Tearful

This video brought me to tears. Enjoy.

Crabb-y

As part of my ongoing training with International Teams I recently finished reading Inside Out by Larry Crabb. I tried to write my own two sentence description of the book but was not satisfied with the results. None of the synopsis I found online seemed sufficient to me either. In a few words, he writes about how to achieve real and lasting change by addressing the pain in our life, and the sin our pain leads us to.

For those of you that know me, I am not naturally an introspective person, or one who dwells on pain for very long. So this book was a challenge for me to go through for many reasons. In fact, if it wasn't an 'assignment' it's hard to imagine I would have stuck with it. However, that does not mean it was a waste of time. It was a valuable read, and challenged me to think in ways I normally wouldn't. I encountered a number of things along the way that I thought would be worth sharing or repeating here on the blog.

Rather than write a snazzy two-sentence synopsis of the book, I thought I'd highlight three of the significant ideas I am walking away with from this book.

"We have not taken the truth that our heart is deceitful seriously enough."
Larry clearly has had enough of shallow Christianity, and of Christians who pretend that everything is fantastic, and that becoming a christian fixes everything in this world. He spends a lot of time exploring the pain in life, and encouraging the reader to face the pain in our lives. At times it seemed like he was essentially saying you either have issues and deep pain in your life, or you are in denial. That mindset frustrated me at points. But the book did help me see that there are ways in my life that I seek to protect myself from further pain that are in fact relational sin - meaning that in relationships I put my need for further protection from pain above Jesus' imperative to love God, and to Love others. And for me, part of the journey of this book was to face up to the fact that my heart is deceitful in that I can explain away this deep sin of the heart and live like things are just fine. This was not the first time this year I've considered these words in Jeremiah 17 " The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" To me it speaks to the mysteries of life. As the next verse states, God searches the heart and examines the mind - essentially - God can understand our hearts, but no one else. Us humans, we seem interminably incapable of discerning our own hearts, much less the hearts of others. If it were clear why would we have centuries of art and literature focused on exploring the human heart and spirit? This means that my own heart is unreliable. And if that is true, it is serious, more serious than I often act.

"When hints of sadness creep into our soul, we must not flee into happy or distracting thoughts."
Another aspect of my life was brought into clearer focus when reading this book - my propensity to selfishly 'demand' that I have time to myself to recover and be refreshed from the daily struggles and pressures of life. It illuminates where I do not fully trust God to provide for my needs, but instead seek to dig my own wells to seek refreshment when we have "living water" available to us. It has me evaluating my use of entertainment and recreation as an escape from daily life rather than seeking more of God and trusting him to provide the refreshment I need. I havn't yet found the pattern, but I intend to build a regular and consistent fast in my life from most forms of electronic media entertainment. (ie like one day a week, or one week a month, where I avoid surfing the internet, watching tv or movies on my own, etc).

"You must make a choice to live honestly."
I highlighted this in a previous posting, but this is the broadest, simplest, and perhaps the most significant take-away I got from the book. Most of the people I admire most are the ones that are the most transparent, and are the most ready to address life as it is, not as we want it to be. It is always refreshing to interact with such people. This book was a good reminder to make an active choice to live life honestly.

While I can't promise it's a fun read, I can recommend this book to anyone who is interested. In the spirit of fairness I should also state that Faith also read the book and really enjoyed it. Psychology majors - go figure.

Politically Disaffected

While I am often quite interested in following politics, I am increasingly finding myself more and more removed from feeling connected. I definitely feel a sense of being disaffected by the state of our nation and the state of our politics.

A friend pointed out this organization called GOOOH!, which (not so) cleverly is an acronym for the phrase above. What is GOOH? They define themselves thus: "A non-partisan plan to evict the politicians from the U.S. House of Representatives." I could copy more of their ideas here, but will save space by giving you this link to their website. In addition to being intrigued, I was also somehow entertained by reading through their site a bit.

I am not at this point ready to participate or suggest others join. However, the concept was interesting enough that I thought it worth pointing it out to others. I have no idea if this is THE answer, or even AN answer - but I must admit it's nice to see some people trying to take action with the intent on making an impacting change for what they think is the better of the nation.

How is your sole?

Some pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago don't actually stop in Santiago, but continue their journey until they reach Cape Finisterre. Translated literally as 'the end of the earth.' Traditionally a pilgrim takes off their boots and leaves them there at the Atlantic coast. I havn't yet made it out to visit Cabo Finisterre, but when Faith and I were visiting a scenic spot here in Coruña on Valentines day, we discovered this old, worn pair of boots along the rocky coast. I can't say that currently my soul feels as worn down and beat up as those boots. But there are times when I wonder if that's where I'm heading. I hope that doesn't come across too dour. There is something warm and attractive about these boots despite their obviously hard life. I'm sure they were very comfortable and familiar to their owner. It looks like they were lovingly used, and lovingly left behind. I honestly have no idea if these shoes were left by a pilgrim at the end of their journey. But I like the thought. And I like to think that if my soul ever does feel like those shoes look, it won't be just a sad thought, but one to remind me of the miles I have covered over the course of my life.

A slice of daily life

This is one of the local parks we visit often. There are three within a short walk from our home. This one is the most popular park of the neighborhood, I presume, because it gets full sun in the afternoon. It has been dubbed "the ria park" by our family because it is overlooking the scenic tidal river here. It is the park that we most often run into classmates of Brennan's, and a few local families we have met. Here Brennan can shyly start to play with those classmates as he feels more and more comfortable here. Here Ryan lives as large and as loud as he wants, and blends right in with the natives. And Kathryn gets to watch even more frenetic activity and hear even louder noises than she experiences at home. She also is a great tool to help us meet other parents. No one can resist her (see my last post for proof).

This is the view of the sunset over 'the ria.'

The above and below pictures are action photos from yesterday's visit.

Another boat photo. Still addicted to them.

Who says you need hair to be beautiful?

This is a face everyone can love. I am so sure of that I had to share these photos with the rest of the world. I want my daughter to look like a model, but would be mortified if she actually became one. I present these pictures from yesterday's photo shoot at a local park as early proof she could be a model, except we all know she's too brilliant for that. My apologies to all you brilliant models, no offense intended (it's probably not wise to start offending brilliant models).

She looks pretty flirty here - watch out niños de España!

Hanging out at the park, playing hard to get.

Is this for real?

I've spent the last 7 days on a self-imposed hiatus from most forms of electronic entertainment. I felt I needed to explain the period of silence followed by this small explosion of posting.

As I spent today catching up on stuff I missed over the last week, I ran across this video that I thought you might like. It's a commercial, and I never feel real great about pushing a commercial - but these guys are ridiculous with a soccer ball.

Obedecer

I was studying for my final exam for my first semester of Spanish (Found out today I passed!), and in frustration, while looking at a verb chart, I decided to count how many different conjugations of one verb there can actually be. Now, not being the grammer-type in English, I honestly have no idea how it compares. But I do know, that as a novice student of Spanish, it gets pretty frustrating trying to learn not only what a word means, but how to use it.

But on to the money part of this post: obedecer is translated to English as 'obey'. There are 106 ways to use the verb obey according to the verb chart. 106!! Here is the link in case you doubt me. Count them if you dare. Never mind that most of them look very similar - if you say it wrong, everyone knows it. Most people will correct you, and most of them will do it nicely. And when you hear one of those forms, you know (if you are lucky) what verb is being used, but are not always real clear on what that particular form specifically means.

May you in some small way experience the joy of learning a new language through this post.

"How are you?"

Or, here in Spain they ask it, "¿Que tal?," or "¿Como estás?". (Can you tell I'm enjoying using the upside down question mark?)

The answer is usually fairly easy. It is both convenient and conversationally correct to answer 'fine', or 'good.' That greases the speed of conversation and allows us to move on to more important matters, such as the weather, recent sports scores, or our children's latest bodily excretions. Even in Spanish the answer is fairly simple, even for those of us who are struggling to learn the language. A simple 'bien,' or more complicated 'estoy bien' will do. It's really great to follow that up with "¿y tú?" That then puts the conversational ball squarely back into the other person's court without having to explain yourself any further.

I've been thinking a bit more lately about how things really are, partly thanks to a book by Larry Crabb called "Inside Out". I may post more on that later, but one of the big themes that stuck with me from the book was his challenge to Christians to live honestly, and to seek that honesty to the point it thoroughly disrupts our complacency. It gave me the idea to blog about how things are really going for me, and for the Walter clan in La Coruña. I'll address a few common questions, give the standard safe answer, and then follow with a more transparent answer.

How are things in Spain? Good. Great. We love being here. We are as confident as ever that we are here solely because of God's leading in our lives. We have a great community in our local church, Vida Nueva, and have been enjoying discovering more about the people, place, and culture here.
Really? It has been a fun, but difficult (at times) transition. We feel we've come through the first stages of the transition pretty well, but it was quite a tough road at times. The kids seem to have adjusted pretty well by this point. Communication has been tough at times, obviously, as we did not speak Spanish when we arrived. We learned to drive stick shift and how to drive in a different country at the same time - with three kids 4 and under crammed in the back seat. We feel pressure to focus on our language studies as our number-one priority, but also feel pressure to figure out how to become more and more involved in our local supporting church. Plus we are learning to live in a completely different culture, and learning little by little to adopt to different ways of living. Our running joke here is that everything takes longer to get done here than you think it will. The way things are done hear are different enough to often leave us wondering why on earth they do things this way. All of this is in addition to the pressures of making sure we are caring for our kids in the best way possible, which is not always that easy, as I hope most parents can attest to. Plus, the real bummer about being here in Spain is that we missed the Super Bowl this year! On the whole, it's great to be here, we really do enjoy it. But we do miss some things from 'home', and are baffled by some things here.

How is language school going? It is good. I know more Spanish today than I did 5 months ago! But seriously, it is a challenge for me, but it's good to be able to communicate better, and I just keep on keepin' on to continue growing in my communication skills.
Really? It's hard for me. This is the thing I worry about more than anything here. Partly because it feels like so much of our success here relies on our ability to learn to communicate. Partly because I've had no success in my past at learning languages. Languages consistently were low spots in my academic career. But mostly, I go to class, and struggle to understand the teacher anytime she veers off of the textbook to explain things. It feels like I am learning at a glacial pace when I look around and see many others who learn quickly (classmates, family members, etc). I definitely feel like I'm learning stuff, but it does not seem to happen fast enough. I'm fairly certain I'm in the bottom of my class. I have no choice but to succeed in what might be the biggest challenge I've faced in my life.

How are the hostel plans? Things are going well. We still have a ways to go to get our plan off the ground. First things first, we have to learn the language! We are excited to have a great teammate, and have another couple who is interested in joining us that we are excited about.
Really? Things really are going pretty well. But I think we often feel as if other people's expectations are that we might already be running a hostel, or be doing it very soon. We have a pretty clear idea of where we think we are heading, but we are prepared for the journey to take some time. We want to do it right the first time, and set ourselves up to see the best possible chance of long-term success. The truth of the matter is that we are here because we feel a pretty clear leading from the Lord that He wants us here. We see that in order for this hostel to become a reality, God will continue to guide, and will have to 'show up' in such a way that any hostel and/or backpacker ministry that results will clearly be of his doing, and not our own. And we continue to hold 'our' plans loosely, aware that what we think is our direction will change if he guides us in another direction (for example, living now in La Coruña instead of Santiago). After I learn the language, opening a successful hostel and ministry might be the next "biggest challenge" I've had to face in my life. Despite all of our planning and dreaming, there are parts of me that have trouble imagining seeing that vision become a reality. But then, I also know it was not that long ago that parts of me that had trouble seeing us moving to Spain, and here we are!

How are the kids? They are great. The boys are adjusting to school. Both boys seem to like being in school. Kathryn is a great baby. Very quiet and well behaved. We had a lot of illness over the first several months here, but we seem to have come clear of that.
Really? Yeah - for the most part, this one is pretty accurate. What we generally don't talk about though are the temper tantrums and fits that each of the boys seem to have seemingly too often. They are happening with less frequency than when we first arrived, but still seemingly too often. We also don't talk too much about the times we are woken up at night--by all three of the kids, not just the baby. But mostly because any parent can talk about that too - there's not much sympathy to be found out there for something so common : - ) We also don't talk as often about our concerns for the kids - how their personalities will adjust to being here. How will Brennan's gentle and quiet spirit adjust in a place where he clearly is an outsider? How will all of the kids respond to growing up in a place where some of the general cultural values are not all that similar to our own?

So, in the end, there is truth in the simple, pat answers. But it is often a simple truth, unencumbered by the more difficult realities of daily life.