Umm...I think it's done...

Me and Susanna (one of the girls who is thinking about coming to Kenya with my team) went camping over the week of the 4th of July. It was Susanna's first camping trip ever and she had a lot of fun.

Things went great...





Until we tried to make cormbread dutch oven style...

That round, black lump...that's our cornbread. I'm not sure what kind of metal WalMart mess kits are made out of, but, whatever it is, it burns up.

Yep. We burnt up a metal pan in the process of making dinner.

Oops!

Catch Up

Sorry about the lack of updates, everyone. For some reason the last month has seen a lack of being able to access Blogger from on campus computers as well as a lack of being to access the Internet from my computer -- it's going to the computer doctor this week to get its poor brains fixed.

Anyhow, a quick update on life:

1) I'm coming home in 22 days!!!

2) I got in a camping trip during my one week of summer vacation... and managed to melt a WalMart mess kit in the fire while making cornbread...

3) I have 68% of my support budget raised / pledged -- a thousand thanks to all of you who have given and prayed!

4) I just got done with a Business as Missions class that was a ton of fun -- and a ton of work.

The idea of Business as Missions (BAM) is to go into a country or community as a legitimate, for profit, business and work to transform that area through Christ centered business practices. A BAM or "Kingdom Business" venture operates on the quadruple bottom line of economic, social, spiritual, and environmental transformation and can serve to advance the Gospel even in countries where traditional missions is illegal.

Our assignment was to create a culturally and financially viable business plan in three days time. --If nothing else we learned why it is that people spend a year or more putting together business plans.

I was the CFO for The Re'ah Partnership ("Re'ah" meaning friendship in Hebrew), a Kenyan based Kingdom Business that partners with local farmers to sell shade grown, organic, just trade, Kenyan AA coffee. (Of the 24 hours directly before our presentation, I spent 15 hours researching numbers and working on financial spreadsheets...ahhh!!!)

Somehow though, mainly by the three corporate officers working 'till 2/3:00AM and the getting up at 5:00AM to start working again, we got it finished and presented. Now we're just waiting for the grade...

Only in Kenya

One of the girls on my team worked her rear off putting together a fundraising video for us to use, and I think it turned out really well. (This is the youtube version, so the quality isn't amazing, but feel free to pass it around)

As a random aside, we found this video highly entertaining -- mainly because there is an intern team from my class leaving for Norway in September.

Little Earth

Okay, I should totally be doing homework right now, but...

Instead of going to the church downtown for a normal Friday night kids club, we handed out fliers, with the help of a bunch of the kids, for an event that will be going on next weekend. The development we were in -- where a lot of the Friday night kids live -- was called Little Earth, and it's a Native American housing complex. It's actually a nice place, although packed really tight for the number of people living there, and, my word, Jessica is in love.

Going made me miss the Rez so bad, but I definitely have a new favorite place in the Cities. Those kids are gorgeous, and I very much did not want to leave after only being there such a short time. If Nicaragua didn't have such a strong, strong pull on my heart, I could easily settle down on the Rez or in a place like Little Earth and spend the rest of my life just living there and loving on those people. (If anyone has a cloning machine or some other magical way to reconcile the two worlds, please, let me know. It would make life a gillion times simpler.)

The rest of my team was very much in culture shock mode -- even more so than after a normal Friday night -- which shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. Something about realizing for the first time that being white can be a detriment to ministry can take some processing -- I think it was the first time most of them had heard the phrase "I hate white people" come out of a kid's mouth, or any one's mouth for that matter.

Maybe I'm nuts for not being as shocked and appalled as they are, but, if I am, I never want to be sane. I never want to see those kids as anything other than beautiful. I never want to let the rough elements of Native culture and history prevent me from binding my heart to theirs. I never want to feel the need to apologise to someone after they spend time in Little Earth. I always want to remember, and I always want to care.

If I am insane, may God use it to his glory.

Pay it Forward

Have you guys ever gotten something -- maybe a piece of candy or a prize from your Sunday School teacher -- and then given it to somebody else instead of keeping it for yourself?

Sometimes people refer to doing that as "paying it forward," and I just got a chance to see God arrange a really cool incident of paying something forward.

God told me to give a specific amount of money to a friend, but I didn't have it with me at the time, so, I gave him an IOU and went back to my room to write him a check. Now, when you write a check, you have to put the person's first and last names on it, so that the bank knows that it really is theirs.

Well, I forgot his last name, and God told me not to give it to him with just a first name, so I gave it to him without any name in the "for" part.

The cool thing was that, before I had even given him the IOU, God told him to give a specific amount of money to a friend, and he knew he didn't have the money -- not in his wallet, not in the bank, not anywhere -- but he told God that he would do it.

It was the exact same amount that God told me to give him.

Not only that, if I had put his name on the check, he would have had to mail it to North Carolina before the money could get to his bank account to be given away, but, because that part was blank, he could write his friend's name on the check and give it straight to them.

That meant that, instead of getting the money next week, his friend got the money yesterday.

How cool is all that.

Romans 10:11-12

Gut Check

Wow! That's a lot of money!

Reality check number two of Jessica's week: Internship is coming faster than I thought it was.

In so many ways, the six months between now and Kenya feel like eternity, but deadlines are starting to creep up on me. By June 30th I have to have 25% of my budget raised or pledged, and the end of the month isn't as far away as it seemed a few weeks ago.

God is good though, and I'm excited to see how He brings in funds, both for myself and my classmates as we get ready for our internships with Bethany International Ministries. It should be good.

Old Man River

Call me naive, but, whenever I read about "muddy, brown rivers" as a kid, I would picture something like the Yakima -- kinda murky in a greenish blue water sort of way. I guess it never made sense that rivers could be actually brown without essentially being natural sewers.

I stand corrected. Rivers in Minnesota most definitely come brown.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Kenya Facts 101

• Home to the largest population of Quakers anywhere in the world


• There is a traveling library that goes through Eastern Kenya -- on the back of a camel
  
• The Kenyan people's idea of casual clothing looks about like an American's idea of office wear
• 
  
• The Lion King is set in Kenya -- Pride Rock is an actual land formation

Singing Spies

I spent last weekend doing a simulation (kind of like a giant game) of the persecuted church.

It was pretty crazy, and I had tons of fun crawling through bushes, hiding stuff in my pockets to bring into the "peace camp," and sneaking around in the dark going on "missions" to get stuff that we needed. About a third of the way through, though, I got caught and sent to "prision." That was when things started getting really cool.

Even though we weren't allowed to talk to eachother most of the time, we were allowed to sing worship songs if there weren't any gaurds in the room. --If they came in while we were singing, they would bang on our cells and yell until we quit.

At one point, they came in while we were singing with all six of our leaders from the peace camp, the people we had elected to plan missions and keep an eye on the rest of the group. No matter how much they yelled, we just kept singing worship songs straight to Jesus.

In the prison they made us do things like push-ups and sits anytime someone did something wrong, so they told all of the leaders that they had to do push-ups until we stopped. For almost twenty minutes they did push-ups and sang with us. Even though their arms hurt and even though it was only a game, there was joy on their faces. They knew that they didn't have to be there, but they wanted to be.

Their arms hurt because they loved Jesus, and they loved that.

We never did stop singing. The gaurds put them into cells with us and left the room, because the power of God was so strong in that "jail."

We may have been captured as spies, but our most powerful weapon was a song and a prayer.

36 Hours to Reality

This past weekend, my school partnered with The Honor Academy (HA)-- the other organization that shares campus with us -- to put on a simulation of the suffering church. The simulation is an annual thing that HA has its interns go through, and they refer to it as the World Awareness LTE (Life Transforming Event).

Thursday night they gathered all of us together to watch "Hotel Rwanda" and then sent us back to our dorms "for the night." Night only lasted about three hours before the facilitators stormed our dorms and herded us out onto the front lawn, bleary eyed and clutching water bottles. Knowing what was going on did nothing to slow the adrenaline that was coursing through our bodies as they marched us to the gym and had us remove "everything" from our pockets -- several people had found creative ways to hide things directly on there persons, so we still went forward with quite a few items they did not know we had...

We were told that the new government in the "glorious Republic of Ceylan" had decided that our "cult" was in opposition to the state and that we were each being rehabilitated either by nature in the "peace camp" or by force in the "prison camp."

I, along with the majority of the group, was led to the "peace camp" out in the back 40, where we were given a few tarps, some rope, a stack of bowls and spoons, a first aid kit, and a map highlighting the places where food and additional water were hidden -- not exactly a UN approved refugee camp, but it was a start.

Anytime we set foot outside of the camp, we were fair game for the facilitators. If you got "shot" you went directly to the prison camp. Our only "job" was to go on missions to collect food, water, sleeping bags, and "bus parts." The "bus" we were building was big enough to hold fifteen people and would see them across the border -- and out of the LTE -- once we completed it. Most watches, cell phones, ect had been confiscated by the government, so time pretty much became a non-issue unless we were on our way to a required movie session. -- We watched movies like "Invisible Children" to try and raise awareness of different world issues.

After the second movie of the day, me and another girl were captured and sent to solitary confinement for a time, before joining the other prisoners in their cells. (There is an empty storage room on campus that is made up of probably a dozen chicken wire and two-by-four "cages," ceiling high and large enough to hold about six college students laying down. They really do look like crude prison cells, so it was perfect.)

I would spend the next 24 hours in this facility, and it was here that the LTE became more than an elaborate game of cops and robbers or capture the flag. Everything we were going through was still a simulation -- push-ups and wall sits are nothing compared to beatings or torture -- but the emotions we were going through, and the moment by moment decisions of whether or not to rebel against our captors, were becoming more and more "real" as the initial adrenaline wore off.

I could tell you story after story of things that happened in that "jail" -- and hopefully will in later posts -- but, for now, let's just suffice to say that there were moments the facilitators could not enter the room where we all were for fear of crying and that, by the end of the event Saturday afternoon, we were all acting far more like Christians than we had been when they drug us out of the dorms early Friday morning.

In some ways, it was one of the longest 36 hours of my life, and, in some ways, I'm amazed that it only took 36 hours to bring us that much closer to reality.

Same story, different page; same journey different mile

I realize that I haven't really posted anything about ministry week besides my random musings, so, here we go.


All of my friends have heart wrenching stories about learning to love from homeless men or amazing testimonies about leading whole families to Christ, and I wish that I could relay something along those lines. I wish that I could tell you that I came to realize what Jesus meant when He said "the least of these." I wish that my eyes would shine as I tell you stories about a homeless vet named Johnny. I wish that God had given me any instructions for the week besides "Wait and listen."

That's a lie though. I don't wish. I don't question that God knew exactly what He was doing. I don't deny the fact that the lessons my friends learned were ones I've learned in the past. On the streets of Portland, on the Rez, in Denver and Mexico, Pasco, Kellogg, and Nicaragua, at Royal Family and through years of Church Camp and teaching Sunday school, I gained much of the wisdom that they did this week. Sometimes, though, I think it would be easier if I weren't always on a different page.

It wasn't that God didn't break my heart this week; the problem was that He ripped it to shreds.


I'm not sure that I have the words to even begin to explain, and, if I have the words, I'm not sure that I have the courage to use them.

The short story is this. If I was discontent with much of the American church before we left, I have no way to politely categorize what I'm feeling now. There has to be some way of phrasing it all without sounding like a revolutionary, some way to make it clear that I don't want to reinvent the wheel simply as an act of rebellion towards the generations that have gone before me, but I haven't found it yet.

I could try to describe to you the passion that churns in my chest at each new sign of consumerism that slips -- sometimes loudly heralded -- into a church sanctuary. I could try to tell you how my heart breaks in agony at the sight of a new piece of equipment, knowing that the money spent there was money not spent on the needs of a hurting human being. I could explain the fear of an almighty GOD who demands the glory that we have given to our things. I could have you watch the end of "Schindler's List," and, next time you get dressed for church, consider how many eternal lives the cost of your ring or your clothes could have saved. I could make you read Isaiah 58, and read it over and over until it becomes a part of you and haunts your every waking thought.

But I don't know how to communicate such things. Church is more than we've made it. Christ is more than we've made Him out to be. And this world is more than we'll ever understand.

If this is just the fire of youth, then I never want to let the flame go out.