Catching Up (part 1)

I am trying to catch up and keep this blog more up to date. As of right now I believe my rate of frequency is about every 6 months. Here's hoping I can bump that up to every 4...

So without further ado I give you:

A picture of my friend Wilson


And last month's letter

Every once in awhile I make a friend on a project. In Guatemala my new friend’s name is Wilson Alexander. Wilson is not a shy child, which is a good thing when you have a group of 20 Americans invade your home for a week. Wilson made friends with everyone in our group, and he loved the camera, (which is also good when every one of the Americans brought their digital camera.) Wilson was always available to pose for a picture.
Wilson, like just about every kid I know, also loved to be tossed into the air. As the project director, I try to let the groups enjoy what they have come to do… work, while I try to mainly stay out of their way. In Guatemala this allowed me to spend time with Wilson, his sister, and their cousins, doing what I do best, which is kid tossing. They would come ask me to toss them or spin them or some combination. With the toss-er to toss-e ratio being 1:4, I had to quickly come up with other ways to keep them entertained without falling over from exhaustion.
My anti-exhaustion solution was introducing this group of Guatemalan ninos to an old “game” my uncles would play on me. “Sack of potatoes” is when you throw someone over your shoulder and carry them around like they were… a sack of potatoes. The most important part of the game is to never acknowledge that the “sack of potatoes” is actually a child, and to continually ask the others where they want you to place the heavy load you are carrying. I was very surprised to find that even in Guatemala, sack of potatoes, translates quite well. I even made the mistake of calling it by the wrong name in Spanish, which the children were kind enough to correct for me.
I am reminded of the passage in Luke 10 about Jesus at the home of Mary and Martha. Martha worked very hard to make everything perfect for Jesus, while Mary simply sat at His feet listening. Sometimes just enjoying the moment we are in is the very best thing we can do, and to try to fill that with more activities would cause unnecessary stress and complication. I am far from perfect at being able to just enjoy the moment without feeling the need to clutter it with activity, but I know my time with Wilson was well spent. I hope that today you would find time to enjoy the important things like laughter and friendship.

Michael

Summer in review

I looked through my photographs from the summer, and I picked out a few that I would like to share with you. Each picture represents a part of my summer that sticks out as memorable. They are a summer review. I often take pictures so that I can hold on to specific memories, but life is filled with countless others that are equally special (we just don’t always have the camera ready.) In the next few months I want to share a couple pictures that I did have the camera for.

My summer was spent in three locations: Mexico, South Dakota, and Guatemala. In each location, I had the great privilege of serving God’s precious children. Because of the work that I do, I am constantly learning new things about my job, my life, and my Father in Heaven. This summer was no exception. I feel that I gained a new passion for what I do, but I am also left with many questions.

I sat in the home of Mary Wright a wonderful lady who lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Her smile and love for telling stories was always a high point of my day. As we worked to try and fix her house, I wondered about what it would take to fix her community. A community where racism is still alive, and Native Americans are mostly ignored.

In Mexico, I got to spend time with my friend Pastor Valente Sobrevilla, a man who sacrificed a comfortable life to start a church in a border community. Where most of us would see a broken neighborhood, Pastor Valente sees hope.

And then in Guatemala I served with missionaries who are literally fighting for the future of the children of Guatemala. Their dedication is truly making a difference in a country where it is rare for a child to even go to high school let alone graduate.

I feel that God is preparing me for more to come. From now until the new-year I will be sending some of the pictures along with brief stories of what I did this summer. I hope you will enjoy the stories as much as I enjoyed them.

Woven Stories

Antigua Guatemala is a place that everyone should visit at least once in their life. It is a beautiful old colonial town that lies just at the base of one of Guatemala's many volcanoes.

Mission Discovery has come here to provide aid to the poor that live just outside the town. Although I am technically the leader of this project I feel more like just a participant in something bigger. Tonight I spoke to the group about how God takes stories and weaves them into a bigger picture. I shared with them that there were some specific stories that had led to Mission Discovery bringing teams to Guatemala, I am sure I have only scratched the surface of the "bigger picture," but here is what I know:

-Many years ago a disc jockey and his wife went on a short term mission trip to Guatemala. They vowed they would never go on another mission trip.
-A couple of years later that same disc jockey found himself starting his own short term mission organization called Mission Discovery. So much for never doing another mission trip
-Shortly after that a 13 year old kid decided it would be "cool" to go with Mission Discovery to Reynosa, Mexico to build homes for the poor. Despite what some have said he was not a troublemaker.
-At the wise old age of 17 that previously thirteen year old kid prayed that God would use him in a great way.
-In 2006 the former disc jockey and the former 13 year old kid traveled to Guatemala and began planing to take teams to do work in Antigua, Guatemala.

I have come a long way from being the 13 year old kid but through it all I am thankful to God for his love in my life, and for continuing to weave His stories together in the most beautiful of ways.

This summer I have licked a frog and played the air guitar in front of Mount Rushmore. I will up date my blog with more details soon...

Why I could have been a Viking

I was going to write about the Chili Cook-off that I am going to be a part of this weekend, but I thought instead I would use this post to explain my thoughts on why I could have been a viking... In the past few years Pirates have become big business. With the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, a slew of cartoons and Jimmy Buffett, pirates are the new Cowboys and Indians. At a recent event I told everyone in attendance that I think I could have been a great viking. This isn't really based on any hard evidence its just a feeling I have. I can grow a great beard which is probably one of the most important parts of being a viking.

( the beginnings of a great viking beard )

And I can also endure cold weather which is another "must" for Vikings. If you think about it, Vikings were like the first pirates. They sailed around and looked for treasure and stole stuff, but they didn't have fancy boats or cannons. They just had swords and axes and of course beards. If we all have an inner person mine would be a guy who wears furs and swings a huge ax. By the way, this isn't really going anywhere. I haven't drawn any life lessons out of this new thought, and I am not going to quit my job to sail the Nordic seas. At most I might rent one of the many adaptations of Beowulf and think about what might have been. Who knows, maybe I will get my wish and Disney will start making viking themed movies and roller coaster rides.

After going through some old family photos I came across this gem of a picture. This is of my brother (on the left) and me (on the right.) We are in the middle of an autopsy of a shrew that my cat rootbeer left on our back porch. Not sure how old we were but I find it interesting that even at this early age my brother knew he wanted to be a doctor. I, on the other hand, probably wanted to be an astronaut at this point, but that didn't really turn out. A few other things I would like to point out about this picture is my awesome camo pants, and the ninja like stance that I am crouching in. Oh nostalgia you bring a smile to my face.

Starving for the playoffs

So at the turn of the new year I decided that I would commit to a 10 day fast. I had done this last year and generally enjoyed the experience so I felt that it would be a good idea. Let me start out by saying that fasting can be incredibly productive and beneficial if done correctly. Let me also say that I do not believe I am capable of fasting correctly. I was (and am) able to give up eating solid foods fairly easily. This came as a surprise during my first fast. I love food and didn't think I could give up eating for one day let alone 10. The problem wasn't in giving up the food it was in giving the time to seek God while giving up the food. I came to this realization when on day 4 I was given the choice of being able to eat and not watch the playoff games or continue fasting and watch the playoff games. I actually chose to keep starving myself so that I could watch football. This is something that I am not proud of, but I feel is pretty revealing of my nature. I can be very dedicated and follow something to the point of being hazardous to my health, but I don't want to give up the things that I really like because it is inconvenient. I believe someone put it quite poetically when they said "What I want to do I don't do and What I do I don't want to do" (Thanks to Paul.) And that was my main complaint of the fast. Fasting was getting in the way of me being able to spend time with my friends because I couldn't eat. Fasting was inconvenient. And this brings me to my point and the lesion I have gleaned from all of this. I had trouble during the fast not because of the food but because it hindered my ability to do what I want. And isn't that what a fast is all about in the first place? We are meant to fast so that our will can be replaced with His will and no amount of not eating will fix this if we are still doing what we want to do. Next year maybe instead of not eating I will finally try to give up the thing that tends to take a large chunk of my day away... watching the TV.