Mission Is Open 1.0

Slow goings the last few weeks, sorry 'bout that, been working on a video. Here it is:

EuroVagrant Part The Second

Hi Everyone

I'm reclining comfortably with a cappuccino at a busy sidewalk cafe in Nitra, Slovakia. It's 8:30 AM and Slovaks walk to work in front of me with their briefcases, mobile phones, and big sunglasses. I have this moment to send out a quick update from my BB on the goings ons from my last week. For those of you unaware of my current travels, NLI has flown me out to Europe for 16 days to make some promo videos for them.

I arrived in the UK Tuesday morning and had a few hours to kill in London before my contact arrived from Spain in the evening. I spent the day at the British Library examining* some of the oldest manuscripts of the Bible in the world, some pages from Da Vinci's notebook, an early draft of Alice in Wonderland, and some letters written by Oscar Wilde. I then attempted to find the British Museum, failed miserably, wandered around, got lost, and ended up at a random pub called "The Angel" where I sat in the corner by the fireplace with a pint of the local bitter and made up stories about the bar patrons in my notebook.

Since that moment I have gotten used to being brought places. Evening brought my contact in from Spain, who brought me to Bedworth. Wednesday brought me the rented camera equipment# as well as some catch up time around the NLI office. Thursday brought me to Serbia with a 4.5 hour layover in Zurich Airport^.

Arriving in Belgrade, I was picked up by the NLI staff running a conference at a Bible College just outside the city limits. On the way out of the city we passed the ruins of some skeletal residential high rises NATO bombed in 1999. While the general vicinity surrounding the complexes has seen aesthetic improvement and renovation, the wreckage of these buildings remains untouched from the day they pulled survivors from the remains. Many believe the Serbian Government allows these wounds of brick and concrete to remain unhealed as a reminder of what many believe was an injustice against Serbia (what was then Yugoslavia). I am fortunate to be with so many Canadians, since some Serbs still hold some animosity towards Americans.

I got some great footage at the conference of training and interviews and met some amazing people. I tried Turkish coffee and played a lot of volleyball. Belgrade has a beautiful pre-bolshevik historic side, a communist concrete side, and a new western shiny side. I have captured clips of all 3.

Next was a Euro road trip. 7 hours drive from Minneapolis will take you through 3 states and the cities of Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago. 7 hours drive from Belgrade will take you through 3 countries, 3 distinct languages, and the cities of Vienna, Budapest, and Bratislava. So with some fresh stamps in my passport, I arrived in Nitra with enough time to shoot a church plant leaders meeting. Nitra has a few Catholic Churches, 5 Universities, and no evangelical churches. That is, no evangelical churches until Miro and Marta and their team of 15 or so officially open next year. This couple has already planted a successful church in a neighboring city and has decided to dare again to plant again in Nitra. Theirs is a story I will be capturing on video.

I have 2 more church planting couples to film still. One is in another town nearby called Trnava, the other is a Polish town on the Czech border called Kudova.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July. I will celebrate by attending a concert in the main square. It is essentially a "taste of Nitra" sort of thing. It was 1 year ago exactly I returned from my 10 month internship in Europe so it is only fitting I spend the anniversary in Europe again.

It is a good trip. Not just for the promotional materials that will result but also because it is what I needed right now. I am happy, healthy, creating, and completely unaware of what will happen to me next. It's just the way I like it.

Reed

' Pop. 100,000
* staring at under glass
# the nicest I have ever had the pleasure to work with
^ Zurich Shopping Center with a few planes too

*´¨)
¸.·´¸.·*´¨) ¸.·*¨)
(¸.·´ (¸.·` *sent via mobile*

Loving Rant

In our culture ( I can only speak for my own, but I am sure this is true else where ) we have the tendency to bastardize things. We remove the original intentions or motives from the notion created, and then use it for our own designs. This is probably due to our pragmatist background (not that an the existentialist constructs of some of our friends across the pond is much better). We merely find what works for us and do it. If the results are positive at the start, we consider it a success and move on. Though sometimes, we move so far away from that original cause, that we lose the way back. I think we can safely say this of the word, and notion, of love.

The word brings thoughts of flowers, wooing, and romance. We have replaced the origin of love with the candy coated, corporate sponsored idea of lust. If we feel passion for something, we then say we love it. This can be true of love, but it is only half the story. The concept of selflessness has been removed. It never worked for us. It seems that the altruistic effects of love have been lost along our way. Is it that the idea of self-sacrifice just didn't work for us? Is the possibility of self-loss so crazy that we merely thought it too idealistic? I fear that we could not handle the ramifications of the passion and desire we feel, when we are in love. Can it be said that we are in love, if we are not willing to lay down our own desires and submit to the object of our affection? I wonder, is it possible for our people to find their way back to that.

We tell children that sex is for two people who love each other, but offer very little guidance beyond this. We leave out the fact that if they love each other, sex is merely an expression of the selflessness we feel toward our partner. Good sex occurs when both people lay down their own desires for the desires of the other, but now it has been perverted into being about fulfilling the individuals involved. How is it that such a sad thing like being wrapped in ones own self can be viewed as greater than being wrapped in the love of another? Finding our way back maybe as easy as letting go of our own paradigms, and seeing the way things actually are. Then we can begin to rebuild upon the original structure in a way that compliments it, rather then merely hiding it.

And how can this selflessness occur any other way then in marriage? There must be an institution that can give both people a safety net. If they understand that the other person is in it for he long haul, then they can experience the freedom of not having to continue the upkeep on the walls defending them. It is a crazy life style, and I fear that being so closely connected to a person can be too much for some, but when it is right there is nothing greater. It is a union that represents the best of what unions can be. It is the basis for how our priorities should be setup, and why they are set. It is nothing more than freedom. It is the very opus of the human experiment. It needs to not be lost to our own direction of self-fulfillment, because if we lose it there will be nothing left but the prison created by our own defenses. It may not always be pretty (sometimes being committed to another means getting in their face when they need it), but the cost of being uncomfortable sometimes and having our faults examined is cheap for the reward of true openness.

I fear the cold world that might be if I am left alone to nothing but myself. Some might think of that as paradise, but I know it as hell.

/discuss

An Abstract Introduction: The Way Home

As an introduction to Linus' blog, I would like to give a nice outline of me. To do this, I would like to post a short story I wrote. It is not quite an autobiography, but is autobiographical if that makes any sense. This is due to it not being all encompassing, but definitely gives a firm structure of who I am as well as who I am not. I will post more soon:

As I drive past my old home on my commute to my current home, my mind begins to flood with memories of my childhood. The house I grew up in was a small double bungalow my mother rented. It was located right off the freeway to the downtown area. With the access to the major roadways and the convenience store right off the on ramp near us, it had always been a crime and poverty stricken area. My mother struggled to make due for my sisters and me, but I can still remember the run down house down the frontage road my sisters went to meet their friends to “experiment” with drugs. There was one night I actually chased my sister, crying on my big wheel down the sidewalk, in the dark of the night because I didn’t want her to leave. I had no concept of what was really going on, but I still remember understanding she shouldn't be leaving. It had been dark as I jumped on my Big Wheel to speed after her. I remember the anxiety had been so intense for my age. I didn’t know where she was going, but I did not want her to go without me. I never found her that night. I had sped so fast with my worry that I had gotten lost. I had only been around six years old, and was I quickly wrangled in by a mother of two on her way to the convenience story near my home. She walked me home, and scolded my mother for letting me out so late. My mother had not been frantic as you might suspect, because she had not known I was gone. Though she tried to be a good parent, she was overwhelmed by how much the world around her threw at her. I have seen some of the brightest people in my life freeze under as little pressure as having to adhere to a deadline, so in the end I find no guilt in my mother’s inability to know what to do with three kids and no help. Any human would feel lost in that situation. She did her best, and never dated after my father. She dedicated her life to raising us to be good people. Regardless of the outcome of her decisions, she tried to correct her mistakes. In that neighborhood she had been in the minority. The rest of the people living around there had given up and just submitted to their state. They wanted nothing more than to just continue their existence. They built toward nothing, and the world moved on around them. My mother wanted to create something lasting. Something that would reach outside of the small world we lived in. She invested these hopes into me. I think my sisters saw it and resented it, but my mother’s hopes in me pushed me on to try and become more than what I was.

The next door neighbors changed regularly, as is the way of things in such an area. It seems to me still that poor people who have no resources live like vagrants even when they aren’t homeless. I saw my friends leave me behind to live somewhere else so many times I almost stopped believing in permanent things. How can a child in such an environment come to feel secure when they know that nothing is theirs, and anything can be taken away at any moment? How can an adult for that matter? In the end I think it taught me to fight for what I want to keep. Some people, even some of my friends, don’t know what it is truly like to have something precious ripped from you with seemingly no reason. Even the ones that have felt the loss of someone close to them dying don’t seem to quite get it. Death, like most natural things, is inevitable and reasonable. Having someone steal your the first bike you have ever owned, days after getting it for your birthday, is none of these things. Both are loss in very solid forms, but for a child the latter is much more tangible. This fact makes it all the more dangerous.

My father was never around long. After a stint of being around he would disappear. I am still not sure to this day if he left because my mother threw him out because of the abuse, or if he simply left of his own mind. Every time he wasn’t around I yearned for him to come back with the intensity only a child can muster for their father, but when he was around I felt the same anxiety that lingers with me today. Helping him with projects around the house or with his many busted up vehicles would always result in yelling on his part because I just wasn’t able to live up to what he required. I never understood quite what he wanted, only that I was not it. He had a way that would make you feel both special and useless at the same time, like I was something sentimental on a shelf kept around because I meant something to him, but he could not really use me in his life for anything but this nostalgia. His mother had died when he was very young, and from what I could gather from him, his father had been worse than he was. He always referred to his mother as if she were a saint, but he stated thing about his dad as if this old man I had never met was trying to destroy him from beyond the grave. In my late teens, I would talk about having children as if it was a burden to be avoided. The truth was that I was afraid I would become my father. It is this fear that keeps me in line when I interact with children in general. My wife is always adamant about my ability to be nurturing, but it I am still unsure.

I can still remember watching television in that house, and part of the experience was the rhythmic sound of the cars outside along with the planes flying over head. Something was always around to disturb your peace of mind or focus. Even looking out the window would give me a sense of restlessness as a child. The cars drove past at high speeds on the freeway, so they attracted your eye with their motion. Nothing seemed to be in equilibrium around us. I had dreams where the house itself would start to move with us in it. In these dreams we were never scared really, just very confused.

As I grew up we moved a few times, but that memories of that first home always shaped my idea of what the next place was to us. I remember the house right after that one off of the highway being so quiet and calm it scared me. I would lay awake at night wondering about all the noises that night produced. Without the cars and street lamps to light up what was outside my window, the world would take on a shadowy, sinister look. The apartment we rented after that place felt so narrow and foreign. I would come home from school, and run through the hallways. It seemed so funny that the entrances to other people’s places were so close to my own. There were so many strangers to avoid. It made me feel paranoid the entire time we lived there.

As for friends through my childhood, I was normal. My best friend was always the kid that lived closest to me, and our fun was always more important than our school work. The only difference between me and them was usually that I had a thing for being a team. I am sure it stemmed from my feeling of abandonment If they would ever be against me in some way I would feel isolated and defensive. I craved to have them be loyal to me, and I would try to be as loyal to them. It made me a bit too intense for most people, especially when I begun to hit my teens. Not until my wife did I ever find someone who could match my craziness for closeness. I found my real partner in her. She has always been supportive of me, and I still have fear that she will be taken from me the same way my bike was stolen. It seems strange, but some of you will understand.

I drive this way home from work even though it is out of my way, because I like to remember. Part of me would like to go back and change things but, in the end, things can’t be made right and even if they could I would not know where to begin. The only reasonable direction seems to be forward and away, but in an instant of driving by my old home I feel closer to that time then to the future. It makes progress a little easier to handle when you are reassured of the structure that has come before it, because you can lose yourself in the flow of things if you don't have anything behind you to give you a frame of reference.