my shirt. I am sore, I am tired. I ask August for a break, and we stop next to a trio of Belgians. I size them up and decide they’re no more motley a crew than we are. A woman introduces herself, her husband, and her father. He is an old man. They are friendly and we are happy to meet new people. August tells us we are 20-25 minutes away from camp. We press on and finish the first day’s hike in 3 and ½ hours. No record, but much faster than we expected and faster than the 4-6 hours advertised by a sign at the trailhead.

The camp here is called the Mandara camp. There are huts and a dining hall and indoor bathrooms with flush toilets. This is camping, I tell myself. Soon after we stop, we feel the chill. We’re at 9,000 feet, and I reapply the layers I discarded on the last 20 minutes of the trail. We make our home in a small hut, hang up our damp clothes,, and have popcorn and tea in the dining hall.

August takes us on a short day hike, just fifteen minutes up the hill to Maundi crater. It’s a bed of grass surrounded by a rim of trees and is, to me, unremarkable. But from the rim, you can see the floor of Tanzania far below. The clouds hover abover our heads, and the sun breaks into beams to shine like flashlights on parcels of land below. We hike back to camp, and dinner is ready. The Belgians are next to us again, and a Spanish couple with a tag-on American sits on the other side of us. We converse with both. When dinner is over, there is nothing left to do. We return to our huts to rest, which turns into an early sleep.

Half-way through the night, I awake to Elizabeth and Amanda leaving the cabin. They don’t return for an hour and I know something must be wrong. Still, I pretend to sleep through it and will find out what I need to in the morning, if they want to share.

It is Tuesday morning. I rise, dress, brush my teeth. Elizabeth taps my should and says she needs to talk outside. Amanda lays in bed, unmoving.

“Amanda has giardia.”

This, I have heard of, and in no uncertain ways that would lead me to believe it isn’t an awful awful stomach bug I don’t ever want to experience. Elizabeth tells me she doesn’t want to sacrifice her sister for a lifelong dream, and I hear the panic and despair in her voice. She tells me, “She might need to go down, and I’ll go with her. You can carry on alone.” This all sounds a little hasty to me, and I ask if we’re sure it’s giardia, if maybe it’s just something she ate. She has already checked with herm mom, and they’ree sure it’s giardia. Still, I think of them making a heavy decision and her feeling fine in another few hours at the bottom of the mountain. I tell her we can wait a few hours, see how she feels, and go from there.

Elizabeth agrees, but seems solemnly and stubbornly committed to getting her sister off the mountain. I go to breakfast. There, the female half of the Spanish couple reveals herself to be a doctor. I share my heavy heart – a day into this and one is sick and our trip is in jeopardy. She offers her assistance. Elizabeth doesn’t show for breakfast. I bring our remaining fruit for her, and the Spanish doctor lady stops me on the way back. I tell her I’m bringing the fruit for “the older one with black hair,” but the language barrier between us has her convinced I’m going to disobey her orders that the sick one drinks a lot and eats a little. Elizabeth comes and I give her the fruit.

Within an hour, Amanda is convinced she can go on. Whether it's naivete, hopefulness, or healthiness, I can’t say. But she’s ready to go, so we pack and take to the trail behind August.

This section of the trail seems flatter. We pass a few more successful summiters, and lots of porters. Here, we share the trail. Some of them run with sacks of pots and pans balanced on their heads, resting on top of the 50 lb packs strapped to their backs. I could never do this job.

I ask August how many times he has climbed the mountain, and I do it with careful, special English. He speaks quickly and his English is good except that the words run fluidly together, like Swahili. I have to think about what he says. He tells me he has been a guide for 14 years, and has climbed the mountain hundreds of times. We are lucky to have such an experienced guide, and I tell him this.

He tells me he’s climbed with people from all over the world, and has climbed in France and will go to Colorado and the Himalayas soon, too. I ask which people come out here the most, and with no hesitation he tells me that Americans do. He says he’s climbed with old and young people. Two years ago, he took two 97 year-old women from Madrid all the way to the summit. The summit day took them 19 hours and it was really difficult for him because usually that part takes 6-8 hours. I marvel at the story of the old women. When I’m 97 – if I’m ever 97 – I will not be climbing stairs anymore, let along mountains.

August volunteers that Austrians make the best climbers and Japanese make the worst. He told me that if ten Japanese climbers start, one will make it. Later that day, a group of Japanese climbers pass us going down. He greets them in Japanese. After an exchange in Swahili with their guide, he tells me they didn’t make it.

After three hours, I am exhausted. Lots of ups and downs. I curse every downhill, because to me, I might as well be walking backwards down the mountain. I learned on the first day that one doesn’t look more than ten feet in front of them, it will only cause disappointment. The uphills will not end. You don’t stop noticing the incline and you don’t stop caring. You can, however, keep yourself from thinking about it.

My pack is heavier with every step. Water, food, layers of clothes, medicine, and books all weigh it down. I brought my big Bible. And I have never resented a concordance so much.

We reach the crest of the hill, and though it’s cool, I am near collapse. There are a few picnic tables. Long ago on the trail, the gnarly trees ended, and here there are only shrubs and flowers. The clouds roll around us; we’re in them. The Belgians are eating at a table, and they invite us to join them. I am tired. Amanda has a violent stomach bug and she broke her toe two months ago and is only 17. She seems to be doing fine. Soon, with my layers again missing and sweat seeping through my shirt and cooling in the breeze, I am shivering. The younger Belgian, his name is Birger, tells me we’re at the halfway point. Only the halfway point? I want to curse. The good nws, however, is that we only have 200 more meters to go upward.

We eat a lunch of dry muffins and oranges, and hit the trail again. Rest is an amazing thing, because by doing nothing you can do so much. I am refreshed, and when I tire, we catch convenient glimpses of the summit between breaks in the clouds. We sweat through, and by three o’clock, we arrive at Horombo hut, the most beautiful sight of our journey, save for a few brief glimpses of the iconic snowy flat-topped summit. A cloud envelops the camp and we begin to freeze. More popcorn and tea, and we are warm. Soon after, a dinner of spaghetti. We wish we’d had a lunch of spaghetti. Again, we retire for an early night.

I have never been this high before, at 3,720 meters or 12,300 feet. The altitude, it seems, forbids me sleep and I catch occasional glimpses of dreams that are trying to start. A mouse visits, eats some of our food. I would kill it, but I am too warm. Elizabeth catches me shining my light on it. I tell her that a mouse is eating her food. She gets up, it scampers away. I lay in bed until the sun comes up. Though the night held none, today is a day of rest. Acclimitization. We three and our new Belgian friends welcome it. I tell myself, “I think I can do this.”

Heroes

2009-11-14T22:04:00.004-05:00

I was in an antiques store today. Actually, an antiques mall. It's just a few miles from where I live, and I drive by it every day on the way to work. I knew eventually I'd have to stop in and look at all their old garbage. So today I did. It's a giant warehouse, and out front is a sign that says, "Invest in your future with the past. Buy Antiques." Whether or not antiques, specifically their antiques, are a sound investment, I can't tell you. But they are neat.

When there is nothing else on TV (and sometimes when there is something else on TV) I will watch Antiques Roadshow and sit in awe as some expert with a bowtie gives a detailed history of Grandma's shampoo bottle. Seriously, I don't know how they know these things. And I'm not sure I want to. I just find it all really really interesting when an object has been passed down by so many people, and outlived them, and accumulated bits and pieces of their life in every scratch, stain, and repair. I have always loved stuff that survived the past, miraculously escaping the permanent, mysterious history of the world, not to die on some scrap heap or landfill but instead to continue serving its purpose long beyond the intention or awareness of its creator.

Which brings me to the RC Cola cans. There was no shortage of cool stuff to stare at and not buy - books better than a century old, coins, glassware, political pins, world war two posters - and RC Cola cans from the 70s. (How do you like that, Mom and Dad? Stuff from the 70s is now antique.) There was a shelf full of them, and each one had the picture and stats of a pro Football or Baseball player. They were basically sportscards that were once filled with soda pop. One had Rollie Fingers on it. And I had never seen anything like that before, so I thought: What an incredible idea! They should do this today! They'd be a hit; collectors would buy 'em up.

Except. Except. I don't think people would be all that interested.

As I imagined a Pepsi can emblazened with the athletic accomplishments of Ledanian Tomlinson and Derek Jeter, I realized that most people probably wouldn't really care. I guess I have this notion that athletes were once heroes, untouchable celebrities from afar who people encountered only occasionally through televised games and nightly newspaper articles and, for the very lucky, once and a while from the stands at a stadium. But people today, I guess, don't see athletes that way anymore.

And there's a paradox in that. Because they get more press than ever and make unbelievable amounts of money, and sports marketing is as big as ever. If anything, they should be far more significant today than ever before. But I can't convince myself that that's the case. I don't think the majority of the population really cares about them at all. Certainly not enough to warrant some marketing company donating an entire line of soda cans to them. People who really want to can go out and get their jersey or an 8x10 glossy or just about anything with their likeness on it. For the diehard sports fan, they're still heroes.

But for everybody else, they aren't. Professional athletes are just people who've devoted their life to getting really really good at a game. They spent their time in the classroom figuring out how to run routes and hit knuckleballs. Maybe they don't really need to be heroes. Maybe they never were. Maybe it's the internet, or too many athlete scandals, or celebrity culture as a whole.

So I guess my question/point is this: It worked to put them on soda cans in the 70s, and it probably wouldn't today. Have professional athletes slipped in public standing from where (I think) they once were, or were they ever really there in the first place?

This is what I do know: Tomorrow, I'm going to spend the day watching football because I still really like it. And next summer, I'm going to spend too much money on baseball tickets, and I'll listen to every game on the radio that I can. So, though the athletes themselves might not be terribly important, I sure enjoy watching them.

Things I wish they told me after graduation

2009-10-19T21:02:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, life moves at a crawl, and sometimes it moves really quickly. For the last few weeks, it has moved quickly.

For the last few years, my defining struggle has been to find my first full time job. 40 hours. Big paychecks. Rent due. Grocery shopping. Health insurance. It was the big hurdle, which when cleared would finally let me see some purpose, some direction, with clarity.

In the last few months, I came to appreciate that time. In the years after college, I obsessed over getting health insurance and income, seeking the definition and direction in a career. Life crawled.

But simultaneously, I lived a few pretty incredible memories. I spent a summer working in Orlando and got my work into a nationally-distributed publication. Later, I would see my name in a magazine on the rack in a bookstore in Grand Rapids. I went to Africa, slept in a tent with shreds of nylon between me and some hungry, loud hyenas. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I learned phrases in Swahili, fought a wildfire, showed films to burgeoning crowds in the waning daylight before the skies glittered impossibly with the Milky Way. I saw that life in ministry, though unspeakably difficult, was full of joy, meaning, purpose. I came home, got really good at delivering pizzas, answered the call to go back to summer camp and be the old guy on staff. And I loved it.

I didn't notice this at the time, but: I lived. While I was waiting for a career, I found ways to fill the cracks in my life, and they became life, became memories. I wouldn't trade them for a cubicle.

But life sped up. A few weeks ago, I got a call for a job. Come down for an interview, they said. I did. And suddenly, a job offer. I took it. Years of struggle, at times painful and exhausting, shaking my fist at a God whose patience dwarfed my own, met with solution.

I liked wondering, waiting. I became accustomed to it; it became a familiar, comfortable foe. And now it's... gone. I miss it.

Can you tell that I'm sliding into cubicle life with a touch of restlessness? If this is the thing you're looking forward to, for meaning, for life, I can tell you that this is not where you will find it.

Lest you worry that I'm miserable, be assured, I am not: Restlessness is not misery. The last few years of my life, I was restless at times, but I was never miserable. I am not worried about where I am. Man has had to till the fields since the first guy screwed it all up for us and I'm eager to put in my work. And to be honest, today was only day one and it was good. This will be a good place to work and I'll probably enjoy it.

If finding a career, or a beginning to one, was a hurdle, I've cleared it. But there are a bunch more hurdles. There's a lot to figure out about where to go from here. That familiar, comfortable foe isn't totally gone.

(In the meantime, I'll just bang on me drum)