Adventures in Orthodoxy

Why I'm Catholic Now

2009-03-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

Dear friends and family,

Here is a short synopsis of how I came to be Roman Catholic. It is an abbreviated version of the story of my conversion, and by no means represents all the myriad ways that God has worked in my heart and the countless doctrines with which I have wrestled, but it does offer a starting point for conversation. As many of you may know, I am more than happy to talk about it and to share about God's calling on my life. Just let me know, and we can get coffee or a meal for the longer story. Thanks, and God bless,

Jason

I am originally from Westfield Center, where I was blessed to have been raised in a Christian home. Growing up with both parents and five younger siblings in an evangelical church, I heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached often and learned of my need for a personal relationship with God. When I was in sixth grade, I realized my sin separated me from God; wanting to avoid the consequences of sin and be forgiven, I asked Jesus into my heart as my Lord and Savior. I trust that was when I first converted and began to live a life of faith.

At the age of 13, I took another step of faith and asked for baptism. At my evangelical church, this sacrament was only considered an outward sign and symbol of salvation's work already finished in my heart. It was tied to church membership and a public confession of faith, much like Confirmation in churches that baptize infants. I saw God's blessing for following His leading to baptism, though, even though not many people in my church were baptized as young as I was. The testimony I gave before my church in a public proclamation of faith gave me a dear community of encouragement and accountability throughout high school. God used my evangelical church to grow me spiritually in countless good ways.

College found me at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, a Jesuit school where I was committed to studying political science in preparation for law school and a life of public service. Before leaving home, though, I was genuinely worried that my faith would not be able to stand up to the pressures and temptations of college life. Georgetown is technically a Roman Catholic university, but very few students actually take their faith seriously. Shortly after arriving, however, I joined several interdenominational Christian fellowship groups for community and accountability. God worked through Bible studies, service opportunities, and fellowship with other Christian believers to protect me from losing faith and my Christian witness. My faith truly became my own at Georgetown, and, praise God, grace carried me through all four years.

It was at Georgetown that I first met Catholics who were serious about serving Jesus. Growing up, I had several Catholic friends who only attended Mass on Christmas and Easter. Their lack of understanding and living out of faith seemed to confirm the negative stereotypes that I had been taught at my Protestant church about Catholics. Thankfully, however, through interdenominational ministries at Georgetown, I came into contact with Catholic believers, and had the chance to see their faith manifested in lives of Christian witness before I even knew they were Roman Catholic. I was completely taken aback, for example, when I learned that a prayer partner in my freshman dorm, who shared my evangelistic concern for our lost friends, was a devout Catholic. I thank God, though, that the anti-Catholic stereotypes with which I had been raised melted away in the first few months at university.

My sophomore year I added a theology major focusing on biblical literature to my course of studies. The classes, taught from a secular and academic perspective, de-constructed as social and cultural commentary all the scriptures that I considered sacred and revealed by God. Faced with new (and unchristian) opinions of my Christian faith, I started to question what was essential to belief. Was a literal understanding of the Bible necessary? Could I ever really find the truth in a specific church, creed, or interpretation of the Bible? I was still actively involved in an interdenominational campus fellowship, so I was being exposed to the whole spectrum of Christian belief and practice. God was calling me to find Christian Truth; a Truth that I knew should not result in the plurality of sects and multiple interpretations of scripture. My Protestant convictions, however, told me that I was the abiter of my own truth and reality: that I could choose my denomination, my specific beliefs, and the way I wanted to follow God.

Junior year I had the chance to visit Israel for a semester of study abroad in the Holy Land. There, God worked in my heart in many ways. First, I was exposed to the beauty of liturgy and the importance of the Christian liturgical year. Concerning the liturgy of the Mass, I realized for the first time in Israel that I felt more comfortable and at peace in a Roman Catholic Mass than I did in an evangelical Baptist service. Living as a foreigner in a dangerous country far away from home, the words of scripture and ancient truth in the liturgy gave me the comfort and peace for which my soul hungered. Secondly, I had the first chance of my lifetime to really live out the liturgical year. Raised in an evangelical faith, we understood Lent as a papist practice, and were lucky if we got hear about the Resurrection on Easter morning. Being in Jerusalem, however, I took full advantage of the opportunities to celebrate Ash Wednesday, Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, with the liturgical Protestant and Catholic communities in Jerusalem. I received ashes on Ash Wednesday from a Catholic Bishop in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I fasted from meat during Lent for 40 days near the desert where Christ himself was tempted in the wilderness, I joined in with the throngs waving palm branches to welcome our Lord and King on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, I kept vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane on Maundy Thursday, I was kneeling at the sight of the true cross when the church bells rang out at 3:00 pm to remember Jesus' death on Good Friday, and I got up before dawn to remember our Savior's resurrection for a sunrise service at the Mount of Olives on Easter Sunday. I found that the experiences of Christian holy days strengthened immeasurably my faith in Christian Truth and my relationship with God.

It was also in Israel that I got to see and interact with churches of Orthodox and Catholic origins. These churches, many of them being in the Holy Land since the time of Christ and the apostles, claimed an authority of faith through apostolic succession from Jesus himself. Seeing the land of the scriptures, that I had studied eagerly as a Protestant, so closely tied to these apostolic churches and traditions, spoke volumes to me. I realized that in the land where Christ lived, the truth about Christ continued to be made manifest in these churches.

Returning to Georgetown for my senior year, I still was not convinced to become Roman Catholic. Although I wanted to believe in a sacramental understanding of reality (as a Protestant I believed only in symbols and faith), I still did not believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist or the literal washing away of sins by baptism. My soul longed to trust Catholic doctrine and to believe God's use of physical objects as the means of grace for me, so I began to pray for faith to accept the Catholic understanding of the sacraments. A dear Catholic friend and mentor of mine was patient every step of the way to answer questions, and explain the significance of Catholic teaching. He encouraged me to go to a Catholic chapel on campus and spend time praying to the Blessed Sacrament, asking, "Jesus, is that you there?"

After much time spent praying in the Catholic chapel, I began to feel a peace and presence that I did not find in Protestant worship spaces. I began to spend more and more time there, going to prayer several times a week, and began genuflecting and crossing myself when I entered the chapel, out of respect for the Catholic tradition. Somewhere along the way, another friend shared with me the scriptural grounds for belief in the Real Presence and, thank God, by the end of my senior year I was a believer.

My senior year, I also took a course taught by an excellent professor and dedicated Jesuit priest on the teaching of Saints Augustine, Bonaventure, Anselm, and Aquinas . Explaining Catholic doctrine through the lens of these fathers and doctors of the Catholic Church, Fr. Fields showed me more and more the great continuity and treasure of faith passed on through the Roman Catholic Church. I realized that if these teachers were alive today, they would probably be Roman Catholic, and, as a Protestant, I would probably be at odds with them. I felt a growing longing to be united with the doctors and traditions of the Catholic faith, while the division caused by the Protestant Reformer seemed to make less and less sense to me. I remember one day trying to justify myself as a Protestant and to tell myself at what one point the Catholic Church "went wrong," so as to require the Reformation. I realized that I probably ought to become Catholic when I could not think of anything.

After Georgetown, I decided to spend some time doing missionary work as an English teacher in Paraguay. I went to serve with the evangelical denomination in which I was raised, believing that if my interest in Catholic faith continued throughout the year, it really was something from God and not something I was doing on my own. While at Georgetown, I was worried my conversion to Catholicism might be the result of peer pressure or my own pride, so I decided to give the choice a time of discernment in South America. There, I reckoned I would see (and indeed did) the worst stereotypes of Catholicism-- that is, Catholic faith polluted by folk traditions in a society where very few actually faithfully practiced their religion. The evangelical church where I served was full of ex-Catholics, all very eager to share their negative opinions of the Catholic Church. I wanted to make sure I got every perspective before I became Catholic.

I realized in Paraguay more than ever, though, that God was calling me to become Roman Catholic. Although much of what I saw in South American Catholicism was not good, I realized that the heart of the faith and the teaching of the Church was good and true. Although many Paraguayans are not faithful to the Church and the society in many ways has fallen fall short of God's ideal, the Church remains the Church and holds the fullest revelation of Jesus Christ for salvation in the world.

Upon return, I knew for certain that I had to join the Catholic Church. I began attending St. Francis Xavier, contacted Jenny Bonarrigo, and, after a few meetings with her and First Reconciliation with Fr. Hollis, was received into full communion with the Catholic Church on February 15. I praise God for the way He has worked in my heart along the way, and it gives me such great joy to consider how He's finally led me here. For years I have thought about becoming Catholic and imagined the joy of being able to share in the Holy Eucharist, and now it feels as if all the gifts of Heaven are mine through Jesus Christ and His Church.

I Thank God

2008-12-12T10:50:00.000-08:00

Thank God, the travel is all over. It's a privilege to be back home with family and friends; to realize there is a country, a state, and even a family where I belong. There are people who dress just like me, speak just like me, and eat just like me. I hear familiar music play on the radio, and I watch familiar programs on tv. It's good to be home.

Thank God, my flights from South America went well. Not a single piece of luggage lost or damaged, not a single flight delayed or connection missed. I arrived in Miami for a splendid visit with Mrs. Moxley, then continued on to Nashville to meet up with Luke. After a short visit to Music City, we flew northward to meet up with our family for Thanksgiving Day.

Thank God, everyone was able to be together the Friday after Thanksgiving for my Grandpa's funeral. All my mom's family, much of my dad's, and a whole host of old friends from church came to offer sympathy and pay their respects. I officiated my first funeral service, and I trust that God used it as a tribute to both my Grandpa's life and His faithfulness revealed in it. It was a cold, cold, day, but one filled with many warm memories and the sweet consolation of grace.

Thank God, following a very short weekend search, an affordable and well-working car was provided for my use. It's a black 97 Toyota Corrolla with only 98 K miles, and a splendid first car for a very-recently-returned missionary. It runs smooth, and, when the day comes to sell, ought to fetch a good price as a used vehicle, too.

Thank God, after a busy weekend, I was able to travel on a university-touring expedition with my new car. With gas prices so low, it cost next-to-nothing to visit Notre Dame with Dad on Tuesday, and Boston College and Yale on Thursday. Along the way, I had the chance to visit with a dear friend from high school in Boston and a dear friend from Georgetown in New Jersey.

Thank God, last weekend I spent a wonderful time in Washington, DC, where I got to meet up with every one of my good friends from university. Most have stayed in the greater DC area, and the weekend was filled with sweet reunion after sweet reunion. Old friends hosted me at their houses, and several fed me as well. Highlights from the weekend included an early morning hike with old roommates and a midday lunch at the Jesuit residence at Georgetown with a dear priest, mentor, and professor friend.

Thank God, Sunday was spent congregating with Georgetown Baptist Church. I was invited to sing in the choir once again, and was overjoyed to find Pastor Carl in good health and cheerful spirits. Truly, God was faithful and good to this congregation, and faithful in answering so many petitions prayed on their behalf.

Thank God, this week has been much more laid back. The family is passing through a rough time, but I've been able to spend time with each one sharing and listening. A job search continues, with a possible opening and interview set for Monday morning. God-willing I'll be able to work next week and settle into a good healthy routine.

Thank God, because it's good to be home.

Bitter Sweet Homecoming

2008-11-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

As many of you may have heard, my Grandpa Donahey passed away yesterday (Sunday) at 5:00pm. He was as prepared, both spiritually and physically, as he possibly could have been to go Home. As a family, we count many fond memories with Grandpa over the past few years, and have been blessed with plenty of time to prepare for his departure. Thankfully, I got to talk to him on Friday and say goodbye and tell him I love him.

As many of you may not know, for the past half year I´ve also been intending to fly home early and surprise my family for Thanksgiving. So, surprise! God-willing I´ll see you on Thursday for Thanksgiving, or on Friday at 10:00 am for my grandpa´s funeral. Viewing hours start at 10:00 am with the actual funeral service at 11:00 am at Waite and Sons in Medina. I hope to see you there!

Argentina!

2008-11-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

Argentina, when compared with Paraguay, is a really big country to get to know. For that reason, along with my limited time and pocketbook, I chose to visit only three major cities in the middle part of the country.

The first leg of my trip was to Buenos Aires, the most European major city in South America. After an 18 hour through-the-night bus ride from Asunción, I arrived to the most Western civilization I’d seen in more than a year. Since Buenos Aires was settled and populated by Spaniards and Italians, the architecture, parks, and beauty of the city reflect Western and especially Western European styles and ways of living. There were beautiful old buildings and imposing ornate churches, flowing gothic fountains and clean Victorian parks.

I also arrived to the most materialism I’ve seen in a year. The first day I spent wandering around wide-eyed and open-mouthed in the shopping district, visiting store after store and mall after mall. I saw brands of clothing and food and entertainment that I had almost forgotten about in my year away from American culture. The best surprise was a man dressed up as a sandwich who led me to Subway.

Sunday in Buenos Aires I went to San Telmo, a neighborhood world-famous for its antiques shops and street fair. I bought a small $10 religious painting a couple centuries old that had been ripped out of a church in Peru.

Monday saw me visiting Palermo, the ritzy part of town, and buying a ham and cheese sandwich for $10. In my defense, I was really hungry after walking around and visiting the Recoleta, a little city-cemetery where all of Argentina’s famous folks are buried (including Evita).

Tuesday I went back to Palermo and Argentina’s National Fine Arts Gallery, where I saw paintings by as many modern artists as you can name. Picasso, Monet, Manet, Rivera, Van Gogh, Degas--- everyone was there, and all their paintings saw me trying to be an artsy fartsy arts aficionado. I figured just standing and staring long enough would make me look like I appreciated art, and I think it worked.

Wednesday morning I arrived in Mendoza, a mountain city on the other side of Argentina and in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. It reminded me much of Boulder, Colorado. The city has a complex system of canals which channels melting snow from the mountains to water its thousands of beautiful sycamore trees. The city would be a desert without this genius system, which also provides the necessary irrigation water for surrounding vineyards and orchards.

My first full day in Mendoza, I took a trip high into the Andes Mountains to the border with Chili and an altitude of about 11,000 feet. I saw snow there, and took my picture with Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas. I met on the tour two American men who were both former contract security officers with American military forces overseas. We had a hearty lunch, since it got really cold so high up in the mountains.

Day two in Mendoza saw me on a bicycling vineyard tour of the surrounding countryside. I don’t know who ever thought mixing bicycles with wine tastings and crazy Argentinian traffic was a good idea, but thankfully I survived the afternoon along with my two new friends from Tufts University that I met along the way. Perhaps it was God’s will to protect us on the roads and to keep me from getting into trouble, but we started off late and were only able to see two vineyards and one specialty liqueur shop. Around a dozen vineyards were originally on the tour schedule. I ended the day dehydrated and with a literally blistered behind.

The last day in Mendoza I went to visit La Difunta Correa Shrine, the center of a folk cult to a woman who, a century and a half ago, was found dead in the desert with her live baby still sucking at her breast. Although the cult is condemned by the Catholic Church, many Argentineans believe La Difunta Correa, or the Dead Lady Correa, can perform miracles for people who ask. Thus, at her shrine, people bring models of their houses to ask for La Difunta’s blessing, leave parts of their cars for safety in travel, and climb the stairs to an altar with a statue of her dead body and suckling baby to ask for good health and prosperity. The idolatry and paganism of it all, along with a bad raw ham sandwich I ate for lunch, made me soul- and stomach-sick the rest of my trip.

Monday I arrived in Córdoba, a beautiful colonial city in central Argentina nearly as old as colonialism itself. With several beautiful churches downtown, I was impressed that native Cordobans nearly filled each one to capacity for mass on a weekday morning.

Besides seeing a few churches a few blocks away from my hostel, I was too sick to do anything else in Córdoba, and ended up passing two days indoors close to the toilet and sink. Fed up with being far away from home and with no one to take care of me, I arranged to leave my hostel early and zoomed on a bus back to Asunción.

Experiencing Argentina, although much bigger and perhaps with many more exciting things to do than Paraguay, was nothing like experiencing home again in Lambaré. I went away to foreign lands only to come back appreciating even more the community of dear friends and Christian brothers and sisters that I have here in Asunción. I missed them all so much while I was gone, and I’m even thankful now that my sickness in Mendoza and Córdoba gave me good reason to return home early to spend more time with them these last few weeks in Paraguay.

Nightmares

2008-11-20T06:06:00.000-08:00

I have never been one to think too much of my dreams. In our over-analyzed post-Freudian world, what ought to be taken as innocent dreams are often twisted around and interpreted to tell us that we have very dark desires and are actually very bad people. As for me, I don’t think that what I dream is necessarily always what I want to do, and I know that if I dream about trees and buildings and people and normal things that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m 100% repressed.

In my spiritual life, my dreams have never been a very big part of my relationship with God. Although I once met the pope in a very lively night of dreaming, I can’t recall meeting God or an angel by way of vision, and I’ve certainly never received any clear instructions for my life while asleep. Although I’ve dreamt of Christian reconciliation between people who have been separated for a long time and of the spiritual salvation I so greatly desire for many friends and loved ones, I claim no prophetic vision and write it off more as wishful thinking on my own part than the reality of God’s workings in the world. I’m generally very skeptical and uncharismatic when it comes to interpreting dreams as revelations from God.

All this goes to say that I’m really surprised at myself for being so impacted by what’s been going on in my dreams the last two nights. I’ve had terrible nightmares for two nights straight: nightmares where everything around me in my bedroom—my blankets, my clothes, the fan, and even my roommate, turn into menacing demons and grotesque diabolic forms. The room swirls with evil, an endless maze of altered reality and torment. I cannot explain it well, but it has terrified me at night and left me feeling completely helpless.

Last night, when the nightmare was at its worst two or three times, I had no recourses left but to cry out to God with the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t speak with any authority as one rebuking demons, but instead, as a lost and terrified child crying out to his father, I prayed for salvation from what I dreamt was evil all around me. As I recited the “Our Father," the incubus world quickly receded and I was left quiet, alone, and trembling in my bed.

I’m really at a loss as to how to interpret what actually is happening. Perhaps I just am eating too much chipa, and my dreams the result of too much Paraguayan cheese in my system. Or, perhaps I have a lot of subconscioius transition stress and it’s working itself out in nightmares. I’m tempted to believe, though, that it really is some sort of spiritual warfare going on and a very real vision of the constant fight going on within my soul between good and evil and light and darkness. Whatever it is, though, it’s shaking me up, and I’m coming out of it able to testify to the power of God in the midst of demonic terror, and of the presence of divine peace in the struggle with very dark dreams.

Some pictures from Argentina...

2008-11-13T16:11:00.000-08:00

Some pictures from my journeys in Agentina.

All goes well.

A Lively Update

2008-11-03T11:18:00.001-08:00

You might say it’s been a while since I’ve updated, so here’s a smattering of information:

1. Jason Jacobs, the fellow to replace me, arrived from Richmond two weeks ago. He stayed with Oscar and Karen a week and then moved in to the house with me and Christian. So far, everything goes real well. Some of our discussions and adventures in the house might make for a good comedy—“Two Missionary Dads Raising a Christian,” or some bad use of words to that effect. You can check out Jason’s blog to get his perspective at jayzilla.com.

2. A week ago Saturday I took the GRE for my graduate school applications. The paper edition is offered once or twice a year in Paraguay at the CCPA, a sort of American-Paraguayan cultural and linguistic exchange center. I arrived around 8 in the morning to find a very large crowd of Peace Corp volunteers who were also taking the test. Most were from the Midwest and looked eerily like me—light hair, blue eyes, and slightly sunburned all around. I met one girl named Ellen who lives in the San Pedro province and who is keeping bees. Apparently Taiwan donated (thank you, obscure South American country, for your vote in the United Nations) a pile of bee-keeping equipment to Paraguay to inspire new forms of sustainable agriculture, but the only person who interested in the project is this fine volunteer from Wisconsin.

The test room was air conditioned like a refrigerator, but we still all protested that no water bottles were allowed anywhere near us during the nearly four-hour test. The room was also a sort of exhibition hall, and on that day were shown blown-up pictures of violence and war from conflicts of recent memory (read: Iraq, Vietnam, Bosnia, Africa). Needless to say, we were all inspired to do well by pictures of blood and gore and sadness and utter hopelessness. I chose to sit underneath a picture of what looked like grieving Bosnian women wailing around their now-dead son. I thought, perhaps, that they were Eastern Orthodox and might have some symbol of religion or hope in the form of a cross. I realized later they were probably Muslim and without any such comfort. One girl went to sit down in a chair and, when she looked up, was startled back out of her seat again. She had sat below the infamous picture showing a group of US soldiers in Vietnam with their backs turned to a presumably-innocent parade of Vietnamese, including one young female victim crying and without any clothes. Clearly frightened and bothered, the test-taker chose a more comfortable spot in front of some Guantanamo Bay detainees. If any of us do poorly on the test, I reckon that at least we’ll have a good excuse.

3. God-willing I’ll leave for Argentina this Friday. My route will go from Buenos Aires, the lively European-like capital on Argentina’s Eastern coast, to Mendoza, Argentina’s primer wine-making region among the Andes Mountains in the Western frontier, to Cordoba, the quiet, colonial, and intellectual town in the center of the country. I probably will be out of touch, but please say a prayer for my safety and well-being on the trip.

4. After my Argentinean excursion, I come back to Asuncion for a while before I finally fly to the States to be home on December 9. God-willing I’ll find work in Ohio, where I’ll be with my family for at least a half-year before I head on off to grad school at Notre Dame, Boston College, Yale, or Duke, or go back to DC to find a job in the nation’s capital.

Thanks for your prayers in everything. My family especially needs them right now. God bless!

Lord, Increase My Faith

2008-10-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

It was easy to come here: listless after university, seeking adventure, eager for foreign lands, Paraguay was a good and logical choice. Girls swooned, guys admired, people prayed.

Lord, increase my faith.

My family was a wreck, my college friends spread out across the globe, and the times were changing. I had no home. It was good for me to leave.

Lord, increase my faith.

It was cool to go abroad in an exercise of faith. God was calling me, I was listening and following. New difficulties came with new possibilities and new challenges with new graces. It was in style to be poor, a bohemian college graduate without anything and depending on the grace of God and others for everything. I was grown in faith to trust and to not value so much the things of this world.

Lord, increase my faith.

A year later, I’m packing up and getting ready to follow God again. This time, though, it’s to much more familiar lands, and this time it’s not so glorious. “Yeah, I come from Ohio,” I tell everyone here. “The most normal state in the United States.” People won’t be so impressed when I tell them I’m getting an office job. I’ll probably get crossed off several prayer lists a few weeks after my return.

Lord, increase my faith. .

My family is still a wreck, and after a year away there’s nowhere now where I can run away from the reality. “The divorce is December 9.” My friends are still all over the country, but now they have really cool jobs in elections and government agencies and national banks. They’ve found success, and I’ve found a pauper self to be self-conscious about.

Lord, increase my faith.

I’m going back to Ohio without a car, without a cellphone, without health insurance, and without a job. At one time I spurned these “things of the world,” but now they´re all looking pretty attractive as I start dealing with American reality. At one time I thought settling down in a place with friends and family was pretty boring, but now I envy those who have never moved out and have it mostly all figured out.

Lord, increase my faith.

A lot has changed the past year, and a lot will change this next year, too.

Lord, increase my faith.

A Prayer for Sion

2008-10-10T14:11:00.001-07:00

“Teacher, are you married?” one of my adoring second grade students asked me. “No,” I responded. “Why?” “Well” she continued, “I was hoping to have a little brother. If you were married, I was thinking you could have a son. Then he could be my brother if you adopted me. I would like you for a dad.”

Although I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time when I heard it, these words were nothing of a joke for Zion. Her mother abandoned her several years ago for work in Uruguay, she doesn’t know her real father, and, although has a baby brother come along the way since her mother left, she’s never met the child. She lives with her grandmother, who I suspect of many eccentricities and perhaps a touch of senility, and only hears from her mom by way of telephone a couple times a year. The child is starved for attention, doing whatever she can to spend time with me and other teachers and to be heard. Although she is very smart and has a great sense of humor, Zion hardly does her work in class and spends her time in school ambling about the classroom and whispering things in the teacher’s ear.

Zion once asked me in whole and simple faith to pray for her family—her mom and her baby brother in Uruguay, and her grandmother-who-turns-sixty-five-today in Paraguay. Athough nearly abandoned, she loves them terribly and hurts because they’re not all together. I told her I that would, and I really do. She is a beautiful child, but one with so many needs and so much brokenness that only a heavenly father can heal. Her and her family are in much need of grace, so if you think of it please say a prayer today on their behalf. She’s the reason that the ministry at Adonai exists and the reason why I’ve come to Paraguay—to bless and reach out to students with the love and hope of Christ, doing whatever we can, no matter how small it might seem, to offer the good news of redemption and restoration through the Gospel of Peace.

You Can Thank Me Later, Jason Jacobs

2008-10-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

The Spanish word for bribery is “coima.” If I were anywhere else in the world at any other time in my life, I’d probably be disgusted by acts of bribery. When I was in Egypt and got snuck in the back way to see the pyramids, for example, our guides paid the guards coima (in Egypt, backsheesh) for us to get through. Although they saw it as a way of polishing the dancefloor of bureaucracy to make it easier for us and them to dance, I saw it as corruption and dishonesty, and I was angry.

Here in Paraguay, though, memories of Egypt and the United States and being upset at corruption are half a world away. Here in Paraguay, I’ve adapted too much to the culture and today have even become guilty of paying “coima” myself. You see, my last dances with the Paraguayan bureaucracy are now being held in the grand Asuncion ballroom, partnered as I am with the need to renew my visa for an extra two months of residency. Today found me making an elegant foot-move at the police station, where I had to get an official paper saying that I do indeed live where I do in Lambaré.

At the end of today’s shuffle of feet, the police chief gave me a sly look and asked me if I just wouldn’t like to give a little money to help make any future dances go a little smoother. It was a complex question, like the innocent-yet-guilty glance of an inviting tango partner from across the room. “How much would leave,” I asked him, “and for what purposes?” “Oh, to cover the cost of paper and so on,” he responded. “You can give whatever you want.”

Knowing that he knew me and the school that I represented (and would in fact come into direct contact with other missionaries like me in the future) and could make their experiences at the police station good ones or bad ones, I was left with little choice. I consciously and intentionally secured the crooked arrangement, offering him 10 mil guaranies, or about $2.50, in thank-you bribe money. The sad part is, it didn’t even cross my mind to decline his invitation. He smiled, perhaps pleased that he could buy a few more empanadas this morning or a week’s worth of yerba for his family, and I knew better than to ask for a receipt. This was bribe money.

I left, feeling a little dirty and a little compromised. I definitely gave money to a dirty police man as a little floor polish to clean up the dances that future missionaries will have with the police, and I definitely didn’t think twice about it. That’s the way things go here: obey blindly, give money to the authorities, don’t ask for receipts, and they won’t hurt you. They may even be your friends if you give enough.

I think I’ve too-quickly adjusted to the bad parts of South American culture, and not quickly-enough to the good parts. South America reinforces some of my sinful tendencies. Thankfully, though, I think I hear North America and a little sanity calling.

Tropical Bonfire

2008-10-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

This past weekend the church youth group went to camp, where I got to sit by the best campfire of my life. It was huge and full of very hotly-burning hardwood, probably taken from the ancient reserves of Paraguay’s tropical and sub-tropical rainforests. In the United States, people might be sad that these natural rainforests are being cut down and burned by those in the South. For those people actually in the South, however, there’s no fire quite like a wood-from-the-rain-forest fire. It was hot and brilliant and beautiful; in the light and warmth of the fire we could have cared less about the World Wildlife Fund or Green Peace or the environment. Destruction of species? Don’t care. Less oxygen for the world? So what? It really was the nicest bonfire I’ve ever seen.

It was even nicer, though, because Oscar knew how to use it as a form of entertainment. He had a pile of nearly-dried sugar cane stalks, each one about 10 to 12 feet long, and every once in a while threw a few on the hot fire. The cane, which grows in segments like bamboo, would burn evenly and rapidly on the outside, causing the gases inside to quickly build up with immense pressure. Then, when the fibrous cane casing could no longer stand the force of the steam from within, the canes exploded with the sound of a gunshot and sent an explosion of burning coals into the night air. Each explosion came as a complete surprise disrupting the calm and cool countryside, startling us to a very giddy laughter and the most fun I’ve ever had around a fire. Many of us couldn’t stop laughing at the joke of exploding coals and loud firecracker sounds, especially at those who had to jump out of the way of the shooting bursts of pressurized fire. The unpredictability and randomness of the trick made the night, and made for the best campfire I’ll never forget.

Impertinent Youthful Ratiocinations on the Falling American Economy

2008-09-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest pleasures of being young is impertinence. As youths we can throw around opinions without experience, talk about things we really don’t know about, and live in an imaginary world where everything conforms to the way we understand it to be. Some might call it idealism, others smug self-assurance, but it’s a state of being in which I find myself particularly caught up recently. Being in a rather isolated Paraguayan evangelical community where my closest friend is nearly identical to me in many aspects of worldview and identity, the temptation to understand things from a very limited perspective is even stronger.

Today I saw that the stock market crashed. The US economy is in terrible shape, and my mind immediately goes to several impertinent thoughts:

1. The US is reaping what it’s sown.
2. I’m glad I don’t have any stocks or a 401K plan to worry about.
3. I’m kind of thankful I don’t have any money at all.
4. My family knows how to grow and can tomatoes. If there’s another Great Depression, we’ll at least survive on stewed tomatoes all year long.
5. I know how to work, and I also know that no work is below me. I’m ready to wash dishes or do yard work if the economy fails and there are no jobs for me when I return
6. Manual work is a large part of spiritual formation and practice in many Christian communities, from Catholic Trappist monks working on egg farms in Tennessee to Anabaptist Mennonite believers toiling away in dairy production on the Paraguayan frontier. These say that calluses are good for Christians and moral development, and I kind of agree with them.
7. Another Depression could serve the US well. We have, after all, become proud consumerist fat cats. My family has four televisions and only three people are living at home. I have an entire household of appliances in storage waiting for me when I come home, and I’m only 23. Where does all this wealth come from? Most Paraguayans live on a couple dollars a day.
8. I have some friends who lived in Argentina when their economy crashed a few years ago. Without any money, they grew and ate fried manioc (a big tuber) all year long. I kind of envy their frugality, and think fried manioc with stewed tomatoes alongside it would be a good combination.
9. A crashed American economy would show American Christians that the blessings of the Gospel are spiritual, not material. We need to hear and know that. “every spiritual blessing in Christ” does not mean a chicken in every Christian pot or a Mercedes in every Christian driveway.
10. I think I may invest in Paraguayan cattle. Cows can have babies every year, reproducing the investment annually, and I have contacts that, for the price of milk they sell, would manage and breed my herd well.

Yes, I am an impertinent youth. I have a particularly Christian view on everything, too, which makes my impertinence even more dangerous and self-justifying. I have a wild and rebellious streak in my ratiocinations on the economy, a strange mixture of workers rights, just desserts, and flippant disregard for the mammon of this world that I’ve inherited from both Joe Steidl and Jesus Christ and the gist of which goes against established financial wisdom, the power of the wealthy, and most of the economic policies of the Republican Party. I really don’t know what’s going on in the financial markets, but I do like to imagine that I could survive well in mind, spirit, and body with calluses on my hands and stewed tomatoes in my belly. I am, after all, an impertinent youth.

Stay on the Sunny Side

2008-09-29T12:29:00.001-07:00

It’s amazing how much a difference of perspective can make. As people, I’m convinced we have an amazing capacity to adapt to whatever situation or way of life where we find ourselves; as Christians, I trust we can stay steady and unshaken in soul and spirit like the Apostle Paul who, despite all the tough confusing times of his life, was able to be content in all things. Often times the thing that matters is the attitude we take and the choices we make when confronting life situations.

I take as two examples circumstances from my life here in Paraguay. Last October, when I was only here a month, a vertical blue line appeared on my laptop screen. I did some research and found the line was a factory defect that came along with my computer when I bought it, replaceable with an extended warranty that ended last March. Since the first line appeared, several dozen more have appeared, making my computer screen into a rainbow of Easter-egg colors with new shades added every week. Thankfully, I can still write and do what I need to do, but the messed-up screen is still a pain.

For me, I have a choice to make about how I think of the lines on my computer. I can complain about how technology is worthless and Dell is a terrible brand and woe is me because I’m a poor missionary with a decomposing computer. Or, I can look at the lines and remember and be thankful. I can look at the lines and see one blue one that appeared right after I was robbed at gunpoint and thank God I still have my life. Or, I can look at a red one that popped up during my cousin’s visit, and thank God I had family and visitors with me for a Christmas away from home. Or I can glance at a green one that showed itself in the days after the first grading period ended, and remember too God’s faithfulness to me as a teacher. The choice, really, is up to me as to how I look at my now-defuncting computer screen. I can complain or use it as reminder of God’s faithfulness to me.

A second illustration comes from my experience in the AC church here. Whenever one lives in community, small things start to bother and quirky eccentricities to chafe. Living in a community with a culture far different than one’s own makes the temptation to complain and be grumpy about the way things are done even much more strong. Customs, even church customs, appear sometimes strange, unbiblical, and perhaps even unchristian. For me and the AC church here, this difference in spiritual practice and opinion has made itself clear many times, but perhaps one of the clearest is in the giving of the tithe.

I was raised, as any good North American ACer, in a church with the donation box at the back of the sanctuary. There was never any passing of the plate or possibility for public demonstration of tithing. We discreetly put our money in the back box at the beginning or end of the service, almost embarrassed by the fact that anyone might see us doing so. Scripturally, Christ’s call to not let our right hand know what our left hand was giving made itself manifest in stealthy donations by way of quick, James Bond style handmaneuvers.

The church here, however, makes the tithe giving a big show. There’s a special worship song when it’s announced that everyone can offer their gift, and then everyone goes up front in a big processional line to deposit their money in an open white box. There is a big and public to-do about giving, undoubtedly cultural but entirely foreign to me.

For me, the temptation is to judge. I can look around at everyone who has their money in hand and think that they must be so prideful to make such a public display of their gift-giving. I want to tell the pastors that the way they donate tithe money is wrong and against what Jesus taught, making people more concerned with what other people think as they go up to the offering box and less concerned with what God thinks as they pridefully do so or stay seated in their shame.

Thankfully, though, there’s a way out for me of this temptation to judge. While Christ speaks of giving alms in secret, the scriptures also speak of celebrations after harvest time and during festivals when the people of God joyfully presented their offerings and sacrifices to God, the first fruits of everything with which He had blessed them. Seen is this light, the communal tithe giving becomes a festive occasion to remember God’s many mercies in providing for basic necessities, a sort of public demonstration and testimony of God’s faithfulness in providing for finances. With this view of things, the people lose their pride and the offering becomes an act of worship towards a good God. The pastors are no longer manipulative and wanting to shame people into giving, but leaders themselves of a congregation joyfully giving back to God what is already His.

I pray that everyday we might look for the best in life: to count the little inconveniences as little blessings and the little differences in the practices and opinions of other people, especially among other Christians, as little manifestations of God’s goodness to all differently displayed. Then, as Christians, we may truly be content in all things and live out the love of God that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

A prayer

2008-09-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

A beautiful prayer by Thomas Merton, and one I can really call my own:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following

your will does not mean that I am

actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

And I hope to have that desire

in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart
from that desire.
And I know that if I do this,
you will lead me by the right road though I

may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though I

may seem lost and in the shadow

of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my

perils alone.

Angry Papa Bear

2008-09-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Don´t mess with my kid

(Warning- Contains a new bad word I learned in Spanish)

I had a “papa bear” moment with Christian the other day. He came home from school very upset, and when I asked him what it was about, he didn’t really want to talk. Upon further investigation, though, he opened up and told me what had happened. In school that day the art teacher wrote him up for calling a girl “pelotuda,” even the he had no idea what “pelotuda” meant.

From what I gathered, the story was this: Christian’s schoolmate, who talks too much and rarely leaves him alone, called him “pelotudo,” so logically Christian returned the remark in reply, even though he had no idea what it meant. The girl got offended in her uncomprehensible-little-high-school-girl-gets-offended-sort-of-way and went and told the art teacher, who is a very cold and unfeeling person that never greets me or any of the other teachers anyways. The art teacher asked Christian if the accusation was true, and he truthfully responded that it was, even though the girl had called him the name first and he didn’t know what it meant.

Long story shirt, Christian got written up and a point or two added to his record towards a one-day suspension (the only kind of punishment the Paraguayan school system knows how to hand out) because an annoying classmate spit out a tattle tale and the conniving art teacher licked it up. The girl walked away scott-free. I was disgusted and upset at the girl for her hypocrisy and the teacher for her man-hating tendencies and unintelligible punishment towards high schoolers who, after all, can do much worse things than call names.

About a week later, Christian and I both found out that “pelotudo” literally means big-balled, and is a some-what crude word used to insult people. When I got his weekly bulletin, which complained that he used the word in art class, I wrote a curt little response that went something like this: “Neither Christian nor I knew what “pelotudo” meant until his classmate called him the name first. Since neither Christian or his classmate are “pelotudos,” however, there really is nothing for us to be worried about. ---Prof. Jason” Christian was a little embarrassed by the note, as I would have been by my mom or dad sticking up for me like that in high school, but he accepted it and took it to school anyways, facing up to the reality of the situation in a pretty good realistic way.

On a Chest of Gold Bars at the Bottom of the Sea

2008-09-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

The sneaking premonition that nothing in this world lasts forever came up and nipped me quite unexpectedly when I was just four years old. I remember the day clearly, and the thought that came upon me without any warning at all: a chest full of gold if thrown to the bottom of the sea will eventually be dissolved by the water. Even the biggest and best bars, with enough time, disappear with the current as if they had never existed.

Startled by the prospect that even the best things might not last forever, I asked my mom if the dissolving of so much gold at the bottom of the sea could really be so. Perhaps she wasn’t listening to my childish question or really was and instead wanted to instill in me the values of security and eternity, but she answered me wrongly in saying that even if the gold was worn away bit by bit it would last forever. Either way, I was too smart for her answer and reasoned my philosophy through to its logical conclusion that everything on Earth has its time and then dissolves away.

They say that when one reaches about my age they start to realize the reality of worldly impermanence and physical death. Parents start getting sick and the cycle of birth and death can be seen as clear as an unmuddied stream as we start to have kids of our own. I don’t know how I’d come to grips with it all if I didn’t have the assurance of faith that there is a place where gold, even streets made entirely of gold, is never dissolved away and where water represents not the wear and tear of time but instead an eternal life-giving fount of beauty and love.

Ready for the Revolution

2008-09-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

A man in the supermarket parking lot this evening told me there was a military coup beginning and that every person should quickly go to his own home because tanks were rolling in from the Chaco to take over. Given the current and tumultuous political environment in Paraguay, his claim was not unbelievable to a generally disconnected and ignorant North American. And so, in good preparation for the revolution, I impetuously purchased

1. 5 pounds of bread

2. 2 pounds of sugar

3. 2 pounds of flour

4. Crackers

5. Toilet Paper

6. Suave hair conditioner

7. 3 cucumbers

8. 4 onions

9. Bananas

10. 4 and a half pounds of rice

11. 2 packages of noodles

12. 2 pounds of yerba for terreré and maté

13. A gallon of milk, in boxes

14. A lot of ricotta cheese

When the revolution gets here, you can bet I’ll be ready. After the prices of commodities fly through the roof because of the political instability, people will want to pay me in gold for my food, but I’ll give it to them for free because I’m nice like that.

Ready for the revolution

Visit to Bañado

2008-09-01T17:11:00.001-07:00

On Saturday I took up the invitation offered me many, many months ago to spend a day in Bañado, home to the smaller and poorer sister congregation of the Lambaré church and perhaps the poorest neighborhood in Asunción. The pseudo-municipality of about 52,000 inhabitants stretches along the uneven coast of the Rio Paraguayo outside all the comfortable edges of mainstream society. Although so many people call Bañado home, it is formally unrecognized by the government and municipal maps (although they also receive formally unrecognized government water and electricity free of charge). The land here, frequently flooded by rains and soggy through and through, is free and up for the grabs. 70 percent of its inhabitants work as trash collectors, rummishing through wealthier neighborhoods searching for anything that can be recycled for money: plastic bags, pop bottles, newspapers, metal scraps. A mere glance at the neighborhood betrays the profession. Trash carts take the place of family automobiles in front of homes while piles of recyclables take the place of swingsets and sandboxes out back.

I was invited by Alberto, a young man my age, Bañado native, and extraordinary servant of Christ with the Apostolic Christian Church in the neighborhood. Although gifted with so many spiritual and intellectual talents, Alberto has been without steady work for nearly a year now. He started university a while back, but left to pursue a work opportunity and lost out on all his credits. Recognized as an honest and trustworthy leader among neighborhood youth, he helped found and organize several community programs with a former American Peace Corp member. Now that she has left and abandoned the work, however, Alberto remains fully invested in the work of the Bañado church.

The congregation is very poor, and most everything they have has been donated by North American brothers and sisters in Christ. The Canadian AC churches sent work teams and money to build the church building, and my family’s own Vesper Lake Bible Fellowship recently donated the fans, lights, and curtains that the building still lacked several years after its construction.

Although the community is very poor, however, it is a community that is committed to and dependent on living a life of faith. Several members meet every evening of the week to spend time in prayer, and several members rely on this prayer for their basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Somehow and with much sharing and charity, the people survive. When someone lacks food, a collection is taken up and God provides. When someone lacks a place to stay, someone opens up their house and God provides. Theirs is a life completely dependent on trust in divine providence.

The congregation also ministers to the neighborhood, sending out groups every Sunday to meet, greet, and pray with new families in the area. There is a weekly Sunday school along with a women’s ministry, and a youth group that often plays sports together on Saturday. Church life isn’t always rosy, but each one I spoke to had a great love for the Lord and a deep commitment to service and evangelism. In Bañado, there are only three evangelical churches and a couple more Catholic churches. The spiritual need, like the economic need, is great.

For all the poverty among the people of Bañado, however, there are signs of hope in community organization and international aid efforts. Alberto showed me a cooperative of women bakers, most deserted by their husbands, who have banded together for the work and profit of making bread. We also passed by the Catholic Church, where a donation from the government of Spain has permitted the building of a vibrant community center where reading and writing classes and public health campaigns are offered free of charge. There was also a community grocery store where the church offers food at bargain prices, a neighborhood pharmacy where the poor can buy medicine at discounted rates, and a library where the luxuries of books and internet are offered to those who would never have the access to knowledge elsewhere. There was even a small radio station, giving public service announcements and keeping the community informed of important news and events. I also got to meet a Catholic missionary from Chicago, an older gentleman with big spectacles and an even bigger heart, fighting drug addiction with the hope of the Gospel. He is a dear friend of Alberto’s, whose oldest sister is a drug addict and who often receives much help by way of the Catholic lay minister.

It was an amazing privilege to see the work of development going on in Bañado, first in the church and then in the community. Often times I wonder if North American aid and volunteer associations actually do their jobs and really accomplish anything at all, but after visiting Bañado I have no doubts. Community development in the poorest places is working. The American Peace Corp is good and effective, as are the donations of churches, civic groups, and governments. A most practical example of this was a school where boxes of school supplies, bought by North America families for those in poorer places, are distributed through an organization called Kids for Kids.

Overall, the day was a refreshing visit to a poor place where the work of God often partners with the development of man in bettering the lives of so many poor. I got to see so many organizations at work, so many projects put to good use, and churches using spiritual and economic resources for the good of their fellow man and the greater glory of their transcendent God. Although Bañado is a place of extreme poverty, it is also a place of extreme grace where the work of spiritual and economic redemption is plainly in sight.

Goin´ on a Jetplane

2008-08-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

Bought my tickets today. Lord willing I´ll be home December 9 after a brief stay in Miami and Nashville.

Update

2008-08-16T12:00:00.001-07:00

Holy smokes- this new president has spent no time in showing his real colors. Lugo´s first act as president: touring Paraguay with Hugo Chavez. Heaven have mercy.

Ascenion and Assumption in Asuncion

2008-08-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

Friday most of Christendom celebrated the Feast of the Assumption, a day calling to joyful remembrance Mary’s bodily assumption into Heaven after her life and mission on earth were completed. In Paraguay, the day has special meaning since Asunción, the capital city, was founded on this feast day in 1537 and thus takes as its name the predominantly catholic and orthodox belief. Yesterday was an even more special day for Paraguay, however, because of the peaceful political transition of executive power to Fernando Lugo, the former Catholic and rebel bishop who is now the lay and secular president of the Republic of Paraguay. Sixty-one years of corrupt one-party rule by the formerly dictatorial Colorado party came to an abrupt end, ushering in a presidency with many expectations for change and reform. Not wanting to miss the festivities celebrating Lugo’s inauguration or the founding of Asunción, I headed downtown to the Centro to see what was happening.

I arrived at 8:30 and found a mammoth crowd surrounding the temporary stage that had been set up for the inauguration ceremony. Only dignitaries could enter the stands to watch, but normal folk crowded around for peeks inside at the president-elect and foreign heads of state who came to the event. I was lucky to see past the crowds to the stage because of my height, but my best point of view was among a large group of Paraguayan Communists waving Che Guavera flags. Dressed as a conservative from Ohio, I may or may not have imagined dirty looks from so many frumpy-looking Marxists.

The ceremony started with introducing foreign dignitaries: around a dozen Latin American heads of state, a prince from Spain, a few African leaders, the president of Taiwan, and the vice-president of Iran. The inauguration proceeded with other normal inauguration proceedings: the national anthem, the swearing-in, the oath to uphold the constitution, the speech. I didn’t listen very much because I wanted to take pictures of all the interesting normal people who showed up: rich and poor; young and old; Guaraní and Spanish; Asunceños and campesinos; Mennonites and Catholics; everyone was represented. I even saw a group of feminists who were handing out owl-eye masks that said President Lugo ought to look at the abortion issue with “ojos laicos,” “lay eyes,” now that he is no longer a priest and is free to disobey the Church. (As a side note, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lugo did legalize abortion after all. He never obeyed the Church even when he was a bishop.)

The National Church of Asuncion
(No worries about separation of church and state here)

It was only after the inaugural ceremony, however, that the real excitement for the crowds began. Every head of state had to travel three blocks from the temporary stage to the central church in Asunción, where a celebratory mass was held to install the new president. Along this route crowded thousands of common individuals to hail leaders from all over the world, and among these I found myself, like the others, wooed with the excitement of seeing and shouting at royalty and heads of state. The most exciting part for me was when the most notorious world leader in the Western Hemisphere passed within a mere ten feet of where I stood. Had I the desire and courage, I could have physically attacked and punched Hugo Chavez, the bedeviled president from Venezuela. Not wanting to be a bad missionary or start an international incident, though, I kept quiet and instead crowded close to the terrible man to take his picture. Along with Chavez, I came within a few feet of presidents from Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Taiwan, Guatemala, Columbia, and vice-presidents from Iran, Brazil, and Cuba. The procession, in many ways, could be summed up as a who’s-who of corrupt and bad world leaders; still, they were corrupt and bad world leaders that I got to see face-to-face and at whom I got to shout with much popular excitement.

Hugo Chavez, South American Foe of USA Foreign Policy Number 1
(So close I could´ve punched him)

The president of Argentina, looking like a superstar
(Yeah, I´m that cool and famous.)

After the morning mass, which only specially invited guests could attend, the new president and his cabinet shared lunch with the other world leaders. In the afternoon was a military parade for Lugo, symbolizing the peaceful transition of military power to the new administration. What I can imagine to be all of Paraguay’s armed forces marched by on foot in a line perhaps a mile long, while the entire air force of eight airplanes and ten helicopters flew overhead. I half expected the tanks and military vehicles going down the road to take over in a grand revolutionary coup, but thankfully the day was peaceful and the military accommodating to the choice of the people.

It was a long, beautiful, sunny day. A new president was installed by the people and the Church, and no few Paraguayans or foreign leaders were able to attend. For me, I came closer than perhaps any of my high-fallutin friends to real political power, even though it was only South American political power and I was only a spectator among a crowd of common folk. Still, it was a real special day for me and for Paraguay and for everyone who got to take part in the uniqueness of an Ascunción Feast of the Assumption.

My Terrible Tropical Voodoo Rash

2008-08-10T12:16:00.001-07:00

I look in the mirror and sigh quietly to myself. Ehhhhhhhh: another day, another cross to carry; another moment as a missionary, another burden to bear. Sometimes the days just seem so weary. Sometimes the load just seems too much.

I look in the mirror again. The little red circle on the skin of my jaw bone seems to grow larger every moment I watch. It quickly transforms, defiantly shining and pussing and becoming uglier no matter how much I wish it away. At one point I imagine that in its little red irritability it screams and yells at me announcing the arrival of endless filth and pain.

I picture myself with a chunk of cheek missing, eaten away so many days from now by what started off as this terrible tropical voodoo rash. Maybe, I fancy, I’d look like one of those old men in middle school health books with chewing-tobacco induced face cancer, their appearances twisted and scarred like soda pop bottles rescued from the middle of a roaring fire. Or, perhaps I’d appear like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II when the outer flesh of his bionic face gets blown away to reveal cold hard metal inside . Yes, I think to myself, that second option sounds much better. Super movie star cool. Arnold Schwarzeneggar cool.

When it first appeared, I thought the rash was just a bit of acne, perhaps from eating too much of the peanut butter that my family brought for me in July. I’ve been mostly stingy in keeping the JIF to myself, so a patch of acne to accompany my sin would in no way be an unsuitable or illogical judgment for me on God’s part When the splotch started to grow into a bigger perfectly round circle and a similar one appeared on my leg, though, I realized the redness was more than peanut butter punishment. It was ringworm.

I once made fun of my wrestler brothers for getting ringworm. I thought the sickness, its accompanying creams, and all stigmas were really funny. They were jocks and I wasn’t, so they deserved it and I laughed at them. Rolling around on greasy dirty wrestling mats with a bunch of greasy dirty wrestlers? Yep, they definitely deserved it. It was probably even God’s judgment on them for caring too much about a dumb sport.

Now I sit in Paraguay, not laughing and very humbled. I think to myself, what could have caused this terrible tropical voodoo rash? I look around at my room, and it isn’t difficult to imagine. I haven’t washed my sleeping bag since I arrived nearly a year ago; my towels are both damp because I haven’t taken them outside to dry in a couple weeks; some of my clothes have a funny smell because I haven’t taken them to be washed in a while; my bedroom has that same funny smell as the locker room where all the wrestlers used to change.

On top of all this, I recently took in a kitten from the street. My mind flashes back to Israel: a dear friend there once took a fancy to a stray kitten, too, and she got ringworm as a result of it. I remember laughing at her and mocking her misplaced compassion in a cat from the street. Now the joke’s on me, though. I’ve been taken in by the whiley purr of a friendly tomcat I’ve taken to calling Charlie. I realize in horror that my own misplaced compassion for Mr. Whiskers is maybe what has caused my terrible tropical voodoo rash. It’s all my own fault.

I swear to myself that I won’t be taken in by Mr. Whisker’s wiles another time. He won’t come near me again, and I won’t ever let him cuddle on my bed or even come into my house from this day to eternity. I make a solemn and holy vow that I’ll wash every sheet and send my sleeping bag to the cleaner to quit my house of every hint left by Mr. Whisker’s fungal fur, even if that means I won’t have a blanket one night or two. I just want to be clean myself.

The pastor this evening preached on Jesus, who cleansed the leper who had faith. I feel like a leper myself, but I’m thankful that everyone still shakes my hand even though I have ringworm on my face. They don’t cast me out, and don’t even mention my skin condition. I wonder if I’m contagious. I think that this is what it might be like to have AIDS, then I condemn myself for making the comparison. AIDS is much more serious than ringworm.

A friend told me that he once had Paraguayan ring worm and that it spread very quickly in a big mess all over his legs and interior parts. I run as fast as I can to the pharmacy and buy an antifungal cream, the same kind I made fun of my brothers for using once. Now I don’t make fun of myself, but I am thankful that one can buy anti-fungal cream in Paraguay without a prescription. I apply it lightly and hastily without rubbing because the cream itself can spread the disease, and put on a fully body-suit of pajama to keep the fungus on my leg and face from contaminating all my healthy parts. I will not sleep well tonight since my mind is worried at profound conscious and subconscious levels about a terrible tropical voodoo rash. I may not sleep at all, I think, and just then my heart sinks inside of me. Mr. Whiskers sits on the window sill crying for me to feed him, but I won’t. I can’t. He and his fungus-bearing fur must leave and find a new owner. He and the terrible tropical voodoo rash he’s carrying must find a new place in which to torment another face.

Glorious.

The closeup.

Argentina AC

2008-08-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

The past weekend saw me off on a trip to the Argentinean frontier city of Formosa, a largely untamed countryside far away from the delicacies of civilization in Buenos Aires. I went for the Seventh Annual Formosa Church Retreat, a weekend of preaching, singing, and sharing put on by the two churches in the city after which the retreat is named. Although the retreat usually finds a large group of Paraguayans coming to visit (the Lambaré congregation is only a three and a half our ride away, unlike those in Buenos Aires that could require a full day’s trip), this time only I, two brothers originally from Formosa, and a divorced single mom from Asunción were able to make the voyage. It was eye-opening weekend as I got to meet and greet Apostolic Christians (in South America called Nazarenos) from all over Argentina.

One surprise to greet me when I arrived at the camp was the lodging logistic. We stayed at a public school near the church where mattresses were brought in and where folks stayed one family per room. Because I didn’t have a family of my own, though, I slept in the cafeteria-turned-general-meeting hall/church and didn’t have a moment of privacy for three days straight. There were no showers and the water in the bathrooms was turned off, so by the end of the first day both the facilities and the people had a distinctly people smell. When someone did finally get the nerve to flush the toilet or take a bath, the water had to be carried in bucket-style from the one working faucet. I felt like a good abused missionary the entire weekend and I’m certain I gained a lot of crowns in Heaven from my misery, although I think the sophisticated Portenos (those from Buenos Aires) had an even worse time of it.

As with any good AC camp, there was an overabundance of romantic drama and sexual tension as well. The Formosa brothers who live in Asunción kept trying to hook me up with there cousin, a beautiful young believing lady studying literature at the university there. I met her in January when I visited Formosa the first time, thought she was pretty, and can even say I may have liked her a little bit, but thankfully my discernment and self-control this time around was stronger than my desire for an Argentinean spouse. I told her up front and a couple more times throughout the weekend that God is calling me back to the United States and not to move to Argentina. Although she was disappointed, she eventually accepted it. Unfortunately, however her cousins didn’t, and that made for a really awkward weekend being around her and having so many accusatory smiles thrown at me from every angle. Her unbelieving dad was at the camp too, which made things even better. He was a funny little man who drank too much, apologizing to me on the first day at lunch when he had to take his “medicine” —a little bit of wine—after the meal. I smiled and told him not to worry about it because Proverbs 31:6-7 says it’s ok. He eventually saw the banter going on between the cousins, me, and his daughter, though, and took to calling me his “yerno,” son-in-law.

I got to meet and know a youth about ten years my junior who looked about the same as I did ten years ago. You can imagine my delight to find that I wasn’t the only blonde-haired blue-eyes German at the camp, as there was this Argentine named Franco who could’ve been my kid brother. His great-grandparents came to Argentina a few years after mine came to the United States and belonged to the same church, too. It was surreal to meet someone who could’ve been me on a completely different continent with a completely different language and culture.

From what I learned, the Argentinean AC Church was originally founded in the 1880s a few years after the North American AC Church, but really established itself as a denomination in the mid-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. The church went through a boom of growth from the 1960s through the 1970s, but since the late 80s has been declining considerably. Its membership is much like the American AC Church with Germans, Serbians, Czechs, Swiss, and all other sorts of Eastern European nationalities mixed in, too, although there is no lack of Hispanic families that have converted, either. Today, there are Apostolic Christian churches all over the country, with dozens in Buenos Aires alone.

The church is still very traditional. Perhaps because it’s been united in the difficulty of spreading the denomination in the midst of a very Catholic Argentina, the church has seen none of the divisions plaguing its North American counterparts. Moustaches are ok, but jewelry is not. All the elders agree that women should wear head coverings and skirts, but only during church services. (As a side note, the head coverings here are bold, huge, and clumpy affairs that look very little like the delicate, discrete, and beautiful laces that North American AC sisters wear). Elder and ministerial authority remains very strong in Argentina, as do harsh forms of discipline and excommunication. One pastor I spoke with said nothing of grace or restoration in church discipline, and left me with a sick feeling after he told me that many people who sin in the church are never restored to fellowship again or counted as brothers and sisters in Christ after they’ve morally messed up. I think this same man, too, really believed that he had never sinned after becoming a Christian; a belief which, no matter how proud or self-deluded he may be, is wrong and anti-biblical. Along with many other things, I took away from the weekend a greater appreciation for biblical truths of sin, grace, and forgiveness that many times I’ve taken for granted because of my Christian upbringing.

The women cooked and cleaned all weekend long while the men talked. The ladies worked like horses, the gentleman laid around like pigs. I was astounded, but not so much to make me remedy the situation except by showing a lot of appreciation for all the great food, hospitality, and service coming from the pastors’ wives. You might say I was just as guilty as the rest of the men, although not quite. When I and two other guys accepted the offer to wash dishes after one meal, the women were all amazed and three or four young single ladies came out of nowhere to take our pictures in the kitchen. The moms told us that no one had taken a single photo of them serving all weekend long, but there we were-- ten minutes with our hands in the sinks-- and we were the all-male stars of the camp.

The theme of the weekend was “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD in vain.” When I first arrived I was thrilled and thought, “finally, a practical topic that every South American Christian needs to hear.” Many evangelicals here think nothing of saying “Dios Mio,” or “Oh, my God.” Whereas in the US we see this as breaking one of the ten commandments and using the Lord’s name in vain, here in the South they just don’t think of it that way. The topic, though, wasn’t what I expected, and the preaching was more of an exhortation to act like Christians if we willingly take that name upon ourselves. Thus, breaking the commandment and taking the Lord’s name in vain would consist in living a secret life of hypocrisy and sin while claiming to be a believer in public.

The weekend ended with an altar call, and a whole lot of people originally from the Formosa Church went up at the end. It used to be a vibrant church, but after many years of serious sin, broken leadership, and bad teaching these days it can only count a handful of faithful members. The story of the congregation is unimaginably bad, but on Sunday many who haven’t been a part of the fellowship in more than a decade went up once again to the altar to renew their commitment of faith. I pray that this past weekend might be the start of a new work in Formosa founded on mercy, grace, and the Gospel to give new hope and life to such a small and sickly church community.

Much More than a Potato

2008-07-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

I found this Asuncion fast-food chain french-fry carton on the side of the road. Translated, it says, ¨McCain: Much More than a Potato.¨

Just wait until the McCain presidential campaign gets ahold of it as a slogan-- they´ll hire me on as a campaign manager for sure, even all the way from Paraguay. Just think of it: ¨Vote for McCain, because he´s much more than a potato.¨Has a good ring to it, doesn´t it?

Stance on abortion? Doesn´t matter. The Iraq war? Ha- a non-issue. Surging energy prices? Out the door.

I´m just voting for McCain because he´s much more than a potato.

Big Anniversary

2008-07-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

Saturday marked the ten-year anniversary of my baptism. If I were traditional Apostolic, I’d say ten years ago I was baptized into the flock of faith, accepted as a member of the church, and my rebirth through repentance sealed by the Holy Spirit in the laying-on of hands. If I were Baptist, I’d say ten years ago I was symbolically buried with Christ in the waters of baptism as an outward sign and public testimony of the work that God did in saving the inner-most parts of my soul at an earlier time. If I were Presbyterian, I’d say ten years ago I was baptized and welcomed into a New Covenant Christian community much like Old Testament Hebrew babies were circumcised as a sign of their membership in the People of God. If I were Eastern Orthodox, I’d say ten years ago baptism marked my passing from death to life, from darkness to light, from Canaan to the Promised Land, even as Joshua and the people of Israel crossed through the waters of the River Jordan. If I were Catholic, I’d say ten years ago my baptism sacramentally broke the chains of Original Sin and drove away the darkness of Adam’s curse from my soul, indelibly marking me as a Christian and ushering me into the newness of life in Christ.

Whatever one’s views of baptism, though, ten years is a long time. Think of it: I’ve officially been on the walk of faith for a full decade now. After so much time, it seems that I ought to be arriving already from my journey to the New Jerusalem. As I look around at the road signs, though, I realize I’m only a few steps outside of my door. My soul was changed when God first met me and I started out on a path of faith, but I still struggle with a whole lot of the same sins that I struggled with a decade ago. Lust didn’t get any better after being thirteen; many of the temptations that seemed innocent to me then have become much bigger, bolder, and uglier to me now. My pride and self-dependence don’t seem to have shrunken any, either; my higher education and greater achievements in the eyes of the world only seem to add kindling to an egotistical fire that was sparked in elementary school. Ironically enough, though, I’m still just as self-conscious as my thirteen-year-old self who did everything he could to please the people around him in a never-ending search for acceptance and success; with scores of friends recently making over a $100,000 a year, joining the ranks of the political elite, and starting their own families, the stakes have just become much higher and my vulnerability to criticism much greater.

In spite of all this, however, I wouldn’t trade a day’s walk with Jesus for anything else in world. I don’t ever regret a moment giving my life away to Him and being publicly identified with Him in the obedience of faith. I’m not perfect, I struggle with sin, and a lot of times I fall down flat on my face recognizing the poverty of my still-prone-to-be-spiritually-poor soul in the presence of His rich holiness and awesome grandeur of perfect righteousness. As the people here in Paraguay tell me, though, I’m “joven todavia,” still young. God-willing, I’ll have a few more decades on the road of faith and a whole lot more of sanctification to be had. I thank God for however long I have to live that He’s patient with me. I know He’s walking by my side, straightening out my course when I get sidetracked to the right or left by my sin and pulling me forward out of the pits when I get stuck in self pity, regret, and hopelessness.

Perhaps the greatest joy to me on this anniversary of my baptism is that God continues to lead and want to be with me. Although I stumble sometimes and don’t keep up with where I ought to be, by His love I continue to follow and He continues to change me and help me along. Time teaches me everyday to love my Lord more and more, and, by His grace, I really am being transformed.

Visit Wrapped-Up

2008-07-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

Me and the family at Foz de Iguazu
Dad definately should have been a cowboy
The team and their lot of tile work

The past two weeks have been jam-packed with the excitement of winter vacations and a visit from Ohio family and friends. A work team came down from Vesper Lake Bible Fellowship, the church where I grew up, with my dad, brother Joey, sister Jennifer, youth pastor Brad, second-cousin Steve, and two other young friends, Chad and Matt. They came down with the intention to do some tiling and painting work for the school, visit with and get to know the Paraguayan Church and culture, and visit with and encourage me. Now that they’re finished, I can say with a big thankful smile that everything they wanted to do was accomplished, and accomplished well.

Although their trip started and ended rather roughly (coming down, a one-day delay in Atlanta because of Hurricane Bertha and nearly a half-day in Argentina because of a missed flight; going back, an extra day in Buenos Aires because of a missed connection to the States and an extra stop in Cincinnati because of their re-routed itinerary), everything they did while in Paraguay went along smoothly and basically without a hitch. The weather was in the mid-seventies and sunny every day, a real Paraguayan miracle in the middle of winter (Paraguayan folklore says that these two weeks of summer weather in the middle of winter usually come two weeks before the Feast of St. John on June 24^th. As Oscar joked, though, this year, when St. John asked permission from God for the good weather to be in the middle of June, God must have told him to wait until the middle of July when some Protestants would be visiting Paraguay). Although the team suffered a bit from runny noses, sore throats, one multi-day case of diarrhea, and a trip to the Paraguayan emergency room after Brad passed out from a badly-sprained ankle (an emergency room, by the way, where a visit with a doctor cost two dollars and x-rays with family and friends standing all around you in the x-ray room only cost $4.50), God was good and no one’s health was ever seriously in danger. The work was never hindered by sickness, and neither was the sightseeing.

Tourism perks of the trip for the team included a trip to Foz de Iguazu (the South American jungle Niagara Falls), a Paraguayan meatfest buffet, seeing Itapu Dam, boating on the River Paraguay, shopping at a Paraguayan bazaar, visiting the Center of Town and seeing historical monuments and sights twice, and climbing up a little mountain for a beautiful view of the Paraguayan countryside in Yaguaron. Visiting with the people from church, they had dinner prepared for them six times on a trip of only a week and a half, and every day ate an excellent Paraguayan lunch prepared by a sister from the church for only about $2.50. They received much good hospitality, which helped them work hard with determined purpose to lay and grout tile floors and clean and paint the church soccer field. They were able to bless the church in Lambaré as well as the church in Sajonia, where the team spent some visiting with church members in a rough area of Asunción and was able to purchase for the congregation badly-needed fans and lights.

For me, the trip was a huge blessing as well. I was kept very busy throughout my winter vacation with making plans and organizing details for the team, but I got to share a lot of time with my dear family and friends. I had the chance to see Paraguay through their eyes, once more as a new, foreign, and exotic place full of adventure and hospitality. They showed me how not to take small things for granted, and made me appreciate much more everything I’ve come to know and have in my missionary life in Paraguay. The snickerdoodles and small American necessities they brought from my mom, along with the peanut-butter-popcorn balls and chocolate chip cookies they brought from my aunts, ought to hold me off on good home-cooking at least until I return home in four and a half months. Speaking of home, having my family stay with me for a week and a half made me realize how much I really do like home and miss my family. I’m going to keep doing my best as an English teacher and missionary in Paraguay, but I’m also looking forward to Christmastime in Ohio half a year away.

Trip over

2008-07-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

The family is back home after a day delay in Buenos Aires. Thank God.

Arrival

2008-07-09T08:03:00.001-07:00

Hooray! After many difficulties and no short voyage, the group from Vesper has arrived! Thank God!

Stuck in Atlanta

2008-07-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

Crew Update: The work team is stuck in a Atlanta, Georgia for a day until the passing of Hurricane Bertha. I guess it´s better than being stuck in the Atlantic. God´s surely answering our prayers for their safety, though, just maybe not in ways we expected.

My Fourth of July

2008-07-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

Friday was a day I was tempted to complain. There were plenty of good reasons to do so, too: it was a really long week, all my dishes were dirty, it was the Fourth of July and I was in Paraguay, and all the Americans in the mission were off to travel the world on the day of American Independence. A couple people wished me a happy Fourth of July, but overall it could have been a really downer day.

Thankfully and by many graces, though, it turned into one of the most enjoyable and consoling days of my time here. This past week was Missions Week at Adonai, a time set aside each year to remember the countries and cultures of the world in prayer. This year the assigned countries all came from Europe. Each class was responsible to research and present to the rest of the school a report on their assigned country, and to pray for the evangelization of that country every morning of the week. The week ended, then, with a Missions Fair and every grade presenting its nation to the school along with its way of dress, typical food, and style of music.

Each grade took the project as a matter of class pride and did their best to participate, from the tiny preschoolers dressed as Greek philosophers to the 11th graders as classy musicians from Austria. Each stand representing a country was meticulously decorated with banners, balloons, and billowing polyester fabric by parents, students, and teachers working together to finish the project. There were vast banquet tables set with dishes from all over Europe, although somehow a lot of Paraguayan food snuck its way in to the mix, too. In the course of the night, I sampled a thick quiche and coffee from Finland, fondue from Switzerland, roast pork and sweet potato from Ireland, fried mashed potato finger from France, lemon meringue pie from Greece, a tuna, egg, and tomato sandwich from Norway, and paella from Spain. Needless to say, by the end of the night I was feeling a little sick.

Still, there was a world of beauty to the entire event: to see all the students putting their best effort forward in study, planning, and prayer for Missions Week was an awesome privelege; to participate in the Missions Fair and see hundreds of students, their parents and teachers, and people from the neighborhood come to the school together was an amazing blessing; and to have my Fourth of July occupied with such excitement and activity was an unbelievable grace.

Missions Week at Adonai really showed me what the school is all about: preparing students to reach out to the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The awesome part of the event was that the students of every grade were really excited to participate, learn, and pray. Even better, though, was that included in the festivities were dozens and dozens of parents and guests from the neighborhood. Thus, the value of my own participation in the school and the time I’ve set aside this year to teach at Adonai were confirmed to me in a mighty positive way as I got to see the mission of the school “to educate children, molding their character in order to serve God and the nations” lived out practically and powerfully.

Family´s Coming

2008-07-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

The family is coming along with some friends from the church today... Please say a prayer for their safety!

A Prayer for the US

2008-07-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

There’re a lot of things messed up about Paraguay: corruption in the current government basically prevents any major national economic development; a lack of security means you have to build high fences around your house and always be ready at a moment’s notice to give out your cell phone or wallet to an armed attacker; and the average Paraguayan family is broken beyond imagination and irreparably hurt by marital infidelity, alcoholism, and general lack of male responsibility.

Although I see so many evil things resulting from sin in the Paraguayan people, though, there is one great and perhaps greatest evil of which, thank God, they are entirely innocent. It is an evil that has been prevented at every level of society by what many consider to be an outdated, archaic, and stale Catholic society. Still, it is an evil that, because of the Roman Catholic Church’s influence, has largely been avoided and is, in any case, a Paraguayan social stigma punishable by many years in prison if found out. Sadly, however, it is also this greatest evil to which my own foundationally Protestant and “more advanced” United States have succumbed. This great evil, eschewed by Paraguay but embraced by the United States in the Holocaust of our generation, is abortion, the intentional murder of pre-born children.

Paraguayans, most of whom are nominally Catholic, at least get this one thing right: they understand that abortion is an atrocious sin, abhorrent before God and intolerable in society. And their country is blessed because they believe it. Paraguayans are a fruitful people, and they are growing fast. New human life sprouts from every corner here, and demographic studies show that half of the now nearly-six million Paraguayans are under the age of twenty. In the United States over the past twenty-some years, on the other hand, we’ve murdered nearly seven times the number of Paraguay’s entire population in children before they were even born, and we are now faced with the crisis and curse of a declining native population.

It literally makes me sick to think how many people my age never had the chance to breathe because of legalized abortion. In the words of Saint James, I “am wretched, mourn and weep” for my nation. I see that although we have plenty of money, power, and “civilization,” we lack the greatest thing of life itself, and oftentimes we even allow that to be taken away from those who are least able to defend themselves. Yes, we find our rights, liberties, and freedoms in the United States, but we also find our hands stained with the blood of millions of innocents.

I believe that soon we shall reap the consequences for our sins. We cannot cheat God forever, because one day He “shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered; and those who hate him shall flee before him” and “in the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.”

For that reason, this Fourth of July I pray, Lord, have mercy. Forgive our nation for the atrocities we have committed in selfishness and the innocent lives we have taken in cold blood. Christ, have mercy. Free us from our self-seeking lives to live in your Life, being able and willing to love You and our neighbor, from the greatest and most powerful to the smallest and most defenseless. Lord, have mercy. Give our leaders the grace of repentance and the strength of will to turn our nation away from its massacre of innocents to a society that recognizes the divine blessing of human life and the value of every person created in the image of God. We pray this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns together with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever, Amen.

Hard knocks

2008-06-24T08:48:00.001-07:00

Every once in a while things in life hit you that just make you say, “Wow, that hurts.” They seem to come flying out of nowhere and, even if they’re things that don’t touch you, your family, or even your close friends directly, you can still feel the knock on your soul and empathize in bleeding heart with those who are going through the unimaginable pain. Within the past week, Colegio Privado Adonai and the AC Church here have both been hit with news that wrenches at the heart; news that makes us question the basic justice of the world and leads us out wondering and wandering around in a mess of pain and unanswered questions.

The first hard knock came about a week ago. I found out in my first class last Friday that one of my second-grade students, Josué, was nearly burned to death in a dreadful accident that ravaged his tiny body. What makes the situation even more tough to comprehend is that even before the accident Josué’s story was so sad to begin with. Abandoned by his mother and having a father who works so much that none of the teachers at Colegio Privado Adonai had ever seen him before, Josué was basically being raised by his ten year-old brother who cooked and looked out for him. In the classroom, although a kind and quiet student, he was unable to concentrate and learn in any significant way because of the problems at home.

Then, a week ago Wednesday, seven-year-old Josué tried to finish up the job of burning a trash pile in his back yard. In the process he was doused in a large quantity of gas that, quite naturally, was quickly absorbed by his warm winter clothing. When the fire jumped up to meet him, Josué’s clothing burst into flames like the ignited tip of a sulphur match. His brother made a good effort to save him by taking off Josué’s burning fleece sweatshirt, but in the process he also took off half the skin from his little brother’s face. He then put Josué in the shower to douse the flames, but the burning continued to the point of charring one of Josué’s entire legs beyond much good future use.

I went with the second-grade teacher Liliana to visit Josué in the hospital on Saturday. He’s in the I.P.S., a massive communist-looking government-run run-down complex offering sub-standard medical care to the thousands of poor Paraguayans who can’t afford anything else. It’s a hospital comprised mostly of medical-student doctors because all the good professional ones work in private practice. It’s a place with broken windows and leaky roofs, where cleaning ladies mop the floor without putting up signs warning against the slippery surface and where surgeries are delayed because the surgical instruments haven’t been sterilized well enough.

There we found out more details about Josué’s condition. He’s in the burn unit all alone, without anything to occupy his mind except for pain and where he is able to be visited only by closest family members infrequently. If infection from his wounds doesn’t kill him soon, he will be having reconstructive surgery sometime next week to transplant the skin from his hindquarters to the charred portions of his leg. They say he’ll need six units of blood for the operation: six units of blood that, with one look at Josué’s small size, you’d imagine could probably fill him up two or three times with a little extra to share. Needless to say, he won’t be returning to school any time soon.

Just knowing that an innocent child, who perhaps has never hurt anyone in any significant way, is in such a state of agony seems to entirely protest the idea that any Good could exist at all in the world when there is such clear evil.

The second hard knock to the church community came with the unexpected death of a dear sister from the congregation. Doña Irene, 59, had been a member of the church for no few years, a founding member of the prayer ministry, the church cook on retreats, and a faithful visitor to and prayer warrior for those who were sick themselves. They say that she prayed several family members to salvation; indeed, today both her husband and son are recently-established although not unimportant pillars of the church and the church’s ministry.

About four or five months ago Doña Irene was re-diagnosed with a form of cancer from which she claimed to have been miraculously healed about ten years ago. She stopped coming to church for her sickness and underwent aggressive chemotherapy treatments—the best and most expensive in the country, we were told—that left her weak, tired, and discouraged. Her last treatment, a milestone for her and the completion of a long, painful process, took place last Friday. I almost took her flowers to celebrate, because I thought it would be a big relief for her to have finally triumphed over the treatment.

Little did I know, however, that those same flowers would have still been fresh enough to send to her funeral. Early Monday morning, perhaps the coldest of the winter, Doña Irene was taken to an urgent-care facility where she passed away after a night of agony. After such a long fight against cancer and the completion of such a dreadful treatment, how could she have passed away so easily? The news took us all aback, as we expected her improvement and a new strength after the ravages of the treatment.

I could probably think of a thousand good theological and very Christian explanations for the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Yes, we are fallen sinners and we suffer the consequences of death. Certainly, the world is broken by our choice and every one of us is culpable. And sure, we even serve a God who, in His grace and mercy, knows our pain and has experienced death for us. There’s no doubt He entered it and redeemed it by His own blood, and then triumphed over all the suffering of the world through His resurrection. Absolutely, as Christians we participate in that reality and we have a hope that we, too, do not suffer in vain and that one day we will be bodily resurrected to an eternal relationship of peace and complete joy with our creator.

Having all of these explanations, though, doesn’t necessarily ease the pain. No, life can be really hard sometimes. There is real agony to be felt, no matter what theologians or pastors or anyone else can say to try to ease it. Little innocent children get burned alive, and godly women who have passed through rigorous chemotherapy treatments die of their cancer anyways. And these hard knocks sting.

An American in Asuncion

2008-06-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

As an American in another country, sometimes you just need an all-around American day: a day, that is, to indulge yourself in your own culture and get reacquainted with your own way of life; a day full of familiar luxuries and simple wonders taken for granted at home; a day, perhaps, even to wallow around and get dirtied in the mud of what many too-good-for-you-types would consider baser parts of American society.

After eight months in Paraguay, I was long overdue for such an all-around gratifying American day. I was ready, and even hungry for, the shopping and the movie theater and the cheap fast food (which isn’t so cheap, after all, here in Paraguay). And so, last Thursday on a day off from school, I headed out to the “choochy” part of Asuncion on the other side of town. Here one can find many of the luxuries of life patterned after finer American living: nice little bakeries, expensive car dealerships, modern furniture establishments, movie theaters, a mall, and even a McDonalds and Burger King. This little piece of America in Asuncion lies in the rich part of town, about an hour bus ride away from Lambaré, amongst guarded mansions and beautiful embassies and high-fenced English-speaking schools for the children of diplomats and missionaries.

The first thing I did when I arrived to the rich part of tow was to mill around Shopping Del Sol, the nicest mall in Paraguay but comparable in the States with old Rolling Acres in Akron. There I hit up the bookstore where I pretended to be interested in reading books, but, after finding that they were all in Spanish, left in a huffy for an antiquities dealership where I had a great conversation about antique dealing with an Argentinian woman whose ex-husband lives in the U.S. After I told her that I had spent time in the Middle East and had taken a course on archaeology, she thought I was an expert archaeologist and asked me my opinion of a hand-cut rock she had. She thought it was from the era of the cavemen, but I didn’t want to tell her it looked like a common broken barn stone. “One has to be careful of you buy from these days. There’s a lot of counterfits,” she said. “Yes, you have to be very careful,” I replied with my best put-on expert voice.

After doing some window shopping of stores and styles that I’m pretty sure were dumped on Paraguay as the unsold leftovers from other shops in countries up North, I went to the movie theater where a selection of movies that opened up in the States two or three months ago were playing as new releases. The only movie that wasn’t dubbed over in Spanish (I was, after all, spending an American day, so I could hardly tolerate an American movie not in American-speak) was the one with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman about two fellows—one a rich but sad white white-collar executive and the other a poor but content black blue-collar mechanic—who find themselves spending their last few months of life adventuring together after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. I won’t give away the ending, but the movie was too long and pretty predictable. I will say, though, that while I’ve only been away from the States for eight months, Jack Nicholson looks like death in the movie and seems to have aged a few decades since I’ve come here.

After slipping out of the mediocre movie I headed down the street for McDonalds, where I ate my first Big Mac in years. Even when I’m at home I usually get something more healthy from McDonalds, but this was a special occasion: a celebration of my American heritage and the Big Sandwich that is undoubtedly a bigmac part of that legacy. The fries I got on the side tasted just like those in the States. I wonder if they ship Idaho potatoes and McDonalds ketchup all the way to Paraguay.

After all was said and done, I left the mall, the movie theater, and MceeDees very satisfied and content with myself as an American. Although many might see the elements of American culture that I experienced as ugly things—that is, the materialism represented by the mall, the ever-new need for entertainment and pleasure represented by the movie theater, and the corporatism and gluttony represented by McDonalds—the day was just what I needed to remind me of my country, bring a smile to my face, and help me appreciate the things that America does and that America is. Even if it’s only for sending name brand clothes all around the world, making bad predictable movies, and being responsible for the manufacture of big cholesterol-filled BigMacs in South America, I will always love and appreciate my country, her culture, and her people wherever I may find myself.

A Good Rebuke from a Good Friend

2008-05-31T11:11:00.000-07:00

(Ben´s response to what I wrote about bad Bible interpretation. It speaks very well for itself)

Since I’m supposedly a theologian extraordinaire and I’ve already talked with the author about most of this, I offer some counterpoint: One must remember and be aware of the fact the great strength and great weakness of our Anabaptist heritage is our literal interpretation of Scripture. This has led at times to prophetic portraits of Christian ethics and community, and has at other times created really bad stuff which borders on cultic esotericism. We can at least laud our charismatic young sister for believing in the authority of the Scripture, even if she doesn’t possess sufficient hermeneutic principles to avoid bordering on heresy. (Although, in saying that, I also have to laud the preacher at the cult who continually repeated that everything he said was based on Scripture.)

One must also remember that this charismatic young woman has a strange polarization of Christian witnesses influencing her hermeneutics: mainly a legalistic authoritarian tradition and a Pentecostal-esque fervor which is almost inevitable in South American evangelical Protestantism. Does that excuse bad teaching? Not exactly, but it’s important to remember that that neither she nor her mentors were in any moment knowingly leading others astray through faulty and wrong Bible teaching. They were doing the best they could with the best that they had, which is pretty valuable in the ethics of the Kingdom.

Allow me to clarify something more: the principles which this sister was using bad Biblical exposition to teach were very important points which the group needed to hear. She used a great deal of discretion to guide the group into greater intentionality in worship; most of things she purported make a lot of sense when compared, for example, with 1 Corinthians 14. Obviously proper ends require proper means, but I was greatly comforted by the fact that her message was pertinent and timely in addressing the situation of praise and worship team.What I would like to highlight is that “orthodoxy” (even just the word) rings pretty clangily without a thoroughly established context of love. Good doctrine is essential; but good doctrine is pointless without love. Of course I’m quick to admit that without a good doctrinal base, love becomes perverted and even impossible. But if the chief end of man to love God and enjoy him forever, orthodoxy can do no more than provide the necessary direction for that love.

Orthodoxy without love does not create orthopraxy. Quite contrarily, it creates the vilest of character qualities, the subtleties of which C.S. Lewis is so good at describing in many of his works. So I am willing to suggest that Jason’s equation may be a bit wrong. I’ve even seen that bad doctrine is often transformed by a genuine love for God into pretty good practice. I think the promise about the Holy Ghost teaching us what we need to know really holds true, and that through her deep devotion to the One and True God of Scriptures, our charismatic young worship leader is being led by the Counselor into the whole Truth. Of course, that Spirit-leading will almost necessarily involve me and other Biblicist brothers and sisters who are willing to humbly speak the truth in love. But thankfully, even if we’re too concerned for orthodoxy that we’re impeded in loving our sister, the Spirit is capable of innumerable other means, and will keep the Church, his body of believers, strangely saintly.

Pay a Visit

2008-05-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

If you’re in Medina today, you might stop in and pay a visit to my mom. She’s in the hospital there, in room 308 bed 1, and should be at least through the late afternoon (of today, Friday, May 30). She might be a little grouchy with you, but don’t worry about it— you’d probably be grouchy, too, if you’d been through all she’s been through the past year and especially the past week. Even if you haven’t talked to her in a year, though, now would be a good time. Pay a visit, bring some flowers, show some love, pray with her. She needs good affection from folks. Give her a hug and a smile, and if she still isn’t happy, tell her I sent you and the hug is from me.

Lessons Learned from Bad Bible Interpretation

2008-05-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry about this one. It was definately written without much love, and even without confronting the person who misused the Bible. I stand by what I said- bad Bible interpretation is bad Bible interpretation and heresy is heresy, but I apologize for the spirit in which I said it. Next time I´ll be more direct and deal with things more openly.

Very humbly with all apoplogies,
Jason

Snow, Soccer, and Hell

2008-05-26T15:25:00.001-07:00

Ice skates. Sled. Skis. Snowboard. This past week I had the privilege of teaching some 25 Paraguayan third graders English words for snow sports. Why any English textbook would include such a flurry of arbitrary words I have not the slightest idea; but behold, such has been my struggle with destiny these past few days. The situation wasn’t helped, of course, by the fact that half the words about snowy things weren’t even mentioned in my Spanish-English dictionary. Trying to find the correct translation, therefore, took the form of me performing complex charades as to how these instruments of winter frivolity practically function along with a base commentary of broken, utterly confusing Spanish. I must have looked like I lost my mind pretending to snowboard and speaking in Spanish tongues to so many kids who have never even seen a snowflake.

Yes, there are certain cultural and linguistic boundaries that just cannot be crossed; gaps of understanding that utterly prohibit the communication of ideas. And it’s not just a problem with Paraguayans, either. Coming from a part of the world where soccer gets the media’s attention only every four years with the World Cup, I haven’t the slightest clue about futbol culture or how so many people can waste so much time being so wrapped up in it. When my students ask me which soccer team I prefer (in Paraguay, Cerro o Olympia? In Argentina, Boca o River?), I respond with a shrug of the shoulders and say I don’t really care or know about it at all. Cultural boundaries there certainly are. Entirely different worldviews persist. A hopeless lack of communication remains.

It all reminds me of the difference in thinking between Christians, those who are being transformed by lives of faith in God through Jesus Christ, and mundanos, those who are staying in the world for the sake of living for the pleasures of the world. The scriptures in so many places describe how there is a complete chasm between the thinking of a Christian guided by the Holy Spirit and the thinking of a non-Christian guided by the flesh. “What partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?” “For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.” The difference, really, is light and dark, day and night, Heaven and Hell. One cannot even be touched by the other; there is not even the slightest point of connection. Just as my students haven’t the smallest idea about snow and how snow-things work and I haven’t the slightest idea or desire to know about the many complexities of soccer, as believers we too must strive to maintain a purity of light in our relationship with God so that we may not know or even want to know about the darkness that can swallow us up.

But oh, how she cried.

2008-05-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

They said he wasn’t worth a thing. A thirty year-old drug addict and dealer living five houses down, he only left home at night to do his dirty business and to play his dirty games. During the day he had little touch with the outside world; so little that, after hearing of his death, his own nephew went to school and played the afternoon as if nothing had happened. No, no one was surprised it happened.

But oh, how she cried.

They said he smoked pot, inhaled cocaine, and even burnt crack. After a while, his drug addiction took the best years of his life and all of his money, leading him to petty thievery of cell phones, fancy shoes, and of more serious breaking into homes for blenders, televisions, and jewelry. I heard it said that he once even stole a camera from a pastor to pay for his ravenous addictions. Stealing from a pastor? No, he definitely wasn’t worth a thing.

But oh, how she cried.

They said he left behind a ten-year old son, although no one knew about the boy or his mother. His own sister said she had no idea where the pair lived, but she did know for sure that her family hadn’t contacted either of them about his death. Not that they would have cared about it anyways; after all, the two never received a penny of support from his deadbeat days. Now that he’s gone, nothing will really change for them.

But oh, how she cried.

They said he was murdered in a nearby city around three a.m in the morning: shot five times, three in the head and two in the chest. It was a quick, easy, and efficient job right next to a popular soccer field, in a narrow passageway where there wasn’t much room to argue. People whispered that it was done to finish off a business transaction turned bad, a sort of life payment in the place of some missing cash. They put a doily over his forehead to cover the wound and cotton balls in his nose so the fluids wouldn’t leak out. It was all a very practical matter.

But oh, how she cried.

They said he went to the morgue early in the morning and finally came home in a hearse at three o’clock in the afternoon. His messed-up friends came by to visit him later on in the evening for one last time, not even knowing if this house was the right one. He’s the brown one, they said. Is that his funeral there? Yeah, I’m pretty certain that’s him inside.

But oh, how she cried.

They said that when she heard the news she went crazy, startling the neighborhood out of its siesta with her screaming and wailing. Five hours later she was the chief mourner and most pitiable of all seated around the coffin. Although considerably comforted by so many little pink pills, she still cried out at regular intervals, “Oh, my only son, my only son. My beloved son. God, why have you abandoned me?”

But oh, how she cried. My, how his momma cried.

Mother´s Day

2008-05-13T14:47:00.000-07:00

This Wednesday Paraguay will recognize Mother’s Day. Why this country doesn’t celebrate on Sunday when everyone has a day off like in the United States I cannot imagine, but the fact remains that moms all across the country here will be honored on Wednesday and not on Sunday. This didn’t stop the church, though, from celebrating Mother’s Day yesterday when every healthy and sane mother and mother-county remembered the holiday. Pastor Pedro preached a sermon on the importance and celebration of mothers, but on families more generally because so many youth from the neighborhood and school have mothers who have left the home or are away in other countries. Generally speaking, the Paraguayan family is a disaster these days with one or both parents deserting or working in other cities and the children left to fend for themselves. Thus, like some cruel politically-correct joke, the church and school both celebrate “family day” out of recognition that our families come in all sorts, shapes, and sizes because of human sin and relational brokenness.

The reality of their political correctness, though, hits close to home for many and for that reason their celebration of “family day” instead of Mother’s Day really is a mercy for the church and neighborhood rather than a concession to progressive culture. On both Saturday night and Sunday morning, the pastors brought to light that many Paraguayans, even some from the church, are left without any parents or relatives at all. For that reason, on both days they preached the necessity and importance of being a part of the Family of God, that kinfolk of faith united in one Father through Jesus Christ. .Thus, they said, when we become believers we have brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and all manner of other relationships within the church. For a couple youth in the church who really have no one looking after them except the church, the message rang especially true. Deserted or abused by their parents, they know and depend full-well on the spiritual family of God for so much of their physical, emotional, spiritual, and even financial needs.

To celebrate Mother’s Day, my own Paraguayan spiritual son/brother Christian and I went to go visit his biological family on the other side of Asuncion. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good part of town. I was a very terrified white and overdressed American with bulging khaki pockets as we walked through the back alley ways to the place where his grandmother had raised a dozen children. When we finally arrived the house, I was pleasantly reminded me of the shack where the Beverly Hilbillilies lived before they found black gold, although this house was in the middle of a semi-urban poor quarter and not the beautiful hills of West Virginia. We carefully entered, and for the first time ever in my life I saw first-hand how a family could maltreat an unwanted child. Only his grandmother smiled to see him, his own mother only recognizing him with a nod. His aunts and uncles, some only a couple years older than him, didn’t even greet Christian. It was sad—really sad—to see how no one cared that he was there and, although I was his official caretaker and the first person ever from his church family to visit his former home, only an uncle who married into the family asked how Christian was doing in his studies and life in general (and that was only out of polite conversation with me). Although they invited us to eat well, it was an awkward afternoon for both Christian and I. After seeing Christian’s family, the irreligious way they live, and the scummy way they treated him, I can say with a thankful breath of relief that it’s a very good thing he left home.

After the visit, we continued our cheery trip in Christian’s old neighborhood with a tour of Ycua, the place where five years ago burned to the ground a mega grocery-store. .The tragedy of the story is that store management, when faced with the prospect of thieves stealing in the chaos of a fire, ordered guards to lock all the entryways and exits, prohibiting anyone from leaving and securing the death of several hundred trapped inside. Whole families perished in what at the time was internationally reported as the worst super-market disaster ever. Five years later, the story haunts all of Paraguay as a cautionary tale against the worst of human greed and selfishness in the face of danger and disaster.

Today, only the outer walls of the supermarket still stand. Beneath and along the side the building , though, are hundreds of hallowed memorials recognizing those who perished in the fire along with long histories hung up recounting the survivors’ search for justice in the aftermath of the catastrophe. There was a place underneath too, in what used to be the parking garage, that held articles showing the force of the fire along with personal items of those who lost their lives. It all was a very moving memorial, where the ghosts of those who mercilessly died in the flames still haunted every small space. We were able to enter the shell-of-a-building in the late afternoon, when the now-twisted iron supports that once held up the roof looked in the fading sunlight like tortured rusty skeletons of ancient sea-snakes. We passed through what used to be customer bathrooms, and I could still see and touch with my fingers the soot on the tile walls from smoke that killed hundreds of innocent people. Feeling like the place merited some sign of recognition on part and not knowing what else to do, I drew a cross in the soot and said a prayer.

And now, some photos

2008-05-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

And now, to move on from a post that for many of you may have been very awkward (but for me was very cathartic), some photos!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2114388&l=9d496&id=1407506

2008-05-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Mom,

I’d like to take the time to publicly send you all my love today and to wish you all my best this Mother’s Day. I’m pretty sure everyone who reads this or knows anything about our family at all knows that we’ve passed through an unimaginably rough year in our now-very-public private lives. Most all of our family’s dirty laundry has been hung out on the line for all the neighbors and all the family and all the church to see, and it isn’t pretty. What made the humiliating spectacle even worse, though, is that at times I was the one spreading the dirt. I cursed you to your face, I screamed obscenities at home, and I spoke terrible things behind your back. I said that our relationship would never be the same, and I even imagined it would have been better if you had died. I did my best to heap up even more abuses and shame upon what was already a very publicly shameful situation. When all the other hypocrites were throwing rocks at you, I myself picked up the biggest stones and hurled them in self-righteous anger.

Throughout all my rage and betrayal, though, you constantly stayed my mom. When I wished you to leave home and drop off the planet, you said you still loved me. When I pleaded to God and you for a different and normal family, you said you’d always be there for me no matter how unnormal either of us ever got. When I rebelled, you showed me patience; when I threw a tantrum at things I couldn’t control, you again proved yourself the parent. With the very love of God you said to me and us all, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Through everything you were steadfastly my mom, steadfastly looked out for me, and steadfastly welcomed me back to be your son.

Please, mom, forgive me for the way I treated you. I love you, and I’m sorry to you and the world and to God for what happened. I miss you incredibly now that I’m a full hemisphere away, and I really dream about the day when I’ll see you again. I’ve cried many times thinking of you since I’ve been here, and I pray for you every day. Words can’t describe your faithful love and all the good service you’ve rendered to me. You’re my only mom: you always will be, too, no matter what, and your faithfulness to me this past year has proven that. For these reasons and so many more I publicly rise up and bless you today and give you thanks for all your love and forgiveness. I value our friendship more than you’ll ever know.

Sincerely,

Jason

Random Thoughts

2008-05-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

Some random thoughts, not big enough to warrant a complete blog entry:

I was rudely woken up last night at hourly intervals by loud packs of barking dogs, and this morning when I left behind the protective innocence of my apartment I realized why: a bitch in heat was roaming through the neighborhood with a good half dozen hounds following her scent, and all the poor un-neutured dogs that were cruelly penned up inside fences just couldn’t bear the thought of being alone so they sang together in a great united chorus of sexual angst. I’ll never take the work of the SPCA and dog warden for granted again.

There’s nothing more beautiful or tasty than a freshly picked mandarin from the mandarin tree in your back yard. I ate two this morning after my morning run. I think I shall move to Florida some day.

I discovered recently there’s huge cheap avocadoes in Paraguay. Many people let the precious fruit fall to the ground to rot away without thinking about how special it is that they have avocadoes at all. Those who do eat avocadoes here eat them sweet, all mashed up with sugar. I’m convinced that if I continue much longer to take advantage of the bargain-priced oil-based fruits, I’m going to die by avocado.

For the first six months I was here, I heard huge flocks of what sounded to be seagulls flying overhead. How strange, I thought, that there should be seagulls in a completely landlocked, river-bound country. When I started to pay better attention, though, I realized that the flocks weren’t seagulls, but instead massive groups of very awkward parrots flalloping together in the wind. I’m pretty sure I heard one of them calling me a silly gringo, and I realized I was still in a very special tropical place.

Life is short, and so are Paraguayan funerals. The father and step-mother of my fellow English teacher at Adonai passed away in a terrible car accident this past week, and both were buried within about 24 hours of their respective deaths (while she died on-the-scene, he died the day after from wounds in the hospital). I was talking to another teacher—a firefighter/EMT who has visited the public morgue plenty of times—who told me they don’t use body-refrigerators here. The sad part of it all is that, because the funeral preparations and actual service went by so quickly, none of the teachers that I know of had the chance to go to the funeral or even offer their condolences. Oscar and Karen tried to go the morning of the internment, but found they were already an hour late. You might say a prayer for Prof. Monica and her family.

I saw a beautiful nun my age on the bus the other day. Although she was completely covered in a modest habit and big flowing dress, she wore very flattering sandal-like shoes. Appreciating her beauty and virginal innocence, I wondered if I had ever appreciated or even could appreciate the natural beauty of chastity and sanctity of a girl completely set apart for God without thinking sexual and lusty thoughts. I wasn’t lusting after her—after all, she was a nun-- but I wasn’t sure and I’m unsure now if I can unselfishly appreciate a girl’s natural beauty.

There are little red ants here about the size of a small matchtip that, like a match, pack quite a burn. There’s a pile of rocks in my backyard that sometimes I like to go digging into, and I always forget until it’s too late that this pile of rocks also has a pile of these pesky little ants. Before I know what’s happening, my bare hand or bare foot or perhaps both my bare hands and both my bare feet are covered in swarms of little stinging ants that, once they bite into you, can only be removed by squishing their tiny heads off. The poison in their peckers, though, leaves itchy pus-filled pocks all over, like the strange bastard children of a pimple who has had a continuing affair with a mosquito bite. Like the consequences of extra-marital affairs, too, the pocks last for way too long, refilling themselves as they do after being popped and itching to eternity.

Teacher and May Day

2008-05-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

This past week has been one of celebration and holiday for Paraguayans and me. Yesterday we had the day off from school to celebrate Teacher’s Day, a national holiday break from school and scholarly endeavor to thank those special teachers in charge of our educational present and to call to memory and venerate those special teachers who have touched our already-formed past. Festivities started a day early in school on Tuesday with a special program presented by the children from preschool to high school. Some sang songs in English, others recited poetry in Guarani, but all had only nice things to say about their maestros. It was a beautiful program that once again brought to my very-recently very-discouraged mind the importance of my work here, the impact of teachers, and the grand significance of educational formation.

After the recital-style assembly and presentation for all the teachers, the students left for their individual classrooms to celebrate with their own teachers. The kids and their parents brought in every sort of treat and decoration just like when we had Halloween or Christmas parties at Seville Elementary School, with everything from frosted cakes to fried empanadas to giant bottles of soda to share on the important day. As an itinerant English teacher, I had the chance to visit every classroom that I wanted, dabbling in a piece of cake here and sipping on some soda there. By the end of the morning session, I was sick to my stomach full of so many cookies and sugar drinks and sandwichitos.

At the end of the day, though, my stomach wasn’t the only thing that was full. My bookbag, too, was packed to the brim with regalitos—little gifts—from all my students as a sign of their appreciation for who I am and what I do as a teacher. Among other things, I got a pair of black socks that say “America”, a little pink alarm clock, a purple marker, a nice Parker pen, a bookmark, a calculator, a thermos, and a guampa to drink maté. The day, a super one full of celebration and congratulatory hugs, ended with a beautiful dinner paid for by the school at a churrasqueria- a huge Paraguayan buffet where men with little bowties push around carts that serve the most beautiful and delicious meat in the whole world. Really, the meal was a dream-come-true with all-I-could-eat sausages and stuffed chickens and fancy noodles and fresh salads and ice cream. I took good advantage, and ended up contentedly rolling myself home with several more kilos on my person than before.

Today we’re left with just one more day to celebrate. In Paraguay, Cuba, and all the former Soviet States, May 1 means international workers’ day. Here, celebrating labor means another day off of work in the middle of the week to give credit to workers where their credit is due. Today is a rainy and miserable day outside, though, preventing the soccer tournament and clothes sale that had been planned at the church. And so, instead I sit at home writing and reflecting and sharing a bit about work and school and life in Paraguay. The work I’m doing here, although sometimes I feel like it doesn’t mean a darn thing, is important and that fact that I have work to do, and important character-forming work as teacher(for both the students and me), is a huge blessing for which I am incredibly thankful. God is so good to give me and the whole world useful, creative, and good things to do every day in our work; just as His own work in the whole world, too, always is and in all ways is useful, creative, and Good.

Time Flies

2008-04-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

For those of you who with puppy dog eyes look several times each day at the calendar on your desk counting down the days, hours, and even minutes until I come home, have no fear: we’ve reached the half-way mark of my sojourn of service in Paraguay. Seven months have already quickly passed since I left, and Lord-willing seven more will pass before I return home to my own and really-beloved United States. Although it’s too early for me to get sentimental about leaving Paraguay, the day of my homecoming approacheth and the time of my teaching here flyeth by.

Thankfully and with many of God’s graces, so far everything has gone well for me. I haven’t missed anything of great import at home, but have gotten to learn a brand new culture and way of life far away from home. Sometimes I really dream about going home and giving huge, long hugs to my family and friends, but other times I realize that I’m living a dream here in Paraguay, too. Be that as it may, I’m confident that God is calling me back to the U.S. this upcoming December. Depending on whether I can work in Ohio or not, I may be there with my family or in DC with my university friends. Lord-willing I’ll return to university to study for a masters degree in some manner of theology in August or September 2009. After that, who knows? Marriage? A job? A vocation? I’ve got a lot to discern. Every day I’m learning that I’ve got to trust in God for everything I am and everything I have; the day-to-day and long-term plans are all in His hands.

The Political Process and Election Day

2008-04-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Political Process:

Although the political process has recently culminated with the national elections, I’ve been witness to the political process since the first day I arrived. At that time seven months ago, already there was plenty of infighting among the parties themselves to establish their candidates through the primary elections. Political posters lined the walls of unkempt buildings and hastily but well-hand-painted murals allured voters to support those candidates who could print and glue up the most paper or empty the most gallons of paint in the race. This tendency continued throughout the generals elections: as old posters got wet or torn down, new ones were pasted up, and when the rugrats representing one party graffitied the mural of another, it was fixed again and painted over many times. For months the city was awash in a sea of red, blue, and green, painted or plastered tit-for-tat political advertising and bickering.

The general population, too, represented well this sea of opinion and political fighting. I think many Paraguayans like the elections because it means they’ll get a crummy new t-shirt or cardboard hat free of cost. Nearly every street vendor or walking homeless person, and in fact many street vendors who are probably walking homeless people, too, wore new bright white t-shirts that supported the major candidates. They weren’t nice well-knit t-shirts, by any means, but instead the single-stringed white variety a normal person would wear as an undershirt. Although they were poor quality, however, their message was loud and clear for one party or for another and those who wore them seemed content enough to have some new strings.

As an American witnessing new democracy in action, the funniest aspect of the political campaign was seeing the party cars that drove down side the small side streets and through the large avenues that blared party music. Each candidate had a prerecorded message championing their candidacy along with a bite-sized jingle. Lugo, for example, had a song called “Lugo Tiene Corazon” or “Lugo Has Heart” that I can sing for you when I get back. These travelling propagandizers blared their songs and made their political promises seemingly at all hours of the day, hoping to win the votes of la gente with the big-old speakers and unforgettable speals.

Election Day

It’s already been almost an entire week since election day, and the shock of the elections still hasn’t worn off. Before I go into results, though, I’ll describe the day itself. The elections were held last Sunday, April 19th, all across Paraguay in a sort of quasi-national holiday. The Paraguayan government prohibits the sale of alcohol on election day along with the meetings of any social or religious groups, so the mundanos, or those from the world, couldn’t drink on the day and los cristianos couldn’t go to church. Our own meeting at the Apostolic Christian Church was, along with others across the country, was cancelled so that people could claim no excuse not to vote. Nationwide the method apparently worked, because nearly two-thirds of eligible voters turned out in the election.

Election day itself was, thankfully, quiet and peaceful. Vans, buses, and other vehicles that the political parties sponsored slowly and methodically canvassed neighborhoods to carry their own party faithful to the voting booths. Some parties even reimbursed cross-country bus tickets so that those who had moved far away from their registered voting locale could return home to support their party in the election (think of the Republican Party buying me a plane ticket from DC so that I could go home to vote for them in Ohio! What an idea…) Needless to say, many people from church took advantage of the free trip to go home to San Pedro on the other side of the country and vote.

When the final results were tallied up, the former bishop of San Pedro, Fernando :Lugo, was declared the winner of the presidential election with around 42 percent of the vote. Thankfully, the elections were quick, clean, clear, and cut sharply. Lugo’s win is historic, ending the longest-running national political machine in world history; after 61 years in power, a former man of the cloth has dethroned the ruling and firmly-established Colorado party from executive power. This win represents real change for Paraguay, and the upcoming months will see an unprecedented transition of democratically-elected power in this developing nation. Although many disagree with Lugo as a bishop running for office or think of him as a seedy tool of the left, there’s no doubt that he will breath a breath fresh air into the Paragauyan government when he takes office in August. I had the chance to visit downtown last Monday, the day after the elections, and it seemed as if the entire city had a new spirit about it. The corruption of the Colorado had finally been purged, and the city felt like it was breathing new life for the first time in decades.

For an interesting discussion of Lugo’s now in-limbo position of authority as a Catholic bishop, check out this Catholic canon lawyer´s commentary and insight . The steps that the Roman Catholic Church now takes to deal with Lugo’s situation will reveal much about the Church itself, and will no doubt have a huge impact on Paraguay, whose current president-elect is a former/still sort of bishop.

The Issues

2008-04-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Issues:

Now that I’ve covered the three major candidates, I’ll move on to talk a bit about the main issues in Paraguayan politics. In the social realm, debates over abortion and gay rights are uncontroversial because of Paraguay’s conservative culture just like questions of environmental stewardship and foreign warmongering are dead on the spot because of Paraguay’s poverty. Even without these core issues that consume American politics, however, Paraguayans still find plenty to argue about and plenty of things over which to form many unique party platforms.

Security and Order
As I’ve already mentioned, the drastic changes in national and local security resulting from the power vacuum after the fall of the dictatorship have had a huge impact on Paraguay. For a nation accustomed over several decades to exacting law enforcement and firm authority, the current lack of security appears to be a blatant lack of government intervention and help. On a national scale, the problems are immense. In the north of the country, multi-millionaire thugs hire private armies to protect their drug-growing and drug-exporting estates in blatant defiance of the government’s drug laws. In the east of the country, a thriving black market of drugs and arms and every other international vice thrives because of government ineffectiveness and corruption. On the local level, too, it’s every man for himself in Paraguay. If you’re walking around at night, you can expect to get mugged. If you leave your house open, you can expect to get robbed. For that reason, no one is out on the streets after seven or eight at night and everyone keeps everything locked up all the time. Under the dictatorship, if your neighbor’s chicken laid an egg on your doorstep you returned the egg politely. Today, however, you can’t let your chickens loose without being afraid someone will steal them. People want their chickens to go free, though, and from the opinions I’ve gathered from many folks I’ve talked to, would pay the price of keeping quiet under another dictatorship to see it happen.

Itapu
Some thirty years ago under the order of the Stroessner dictatorship, Paraguay partnered with Brazil to build the Itapu Dam, until very recently the largest power-generating dam in the world. Because the project was funded by Brazil, Brazil called and continues to call all the shots in the management of the Paraguayan dam project. Paraguay, in turn, has continually gotten screwed by the deal; first because of al the Paraguayan land taken away by the flooding of the dam, and now by Brazil’s continued exploitation of the dam’s energy (all of Paraguay’s energy needs can be covered by only one and a half of the nearly dozen and a half power-producing turbines, so the rest of the energy goes at bare-minimum cost to Brazil).

Throughout the years since the completion of the dam, the Paraguayan government has come up with all sorts of failed plans to gain more control over the dam, making all sorts of unfulfilled half-promises along the way that have only managed to demonstrate more and more through the years the government’s complete ineffectiveness. What makes matters worse is that, while the dam could cover electricity nearly free of cost for all of Paraguay, the cost of electricity for normal Paraguayans is still very high. Thus, the ineffectiveness of the government in dealing with the Itapu project and the still-high cost of energy give many Paraguayans good reason to believe that the government is very corrupt with much of the money generated from the dam going into the private bank accounts of high-ranking officials. The project stinks with corruption, and the Paraguayan people are tiring of the decades-old smell.

Health Care
If I were Paraguayan, I certainly would never complain about the costs of health care in Paraguay. A visit to the doctor only costs about five dollars, and two cavities can be filled in by a dentist for about forty dollars. Worries about the rising costs of health care and sky-rocketing health insurance bills seem to me a world away in a place where monthly coverage costs about ten dollars. Still, though, I’m only an American who’s living in Paraguay; for the average Paraguayan health care is an important and costly necessity of life, sinking budgets and worrying families to no end. Thus, one of the political issues in Paraguay is health care. Paraguay’s next-door neighbor, Argentina, offers universal health care for all her citizens. I’m not sure how effective Argentina’s system is, but Paraguayans seem to idolize it as a utopian system where everyone’s health needs are taken care of by the government. This ideal, when coupled with the ineptitude of the Paraguayan government to provide the goods for really any one, makes health care an important and pertinent political issue.

Jobs and the Economy
Paraguay is a nation of immense possibility. The facts that the land is rich, the climate is useful for productivity, and the geographic location is next to Argentina and Brazil, the two largest consumer markets in South America, offer countless occasions for economic growth and achievement. One only needs to look at the model of success in Mennonite cooperatives and farms to realize to the immense economic possibilities in Paraguay. The reality, however, is that for many Paraguayans work is no sure thing. Living day to day means scraping by without any faithful work or means of providing for basic necessities. In our congregation of under one hundred members, for example, there are now at least a dozen able men (some with large families) who don’t have steady incomes. Even for those in good health and good mind, it is often difficult to find reliable work. Pay is low, the minimum wage laws are unenforced, and those that can find work are easily taken advantage of. The lack of jobs and stagnant Paraguayan economy is, to say the least, one of the greatest needs in this country and one of the political issues that touches many Paraguayan very closely.

Corruption
Corruption, finally and unequivocally, is the most serious issue facing the Paraguayan political system. The establishment has been established so long that its structures and systems have nearly rotted completely through, with nearly every Colorado statesman or stateswoman accused of everything from bribery to stealing government monies to drug trafficking. What makes things even worse is that the very system allows such crimes and abuses to go on abated, since it’s illegal in Paraguay to convict any member of the national Congress of a crime while in office. Thus, while the poorest of the poor go on struggling to make ends meet, the richest of the rich and those with connections in political power continue on without end stealing government money and taking part in underhanded government deals and even drug trafficking. For these reasons and so many more, the Paraguayan political system is in need of a lot of redemption.

Politickin´in Paraguay

2008-04-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

As a former government major and current political junky, I’d be completely amiss to pass an entire year in Paraguay— a year, coincidentally, that will see the first national presidential elections in five years—without ever talking once about the current political situation. And so, in honor of the national political elections that will take place tomorrow, I’ll go through a summary of the current Paraguayan political situation, the major candidates in the election tomorrow, what are the major concerns and voter issues (hint: abortion is not one of them. In a nearly all-Catholic country, el aborto remains, blessedly and wonderfully, a non-issue in the hearts and minds of the people), and what democracy looks like in a developing country. I’m doing my best to surmise and summarize everything I’ve seen, heard, and learned from the papers, people, and culture, so I cannot pretend to be authoritative in fact or unbiased in opinion. It’s long and might bore you if you don’t like politics, political philosophy, theology, or other cultures.

On the Ground: The Paraguayan Political Situation

First, a quick political primer on Paraguayan politics: The nation was governed up until 1989 by the second-longest running dictatorship in world history under a certain General Alfredo Stroessner. His was the brand of authoritarianism that people didn’t mess around with: you vote for the other guy, you go to jail; you protest, you end up missing; you do something wrong, there’s a swift and terrible recompense. After the dictatorship fell, the leftovers of the general’s Colorado political party remained in national and presidential power without any of the difficulties or obligations of formal tyranny. So-called free democracy took the place of the well-committed despotism, and Paraguayan society “opened up” to all the bad elements of a society completely bereft of traditional authority. Because criminals no longer get shot for stealing the first time, there is a lot more stealing today and everyone has built high fences around their homes. Because prostitutes are no longer hidden away in the dungeon for selling themselves, you can buy one openly on the street for the price of a good cup of coffee.

Although the strict rule of law and conservative society under the dictatorship has come to an abrupt end, the basically one-party self-feeding rule of the Colorado Party and blatant simony of the connections-based political system has continued without flinching. Your position in the government is not based on your skill or talent, but rather on the person you know and how you know them. To the victor belong the fiscal and political spoils in every election and level of government, and on the national level nearly every executive victor is Colorado. There’s a lot of support, too, for this deeply established “democratic” system. Those in all varieties of public jobs depend on the Colorado party for their positions, so public school teachers, police officers, and nearly every other government official is eager to and must, if they like their work, vote Colorado. It was no surprise for me to see one of the sisters in our church with a relatively good job as a school principal campaigning openly in the street for the Colorado party. Her job and livelihood depend in large measure on who wins the election and how good a supporter of the party she is in the process.

The Candidates:

Blanca, Te Quiero!!
The Colorado Party’s main candidate for this round of national elections is Blanca Ovelar, a former minister of Education and well-grounded party insider. Having coming through the fire of an intense and bitter inner-Colorado primary, she is the establishment’s own and current president’s hand-picked successor to lead the nation. Although a novelty for Paraguay as the nation’s first female candidate for president, Ovelar represents the “man” of the powers that be in one-party Colorado rule.

Lugo: the Bishop with Many Demons
The main opposition to Ovelar and the Colorados comes from the PLRA, a mixed bag of politico nuts that have come together to fight the Colorado candidates. At the PLRA’s head and the liberal party’s national candidate for president is Fernando Lugo, the former Catholic Bishop of San Pedro. So far, I’ve had a very difficult time of discerning the facts from the fictions about Lugo. Since so many members of our evangelical church in Asuncion originally come from San Pedro, they claim to be very well-informed about the bishop, and, because of their insider information, have very definite negative opinions of him. I’ve heard from them among other things that Lugo is an international drug trafficker (we can show you where is his marijuana-growing church compound and estate), is personally responsible for the deaths of many connected to his cruel drug ring (we saw the trail of blood that led straight to the bishop’s mansion after a former chauffer who accidentally found a suitcase of the bishop’s crack cocaine was murdered and his body dragged away), maintains a harem of mistresses (we know one of the poor girls who escaped from his evil grasp), and even made a pact with the devil and other international leaders on a trip he made to Voo-dooville in Brazil (well, we weren’t actually there, but we heard about it, at least).

In real life, though, Lugo’s dual position as a former bishop and current presidential candidate, when taken together with the way he has been speaking and politicking in his campaign, represent something very, very, dangerous for Paraguay and for Paraguayan Christians both evangelical and Catholic. First, Lugo’s thinking and actions in regards to the Faith can only be seen as a perversion of true Christianity. As a bishop and theologian, he has embodied in the past and even now especially stands for a very precariously-founded and historically unchristian form of liberation theology that seeks to realize the Kingdom of God through political processes in the kingdom of man. This is the sort of theology, born in South America and other developing regions as a reaction from brutal colonial oppression traditionally and shamefully partnered with the established church authorities, that calls for social revolution and political change in the name of opposing radical Christian faith. Liberation theologians say that Jesus was a man of political change whose goal was to bring about justice for the poor and to bring power to the weak on earth, that God’s general goal in the world is to establish a nearly-Marxist equality of persons under just political authority, and that as followers of God through Jesus Christ we must do all we can to bring about that reality. Thus, in a Paraguayan context, liberation theology would say that good Christian voters and revolutionaries must upset and bring to an end the abuses and injustices of the all-powerful Colorado party, establishing through whatever means necessary more just and more equalizing social and socialistic political structures. And so, through his own presidential campaign, Lugo hopes to bring about this real justice and real dramatic change to the corrupted Paraguayan government.

On the surface, Lugo’s dream doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea. After all, the current political establishment here in Paraguay is unjustly corrupted by the rich who take advantage of the poor and, as Christians, we serve a God of justice Who has an incredibly large heart for the needs of the poor. Why shouldn’t we support and take part in social change that promises justice and equality? The problem, though, is that the social changes that Lugo and liberation theology champion to solve humanity’s political problems are only surface-deep. They only touch the things that can be seen in outward politics, government structures, and the tangible state of affairs. The real problem with humanity and all political structures and institutions is not, however in the structures and authorities as Lugo would say. Instead, these troubles are the direct and universal result of our first parents’ original sin, and the real problem of corruption and injustice lies within the sinful heart of every human being. Hence, the real answer to the quandary of sin is not in political campaigns or revolutions or changes of governments, but rather in God’s saving graces through Jesus Christ alone. Only the work of the Holy Spirit can change hearts of government officials from greediness and abuse to service and care, and only the work of an almighty God in an individual life can bring about the call to true justice and divine standard of conduct with others. Worldly and broken political processes and institutions will always be just that: worldly and broken. Only the pure good news of Christian faith and hope in the Gospel of Jesus Christ can give heavenly purposes and heal the tendencies toward injustice in all human hearts.

Lugo, however, doesn’t represent this Gospel of Jesus Christ. He has turned to man’s gospel, trading the good news of spiritual liberation in Christ though the Church for a perverted faith in human politicking and the always-fallible realm of political institutions. What is worse and even more condemnable is that Lugo has used his position of spiritual authority as a former bishop in the Catholic Church for his own purposes in search of political authority and power. He has twisted his God-given Christian ordination into something very ugly to garner the temporal support of the easily-influenced masses. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, preaching a false gospel of political change devoid of hope apart from the true Gospel of repentance from sin in Jesus Christ. Thankfully and rightfully, the Catholic Church has recognized this and has suspended Lugo’s rights and responsibilities as bishop and priest. The Vatican has installed a new bishop in Lugo’s place in San Pedro, distancing itself from Lugo and from his blighted forms of thinking. In the process, the Catholic Church preserves the Gospel of Faith in Jesus Christ from being polluted by the all too-temporal and all too-human political social movements that Lugo represents. In the end Lugo and all revolutionary social movements will come to an end, but the news of salvation through Christ will remain forever.

Apart from his dangerous and heretical theology that twists beautiful and simple Christian faith into a human system of social change and politics, Lugo’s blasting rhetoric and appeal to far-left populism also show him to be a very dangerous presidential candidate for Paraguay. He has aligned himself with the likes of Hugo Chavez, the off-the-edge Venezuelan loudmouthed president and ally of Cuba and Iran, by promising a fiercely patriotic and self-focused Paraguayan government to the exclusion of friendly relationship with the United States, the gentle giant of a country to the north. No, Lugo is definitely no friend of America as he spouts off fierce but tired jingoistic rhetoric. If elected, Lugo would put himself and all of Paraguay in political and cultural peril outside the good graces and influences of North American values and helps.

Lino: Crotchety but Firm
The third major candidate is Lino Olviedo, a former military general who managed to get himself into a pile of trouble in the aftermath of the Stroessner dictatorship. Throughout much of the 90s and early 2000s he was confined to prison for being accused of plotting a military junta against the established democratic government, but recently he was released to plot and carry out his own and now legal political junta in the elections. Although popular among the people and especially the military for his role in the 1989 ouster of Stroessner, Olviedo represents an old-era style of Paraguayan leadership that promises to bring back authority and the order of law to the now-disordered democratic nation. The youth especially despise him because they think he will bring back nine-o’clock curfews to clear the late-night streets of vagabond kids. Last week I saw a group of folks campaigning for Olviedo and not one was under the age of sixty. Thus, I’m pretty sure Olviedo is like your crotchety old neighbor who waved his cane and yelled at you for walking on his grass when you were little: although loud and annoying and demanding you respect him, he isn’t going anywhere and can’t really do anything.

Playing Dad

2008-04-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

I only recently turned 23, but in a couple weeks my son will already be 16 years old. You might wonder at such a strange curiosity— a father, that is, who is only seven years older than his very own child! I’m sure you’re wondering even now what accident of nature or miracle of science or manner of perversion could have been the cause of such an extraordinary family circumstance. In reality, though, my fatherhood was thrust upon me quite recently, quite dramatically, and quite unexpectedly here in Paraguay. In contrast to what you may be thinking, though, I certainly did not have a South American love affair with an Asuncion bell some fifteen years ago, and my long-lost and long-illegitimate Mestizo child born from a childhood tryst definitely has not recently surfaced to claim me as his own Gringo papa.

Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I don’t share even a drop of the same blood with my son, as he doesn’t look a spot like me. He doesn’t carry a hint of the icy sky-grey color in my eyes, the sensitive and easily-irritated pink color on my skin, the pointed slenderness of my nose, or even the trademark spare tire that I and many other Steidls I know grudgingly wear on our midsections. No, he looks much different than a Steidl. His eyes are as black as the pure coffee I used to drink in the mornings, his skin is as brown and smooth as a polished coconut, his nose is short, stout, and looks slightly squashed on its end, and, if these signs aren’t good enough to prove he isn’t my biological son, the definition of his stomach muscles prove that his ancestors’ people lived very different lifestyles from my own (with far less strudel to eat, perhaps).

No, he definitely isn’t my biological son. The real story is this: Christian left his terribly abusive home several years ago in search of a better life on the street. Here in Paraguay, that means his life at home was unbearably rotten to make him search for better by begging and scrounging on the street. When we were telling ghost stories around a bonfire a couple months ago, all the guys asked Christian to add to the repertoire by recounting the things he’s seen and lived through. Thankfully and miraculously, though, Christian’s real-life scary story came to an end a few years ago. After some time on the street he got connected with a Presbyterian church, got saved, and eventually wound up with good stable work in the auto upholstery shop of a lady who attended the Apostolic Church. Through her and another friend’s influence, he got connected to the AC church, became a member last year, and since that time has received a scholarship to attend Colegio Privado Adonai and finish up his four last years of high school.

The entire church has adopted Christian as its own, too, providing for his physical, emotional, and spiritual needs in many varied ways through many different families. Some give him lunch every day, others help him with homework, and still others pay for the little things that other children’s parents would normally cover. Every parent corrects him when he needs it, and every one watches to make sure he makes it church for every meeting. Right now, he’s living with me in the missionary house to keep me company and give him a sure place to stay, so I’m the closest thing he has and perhaps ever has had to a dad. I feed him breakfast and dinner everyday, keep the roof over his head, make him wash the dishes and clean the bathroom sometimes, and even give him a good lecture when he needs it. Although he’s incredibly mature for his age because of his tough life experiences, he’s still a young guy at heart and in need of a lot of guidance and mentorship.

If you think of it, you might pray for Christian and me. I have no idea what he needs by way of love or authority or friendship or security or whatever else. I still feel like an adolescent myself, and I’m basically in charge of one who comes from a totally different culture and with a totally troubled past. I’d trust him with my life and we are very open as we share together, but I’m totally clueless as an adopted dad. We’re both in need of a lot of grace together as we learn how to get along as a very dysfunctional and untraditional family. Please pray also for Christian’s future and his time in the church after I leave at the end of this year. There’s a lot of other amazing people who take good care of him, so he definitely won’t be alone or out on the street as long as there’s a church, but he also definitely needs stability and someone to invest in him long-term.

Another American Part of Me Dies

2008-04-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

I said I’d never do it. I’m an American, doggonit-- I’d never even go near that green maté tea stuff that all the Paraguayans drink in the morning. I may do everything else strange and uncomfortable to fit into Paraguayan culture and be a good missionary, but I need coffee when I wake up: coffee that’s rugged and bold and full of life-giving caffeine, the sort of drink that puts hair on chests and makes mighty nations tremble before its awesome power. As an apt student well-trained in American history, I know that both George Washington and George Bush drink coffee every morning, and everyone knows that they are tall and handsome and intelligent and, although I can’t confirm it, I can imagine they have hairy chests, too, because of their black American coffee. I think I even heard once that coffee is the reason why the Americans won the Revolutionary War. While the Brittons were sipping on their dainty tea and nibbling on their sissy crumpets, the manly rebels were able to sneak in and beat them to the ground because they had guzzled down several tankards of coffee along with their hearty morning meals of bacon, egg, and cheese McMuffins.

All of my American cultural knowledge about coffee, though, is now weighing heavily on me as I’ve decided to start drinking Paraguayan maté in the mornings. Although I feel like a rebel against my own upbringing and culture and everything good that I have as an American man, I also feel like I can’t stop or even slow down this conversion to drinking maté. The weather, you see, has finally changed to falltime, so there’s now a distinct South American chill in the early-morning air. It’s this new Paraguayan chill, a chill that makes my feet go cold and my nose go runny and the air on my bare skin feel like a thousand sharp needles, that’s calling me to a distinctly Paraguayan remedy of hot maté. This maté is potent and long-lasting in its ritualistic fight against the chill, offering my hands hours of precious heat-giving movement as I pour the hot water from the thermos into steamy draws of only a couple sips each.

And so, after today, you’ll be able to see me carrying around a thermos full of hot water for maté in the mornings, instead of the coffee you might assume an American man should have. I’ll no longer have an industrial-black glazed porcelain mug in hand, either, but instead an organic wooden guampa, the short and stout gourd-looking cup that holds the yerba (the Paraguayan tea-like leaves) from which is sipped through a metal straw the delicious and comforting maté. I may be taking another step away from my own American culture and good upbringing, but it’s a step that brings me a little closer to the Paraguayan way-of life and a step that carries me to a warmer, happier, and more content place in the cold morning.

In all of this talk about identity and national pride and contentment, though, there is one thing I must confess. Even if I weren’t in Paraguay, I probably would have given up on coffee in favor of maté anyways. I’ve been drinking the hearty American black stuff for ten years now, and the chest hair is still yet to come. It’s definitely time to try a new strategy.

Encarnacion Exploration, Part 2

2008-03-31T10:21:00.001-07:00

Shortly after arriving, I got a hotel close to the bus terminal and splurged an extra five dollars for a room with air conditioning and cable (the first of both luxuries, I can proudly say, I had had in six months). I wasn’t disappointed by the extra commodities, either, as the air conditioning ran at a constant and frigid rate throughout the night and the cable had CNN in Spanish along with some of my favorite American cartoons translated.

In the morning I boarded a bus which, on its way to another big city, would pass directly by the ruins. My ride, as one of those extra passengers without a seat that I disliked so much from the day before, was a quick forty five minutes before I got off at a deserted stop with signs pointing to the ruins of two different Jesuit missions at Jesus and Trinidad. Although at first glance the stop looked empty, a second bus waited beyond one corner to take me the extra ten miles to the town of Jesus. This bus line, leaving when it was full, passed its entire trip on an unpaved road a maximum of once every two hours. After passing through the quiet but dusty Paraguayan village called Jesus’ town, the conductor let me off at the end of its route where a fence for the Jesuit ruins marked the boundary of the historical site. I walked an extra two blocks to the entrance, where for a dollar fee I was granted admission and, upon request for a tour brochure explaining the site, was given a pamphlet on the broader industry of Paraguayan tourism.

Although information on the Jesuit ruins was unimpressive, the architecture that remained of the mission town was anything but. The main attraction was the huge earthy basilica, three stories high and partially reconstructed from the deep-rust colored stones originally cut and carried from miles around, which stood firmly planted on a plateau like some medieval fortress. Outside the church walls, the stone architecture still bore Christian imagery carved by people converted from distinctly unchristian ways of life. Inside the church, the emerald-green grass spread like a fine carpet over the sanctuary, and the now-truncated pillars that originally supported the rafters seemed to be like so many well-ordered altars. At the head of the church stood the artificially-supported stone of the original altar, which undoubtedly witnessed so many thousands of masses and so many thousands more of natives coming to share at the table of Christian Truth and Faith.

I was able to pass all over the sight without any boundaries and without the company of any other tourists. The place was completely quiet and empty, as if the spirits of the Jesuits and natives long passed on still guarded and protected the town as a sacred and secret space. The only other people I saw, except for all those ghosts that I easily imagined were still worshipping, learning, selling, and socializing in the ruins of the church, school, marketplace, and plaza, were some living Paraguayans cutting the massive fields of grass with tiny gas lawnmowers. With their broad hats and Paraguayan style of clothing, though, it wasn’t too difficult for me to imagine them as some of the original inhabitants. I explored and imagined with great reverence and delight, even climbing the thirty-foot bell tower to see all the ruins together with the Paraguayan countryside spread out before me like so many panoramic photos in National Geographic. There, all I could hear was the wind, which seemed to whisper in my ear of forgotten times and histories and peoples and faiths.

After my two hours of imagination and exploration ended, I caught the bus’s next round out of the village and, after it let me off, walked a bit further to the other ruins at Trinidad. There, I spoke with the gal in charge of the site who I imagined was an idealistic and eccentric student of Paraguayan history, but who was in reality an unassuming college-age youth sipping terreré with her two friends on a hot country day. I asked her about the Jesuit missions, and what her opinion of them was. In Lamabaré, I had talked with many people—both Protestants and Catholics—who told me that the Jesuits organized the missions to exploit natives and steal gold to send to Rome. I wanted to know the truth, which I was willing to equate with her own opinion of the Jesuits, because I figured that the gatekeeper of the missions would be the best person to know.

I was surprised and pleased when the history she told me was much different than what I had heard. These huge and productive missions were no exploitative slave plantations as some imagine and slander, she recounted, but instead self-governing and self-supporting communities of natives under the guidance of only a couple Jesuits. These missions really did help the Indians and actually brought the indigenous peoples many good things. Although when I watched The Mission with some of my future-Jesuit friends at Georgetown I thought the Hollywood production idealized too much of the Jesuit-organized native communities, this gal told me that the movie was pretty accurate and that the towns really did work well for everyone’s benefit.

Many of these social goods that the villages provided, manifested in the architecture of a well-to-do culture and the adornments of a Christian lifestyle, could still clearly be seen in the ruins of both Jesuit towns. Although I thought the first ruins I saw were mighty impressive, the ruins in Trinidad were even more extensive and long-standing than those in Jesus. European-style sculptures in the church adorned everything from the statues and baptistery in back to the altar and preaching-stand up front. The bell tower, a complete structure separate from the church, still stood tall and proud watching over all the many Roman-style arches and porticoes of ruins surrounding it.

I left Trinidad in the middle of the afternoon as the sun began to burn through my two applications of sun screen and my lowly hat lost all its good function in the brightness of the blinding light. After buying a souvenir hand-cut stone representation of the Bell tower pencil-holder for only two dollars, I boarded a bus back to Ecarnación where I once again left for Asunción. After a long day of sight-seeing, learning, and imagining, I was tired to the bone and ready to rest. As the bus’s gentle swaying rocked me into a steady and sound sleep, though, I had one more opportunity to pass through the extraordinary Jesuit villages. This time in my dreams, however, I was actually able to see and hear and to touch and smell the bustling eighteenth-century society; to meet and converse with so many dedicated priests whose Holy-Spirit inspired work brought the teachings of the church to a new continent; and to marvel first-hand at the wonder of an entire native people group recently and miraculously converted to Christ.

Encarnacion Exploration, Part 1

2008-03-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning of Holy Week I left for Ecarnación, a cosmopolitan city by Paraguayan standards located a drive that ought to be only about five and half hours away from Asunción. The reason I say that the drive ought to be only five and a half hours, though, is because it took us nearly seven and a half hours to get there. Paraguayan bus companies refuse to leave the terminal until every vacant seat has been filled and then, after they leave for the destination city, they pick up every other person along the way who wants to travel. These unfortunate passengers have the bad luck of standing the entire trip, but I’m certain it’s a well-deserved form of karma punishing them for lost time on the trip.

Be that as it may, the bus to Ecarnación at one point had nearly two and a half dozen extra people crammed into the isle. One family, a group of ten indigenous tribesfolk who boarded the bus without seats, stood out particularly to me. Their skin was a dark but brilliant bronze, their cheek bones stuck out like knucklebones, and their hair was equally black and bowl-cut (except for the oldest son, who had a mullet). Paraguayans generally make fun of these sorts of people by saying that they appear so indigenous that they’re only missing the traditional feathers of native tribespeople to complete the look. The grandma among the bunch, though, really was so indigenous that she even carried around the feathers, for luck.

I normally wouldn’t notice the family, but the grandma, who wore a colorful patterned skirt along with a holey t-shirt through which you could see her bare chest indistinguishable from her bare belly, didn’t have a seat. She made it all the way to the back of the bus where I was, too, without anyone offering her their seat as is the respectful Paraguayan custom. Being the culturally-savvy and Christian traveler that I am, though, I offered this dear old Indian woman my seat and stood up with her many children and grandchildren. After a long while some seats cleared and I was able to sit next to my Indian grandma. She tried speaking to me in Guaraní, the national native Paraguayan tongue, but I had no idea what she was saying. Still, she seemed content to talk to me as long as I shook my head and feigned understanding. At one point, a Coke vendor boarded the bus selling drinks to the thirsty travelers. The native grandma tried to give him her lucky feathers in exchange for a cold Coke, but he laughed and refused.

The bus continued on its interminable ride all day long through the unending Paraguayan countryside, full of ranches and estates and tens of thousands of cows grazing on the grassy plains. The land reminded me of old westerns I’ve seen, and at one point I thought I even recognized the ranch from the show Ponderosa. It was beautiful and open and free, though, and real farm country, too, like there is in western Ohio with big tractors and impressive combines and every other sort of farm implement. I saw real cowboys rounding up a herd of cows, along with every other imaginable form of frontier living.

Around five-thirty in the afternoon we finally arrived to Ecarnación. My purpose for the trip wasn’t to meet an indigenous grandma or see the Paraguayan prairie, though, but instead to visit the Jesuit ruins, about the only must-see thing in Paraguayan guidebooks and an officially-declared United Nations World Heritage Site. Located thirty kilometers outside of Ecarnación, the ruins are the remnants of a great missionized society that the Jesuits organized in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here, the Pope’s priests brought together tens of thousands of native Americans into quasi-European social structures and ways of life. The towns were hugely productive and hugely beneficial to the tribespeople, giving them Western society and Christian values and a share in productive work. A 1986 movie starring Robert Dinero, The Mission, offers a unique perspective into the stories of these missions and their ways of life. As the movie also shows, however, the Jesuit project was eventually shut down because the great power held by the Jesuits became a threat to the established imperial governments and the latter’s wanton appetites for colonial exploitation of the native populations.

A ¨Mary¨Time

2008-03-23T14:11:00.001-07:00

Monday I continued my grand tour of Paraguay and visited Caácupe, the center of Paraguayan Catholicism and the place where stand both the country’s most famous basilica and the most-venerated statue of Mary, the Virgin of Caácupe. Every year on December 8^th, the Catholic feast celebrating the Immaculate Conception (Mary’s, that is) brings several tens of thousands of the devoted to Caácupe on a pilgrimage by foot. They end up in droves at the basilica, where they ask Mary for all sorts of things and petition her for all varieties of favors to be granted. The town is an important place to understand Paraguayan Catholicism, and, in effect, to understand most of Paragauyan culture, too.

The Monday that I visited, Caácupe was a quiet and simple town in the hilly countryside. The sun shone brightly and the sky was crystal blue, but plenty of green trees provided shade as the bus passed through the hills. The ride took about two hours, but I enjoyed getting out of the city a little bit and seeing the campo. The basilica and surrounding town itself is located on a large hill, so the church’s huge globe-of-a-dome can be seen from miles around. I disembarked right in front of the basilica, and proceeded to scope out the area.

The first thing I noticed surrounding the plaza of the church were the dozens and dozens of santerias, stores selling images and statues of the saints along with all varieties of rosaries, holy bracelets, and Virgin of Caácupe souvenirs. There were even blue plastic water bottles, Aunt Jemina-style, in the form of the Virgin for about $8 a pop. It all reminded me of the scene in the movie Luther, where the famed reformer is sickened by the outrageous sales of religious articles and the vendors who take advantage of unprudent religious fervor. My reaction wasn’t so strong as Martin Luther’s, but I could see that the shopkeepers definitely made a good business off of the pilgrims who come to see the famed statue of Mary.

One thing I did find revolting in Caácupe, however, was the sale of pornography in booths right next to the santerias. In a town where every penny is made by remembering a holy virgin and her purity of life, there was filth and pornographic trash sold side by side with images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. It made me sick to see how great a fall from its original Christian ideals Paraguay has taken, and how hollow indeed a society’s faith can be to allow such promiscuity to exist right next to and even intermingled with things considered so holy.

I realized too, though, that I’d be a huge hypocrite to say that Paraguayans are the only ones with this problem. After seeing the way good and evil coexisted so easily and so blatantly side by side in the shops of Caácupe, I was convicted that I, too, so often tolerate inner and disgusting sin in my life alongside all the good and outward Christian things. The Apostle James’s poignant question was pointed at me and Paraguay both—“Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs?” The answer, of course, is that “Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.” Good doesn’t come from evil, and evil doesn’t come from good, and they should not and cannot exist together in either Caácupe or my own life.

After walking around town and thinking about these things for a while, I finally entered the bright white basilica, which looks like an extraterrestrial colony set among the natural green and red hues of the city streets and parks. Inside, the walls were painted with an equally intense shade of white, but brilliant colors poured through the beautifully-stained glass windows. I was taken back by the simplicity of the basilica: I had expected to find a complex and gothic church with images of saints and the smells of incense and burning novenas everywhere, but I found a puritanical whitewashed sanctuary with strict benches and signs that prohibited lighting candles. At first, the only thing that told me for sure I was in a Catholic basilica was the papal banner hanging on one side of the altar up front.

Proceeding forward, I gingerly stepped through the church not wanting to disrupt anyone’s prayer or to look too much like a tourist with my camera in hand. As my eyes focused on the area beyond the altar, though, I could plainly see the famous Virgin of Caácupe. She stood on top of a little globe and wore a fancy crown and blue-spangled gown, representing her place in Catholic belief as the queen of saints in heaven and of the living church on Earth. Her hair was light auburn and curly, and her skin a very pale white. Set as the object of veneration among a nearly homogenous Paraguayan people with black hair and darker skin, she seemed very out of place and looked like a cheap European imported representation of the Mother of God. I was disappointed to see that the idea of beauty for Paraguayans, as represented by the Virgin of Caácupe, consisted in what seemed to me to be artificially light skin and European features.

A final thing I noted, then, about the highly-esteemed Virgin of Caácupe was that in real life the statue only stands about three feet tall. I had seen short imitation models of the statue around Asuncion, and I had always thought they were shorter just because they were copies of the real thing. Come to find out, though, up close even the real thing still just looks like a very big doll (sort of like the giant Barbie princesses I used to see in toy stores). Although so short and perhaps childish-looking in physical stature, however, the Virgin of Caácupe looms as a much taller and influential figure in the hearts and minds of Paraguayan Catholics as a guide, help, and succor for them and the nation.

Birthday Bash

2008-03-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

It’s Holy Week here and around the world, and in Paraguay that means a week of vacations in remembrance of Jesucristo’s death and resurrection. Nearly everyone from the church is taking advantage of the time to visit relatives, so I, too, have decided to use this holy week for a vacation to see and hear the sights and sounds of the country I normally don’t have the time for. The things I’ve done the past few days will take up a few pages to explain, but I think they’ll give you and me a better understanding of Paraguay and her culture.

The first big day was last Saturday, the 15^th, and coincidentally my birthday, too. Paraguayans make a big deal out of birthdays, and the custom is to greet the birthday boy or girl with kisses and blessings and all sorts of show. Everyone asks for weeks ahead of time what your birthday plans are, and then for days after the fact they ask how it all went down. As for me, I hoped for a quiet birthday without much show, so I decided to visit Pilar, my Georgetown friend serving with a Catholic organization about an hour and a half bus ride away in Itagua.

I got off the bus around eleven in the morning along the main route, where Pilar was excited to greet me and show me around town. Itagua is known as a center for fancy Paraguayan needle and stitchwork, so nearly every local shop has windows full of beautifully colored and elaborately patterned fabrics. The town is far more colonial, and beautiful, too, than most of the neighborhoods I’ve seen in Asuncion. The central church and plaza are still the central parts of town where everyone comes to relax and do business, and the lazy streets are all lined with beautiful columned porticoes and Spanish-looking architecture. While Lambare, the neighborhood where I’m living, feels like New Jersey with its strip malls and endless, poorly-organized neighborhoods, Itagua seems like a beautiful, purposefully-designed New England village with life centered around the church.

Pilar then showed the ministry where she works, a serious neighborhood helps organization run by three serious nuns called the Good Shepherd. The ministry has several arms, each reaching out to embrace and serve the lives of many poor people in Itagua. One seeks to improve the livelihood of exploited women in the needlecraft industry, providing a co-op and network of help through which they can sell their crafts and earn fair wages. Another branch, the one Pilar is involved with, is a sort of microfinance enterprise that loans families money to raise animals and sell at profit, all the while offering the encouragement and training to continue growing a business responsibly. A third ministry, finally, matches poor Paraguayan children with donors from North America to provide the little ones with health care, educational materials, and decent daily meals in the context of a Christian community. I was very pleased to see all the ways these three Catholic sisters, and their three American volunteers, are so wrapped up and tied into serving the community as a witness for Christ. Their work, like the school project in Lambare, is having real good effects on the entire neighborhood around them.

After being showed around the ministry center and nunnery and actually being invited to a second lunch with the Paraguayan nuns, we went to visit a family being helped by the loan/education program Pilar helps coordinate. We went with the purpose of seeing the family’s first pig, Bonita, before they butchered her and sent her carcass off to market. When we arrived, though, we were already too late. The butchering had taken place at 6 in the morning, not at 6 at night as Pilar had thought, so instead of getting to see a real live breathing pig, we were invited to have a bite to eat. The family had kept and cooked Bonita’s fatty skin with some corn flower, making it into a delicious treat along with some boiled mandioca and red wine. Pilar and I were disappointed not to see the pig alive, but not too disappointed, because we left mighty happily with our stomachs full of rich fresh pork.

After our visit with the family who butchered their pig, I returned home to Lambare once again and went to Saturday night church, where everyone greeted me with great emotion and smiles upon my completion of 22 full years. Afterwards, I spent my evening just as I would have liked to: quietly, with a few friends, and with plenty memories of a birthday well-spent in Paraguay.

Chicken Sacrifice... For Real

2008-03-17T07:12:00.001-07:00

I saw a sacrificed chicken along the route of my morning run today. It sat bloodily prostrated-- as if someone had squished it with a big foot from above-- on a ceramic saucer at the crossroads two blocks away from my house, just across from the place where yesterday morning a Palm Sunday service was held. It definitely freaked me out a bit, and reminded me that I’m in a place where the spirit world is very present to many people and where things like demon worship and witchcraft still take place.

My neighbors told me recently that the house next door to my own used to be a place of cultic rituals. Today, a Catholic family lives there with one daughter who’s even an evangelical. They told me, too, that they once found goat heads nicely arranged on their own front lawn, left by some angry relatives who also happened to believe in and pronounce evil curses. Bringing in the spirit world to deal with family disputes seems to take sibling rivalry and familial jealousies to an even higher level.

As for me, though, I trust that all these demonic powers have no power of me. I believe that they exist, for sure, and I even fear and respect them, but I also have the faith and trust that the Lord I serve has “disarmed all the rulers and authorities and put them to shame, by triumphing over them in the cross.” I know that, by putting my hope in the death and resurrection of Christ, all the powers of evil and death have lost all their powers over me, so I have nothing to fear as I pass by sacrificed chickens and hear rumors of all sorts of dark things. I plead the protection of the holy cross, the instrument through which, as we remember Christ’s passion this Easter week, God defeated all the dark spirits in the world.

Egg... All over my face

2008-03-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

So, I realized yesterday that I’m the worst teacher, and maybe the worst person, in the entire world.
In the second grade class, there’s a girl named of Suely (Sway’-lee) who always has a terrible attitude. While everyone else at the start of class is eager to shake hands as we practice the word of the day, she coldly withdraws and refuses to greet me. While everyone else is doing their best work, she circles whatever answer is convenient and easiest to her without the slightest concern for truth. She’s apathetic and grouchy and hardly participates with the class.
Because of her strange and rude behavior, I responded in like unchristian manner. When she flippantly turned in her workbook, hastily and wrongly worked through, I tossed it back at her and told her to do it correctly. When it seemed like she purposefully chose the wrong answers, I upbraided her time and time again to do her work right. I got frustrated, mad, and was very curt with her: “Why don’t you ever try to do anything right?,” I asked her more than once. “You need to learn to do your best,” I told her angrily several times.
Come to find out, though, Suely doesn’t know how to read.
I wish her teacher would have told me a month and a half earlier-- before I got so upset, that is, and undoubtedly shamed this poor girl so terribly so many times in front of all her classmates. Now, though, I’ve got my big old foot in my mouth and there’s nothing I can do except apologize and be more understanding. Once again I’m humbled, but this time I feel like scum, too. I don’t know everything and I’m so human. Shoot.

2008-03-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

I got a taste of some heavenly culture yesterday. There was a free Baroque music concert at the large and locally-well known Concordia Mennonite Church, so I made the special hour and fifteen minute trip for a rare but glorious showing of classical music. I wasn’t disappointed by what I found, either. Although completely out of step with the current Lenten season, the choir performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s Ascension Oratorio, a beautiful piece that portrays through musical composition the full range of emotions experienced by Christ and his disciples as the Lord ascended into Heaven. I myself was carried away in my imagination by the magical arrangement to one of the great concert halls of Europe, or perhaps the National Cathedral that I already know in Washington DC. Either way, the concert, with music some three hundred and fifty years old, was a tremendous gift in a country where pop music and pop everything is ever and always the rage.

It was a great gift to be in a place, too, where I didn’t look or feel so out of place. The Mennonite Church is full of Germans or Germanic-looking people-- folks of tall and proud stock with blonde hair and freckles and crystal blue eyes. There were even a bunch of older men who wore plaid and khakis, like me and my own people from Midwestern Ohio. For once, I was normal and fit in with a group of folks who looked just like me.

On the Paraguayan street, everyone always stares at me because I’m not Paraguayan or mestizo-looking. In the Mennonite church, though, I felt like my presence and my Germanic traits were expected. Rather than being an object of cultural curiosity, I was just a person among other blonde-haired and blue-eyed persons. An older fellow even tried to start a conversation with me in German, to which I responded politely in a mixture of Spanish and English. It might sound strange because I’m a fourth generation American, and I’ve even been wondering since yesterday if I have some secret and primal racism hidden deep within me, but I was really content and really peaceful to be among a bunch of German folk.

I’d be neglecting a very important detail about the concert, too, if I didn’t mention the fact that the most powerful person in all of Paraguay was in attendance. Yes, that’s right-- the American ambassador to Paraguay himself was at the church. There was an entire CIA security detail there to protect him, too: men with cool ear phones, super-sharp suits, and buzzed haircuts that looked like they were ready at a moment’s notice to karate-chop or shoot any one who messed with their American diplomat. They looked very out of place amid the simple and pacifist Mennonite congregation, but they made me feel safe and happy that there were a bunch of other Americans nearby. After the concert, the diplomat was quickly whisked away in a dark black Cadillac with police escort like many I got to see in DC. I never imagined I’d see an American diplomat in Paraguay, and you might even say I came here to escape some of the power and politics that I saw everywhere in Washington, but hey, what can I say? It’s hard to avoid smart and powerful people, and the things that smart and powerful people like to do (like go to Bach concerts in Paraguay), when you seem to yourself to be a smart and powerful person.

After the performance ended and I saw my diplomat leave, however, I was gently humbled and brought back to reality once again. There was no Cadillac escort to take me away, but a big dirty public bus that I waited nearly twenty minutes to catch. I then headed back to my three room, rents-at-less-than-$100/month-with-only-one-fan-and-a-stinky-toilet apartment, and put my folded clothes away in improvised drawers of old fruit crates. The sounds of Bach and high culture continued to swirl around in my mind and lift my spirits to the highest levels of the heavens, but everything else around me testified to the fact that I was very much a part of the lowly earth. Still, on a night like last night, I wouldn’t trade my place for any other in the entire world. I’m pretty sure living my young life on purpose for God, along with all the adventures and difficulties of living it in another country, is about as close to Heaven as I’ll ever get.

Tears Are Pride Leaving the Body

2008-03-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

I definitely used to be one of those kids. I’m sure you probably knew me in school—the brown noser; that one dork who always got the A’s in every subject and who always did everything he could to please the adults around him. He was a strange one, for sure: that smart kid who obsessed over his grades and whose sense of self-worth was so strongly tied to good marks and praise from teachers. You probably could never understand when he cried over an A- on his fourth grade math test or when he faked sick in kindergarten to avoid talking to his teacher about a matter that really never was his fault, but for him, these sorts of things were world-shattering horrors.

As for me, though, I actually was that strange elementary school kid. I cried in Mr. Rossi’s class after I got a 92% on a math test (to this day most folks still don’t know that oranges weigh 2 pounds each and that people drink their coffee at 120 degrees Farenheit), and I pretended to have the stomach flu when I didn’t want to talk to my kindergarten teacher about something I was coerced into saying on the school bus (a bad-influence-of-a-friend told me to tell another kindergartener that I wanted to have sex with her. As an innocent five year old, I really had no idea what that meant, but apparently my rotten friend, this girl and her mom, and the school principal did). Yep, I was that smart and suggestible and proud kid. I did my best in everything, was very self conscious about it all, and, when my best wasn’t good enough, I cried.

All of this long personal history puts me in a unique position of empathy with those same sorts of kids that I’m getting to know now that I’m a teacher. There are a few students who try so hard to please me, just like I tried so hard to please my own teachers. There are a few who will do just about anything to get a good mark, even giving up their recess time to study English, just like I tried everything I could to put an extra plus sign after my A. After only three weeks teaching, too, I’ve already seen a few students in my classes cry when, like me in elementary school, things didn’t go there way.

As a teacher who was there in their place at one time not so long ago, I can empathize with them. I know well the feeling of disappointment and self-hatred after even a minor failure. I, like one of my first-time English students who is stressing out over a new foreign language, spent many nights of my innocent youth worrying over classes and whether I’d ever be able to accomplish the tasks set before me. I cried many times at discipline and correction, too, never wanting to be wrong at any time in public. I was easily-humiliated, and easily affected by how others thought of me.

Since that time, though, I’ve learned a lot. I’m a lot more thankful for what I have these days, and I don’t always think about what I don’t have. I’m not so easily moved by what others think is right, and am a lot more confident in what I think is right. This doesn’t change the fact that there are still standards and truths and sometimes I get them very wrong, but I’ve come to know that I’m just a human person and I make mistakes. Slowly, I’m getting better at accepting that. I know, too, that’s it’s a good thing to be humbled every once in a while and to believe that there are a lot of people a lot smarter and a lot better than me.

Knowing my own life and how much I’ve learned through so many painful lessons, I can’t help but be pleased when I see my own students learning these same things. It might seem a little strange that I smile when one of my best students misses recess for misbehavior, but I know they’re learning the important lesson that no one is better than the rule of law. I might seem to be a different sort of teacher when I’m glad to see a very bright student shedding a tear over her bad grade on a quiz, but I’m content to believe that those tears are very important and never shed in vain, demonstrating to her and the world that no one is perfect. Discipline and correction and humble pie certainly makes all of my students and me much better people. No one is perfect or invisible, and we’re all in need of a world of correction and training. Although it’s tough for me and my students to hear sometimes, we’ve all got a long way to go, a lot of humility to learn, and maybe some crying to do along the way, too.

There´s a Fever in the Air

2008-02-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

Ain’yu feelin’ it? Thaysuh feevuh en the aye’! Thas raught— Ahhh sayed, uh feevuh!!

A yellow fever, to be exact. All of Paraguay is “feeling” it, too, with some six confirmed cases in the San Pedro district, one case here in a suburb of Asuncion, and sixty-six more people thought to be sick or dead with the tropical disease, although their cases have yet to be confirmed by medical authorities. Thus la fiebre amarilla, or the yellow fever, is all the rage in newspapers, chat around water coolers, and just about every other place where ideas are communicated in this sometimes crazy and sensationalized culture.

This time, though, the people may have good reason to be worried. Yellow fever, like Dengue and malaria and a host of other illnesses, is a virus carried person to person via a species of black and white tiger-striped mosquito. In a tropical environment like this one, it’s not uncommon to wake up with legs and arms covered by these ugly insects. Once infected, though, the virus’s host is stricken down with a terrible fever that lasts for a few days. After this dreadful period of time, the person may seem to feel better and improve on the outside, but the sickness continues to secretly wreak havoc on the inside, causing internal bleeding and eventually multiple organ failure. When the kidneys shut down, the body becomes poisoned and the skin turns yellow; hence the name, “yellow” fever. What makes the fever even more notorious is that once you get it, there’s nothing doctors can do to help you except to alleviate the symptomatic pains. About half the people who get yellow fever die from it.

Usually the disease is confined to remote jungles and extreme boon docks. When I traveled to Egypt, for example, I didn’t need a vaccination to go to Luxor in the center of the country, but had I gone all the way south to Aswan the immunization would have been advisable. Likewise, there was no yellow fever warnings for travel to Paraguay when I was making my plans to come here. Had I decided to go to the tropical Amazon in the wild Brazilian frontier a yellow fever vaccine would have been important, but here in the more civilized Asuncion it was never considered a necessity by me or the U.S. Department of State.

Now that’s all changed, though. I’ve been forwarded two emails from the American embassy saying it’s a good idea to get vaccinated, along with lists of all the places and times in the entire country offering vaccinations. The Paraguayan government, for its part, has done a very impressive job of responding to the health emergency, and already millions of vaccinations have been made available and administered. Nearly all my students along with their families have been vaccinated in just the few past days, and there’s even talk of a vaccination squad coming to Colegio Privado Adonai in the weeks ahead to immunize everyone else.

Some naysayers say that the yellow fever is just another example of a media hype and public frenzy, full of news and talk and gossip but devoid of any real threat to public health. Last year, for example, Dengue fever was all the rage (you can even read about it in Ellen’s blog), but already the public fear of that disease has completely passed. Supporting this point of view, too, is the claim that the men from San Pedro who contracted yellow fellow recently traveled the Brazilian interior where they ate infected monkey jungle meat. Basically, you might say, those guys deserved to get yellow fever.

Still, I’m not taking any chances. Pastor Pedro preached on Sunday that we all ought to take advantage of the free government immunizations, and I’m always one who’s inclined to listen to authority and be easily swept along with the currents of public opinion. Hence I went this morning with the two Caballero boys to get vaccinated at the health clinic in Lambare’.

Outside the clinic’s fences was a carnival-like atmosphere, with vendors selling food and people smiling all around. There were hundreds of people lined up in a regimental-style to confront just as many and similarly-arranged nurses battling to give the injections. We gave our own names and neighborhoods to some young men keeping the registers, and then proceeded to join in with the vaccinating throng. The wait wasn’t long, though, and within a minute or two we all three were holding our arms in after-injection pain.

I’m not sure how official or sanitary the improvised clinic was, but I was careful to watch my nurse take the cap of a new needle and then discard the syringe when she was done. It only took a little pinch and two minutes, and suddenly I was able to count myself as one of the millions recently safeguarded from the terrible wiles of yellow fever. For once, it seems as if the Paraguayan government has been effective, efficient, and especially helpful, even if it is only in giving a sense of security and peace of mind to so many citizens feverish with the fear of a certain yellow fever.

New Schedule

2008-02-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

Please forgive me as it’s been a while since I last updated my blog, but life has gotten much fuller for me since classes started two weeks ago. Since you’re all probably wondering what I’m up to, I’ll give you my typical schedule along with some commentary, too.

5:45-7:00: Wake up, have a cup of coffee, read scripture and Lenten passages for the day, pray a while, make my rounds through the house. This is the foundation for my day, so I’m really thankful that I don’t have to be at the school until later (most teachers’ schedules at the school start at 6:30). Once I get my fill of coffee, the Word, and a little bit of the Church Fathers, I’m ready to face whatever might come my way.

7:00-7:30: Run around the big block of our neighborhood a couple times. Shower. I’m trying to stay in shape, running off all the extra carbs I get from too much bread and rice and noodles. Showering is always a good idea after running in the tropical morning heat, when temperatures even this early can be in the mid to high humid 80s.

7:30-8:30: Get dressed. Plan out and review my lessons for the day. Go to school. A good lesson plan = a good teacher. I have four plans to make every day: 2nd, 3rd, and 5th grades, along with conversation classes on topics of my choice with 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grades.

8:30-8:50: Round up all the kids on recess who misbehaved in English class the day before so they can sit with me on the bench and serve their punishment time. I’m pretty strict and am not afraid to discipline the kids, who can be really unruly. The third time I tell a kid to be quiet or sit down in class, it’s already too late—they’ve lost some of their recess time the next day. I like the system, as it gives me the chance to spend quality time with misbehaving students.

8:50-9:30: Mill about the school socializing and making last-minute class preparations. I think parents and students like to see the English teacher out and about. I’ve heard a lot of moms and dads especially like Adonai for all the North Americans who come to visit and teach.

9:30-10:10: 2nd Grade. About 18 eight-year olds who are still learning how to control themselves. Most respect and maybe even fear my authority a little bit, but some don’t want to listen to or do a single thing. About half the class time is getting the class under control.

10:10-10:50: 3rd Grade. About 22 nine year olds, several who are related to one another, in one giant chaos of a class. This group definitely receives the brunt end of my disciplinary wrath. I’ve removed four of the worst students from the class (three of whom are cousins from the church) to write sentences outside the room, and more than half of the class has lost recess time to me. About 2/3 of the hour is spent getting the class under control.

10:50-11:30: 5th Grade. About 21 eleven-year olds who are much more fun and interesting than the younger kids, but still need correction and guidance often. They can take notes on their own and are already well on their way to becoming young adults, so it’s usually a pleasure staying with them.

11:30-12:10: Leave the school. Check my email. Eat lunch.

12:10-12:50: Weekly conversation class with the older grades. Some of the classes I like, some I don’t. Some are at really awkward and annoying ages, and some I’d like to consider my friends. All these classes consist of me speaking loudly and clearly in English, and I nearly pass out for all the breath I’ve lost in the tropical heat. Right now we’re doing a unit on American cities.

12:50-1:50. Leave the school. More lunch. Take a short nap.

1:50-2:30. Round 2. 2nd Grade. A lot smaller than the morning class- around eight kids. I’m still really sleepy from my siesta and it’s really hot in the middle of the afternoon. I and the kids just want to sleep, but it’s much easier to learn because the kids are so much quieter. As with all my afternoon classes, I often run out of things to do.

2:30-3:10: 5th Grade. Only 10 kids, mostly pretty good and laid-back. By this time, I’m not so sleepy anymore. The young bachelorette teacher of this class always smiles at me as she leaves the classroom in a wow!-she’s-got-a-great-smile-and-is-really-pretty-too sort of way.

3:10-4:10. Rest from classes. Tutor Caballero boys in the library. Brandon and Gabbie go to an all-English-speaking Christian school in Asuncion, so I help them out with their math in the English language. A young guy from the church recently asked me to help him with his math homework in Spanish, but I had no idea how to explain it in English. Tutoring in English brings down at least one barrier to understanding.

4:10-4:50: 3rd Grade, last class of the day. Although I’m nearly exhausted, this class is a lot of fun. A huge variety of personalities in only eight students. You might say a pray for one of them—Santiago--, who really acts as if he’s possessed by some demon spirit of disobedience and has missed school the past week for his actions. He scares the girls in the class.

4:50-Evening: Home. Home at last, home at last. Thank God, I’m home at last. I’m learning a lot from teaching, am enjoying it immensely, and am seeing the HUGE impact teachers can have on students’ lives, but it’s really tiring and I’m always thankful to have made it through another day.

Home

2008-02-11T07:30:00.000-08:00

I finally got a space to call my own. For those of you who didn’t know, before I moved last week I had been living in the church for two months. I had my own place there in a classroom with all the necessities for living- a bed, a refrigerator, and even an oven. I was just like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, you might say, except I didn’t ring any bells, my back’s somewhat straighter, and I’m much better looking. Be that as it may, living at the church was a place where I was able to get to know the church community well—almost too well, for sure. Throughout the summer months there were always people there, and moments of privacy and quietude were few and far between. Luckily, I had two Argentinean brothers from the church keeping me company for safety and sanity’s sake, but it was still a time of much frustration in my life for the complete lack of boundaries between personal and public appearances.

The problem on my part was neither financial nor a lack of desire to move out. I’ve received much support to be able to rent a very decent place for Paraguayan standards, and all summer long it nearly killed me that I was bumming off the church and without a place of my own. I felt needy, dependent, and very incapable as a missionary. So intense was my desire to leave the church that I spent two months searching every neighborhood within the distance of a twenty minute walk from the church for a place to rent. I went out for hours at a time in the severe Paraguayan heat with my thermos of water in hand, barely able to communicate in Spanish but, by some amazing grace of God, conveying to so many dozens of people that I needed a place to live. The problem, however, was that these same so many dozens of people responded with blank stares and empty answers when I asked them if there was any place available nearby. For the life of me, I couldn’t find any place to live. There were several close calls, but always the opportunities closed before I could do anything and I always left empty-handed. I think I knew a little bit how Jesus felt when he said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Part of the problem may have been the long list of requirements and special conditions that the search required. Safety was a priority for me and all my American things, and I wanted a place that was close enough to walk to the church. I have the privilege of staying with two other guys from the congregation, so I needed an apartment that could house three guys comfortably along with all the visitors that come on the weekends and on missions trips. Finally, to stay on budget, I needed all this for under $100 every month. I often found places that met three or four of these conditions but seemed woefully lacking in the fourth or fifth area. There was a nice apartment that was cheap and close and safe, for example, but where the landlady only wanted two people to stay. There was another house that was big and cheap and close, but that was located in a rough part of the neighborhood and had no fence. Everywhere I went to look, I only met tons of dead ends.

Throughout the process, I got more and more discouraged. As the start of school year approached and my deadline for moving out of my classroom drew near, I thought for certain I’d be out on the street or sharing a small, sleeper-style room with a friend who was already renting. I was upset, because I knew that as a missionary I ought to have a suitable place to have people over and to be hospitable. Like my mom, one of my gifts is hospitality, and I knew I’d be nearly broken if I couldn’t exercise it. I also knew for certain that God wanted me to share my life with others, and that He certainly could provide a suitable place if He wanted to. The God I serve is, after all, the same God who said, “Every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.” My request wasn’t so big as a thousand cows or all the animals in the jungle, either. No; I just wanted a little place to live.

Thankfully, many people continued to encourage me in the search for an apartment and in my faith, too. Karen reminded me time and time again that God often works in last-minute ways to provide for all our needs, and does this to build up our faith in Him. I was skeptical and upset with God, but couldn’t argue with her proof: she reminded me of what God had done (and of what I had personally and recently seen) for the school by providing all the monies for the construction project just a few days before work crews from the States arrived, and also for the $17,000 in student scholarship money just a few days before we had to notify families as to who would and who would not receive the necessary help. The theme, she said, was this: God is good, knows our needs, and we’ve just got to trust that He’ll work things out in the end; even when it’s the extremely last-minute end of things.

Today, although I don’t want to admit it, I have to testify that Karen was right. I’m sitting in the miracle of a perfect apartment this morning that has two huge bedrooms, a bathroom, a nice kitchen along with a back patio and lawn, high safe fences, is within a two minute walk of the church, and rents for only $70 a month. I couldn’t be happier. A week ago Thursday a lady from the church told me about her own miracle: she had been praying for a cheaper and better place than what she had, and God had mercifully provided her family with the stewardship of a large home. They had heard of the opportunity on the radio and, out of 200 applicants, were chosen to house-sit. They would be vacating their apartment quickly the next day, so she wondered if I was still looking for a place to rent. I sure was, I said, since school started next Wednesday and the teacher whose room I occupied was awfully antsy to start decorating. Thankfully, that same day this kind lady referred me to her landlord and by the next day she was packing to up move out. Long story short, the landlord offered me his miraculous place, I signed the papers, and now I have a contract to live here through January.

Thus, God came through and provided in a wonderful way for me. When I was unable do anything on my own with two months worth of effort, God did everything for me in a single day. When I wanted to compromise safety or budget or convenience to rent a place quickly and imperfectly, God provided everything for me in abundance and perfection and while also teaching me mighty lessons in patience and waiting on Him. I’m still not certain why it took so long for me to learn the lesson, but I’ve seen once again how God can work in the last minute in superrich ways. My faith has been grown through no choice of my own, and I can see for certain that, “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

Tell Mother I´ll Be There

2008-02-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

I went to an Ash Wednesday service last night in a grand old decaying Asuncion church. The magnificent ceilings had once been painted sky-blue, but more recently had begun to chip off into a yellow oblivion. A couple pigeons flew around in the peaks of the cross-shaped edifice, as if to remind the church-goers that the service would be held partly outdoors for the bad shape of the crumbling architecture. In fact, it seemed like the ancient cement pillars were the only things that kept the entire ceiling from falling down. Yes, the roof was definitely rotten; but I felt safe because the mighty columns were firmly planted and in spectacular shape.

Although the church building appeared as if its term had nearly expired, the congregation inside was full of life, warmth, and the always-renewed vigor of ancient tradition. I had visited the place another time before, so I recognized a few of the congregants from the earlier trip. Among these stood out to me a group of older mothers, grandmothers, and aunts who sat at the front of the church. This mixture of women, some looking like they came from high Paraguayan society and others appearing as if they came from simpler ways of life, met together ahead of the church service to pray. Some were bent over and nearly-crippled with advanced osteoporosis, while others were able to hold their heads high and dignified when not bowing in prayer. Some wore incompatible outfits of gray and green paisley skirts with red and orange flower-patterned shirts, while others matched perfectly with their nice peach makeup and form-fitting cream dresses. Nearly all wore sleeveless shirts for the heat and had sagging arms because of their age, although on some arms the loose skin was much heavier than others.

What impressed me about these women was not their appearance, though, but rather their devotion to intercession and prayer. Most of these women come every day to the church to pray for their loved ones, and I have to believe that their daily practice is an extension of their motherly instincts to watch out and always be concerned for the physical, emotional, and especially spiritual well-being of their families. Their daily prayer vigil testifies to fact that they care, that they love, and they are seeking true happiness through eternal salvation for their husbands, children, and relatives. During a special part of the service, personal prayer requests were read before the congregation. Among these petitions were mentioned the names of many unsaved family members, undoubtedly wayward sons and daughters who weighed so heavily on the hearts of their devoted mothers.

In the congregation that meets in Lamabare, too, there is a group of women that prays every day of the month for specific needs in the church. As one of the missionaries, I’m privileged to be counted among a prayer request in the monthly cycle. It’s a comfort—a real comfort—to know that there are nearly a dozen women from the congregation praying for me. I really believe that the prayers of all these women are efficacious and important, both for the salvation of their families and the well-being of the church. I know for certain that I’m where I’m at today because so many women—from my own dear mom to my aunts to my spiritual mothers from the church—have taken the time to intercede on my behalf. I know, too, that these women are just like the pillars supporting the crumbling church I visited: as long as they’re standing spiritually tall and praying firmly, the rest of the church, however badly it looks, will keep on standing, too. As long as there are a few good women praying, I trust and believe that families will continue to come to know the Lord and the Church will continue to advance as the Kingdom of God is grown.

Un Poco Mas Gordo...

2008-02-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

I got my haircut yesterday evening, and it’s really short: soldier short, you might say. Although I’m serving in a church with pacifist roots, I definitely look like a military man with my nearly buzzed-off head. If I had been a member of the ACCA church a century ago, they probably wouldn’t have accepted me with my haircut’s connotations, along with those of my great-grandfather’s generation and their Eastern European moustaches.

Whenever I get my hair cut so drastically, people always feel free to tell me how they feel about it. In the States, there’s been a long-standing debate amongst my lady friends as to whether I look better with my hair really long or with my hair really short. I’ve always taken their opinions seriously, but for laziness I’ve always alternated between one extreme or the other (except for when my hair is still growing and I’m just right in the middle, that is). I always disappoint some when I cut my hair and please others when I do, so I’ve learned the past few years that I can’t please everyone.

Usually folks, regardless of whether they like me looking more like the Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale or the Heath Ledger in Ten Things I Hate about You, react with surprise to my new-do and tell me how much different I look after the change. Most of the time I receive comments about how much younger I look without my not-so-nicely-trimmed sideburns. One government professor told me last year I looked like a sixteen year old without my shag. Every time that people do remind me that I got my “hair cut,” though, I correct them and tell them that “no, I didn’t get my hair cut, I got my hairs cut.” I think my dad’s the one who taught me the joke, so he always says “hairs cut” the first time. The joke, unfortunately, doesn’t translate into Spanish. I’ve tried.
Anyways, this morning at school I got a comment about my haircut from a Paraguayan that I’d never heard before. Pastor Baldo, the school chaplain, told me that he liked my haircut, smiled, and then said it made me look “un poco mas gordo,” a little more fat. Now, I admire and respect Pastor Baldo a lot—he’s the shepherd for a congregation of extremely poor Christians in a terrible part of Asuncion, and has no doubt seen and perhaps known as much poverty as Mother Theresa-- but we’re not really that close. It wasn’t like my brother or best friend joking and saying that my haircut made me look fat (which I’d expect them to do): no, it was like a respected pastor saying to me that I looked chubbier without my longer hair.

I’d always suspected shorter hair made my face look rounder, but that’s not my point. The point is that here in Paraguay, it’s perfectly normal for people—for pastors—to come right out and say what they think about your or mine or his or her appearance. There aren’t so many taboos about hurting people’s feelings, especially in regards to body image. When describing and distinguishing people one from another, for example, it’s common to call them by their physical characteristics. On the soccer field, the chubby-kid-of-whom-know-one-knows-his-real-name is simply called “el gordo,” the masculine fatty one. When visitors come from other countries, they often get nicknames too, like “la flaca,” the skinny feminine one, or “la gordita,” the feminine diminutive fatty one. There’s a restaurant downtown, which undoubtedly would cause much trouble in the U.S., called “La Negrita,” the feminine diminutive black one, with an antebellum cartoon of a black woman for its Ronald McDonald. Here, however, the restaurant’s name bothers now one. People are known by their physical characteristics, and that’s just that. Pastor Baldo thus meant no harm in saying I looked fatter, because that’s just what it seemed like to him and that’s just what he wanted to say.

So, if you ever visit Paraguay and someone tells you that you’re skinny or fat or short or tall or black or white, don’t take it personally—it’s a cultural thing. It’s different, for sure, but it’s helped me not to take myself or my body image too seriously. I’ve been maintaining the same weight and skin-color since I’ve gotten here, but there’s always plenty of people to tell me I’m getting skinnier or fatter or lighter or darker. In the end, I reckon people can tell me their opinions and it doesn’t really matter all that much to me. I’m just gonna keep on living like I do, growing out my hair and then cutting it back like I do, and doing my best not to let anyone else get in the way.

Teacher Culture

2008-01-30T08:01:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s official: I’m a teacher. I know I shouldn’t be so surprised, as nearly my entire purpose for coming to Paraguay was to teach English, but this realization caught me a bit off-guard last week. You see, I went to my first teacher’s conference, a cultural experience in and of itself, and what you might call my own personal initiation into the world of teaching. The conference, a short bus ride away in another suburb of Asuncion, was organized for teachers from Christian schools all over the country by a Christian book publisher. It was held in a mega-grocery store supercenter with several conference halls perfect for lectures and workshops and practicals.

My first impression when I arrived was how out-of-place I looked in line waiting for my conference materials. There were only a dozen or so men out of a dozen hundred or so participants, and of these I was easily the tallest and blondest, too. In a game of which-one-doesn’t-belong-with-the-rest, I was the easy-to-find and sure-fire answer to the not-so-difficult puzzle. Although I looked and felt so strange among a group of so many Paraguayan women, though, there was something quietly reassuring about being in a group of teachers. I felt relaxed, like things would be taken care of, and that I’d learn something from all the nice folks around me if I cared to. I felt like I was at home once again in elementary school amongst a group of mentors just like my own dear teachers of school-years past. I’m pretty sure I even saw in the crowd my own first-grade teacher, Mrs. Roush, alongside many precious other educational characters that have had such a great impact on my life.

I realized, too, that the looks, attitudes, and even the personalities of teachers transcend cultures and countries. The relaxed-but-professional clothing, the cloth tote bags, and even the uniquely teacher haircuts of these Paraguayan educators proved they shared a common culture with their North American counterparts. The way they spoke one with another, their friendly glances, and their proud, but not too proud, postures betrayed the fact that they were all educators. The teachers’ interest in learning new methods of teaching and excitement at prospects for creativity in the classroom, finally, showed me, too, that they were all of a very special and unique sort.

The main-hall lecture consisted in the recounted history of the many psychologies of modern learning, starting with Pavlov’s behavorialism and ending with the more recent constructivist approaches to education. The smaller lectures proved even less inspiring, with more-or-less demagogic professors teaching common-sense methods for classroom instruction while at the same time always lamenting the quality of education in the Paraguayan school system. I had the chance to attend one such lecture on story-telling within the classroom, and ended up leaving some hour and a half later with very few practical things that I could put to use as an itinerant English teacher. Despite the impracticality of the conference, however, I’m very satisfied that I had the chance to attend. I had the double privilege of being invited to a mysterious and obscure “teacher in-service-day” while also being initiated into their top-secret culture; a culture, I learned, that transcends even the boundaries of language, frontier, and time.

Penny Bargains

2008-01-24T16:14:00.000-08:00

I can remember more than a decade and a half ago when my family started building a big old garage at our home on Blake Road. My Dad, the mason in charge, put a cornerstone dated 1990 in an especially visible place out front. Before he laid the special brick, though, he gave us kids the chance to put a real shiny new penny in the mortar for good luck to go along with whatever wish we could make. Most kids, I’m sure, would ask for a bike or a puppy or maybe summertime all year long. For me, though, I could think of nothing more important to wish for than the health of Grandma Donahey, the mom of my mom. She had been sickly for as long as I could remember and more recently hospital and bed-ridden, and as her young grandchild I was overwhelmingly burdened for her well-being. And so, with the fully-trusting and fully-given-over heart of a five-year-old, I made a secret but powerful prayer for the health and life of my grandma.

With my lucky penny firmly cemented in place and my wishful hope steadfastly determined in mind, I figured that God had to do something for me and my grandma. Surely He could see how important my shiny piece of metal was and would know, too, how important the wish was for my soft and vulnerable heart. I hadn’t asked for anything selfish, after all, but instead sought so earnestly something so good for someone I loved so much. With such pure motives, surely God had to act in an amazing and incredible way, perhaps making my grandma breathe all right again without oxygen tubes so that she could get up and dance around and even play with me like other grandmas did.

Needless to say, my heart was broken and continued to break as Grandma’s health continued to decline. She never did get any better and never could really play with me at all, and ended up passing away a short two years or so after I made my wish. Although my lucky penny was still part of the garage’s foundation in 1992, I was suddenly seven years old and without a single grandma in the world.

I think I learned then a mightily powerful lesson: God doesn’t play by my rules. He doesn’t have to heal people because of lucky pennies, and He doesn’t have to change things because I feel a certain way about them. He doesn’t have to relieve physical suffering because it makes me feel bad, nor when making His decisions does He have to honor my innocent pleas for the well-being of those I care about. The world can be rough, I found out early-on, regardless of all my best wishes and most ardent prayers otherwise. Sometimes what God decides to allow just doesn’t make sense to me.

I had no idea, and I still don’t have any idea, of what God intended by allowing both of my grandmas to die so young. Like Job, though, I figured out that “God can do all things, and that no purpose of His can be thwarted.” Also like Job, I learned that in my pride and foolishness I had demanded too much of God in the healing of my grandma. I had tried giving a mandate to the All-Mighty, and received back for it a lot of nothing that I had required. As His creature, I had told my Creator what was best for my grandma and for me and what He had to do for her on my account, but I had “hid counsel without knowledge and uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

All of which brings me back to today. You see, I’ve got a new shiny penny in my life and a new unselfish request, too. My new lucky coin is the time I’m spending here in Paraguay—a year of my life doing good and exciting things for others. It’s bright and nice and new and impressive, too. My new unselfish request is pretty moving, also -- a constant burden and heartfelt prayer for the reunification of my family. Like before, it’s a pressing and hard situation that requires healing and life and the grace of God. Like before, though, once more I’m realizing all over again that my shiny penny isn’t working.

Before I left for Paraguay, I let God know of some pretty important conditions for my going: namely, that although there were so many worries in my family at home (shouts of anger from siblings, whispers of divorce between parents, wailings of fearful abandonment from a bed-ridden ailing grandfather who hasn’t made a good confession of faith in decades) I’d still go to Paraguay if He could make sure to take care of them all. I’d go away, give up plenty of comforts with all my ambitions, and lay a fresh coin in the mortar so that He’d have to fix up familiar things in healing broken hearts, putting back together messed-up relationships, and bringing back to faith those who’d left it. I really believed God owed it to me.

Now that some time’s past and things haven’t gotten any better back in Ohio, though, I’m in a hard place where I’m learning again that it’s awfully foolish of me to try to tell God what He has to do. All the expectations of everything I ever imagined being fixed in my family have been shattered, just like the time when I put a lucky penny under the cornerstone of a new garage, made a wish for my grandmother’s health, and then she died. I feel as if I’m losing all over again a certain child-like innocence to my faith (or is it presumption?), as if my expectation for practical graces at work in the world around me are completely unfounded and, as Job says, without knowledge. I know it know it sounds like a sad story, but really, who am I to question why God can’t be paid in pennies?

Visit to the Campo

2008-01-16T08:59:00.000-08:00

I took the chance this weekend to visit San Pedro, a town six hours away in the campo—countryside-- where a couple decades ago was born the Apostolic Christian Church in Paraguay. I traveled with Juan, Oscar’s nephew, and stayed the weekend at his grandmother’s house, where I was welcomed to the Caballero homestead with incredible hospitality in the midst of immense pastoral tranquility. Some general observations and pieces of my trip to share with you all:

I saw some Mennonites in the Asuncion bus terminal. There’s a large Mennonite population here, much like there is in very own Ohio, who work as farmers and practice their steadfast pacifism in the north of the country. The lady Mennonites I saw wore traditional bonnets, dresses, and stockings, while the men wore overalls and simple button-up shirts. Since they work so hard, the Mennonites here are very productive and very rich, too. One Mennonite lady I saw reminded me so much of my own very Germanic-looking Great-Grandma Kemp that I couldn’t stop staring at her.

There are two bus lines with similar schedules that go to San Pedro. The bus line we took traveled through the night, leaving around 10 and arriving around 4 in the morning. It was the nicer bus line, with air conditioning and very few stops. The cheaper bus line suffered a terrible crash a week ago where everyone on board was killed, and some were even decapitated. The bus drivers were drinking and making merry in the New Year festivities and not paying enough attention to the route, which is currently being paved for the first time and is very dangerous.

We were welcomed to our destination at four a.m. with big hugs from Juan’s grandma, Abuelita (little grandma). She was just getting up for the day, and resolutely gave me her bed to sleep in for the rest of the morning. She wouldn’t have it back the entire weekend, either, insisting Saturday night that I have her bed to myself while she shared an old mattress on the ground with her daughter. Abuelita lives on her own with a few granddaughters, surrounded by the smaller homesteads of her now well-grown children. She keeps a tremendously large garden that looks like it ought to be taken care of with a tractor, when really it is all tilled and planted and weeded and harvested by hand or with the help of a horse every once in a while. She has fiercely bright blue eyes—an extreme rarity in Paraguay—and a wise old face permanently wrinkled with so much wisdom and compassion. I’m not sure if she knew I was coming ahead of time, but she welcomed me nonetheless as a grandson to her home. We were hardly able to talk together, as she nearly strictly speaks the indigenous Guarani tongue, but the welcome she communicated to me was far stronger than words in any language could express anyways.

Saturday we traveled to the river about a half an hour away to buy some fresh fish to carry back to Asuncion. We took motorcycles, the cheaper and easier mode of transportation than bulky autos. I sat behind a Caballero uncle as we sped through the beautiful Paraguayan countryside on a nicely paved road. I don’t know much about Che Guavera, I certainly don’t like Communism, and I’ve never seen the movie Motorcycle Diaries, but I felt a certain connection to the young South American rebel leader as we passed freely along through the fields of sandy red soil. We didn’t wear helmets, either, which is another Paraguayan (and dangerous, too!) tradition, reaching speeds of 55 miles per hour with our heads completely unprotected. Once, when I thought we were going way too fast, I purposely lifted my head up a little and lost my cap. It was a good excuse to stop and slow down, and I didn’t even have to show my driver that I was a really scared and sissy American.

Saturday night we went to a recently chipped-off-the-old-AC-block church service meeting outside of a home in San Pedro. The church there (the first in Paraguay!) has recently gone through a very painful division, splitting families down the middle and a small community into two even smaller groups. Being associated a tad more with the new faction, we visited their weekly service on Saturday. I thought the freedom and informality of the service was beautiful and certainly like the early church in its original wooly form, but I thought how terrible it was that the foundation for starting a new church had to be built all over again because of human divisions and arguments. Sunday morning, then, we went to the old and original church. We were welcomed there, too, and as the new North American missionary I did my best to show that I wanted no part in any factionalism by giving a small offering for the very-public tithe.

Sunday afternoon I drank pure milk straight from the cow’s teats for the first time ever. It was warm and buttery and delicious, and I thought how terrible it is that some Americans are thrown into prison for selling such a wonderful delicacy. Cows here are a sure and solid investment, and the number of cows a person owns reflects just how much power and wealth they have, too. I’m thinking of buying a cow as an investment of sorts, one to be managed by friends from the church who live in the countryside and one that reproduces itself every year or so. Then, when my herd reaches twenty or so, I can sell 19 at great profit and start all over again.

We returned back home on Sunday night, nicely fattened by a weekend of great food and leisure. At times the campo life was boring, but it was always beautiful and full of relationship. There were family and friends and time and visits and everything else in the world that’s important, although so many commodities of modern life were missing. There was sunshine and stars and flowers and cows and little horse-drawn carts and so many other things to give so much pleasure to a tecnoeducadvanced North American. I really took a great deal of delight and rest from my short time in San Pedro and hope to return soon to see and take in even more of the simple country life.

A Nice Visit

2008-01-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

A typical Paraguayan visit:

Sunday, 10:30 am: Invitation received. The Señora: “Why don’t you come over to our house sometime this week?” Me: “Sounds Great. How about lunch on Tuesday? How does 11:30 sound?” The Señora: “11:30? Way too late. Let’s make it 10:00.” Me: “OK.”

Tuesday, 10:40 am: Having completely forgotten my lunch appointment, I realize I’m now over 40 minutes late. I make a quick call to the Señor. Me: “Senor, I’m really sorry I completely forgot about lunch today. Is it ok if I come over now?” The Señor: “Sure, no problem. Our schedule is completely open. Come on over.”

4:15-4:30: The Señora insists I have some of her pudding, which is still two hours from being chilled enough to eat properly. I eat it warm anyways, and it’s very delicious anyways, too. I say many thank-yous and then begin to leave. The Señor and Señora invite me back again another time to spend an entire day visiting with them—a day when, as they kindly say, I won’t have to worry about putting any of the tools away.

11:10-12:45: Approaching the house, I ask permission to enter and am welcomed inside. The Señor, after realizing that I’d be late, has begun to repair the refrigerator door on the kitchen table. After 16 years (as long as they’ve been married), the refrigerator is coming apart. I am offered an egg and vegetable tart to eat so that I’m plenty full before we start to share terreré together. You’re never supposed to take terreré on an empty stomach. We pass time together making small talk as the Señor, shirtless, fixes the refrigerator. The Señora starts preparing lunch only after I arrive.

12:45-1:00pm: Lunch is ready. We have a typical Paraguayan meal: noodles with a hamburger-tomato-vegetable-potato sauce, cabbage salad with cut up potatoes and canned corn and mayonnaise and vinegar, and bread. We wash it all down with pineapple juice, made in the blender with one pineapple, some water, and a ton of sugar. No one talks during the meal. Paraguayans know how to eat, and when they do, there isn’t much chatter. The food is good. As usual, I ask for seconds, even though I’m full, to show how much I appreciate the meal.

1:00-1:15: The Señora asks me if I’m tired. I say not really, we fail at communication, and she offers me her son’s bed to take a nap while she does the dishes. Content always to accept the offer of a nap, I oblige and lay down. Since it’s so hot, the nap is short but good.

1:15-1:45: I wake up and go back to the kitchen, where the Señora questions how long my nap was. I tell her I feel great and refreshed, and then I go watch her sons play soccer on the family computer in the Señor and Señora’s bedroom. The Señor, trying to take a nap, is woken up by my entrance. Feeling like it’s the polite thing to do, he sits up and starts to chat with me. The soccer on the screen is in terrible slow-motion. The computer is too outdated for the fast-paced program.

1:45-3:00: The Señor leaves the room, off to take a nap somewhere else. The sons show me pictures on the computer of the church and camps and other special events from their life. We sip terreré. The Señora comes in sometimes from the kitchen, where she is preparing pudding, to chat.

3:00-4:15: I leave the bedroom and go out on the back porch to sit down. By this time, the Señor’s nap has ended and the Señora’s pudding is all cooked. We sit under the shade of a mango tree and sip terreré again, passing time together and talking. Feeling like the afternoon lunch has been a long and good one, thinking I’d like to check my email back at home, and not wanting to take up any more time of my gracious hosts, I politely tell them I’ve got to put away the tools I was using before I came and must return to the school before the room that holds the tools is locked for the day. The excuse to leave is not a lie, but it’s pretty lame.

4:15-4:30: The Señora insists I have some of her pudding, which is still two hours from being chilled enough to eat properly. I eat it warm anyways, and it’s very delicious anyways, too. I say many thank-yous and then begin to leave. The Señor and Señora invite me back again another time to spend an entire day visiting with them—a day when, as they kindly say, I won’t have to worry about putting any of the tools away.

How I´m doing: A General Update Letter

2008-01-07T05:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family, January 5, 2008

Greetings in Christ and a Happy New Year from Paraguay! I hope this letter finds you all knowing and enjoying the best of God’s blessings as January begins. Here in Paraguay, we’re in the midst of vacations and the unforgiving tropical summer heat. The mango trees are growing heavy with their ripening fruits and I too, along with them, am growing a little heavier from the abundance of tropical fruit I’ve been eating myself. Thankfully, construction on the school here has kept me busy with some physical work, while playing soccer and volleyball at the church nearly every day has helped keep me in some sort of shape as well.

My Spanish is improving by leaps and bounds. I can communicate now with nearly everyone after they’ve repeated themselves two or three times, although I’m certain that when it’s my turn to speak I sound like a foreigner and my speech is often garbled. Needless to say, it’s been a good lesson in humility for me to learn another language.

School starts in about another month. Until then, I’ve got many preparations to get my lesson plans in order and many activities in the church to keep me busy. There are services three nights a week along with Sunday morning church, as well as sports nearly every evening. The church community here is very close: they live together, worship together, and spend time together all the time. When there’s nothing else to do, people sit around and talk. When there’s everything in the world to be busy about, they still take the time to sit around and talk. It’s an incredible blessing for me to be so actively involved and to be so warmly welcomed in such a closely-knit fellowship.

Thank you so much for all your continued prayers and support. I’m learning more and more everyday just how dependent I am on God’s grace for even life itself, and I know that your prayers play such an important role in the work that God is doing. I have seen so many miracles in the way God has provided for the church here, and in my own time here as well, that I can’t help but believe He’s behind it all. We serve an awesome and faithful God—one who cares for us and wants us to know just how much He is moving in every way in our lives.

Please continue to remember my family in your prayers, too. The situation at home continues to be very trying for every one of them, and I know for certain they are in need of much encouragement and support. God has used many of you in the past to build the faith of my family, and I pray and trust that He will continue to use many of you in the same way now.
I miss you all very much and look forward to seeing you again, Lord willing, at the end of this year.

All the best,

Jason

The New Year

2008-01-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

The New Year celebration came and went here without much fuss on my part. New Year’s Eve was spent at the church with about a dozen good friends from the Shurance and Caballero families along with a few folks from the church and kids from the community. It rained, which made me feel a little sad and homesick, but which also made watching some of the younger folks play soccer on a wet slippery field really entertaining. We waited until after midnight to have the best and latest New Year’s meal of sausage, roast chicken, mandioca, potato salad, rice salad, tomato and cucumber salad, and soda. As on Christmas, the city lit up at midnight with fireworks as so many thousands of amateur pyros lit off so many tons of explosive gun powder.

People say that every new year is a good chance to reflect on the year past and to also wonder at the year ahead. Not wanting to forsake any tradition, I’ve been doing some reflecting of my own. Last year at this time, I was at the Urbana Missions Conference in St. Louis wondering where in tarnation I’d be today. Needless to say, after much prayer and preparation, I’ve arrived here in Paraguay, ready to serve and learn. God was incredibly faithful in getting me ready to go and securing in my heart the desire to come here, and I’m so thankful for the certainty He’s placed in my heart that here is where I needs be for now.

And as for next year? Just like one year ago, once again only Heaven knows where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing when the calendar strikes 2009. With my family in turmoil at home and friends in places all over the States (neigh, even all over the world), plenty of things I’d like to do and experiences I’d like to have (not the least of which is finally settle down a little bit and maybe get a job, or wife), and an open heart and mind for plenty of tasks, I really could end up anywhere doing any thing.

I once thought that after high school life choices would be easier and easier to make, with certain pathways becoming more and more clear every day ( ie. get a Georgetown political science degree and girlfriend, go to law school and make her my fiancé, find a job and take her as a wife.) Needless to say, the way I imagined things has turned out much differently, and it seems to me today as if I’m right at the beginning again with so many possibilities and so many choices.

I don’t complain, though. To have so many options is a unique and beautiful gift, and something I don’t ever want to take for granted. Still, however, it’s a tough gift at times, and one that builds up my faith in the work God’s going to do in my life tomorrow as I keep on trying to do the work He’s got for me today. Thankfully, I know some things for sure that I have to do every day, since I know “what [is] good; and what doth the LORD require of me, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.¨ When it’s all said and done, perhaps the best thing I can do is to not let too much of me or own thinking get in the way of this necessary way of life. After all, “A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps..”

Not Quite Silent Night

2007-12-26T11:05:00.000-08:00

Christmas in Paraguay passed much differently than any I’ve experienced before. Since the holiday takes place in the middle of summer and vacations, the fiesta turned out to be like a strange mix between the Fourth of July, Mardi Gras, and perhaps a little Christmas, too.

Our festivities began on Monday, Christmas Eve. We worked only half a day on the school construction, and then took off the rest of the afternoon to celebrate our Savior’s birth. Eric, Joel, and I took a bus to Mercado Cuatro, a shopping bonanza of clothing, artisan, electronic, jewelry, juice, and Paraguayan shops. The place was crowded and still open even at four in the afternoon on Christmas Eve; our bus line, too, would go until its normally-scheduled final 8 o’clock round. The area was crowded, as usual, but the celebrations for Christmas seemed to already have begun. Corner eateries with grilled sausages and roasted chickens and boiled mandioca and fresh juice and cold beer were full of merry revelers, drinking and eating to celebrate the human birth of God. Strangely enough, people weren’t rushing about buying gifts. Paraguayans give their gifts on January 6th, the day that tradition celebrates the arrival of the three wise men to the Nativity scene, with perhaps a more biblical foundation for gift-giving than the Santa Clause myth in North American countries.

Anyways, being North Americans and feeling like we had to buy something in the rush and bustle of Christmas Eve, we picked up some gifts for family and friends at home then went back to Lambare. Early evening, Eric and I had the chance to visit another church for their Christmas Eve service. Since Christmas Eve is usually celebrated with so much family and church services are usually so poorly attended on La Noche Buena, the Apostolic Church in Lambare gave up on Christmas Eve services a few years back. Thankfully, we found another church with a full service and thus remembered the Lord’s birth in grand liturgical style.

The later evening we passed with Ben, Vivi, and Joel at their place. We enjoyed a few rounds of cards, then had a full 10:30 pm meal of stuffed chicken, mashed potatoes, bean salad, chipa guazu, tomato-cucumber salad, and plenty of soda. Ben even made a celebratory cheesecake with cream cheese brought down straight from the U.S.. In the end, it was a perfect mix between the hot Christmas dinners of cold North America and the cool Navidad suppers of hot South America.

Around 11:45 the Paraguayans really started to celebrate Christmas. Fireworks started going off all around us, breaking up the night with the loud bangs of firecrackers and screaming whistles of bottle rockets. The neighborhood sounded off like a battle zone, with the noises of sharp fighting nearby and more muffled conflict in the distance. The blasts were loudest at midnight, when it seemed as if every Paraguayan household was suddenly setting off its entire arsenal of gunpowder in a moving salute to Jesus’ birth. The Nativity was celebrated with much noise and great joy, a fantastic show of Paraguayan social and religious unity in Christmas tradition.

After enjoying a bottle of traditional Paraguayan champagne-like cider, we all headed very-tired to bed at around 2:00 in the morning. It was the latest, and certainly most lively, Christmas I’ve ever enjoyed. Although many Paraguayans spend the holiday in excessive revelry, I think I learned a new colorful way to celebrate Christmas and found something good to hold on to for a lifetime.

Yep, Still a Doofy American

2007-12-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

The time was running out. My visa only had a few more of its 90 days left before it would expire-- a few more precious days of legal residency in Paraguay before I’d become an illegal alien and open to all sorts of problems. In my irresponsible procrastination I’d put off renewing my visa until the last minute, and when I finally went to the migration office, I realized the documents I needed would take longer to procure than my short time allowed. I decided to take a drastic measure and go to Argentina, hoping and praying that on my return to Paraguay I’d get another stamp on my multiple-entry-visa that would allow me to stay for a longer time.

The trip lasted an afternoon, and made me realize I’m still much more of a foreigner than a resident in Paraguay. I got to the central bus station all right – a short trip from Lambare on a single bus. At the station, though, I found an amazing array of bus companies, each offering various trips to destinations all over South America. I was hoping to go to Clorinda, the first major city in Argentina beyond the Paraguayan border, and began asking in earnest at every company’s line whether they had buses that went that way. The Paraguayan workers, perhaps afraid to offend me with a simple answer of “there are no bus lines to Clorinda,” kept pointing me on to other companies with promises of my final destination. After trying four or five companies, though, I realized that mine was a lost cause. Clorinda was too close (about an hour drive) and not an important enough destination for any bus line to have a route there. I finally asked a police man how I could get there, and he pointed out a place where shared vans were supposed to pick up passengers and take them to the Argentine border.

Waiting for half an hour and not seeing one official-looking vehicle, though, I became quite discouraged. Finally, I saw a decrepit old van with a young 20-something driver and asked him if he could take me to the border. Come to find out, he had just dropped off a load of people coming back from Argentina and was looking for more passengers back that way. He was going to be returning to the border anyways, but had the courtesy, you might say, to charge me 50 mil guaranies- about ten extravagant dollars- for the trip. Desperate to get to Argentina, though, I paid.

The ride was bumpy and rough. The steering wheel on the van kept turning all around even though the vehicle itself miraculously went forward in a straight line. The wooden floorboards nearly burned through the bottoms of my sandaled feet as the heat came up from Heaven-knows-what overused mechanical parts underneath. One consolation of the ride, though, was that my driver loved 80s American music. In my desire to please him as much as possible (as my life really was in his hands), I tried translating for him the songs “Red, Red Wine” and “We Don’t Need No Education.” It didn’t work out well.

After an hour ride we arrived at the desolate border, a crossing point in the middle of nowhere. There were a host of people and buses and trucks crossing, though, as three- days-before-Christmas seemed to be a popular time to travel. My driver told me that I’d need to change my money over to Argentine pesos before crossing, and kindly arranged for a friend to do the job. I gave him 100 mil Paraguayan guaranies, and got back 50 Argentinean pesos. After the exchange, I paid my driver for the trip, at which point he also told me that I still needed to pay him 50 mil more guaranies for my 50 Argentinean pesos. Not knowing the exchange rate (Oh, fool that I was!) and trusting the man (he had told me that he used to go to a Pentecostal church, after all), I obliged him, said goodbye, and headed to cross the border with another of his friends who would help arrange things for my crossing. I’m not sure how this new guy, who had one bloody and broken eye that looked like it’d been sling-shotted out and only spoke Spanish like everyone else, was supposed to help me cross over, but somehow I felt a little more comfortable being accompanied by the acquaintance of a stranger I’d known in a foreign country for only a very short while.

Providentially, though, I got out of Paraguay and into Argentina all right with my right hand man who lacked a working right eye and arrived at a small coke, smoke, and empanada joint on the other side. I learned the trip to Clorinda was further and more expensive than I wanted, so I decided to turn straight back around again for Paraguay. Luckily, the immigrations officials coming back into Paraguay were different people in a different location from the ones I’d just seen (I had told them all I was planning on going to Clorinda, which was true at the time, but then I changed my mind), so there should have been no problem upon my reentry.

It seemed that I hit a snag, though, when I spoke with the Paraguayan migrations official. After looking at my passport and visa, he invited me back into his nice air-conditioned office for a privileged conservation with. A kind grandfatherly figure with a huge gut, the immigrations official asked me if I new my visa was soon to expire. I told him that I did, and that’s why I had gone to Argentina and come back to buy some more time. He gently lectured me and told me this wasn’t allowed, then offered to give me ninety days more time if I’d pay him a certain amount. Not having the money on me a suspecting it was a bribe, I kindly thanked him and asked for a shorter, but-free-of-cost, stamp on my visa. He ended up giving me a month’s more time in his country – a kind Christmas present, he told me, and certainly enough time to get my official documents in order.

I left with my prized month-long stamp and, accompanied once again and hurried on by my one-eyed friend, I came back to the money changers. Not needing my 50 pesos anymore, a money-changer took my Argentinean currency and gave me back 60 mil guaranies. Not thinking, I dumbly accepted and continued on. Thus, in my two money exchanges, I went from 150 mil guaranies, to 50 pesos, to 60 mil guaranies, and didn’t buy a single thing. Somewhere in the process, I lost some 90 mil guaranies (about 17 dollars) and got screwed over.

I arrived back to the van loading area and got on with the same fellow who had driven me the first time. Now, however, the 7-passenger van looked completely different, packed as it was with some 15 people. I dropped my cycloptic friend a two-dollar tip, then boarded for Asuncion. Miraculously, I made it back home after a long day of being taken advantage of like some ignorant foreigner in a strange land. Indeed, though, I really was an ignorant foreigner in a strange land who learned a good lesson that procrastination doesn’t pay. The cost of this adventure was far too high for me, and from now I’ll be doing to best to keep everything legitimate and on time.

Update

2007-12-20T08:13:00.000-08:00

Hi friends,
A quick update- our friend and brother Adam for the time being seems to have lost the fight against his addiction, and left the church for his mother´s house on the other side of the country. Please say a pray for his recovery and well-being today.

But the Greatest Is Love

2007-12-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

His name is Adam* and he’s more than just a regular member at our church. Yes, he’s much more. The 22-year old’s larger-than-life testimony about the power of God precedes him everywhere he goes, and he practically lives in the sanctuary of the church (his small room is actually behind the baptismal, past the hallway). He’s always around, inviting everyone to church with big hugs and enthusiastic “hah-lay-lou-yahhs.” The kids from the school and community all know him well, and he often takes the time to play with and look after some of the younger ones.

Adam became an official part of the church a couple years ago when he was released from prison after spending most of his adolescent years behind bars. He was a hardened criminal back then, raised by thieves and mentored by murderers. His life was marked by constant danger, his experiences shaped by hardship and hatred. Today, his lower torso bears a foot-long scar from the time he was slit open from behind with a crude knife. The weapon pierced him completely from one side to the other and, if you ask him, he’ll show you where it nearly missed his kidneys. He can also show you how he used to defend himself from attackers with kung-fu like moves, probably learned from bad American movies. While in jail he became a master at Jackie-Chan knifework and Churck Norris karate, spending all of his time refining and refining even more his precise skills. He must have been pretty dedicated and learned pretty well, because he managed to kill two other inmates with his own hands before he left.

Also before he left prison, though, he came to know Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior through a prison ministry. His soul was changed by the encounter, and finally he was given a hope and vision for his life. He learned how to be a Christian and, in the carefully-structured and closely-guided environment of the jail ministry, grew much in his faith and new way of life. He became a new man with a new religion and a new reason to live. His was the type of miraculous turn-around and tremendous testimony of faith that has the power to lead many others to the healing and cleansing streams of blood flowing from Christ’s own pierced side.

A year and a half after leaving prison, however, things have become more complicated for Adam. The fire-like vibrancy of new-found faith has left him, and he now faces the shadows and coldness of his past along with all the spirits of substance abuse that have returned full-force to haunt him.

Adam hasn’t been Adam the past few weeks. He’s been inhaling terrible things to send him on short trips of self-destructive pleasure. He’s become an ashamed introvert, shying away from human community and real life for the false high of a chemical-induced state. And everyone at the church can see it, too. Just as before when his testimony of faith was in the spotlight, so now his great fall and serious sin, too, is apparent to all. He always has a dazed look on his face, and his breath smells like industrial-strength solvents. The church yard, too, testifies to his problem -- used emapanada bags smeared with shoe polish litter the ground outside. It’s a real problem, and people are really scared.

So far, the pastors haven’t been able to do much. They’ve tried to exhort Adam and pray with when he’s in his right mind, but the power of addiction holds strong and his times of clarity are fewer and fewer in between. They’ve talked, too, with the more-qualified head of the prison ministry about the situation, but even he says that sometimes saved criminals have to fall really far before they finally come back to the church and Christ again. There is also a certain fear among the church in general of kicking Adam out his room in the church. He might, they think, come back some time for revenge in a much worse state of mind and with many bad intentions.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the church’s sense of Christian charity recognizes that, were he forced to leave, Adam has no where else to go in the world; he has no family or any community except for this body of believers in Lambare (and it’s a good thing that he has them, too). The church here is committed to caring for and loving Adam, even to the point of putting in dangerous jeopardy its Christian testimony before the community and putting in danger, too, those around this young man with judgment clouded by so many unnatural and unhealthy chemicals.

The situation is exceedingly difficult. It certainly raises far more questions than anyone here is capable of answering, and it’s showing in great relief just how human a church and its leadership can be. No one knows what to do, least of all the pastors and those in authority who ought to be doing something.

And yet, through it all, it seems that something very important remains. This Paraguayan church, rooted and established in Christ’s own love, desires to love and reach out to Adam, too. The church can see that he is a broken man, ruined by his own sin and hopelessly lost in his own self-destruction. Where he is unable to have the faith that he can change, though, the church does for him. Where he can’t see the hope in his situation, there are many praying for and trusting in his redemption. Where he hates himself and can only see the evil in his soul, the church loves him with Christ-like compassion and welcomes him even as he is. So we see now in this church that “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest is love.”

Finally, I can see here a church that really is being Jesus Christ to someone who represents the lost and dying world; even to someone who, though now causing great hurt and shame to the congregation, is still considered, cherished, and also grieved over as one of their own. It is painful and tiring and dangerous work for the congregation, yet it is work that incarnates and demonstrates the power of a living God. It is no easy fix, magic remedy, or quick conversion, but it is good and ultimately will abide, like the God upon which the work is founded, forever.

*I changed the fellow´s name, but it´s close enough

Travel Wish List

2007-12-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

A blog lacking in inspiration, but a window into where I’m at right now:

A list of things I’ve asked for from the States, traveling with my cousin who arrives on Tuesday:

-Peanut Butter- There’s no American peanut butter to be found here. Apparently, Paraguayan moms aren’t so choosy as American moms, because JIF is nowhere to be found on supermarket shelves. Instead, there’s a more oily, grainy, and expensive substitute that they call peanut butter, which is much sweeter than it’s American cousin butter but completely lacking in saltiness. Paraguayans are very much against mixing salty and sweet foods together. There are clear distinctions: traditionally sweet food shouldn’t taste so salty, and traditionally salty food shouldn’t taste sweet, either.

-A GRE Study Guide- There’s not really a big book market here, and I really miss the Barnes and Nobleses from up North. That said, I’ve got to be doing some prep work for taking the GRE test, a pre-requisite exam to being accepted into many masters and doctoral university programs for continuing my studies. I don’t think college administrators will take my stay in Paraguay as an excuse for doing poorly on the exam, so I need it sent down. Don’t worry, mom, I plan to return next year and keep on going with my education. I’m not sure where or what I’ll be studying yet, but I’ve got plenty of time to figure it all out.

-A Nice Candle- All the candles for sale here are pretty crummy devotional ones for putting in front of loved ones’ graves or on the altars before Mary, other saints, and perhaps God, too. Because they’re made from some cheap petroleo material, they’re quite disposable and burn really dirtily. Thus, I asked Mom and Dad to send me down a nice-smelling and clean burning candle to enjoy.

-The Office, Season Three- The Office is pretty much the funniest tv show out right now. I didn’t watch it often when I was in the States, and I don’t really miss tv right now, but it is a good reminder of American culture and humor and something that’ll be good in lifting my spirits up and to share with others.

-Some Good Coffee- Dang it, it’s South America- I thought they grew good coffee everywhere here. I suspected it would be cheap, fresh, and delicious, like the pictures of Brazil and Columbia and Argentina on so many coffee containers. And I was wrong. Not many folks here drink real coffee, and when they do, it’s of the instant variety. I asked Mom and Dad to send me some real stuff to fill up my lonely French Press.

Good Sugar-Free Gum- There’s plenty of gum here, even sugar-free gum, and it’s cheap, too. The problem is, it loses it’s flavor really quickly. So, I’m asking for some good Orbits or Dentyne Ice or something like that.

Mink oil- My deck shoes and leather sandals are drying out, and I can only find sticky shoe polish in the store. A little mink oil from those Northern minks ought to do the trick.

Yep, I´m getting old

2007-12-14T04:15:00.000-08:00

The rebel look just doesn’t float for Paraguayan ACers. Tattoos in general and long hair along with pierced ears for guys specifically are complete taboo. Church discipline often-times requires that interior spiritual change be accompanied by very physical outward changes in appearance, too. In order to become a member, you’ve got to cut your hair like everyone else and stop being a wannabe radical by taking out your earrings. I suspect there are now at least two Christian youth in the church who have yet to be baptized and become members because they don’t want to bend their knees to the pastors’ authority. They like long hair and pony tails and tattoos and piercings.

Although I’ve never had any part of my body pierced (except for one time when a pair of pruning shears fell on my right foot and left me with a permanent stigmata-looking mark), I have indeed grown out my hair pretty long before and tattoos… well, I’ll leave that one up to your imagination. The point is, though, that the church here condemns many things that are accepted by me and what you might call more culturally progressive churches in North America. It seems as if the congregation in Ansuncion is about ten years behind the trends of my home church in Akron, Ohio, where today nearly everything modest in outward appearance is acceptable. There, about a decade ago, several folks very strongly condemned a young man – my middle school Bible study leader and mentor at the time- for the scandal of his shiny earring. Since that time ten years ago, though, a lot has changed. Today, for example, the church has a head pastor who used to have very long hair in his public ministry and also has a leader on the missionary board with a tattoo.

So, which church system is right? They represent two very different standards of outward appearance and conformity to church discipline: the one requires a somewhat strict, legal code of dress and style, while the other permits very many culturally-popular and what are sometimes-perceived as rebellious fashions.

Part of me (the wrong, sinful man) wants to condemn the Paraguayan Church leadership for its legalism and focus on outward appearance. How can the pastors be so backwards as to only be concerned with exterior looks? How can they let their youth, who are foregoing real commitment and real service to the body of Christ, slip right through their hands because of the rules some old fuddy-duddies have made up? In my own experience, after all, I’ve known believers who sometimes looked strange or dressed funny to the world, but were actually far-better suited in their hearts for service to God: people who, although they didn’t look like they had everything together on the outside with their well-worn sweat pants and dirty hoodies and crappy shoes, had everything together on the inside with divine creativity and passion for the truth and the warmth of God’s own love.

On the other hand, though, I have also known people who looked good on the outside to the church (even myself sometimes with a short haircut, plaid, khakis, and Bible in hand), but on the inside were all messed up by many hidden sins (even myself sometimes with lust and pride and selfishness). Our Savior knew the hypocrites when he saw them, too, saying that the Pharisees were like white-washed tombs: nice-looking and clean in appearance before men, but ultimately lost with hearts full of stagnant death before God. Hence, we can see for sure from both scripture and experience that outward appearance matters nothing to God.

The truth of the matter, though, is far more complex. We must also take into account why Paraguayan youth, or perhaps any youth, dress so strangely in the first place. Where are they coming from, and is it possible that they might be sinning in the way they present themselves?
The answer, I think, is a strong “yes.” This is not, though, because I believe there is something inherently wrong with masculine pony tales or shiny metal adornments or permament unnatural body markings or anything else in outward appearance. Christian scriptures, after all, can be interpreted in many ways to defend any particular viewpoint on style and dress; even, I might add, to defend progressive, culturally-edgy styles (for example, I’ve heard tattoo proponents say that Christian tattoos are all right because Jesus has one on his thigh when he returns in glory – Rev. 19:16). No, there certainly are no biblical Christian mandates or certainties regarding cultural norms of dress. Instead, I think outward appearance ultimately is a matter of the heart and can be an important reflection of inward spiritual realities. Why, we must ask ourselves and others, do people (or perhaps we ourselves) want to look different from the rest of society?

In the church community here, rebellious dress is one very big and important way for someone to say, “No, I will not submit myself to your authority, and I will not go by your rules. I shall dress and adorn myself as I please, no matter how goofy or perhaps socially defiant I may seem.” Outward appearance can be the most practical and perhaps simplest form of disobedience to parents and society. I think of the ease with which a youth can pierce his own ear in the back of the bus to surprise and offend his loved ones, or how quickly and easy (although certainly not painless) a trip to the tattoo parlor can be to receive some permanent form of society-forsaking self-expression. The outgrowths of these simple actions, though, when stemming from the roots of rebellion in the heart, are definitively wrong. When a culture of parents and pastors with authority given from God Himself tells us that we need to dress or appear more conservatively, then we had best better do it if we want to live good Christian lives of obedience. We must submit ourselves to the norms of culture and outward appearance when those into whose care we’ve been entrusted require it. We must give ourselves wholly over to God and forsake entirely our own rebellion and independence, even if it means looking like a Mormon or a Baptist or even a Paraguayan Apostolic.

So, which church and mode of outward appearance is ultimately right? I’m afraid I’ve got to conclude in a terrible post-modern way and say that both can be healthy and good systems to dress by. In the end it is all a matter of the heart: in a culture where looking like a rebel doesn’t buck church or parental authority, go for it—dress like James Dean or Fabio or even Ozzi Osbourne. On the other hand, where God-ordained systems of authority say that a Leave-it-to-Beaver look is more appropriate, then by all means, put on your brown corduroy pants, spin-top hat, and button-up shirt. Cut your hair and take out your earring, cover up your tattoos and put a smile on your face. You might feel and look goofy, but in the end you’ll learn humility and obedience and, finally, how to be more like Jesus, too.

Searching for Green Peace

2007-12-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

I’ve said before that Paraguay is like a Paradise, a tropical oasis of exotic smelling fruit trees and golden sunshine and gentle rolling hills. All this is true and even more, sometimes. The red sandy dirt feels softer than in the States, for example, and the water from the faucet, too, tastes sweeter than I’ve ever had.

The problem, though, is that it’s a terribly polluted paradise. It seems that Paraguayans, in their carefree lifestyle of ease and anything-goes, care very little for the environment and rarely think of the impact their trash will have on the earth and, ultimately, their neighbors and themselves, too.

For example, yesterday a young man at church -- a member in good standing who plays in the praise band – finished off a pack of cookies. What was the natural thing for him to do when he was done? He threw the plastic container on the ground in the middle of the church playground, expecting it blow away sometime and perhaps become someone else’s problem. And the strange thing is that this small act of selfishness, even from an upstanding member of the church, isn’t so strange here. Everyone throws all their garbage on the ground or out the window or into the river, dumping junk where they can and leaving trash where it’s convenient. For this reason, the tropical paradise is in many places a tropical garbage bin, littered with blowing bags and pocked with used plastic bottles.

The streambeds are where you can see pollution at its worst. Heavy rains may do their best to clean the streets of garbage, but it all collects in the drain basins and eventually the waterways. Here, huge-ton-piles of assorted trash ferment in massive gob-balls of filth, like so many mutant monsters birthed from landfills nursing on humanity’s worst muck. The effect is altogether discouraging, if not depressing, for a North American who prefers tropical paradise to tropical ruin.

Not only does the landscape look bad because of the trash, though, but many waters are also ruined because of it and other pollutions. The Caballero home is close to the Rio Paraguayo, but only the most-daring would think of swimming or fishing in its murky waters. Two weeks ago we had the chance to visit the largest interior lake in Paraguay- a beautiful body of water surrounded by hills and at one time by hotels and resorts, too. The trouble is, the past few years the lake has become so polluted that it’s no longer safe to go swimming in it. The tourists are leaving, the resorts are closing, and the beaches are dying. The water looks and smells like black sewer, and even crusts over in some places with oily residue. The lake is an amazing refuge completely spoiled, pure delight blighted with the diseases of human progress and ruined by the selfish exploitations of an easy-does-it society.

In Paraguay, it’s easy to imagine how creation was supposed to be: a tropical fruit garden with sunny skies and crisp clear waters; a place where it pleased God to walk side-by-side with men. Unfortunately, the effects of the Fall are also clear here. There’s trash everywhere, the lakes stink, and somehow everything’s become dirty. Something’s gone wrong – very wrong -- in the garden, and we can hardly recognize the way things were originally created to be. There’s plenty of suffering to go around because of it, too, as creation itself seems to groan under the weight of humanity’s filthiness. The earth desperately needs and cries out for Health, for a Savior; for Emmanuel, for God-with-us. Ultimately, it cries out for His eternal life and for his final redemption, “Come, Lord Jesus, come!”

Best Wishes

2007-12-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

Ellen headed back to Canada Tuesday. She was the English teacher/missionary this past year in the church and school, and also the one who trained me most in the ways of Paraguay since I got here. She introduced me to the joys and sorrows of being a first-time missionary a year ago when I first started reading her blog, and last March she was the one who invited me to come take her place as a teacher. Basically, God’s work through her is the reason I’ve arrived where I am.

Now that Ellen’s gotten me all ready to live and teach on my own, though, her work seems complete. A full year-long circle with a trained replacement and all, Ellen’s leaving a well-finished time in the southern tropics for more and new Christian service in the colder North. Her legacy in the church and school is rich in relationship, love, and charisma, and the shoes that she leaves behind for me to fill seem overwhelmingly large. I know I’ll have my own ministries and ways of doing things here, but Ellen has really been a God-given example of faithfulness to the church, His ministries, and Christian service in general.

Seeing her leave brings me mixed emotions. On the one hand, I’m really jealous of her: the fact that she’ll get to spend Christmas with her family, be reunited with her North American church and friends, and get to live at home in a culture that she recognizes and knows. Right now, the idea of spending time with my loved ones on a cold, snowy, winter day inside and in front of a warm fire with sweaters and hot cocoa and football games and a real Christmas tree sounds like a dream come true. On the other hand, though, I recognize really how blessed Ellen has been to spend a year learning another culture and language and making an entirely new spiritual family in South America. The experiences that she’s had, and those that I’m having and am going to have this next year, are invaluable as life and faith lessons-learned. Seeing all the things I’ve learned in only two months and all the new ways I’ve had to trust God more, I can only imagine how much a different, and more spiritually mature, person Ellen is now after a full year. For us short term missionaries in Paraguay, I really think the spiritual environment is much like the physical environment: with plenty of sunny and sometimes uncomfortable heat, enough humidity and rain to stifle or drown even the best-accustomed Ohioan, and the richest, most colorfully fertile soil I’ve ever seen, it seems as if, by the grace of God, our souls can’t help but grow lush and green and be more productive like so many mango trees and hibiscus flowers and banana fruits. Life, spiritual and otherwise, is abundant in all forms here. It’s not always easy, either, but it’s very good.

And so, my prayer for Ellen is that, like a mango tree miraculously transplanted and sustained in the middle of the Albertan winter plain, she might stand out and continue to bear many new spiritual fruits when she returns home. I’m certain, too, that she’ll bring along with her all the sunshine of her God-given gifts, personality, and everything that she’s learned in order to share with so many more. I’ve seen that her “delight is in the law of the Lord,” and for this reason I trust that wherever she goes, Ellen will be like “a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that (she) does, (she) prospers.”

Sorry

2007-12-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

Hi all,
Sorry I havent posted in a while- I´ve misplaced my pen drive, so I´ll get something up as soon as I find it or buy another one. I´ve a few written, though, so don´t worry. All is well here, please pray for some of the folks I´ve left behind in the States.
Best, Jason

A Shameless Plug

2007-11-29T05:57:00.000-08:00

Here in Paraguay, there are plenty of signs that summertime is at hand. The mango trees seem to be weeping under the heavy loads of their Christmas-colored fruit, and the students at Collegio Privado Adonai, too, appear burdened down in the late-springtime heat with all their books and final exams and end-of-the-year stresses. Behind the scenes of the school, however, preparations are already being made for next year. Ben’s wife, Vivi, has been appointed next year’s directora, or principal, for the primary grades. I’ve received my own marching orders for teaching English, too – all six classes of 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders will be my responsbility, along with an hour of conversation each week with the 7th, 8th, and 9th graders. The foundations for the new addition to accommodate next year’s inaugural 11th grade have also been laid, waiting like a tilled concrete garden with iron beam sprouts for work teams and additional donations to be completed this summer (while God has blessed the school with a plethora of the workers from the North, we’re still waiting on and intensely praying for God to provide the funds).

Along with all these preparations for next year’s academics and ministries also comes another responsibility for Ben and I: facilitating and distributing the scholarships for needy students in the community. We have the privilege and duty of visiting families to decide whose children are most in need of tuition funds and, perhaps by extension, to also decide who will or will not be able to attend the Christian school. For most of the kids who receive the becas, the funding is perhaps the only chance they have to receive a decent education. Standards in public schools here can be abysmally low, so the Collegio Privado Adonai fulfills a very-real need for the children who attend, all within the safety and care of a Christ-centered, church-supported environment.

The scholarships given to children from the community also open doors of opportunity for their families to get involved in the school and church. There are countless parents and relatives of children from the school who are now attending the church as well, revealing the ultimate purpose of Collegio Privado Adonai and the church here – to reach out in service to a lost and dying world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This school has a real spiritual impact on lives.
So, how can you get involved in this God-grown ministry? I’d offer to you the Adopt-A-Student program, which gives North American friends the opportunity to sponsor a specific child here by donating the money necessary for tuition their costs. It costs $500 a year to send a Paraguayan child to Colegio Privado Adonai, but this investment in the lives of students and their families undoubtedly yields eternally significant and spiritually weighty dividends. Adopting-A-Student is an awesome chance to have a practical impact in the Kingdom of Heaven through blessing the life of a student and their family.

If you’re interested in helping out, send me an email at jbroredman@gmail.com. I’m more than happy to answer any questions you might have and help facilitate your participation in what God’s doing in Paraguay.

Thanksgiving in Paraguay

2007-11-24T06:36:00.000-08:00

It’s Thanksgiving in Paraguay. The sun’s out and shining with all it’s golden strength while the soft scent of Jasmine floats gently and amiably through the backyard. Oscar’s outdoor thermometer, although perhaps giving an embellished reading because it sits in the light, reads some 110 degrees. It’s probably much cooler than that-- about 95. I’m sitting inside with the lights off and fan on, doing my best to imagine a cold and rainy November day in Ohio. The English Christmas carols I’m listening to sure do their best to set the sound of the season, but they do little in the way of driving away the reality of a hot day.

In reality, though I may wish for the comforting cold of home, I’ve got a world to be thankful for, especially as far as the weather goes. I’m living in a veritable tropical paradise, very similar to Hawaii, from what I’ve heard, and I’ve got a lot of people who care for me. This Thanksgiving, I’ll be celebrating with Oscar and Karen and their family, Ben and Vivi, and Pilar, a friend from Georgetown also serving in Asuncion, and two of her friends.

While the weather today has been hot and peaceful outside, Karen has been cooking up a storm inside with all the traditional Thanksgiving bells and whistles: a turkey, some mashed potatoes, sweet corn, and even some sweet-stuffed-squash. The turkey here is what is most precious. One pastor I spoke with had never tried it in all his life, and the other had a faint memory tasting the giant bird perhaps a couple decades before, although he couldn’t remember the taste. Needless to say, we’re privileged to have such a feast and American celebration in a place so from home.

And I am thankful, too: thankful that I’ve got an opportunity to serve in a foreign country for a year and to experience Thanksgiving away from home in Paraguay; thankful for all the hospitality that the Paraguayan church, and especially Oscar and Karen and their family, have shown me; thankful for everyone back home, too, who is thinking of and praying for me while I’m down here- I know there’s a lot of people who care incredibly much; thankful for God’s own strength, protection, consolation, and many other graces as I’ve adjusted to the culture here; and thankful that, ultimately, I know my destiny is in His hands and that He cares for me far more than any one else does and knows what’s best for me far more than I do.

And so,

Now thank we all our God
With hearts and hands and voices
Who doeth wondrous things
In us and in all places
Who from out mother’s arms
And from our childhood’s way
Hath showered us with gifts
And blesseth us today.

Some Iguazu Pics

2007-11-21T04:39:00.000-08:00

By popular demand, some pics from Iguazu falls...

A Bloody Ritual

2007-11-20T04:20:00.000-08:00

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m wide awake. Outside, a tropical thunderstorm pierces the night’s dark quietude with intense flashes of lightning and booming drumrolls of thunder. Because of the storm, the electricity’s gone out and the fan that usually propels me back to sleep is suddenly and helplessly dead in the corner of the room.

It’s not the heat that bothers me this morning, though. No, it’s the cult of seemingly invisible mosquitoes swarming around my head that prevents my sweet repose once again; mosquitoes that, under normal circumstances, would be expeditiously exorcised by the fan’s firm and reassuring breeze.

The only sensible evidence of the disease-carriers’ despicable presence is a soft low buzzing next to my ear, eerily reminiscent to the sound of a dentist’s drill. Making matters even worse, I can neither see nor feel the pests until it’s too late to object and they’ve sucked my life right out of me, like so many tiny demons drawing the blood from a helpless sacrifice. They fly an evil and complicated dance around my head for what seems like hours as I, with body hastily covered by the protection of my light cotton sheets, frantically pray for them to go away. Occasionally, I madly but vainly protest their diabolical ritual with a wild and desperate flailing of arms.

Under these hallowing circumstances and in the daze of half-sleep, I ponder the import of an eternally significant, yet so often neglected, question: why don’t Paraguayans use screens in their windows?

A Touch of Romance

2007-11-17T03:43:00.000-08:00

“There are people praying for you, Jason,” my friend told me solemnly and honestly. I wondered for a moment why people here would be praying for me in such a serious way. Maybe they thought I was a little edgy for them, a little too secular, a little too North American. Then I wondered if they thought my soul was in danger, perhaps because I listen to Garth Brooks sometimes and have an Anglican prayerbook on my shelf. After thinking some of these things out loud, my friend clarified what she had said, and this time there was no wondering about the meaning of her words. “No, they’re praying for you. Te quiere, literally, they want you – they like you .”

The words hit me like a ton of bricks. “Oh,” I mumbled, much like one mumbles when he is not watching where he is going and walks straight into a wall or corner and there is no where else to go. They want me. They’re praying for me. For a husband. For their husband.
What to think… what to think… what to think… There are a lot of things that come to mind when the idea of marriage, and specifically the idea of my marriage, pops up. And trust me, my being in Paraguay only makes me even more confused and even more uncertain as to what the future holds. Some things I know for sure, though:

1-It’s way too early in my time here to even be worrying about these things.
2-I didn’t come to Paraguay to find a wife. I came to serve God, Opa (Guarani for “it’s finished”), end of story.
3-I appear to most people up North and here, too, to be the perfect eligible bachelor missionary. Not only am I good looking, but I look holy, too.
4- Number 3 is mostly true- I’m eligible, a bachelor, and a missionary. But I’m not so holy or perfect as I act around other people.
5- When I finally get around to dating a girl, it will probably be after a long and serious friendship with her.
6- Be that as it may, number 5 comes only after a lot of prayer and fasting and seeking God’s will.
7-Whoever the girl is will know for sure what my intentions are. If I haven’t said anything to her officially, there’s nothing officially or importantly there.
8-I don’t want to break anyone’s heart -- mine, any girl’s, or God’s.

Casual dating isn’t an option for me in general or in the church here specifically. When people decide to become novio and novia, “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”, in the Paraguayan church, they make a prompt and public social and spiritual commitment to marry each other sometime. Considering the culture, it’s not ironic that in Spanish, novio and novia also mean “groom” and “bride.” Whatever these relationships are, then, they are very quickly announced in front of the church and the plans for a wedding are very soon in the making. It may seem strange, but relationships go from friendships to engagements in one quick and giant (and perhaps sometimes too careless) jump. Dating relationships/engagements are only broken off with much pain and public demonstrations of remorse, and I know already a couple people my age who have had to go through such a well-known and difficult ordeal.

So, I’m certainly in no hurry to jump on the marriage wagon, especially here in Paraguay. I’m waiting on God and doing my best, as the Song of Songs suggests, to leave the passions of my love all alone in peaceful and unaware slumber until the mightily right day when comes the time to awaken and stir them up to life. Until that day, though, I’m an eligible bachelor missionary doing my best not to trample over anyone’s soft and precious heart. I’m treading softly and trying not to show too much interest in any one girl particularly, all the while learning a new language and culture and making new friends and so much more. It seems to me to be a big and dangerous undertaking, so I’d ask you to please pray for me. Just please, I ask you with all my heart, don’t pray for me.

A Paraguayan Funeral

2007-11-12T05:22:00.000-08:00

I arrived at the small, rusty brick house under the cover of darkness with a large, hasty group of church members, like so many troopers storming an enemy stronghold in the middle of the night. We came to visit the home straight from Wednesday night services with a dual purpose: to offer our emotional support and physical company as a sort condolence for the bereaved immediate and evangelical family; and also, by our presence, to prevent the complex mourning and death rituals of the extended Catholic family.

The main person of interest at the meeting was the recently departed, an older gentleman who had also recently joined our Anabaptist church. Following in the spiritual footsteps of his wife and daughter, he had been accepted as a full member of the church and was baptized again on his death bed only the Thursday previous. Now it was the following Wednesday night, and he was dead. I heard he had been suffering from cancer or some other ailment for some time and had come home to die in the comfort of his home.

The home did its best job in preparing itself to honor the patriarch’s death. The front room, visible from the street, had cleared itself of all furniture and in the center, elevated like some magic floating platform, was a rented sterling silver coffin holding the body of the deceased with his feet facing the road. He was wearing a comfortable new brown sweat suit and, while I don’t think his family intended this, looked like a Franciscan monk lying in repose. In the background of this mourning scene, at the head of the coffin, was a massive crucifix lit up by Las-Vegas style neon-purple lights, along with a serious-looking six-foot silver candelabra whose one light bulb three-over from the right burnt out. To the left of the coffin was a plastic wreath-sign almost as big as the room that advertised for the funeral company. A glass of holy water under the coffin was left to ward away evil spirits.

You could feel the tension in the air just as much as you could feel the warm Paraguayan night. On one side of the front lawn sat the Catholic extended family, seemingly un-welcomed from the front room of the house once the Protestants arrived. They appeared to be moping about and waiting for us all to leave, and I noticed more than once on their faces irritated expressions of mistrust and doubt. Most of the immediate family, including the widow, daughter, a son, and some grandchildren, met with the newcomers inside.

Here, dividing the two factions by only a few physical feet, loomed the immense spiritual and ideological chasm that wholly separated the evangelical and Catholic churches and cultures of Paraguay. On one side were those who had come to build an altar of candles and say rosaries and pray ancient prayers to God on behalf the departed. On the other side were those who had come to sing songs with a guitar and preach a sermon and pray an unscripted prayer for all the family members left behind. Two worlds collided at one poor Paraguayan man’s funeral. One world that wanted to say evening masses for nine days in an elaborate ceremony to rescue the departed’s soul from hot Purgatory, and the other that wanted to reach out to the community through a gesture of inviting faith in cool contemporary form.

In the end, the evangelicals seemed to win the turf war over the dead man’s house. At the request of the widow, daughter, and some friends, evangelical preachers came every night for more than a week to prevent a Catholic mass from being said. I’m not sure how the Catholics were able to finally express their grief, but I’m fairly certain the immediate family was pleased by the reaction and support shown by the evangelical church.

And as for the welfare of the dearly departed man’s soul? I can’t say for sure where he’s at or what he’s doing, but I can say for sure that he knows now better than any of the rest of us just who is right and who is wrong in this mixed-up church business. I can also say for sure, though, that he’s not going to share his secret with me or a single living soul.

Long Weekend Trip

2007-11-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I had the chance to see a little more of Paraguay and get a better taste for her culture and form. The 9th and 10th grades went on a two and a half day trip to see several sights in areas of the country about six hours east of Asuncion. I was privileged to go along on the secure but tiring excursion with all the excited youth.

We left around midnight last Thursday. Lucky for me, the sickness I felt in my stomach from a bad lunch of tepid fruit-smoothie was no indication of how the rest of the weekend would end up. We boarded our bus, which to my grand surprise was a huge air-conditioned Brazilian affair with twice the space for reclining than any of the airlines I traveled on to get here. With my pillow in hand and ear plugs in ears, I drifted off to sleep.

Around 5:30 in the morning I was awakened to breakfast time. Our bus was stopping at one of the most-famous Chiparrias in Paraguay to enjoy an early morning bite to eat. Chipa, one of the national foods here, is a bagel-like snack whose dough is baked warm with cheese and is sold everywhere. Women with chipa baskets on their hips or heads enter public buses all the time to sell it, and countless roadside stands feed weary travelers with it.

We stopped at a place that was supposed to sell the best chipa in all of Paraguay. There was a bathroom there, too, that had a guard posted outside who carried what looked like an elephant gun. I felt much better knowing that we were all safe from stampeding herds of giant mammals as we ate fresh chipa and drank hot cocido, a drink like sweet creamy coffee made from charred yerba mate.

Along with the guard were several middle-aged ladies selling chipa at this most famous chipa stand. They wore robin-egg blue form-fitting outfits and reminded me of airline stewardesses. From what I heard, the chipa vendor has a coveted job here, selling a flavor of national culinary pride and making good business while doing it. I thought the stop was a delicious piece of Paraguayan cultural pie.

We traveled some more and I slept another two hours all the way to Brazil, where we stopped at Tres Fronteras. The tourist spot, called Three Frontiers in English, is the place where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay all three meet in a grand panorama and where can be seen two rivers flowing into one another with an ancient embrace. It was exciting because it was the first real photo opportunity, and I learned there that Paraguayans have a little jingle they sing when they want or are having a picture taken. It goes something like this: “FOH-toh, FOH-toh, FOH-toh.” All through the trip, I took plenty of FOH-tohs.

By mid-morning we’d reached Iguazu Falls. I’m pretty sure these falls are, water quantity-wise, the largest in the world. Even in a time of drought like now, their size supposedly dwarfs Niagara Falls (although, in my own mind, they were no more impressive than their North American counterparts. The nice thing about Iguazu that is different than Niagara, however, is that the former is set in the midst of a largely unspoiled jungle. The Brazilian government has set up just enough amenities and tourist huts to make the visit comfortable for the foreigner, but not enough to spoil the natural serenity or beauty of the surrounding tropical landscape). I’m not sure how I could have come to any other conclusion than to say that they were really beautiful, really big, and pretty impressive.

One thing I remember more distinctly than the waterfalls were the millipedes – giant South American ones the size of your face – crawling everywhere on the footpaths. People naturally stepped all over the path and the millipedes, smooshing the creatures into the ground. I could tell the ones that had died recently, as they were still round and fleshly, apart from the ones that had died much earlier, which were only skeletons and dried out. At some point the dead ones seem to have become part of the cement walkway, leaving their imprints like very ancient fossils.

For lunch on Friday we visited a Brazilian buffet. The food was abundant and, in my opinion, very tasty. There were savory gobs of various meats, served fresh off of long roasting rods, along with plenty of South American salads and treats. We washed it all down with Coca Cola, the drink de force of the weekend and of good times in Paraguay.

Friday afternoon we visited Itapu, the site of the world’s largest man-made dam. Built under a Paraguayan dictator a few decades ago with Brazilian financing, the dam is a testament to man’s ability to harness nature’s forces. Nearly a dozen and a half giant turbines slowly let filter through the great waters of the now stopped-up Parana, the fourth largest river flow in the world, creating enough electricity in just one and a half turbines to supply all of Paraguay’s needs. The rest is sent to Brazil. Money from the dam is used in building projects and public services all over Paraguay, with a large part of it also going into the private coffers of high-ranking political officials and friends of the state.

Friday night we stayed at a beautiful campground on the shores of the great lake created by Itapu Dam. The stay was completely free for our school group, financed as a gift and pacifier to the Paraguayan people by the dam proprietors and government. It was a scenic paradise where we had the chance to enjoy a ride through the jungle in horse-drawn carriage in the daytime and see the massive ginger moon rise up out of the dark waters in the nighttime. The perfect setting, along with a massive grilled meat dinner served by the school’s director and pastor, made our stay entirely wonderful and a highlight of the trip.

Saturday we woke bright and early to enjoy some more of the campground. We left mid-morning for Ciudad del Este, a shopper’s paradise filled with the newest and cheapest electronic goods, the most fashionable and imitated sports gear, and the most impressive and blackest of all markets I’ve ever seen. It was a dream-come-true of materialistic sensationalism, with shop after shop and seller after seller pawning their worldly wares. I was completely overwhelmed by the scene and unable to process anything. With all the frenzied purchasing activity going on around me and my own explainable fears of losing everything in my pockets, I was glad we only had an hour to stay. Even though I needed an alarm clock, I decided not to purchase anything in this great “City of the East” (Ciudad del Este) and left with my pockets still burdened by Paraguayan cash.

Saturday afternoon, we visited another waterfall and then spent the remainder of the day at the AC Church outside of Ciudad del Este playing bocce ball and eating roast chicken. We returned in the evening to Itapu, where we saw an over-hyped light and sound show as the dam slowly and un-dramatically turned on its fluorescent nightlights. After another stop at the church, we headed back to our air-conditioned bus for a night trip back to Asuncion. All in all, the excursion was a grand adventure in the safety of a school field trip and gave us all the chance to see, hear, and smell some of Paraguay’s greatest secret treasures.

Costumes and Candy Corn

2007-10-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

Today is October 31st. If I were in the States, I’d probably go to a costume party wearing some sort of clever outfit and eat way more candy corn than is healthy for any one person to eat in the course of a decade. Last year, for example, I dressed up as a Republican who’d been badly beaten up by an angry electorate and ate probably three pounds of the white-yellow-orange card-board tasting pyramidal treats. I had a grand time celebrating with folks dressed up as ghouls and even went on a tour of haunted houses in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. As a child, Halloween candy was an important part of my autumn diet and someday I’ll probably take my own kids trick-or-treating, too. I think it can be a healthy, human, and good thing to confront the realities of death with a sense of humor and a touch of spook. For the Christian believer, after all, the grave will never win any permanent victory nor will death have any lasting sting.

Here in Paraguay, though, Halloween is different. Christian believers take the holiday as a time of very real spiritual danger. This past month, the pastors at church have been preparing us all for October 31st, a day on which they believe satanic forces are much more at work than the rest of the year. In the school and church, October was proclaimed a month of spiritual warfare and the Devil’s forces were battled with much prayer and fasting, for some kinds of demons “cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.”

Thus, I won’t be celebrating anything related to Halloween this year. I’ve hung up my ideas for clever costumes in the closet of my mind for another place and time, and I’ve even shied away from glancing at the candy corn displays in the supermarket. And what’s all this for?

The rational part of me wants to say that the Paraguayan church is superstitious, believing in ghosts and spiritual forces that the rest of the modern world has given-up on. How many people do I know, for example, who have been demon-possessed in the U.S.? I definitely heard of one person once, but even then my skeptical mind attributed her demons to mental illnesses and her exorcism to an act of social readjustment.

Yet here, people do believe in satanic forces and demon possession and evil powers and they do believe in it strongly. Many from the church, for example, have told me of ritualistic demonic sacrifices on Cerro Lamabare, the same hill just a few miles away where we were mugged just a week ago. Other believers have told me of extended family members who have made pacts with Bombero, an ancient demon firmly established in pre-Christian mythology and the Paraguayan mind. At a funeral vigil I attended last week, there was a cup of water placed under the coffin to ward away evil spirits. For better or worse, the Paraguayan people and the church here have strong beliefs in the world of spirits.

This Halloween, I’m giving up my so-called reason and American point-of-view and embracing the attitude of Paraguayan believers. The belief in invisible spiritual powers is, after all, thoroughly Christian and biblical. I want to believe in spiritual realities, both good and bad that I cannot see, because I know scripture teaches so much about “cosmic powers” and “spiritual forces.” Our own Lord Jesus Christ cast out evil demons while on earth, and is now seated in Heaven with all “angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” When Jesus Christ himself saw and understood spiritual forces and is described as the Lord and ruler over every one, it would require no small amount of hubris on my part to claim that, intellectually, I’ve moved beyond a belief in other-worldly powers. Oftentimes my faulty reason is a hindrance to true biblical and Christian faith and too often I quickly abandon very important aspects of belief in favor of a modern, rational interpretation.

Hence, this Halloween I’m trying to give up some of that prideful and wrong thinking. I’m fasting from Halloween candy and costumes and praying for God’s protection over the church. I’m paying closer attention to what my brothers and sisters in Christ say about spiritual realities and truths, and doing my best to leave my unchristian modernist ideas at home in America. I’m slowly learning about things I cannot see and doing my best not to jump to conclusions. While I think I may be starving for lack of candy corn, I trust that the harvest of faith I reap in its place will be longer-lasting and more satisfying anyways.

Que Paso (What Happened)

2007-10-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

With the exception of strong rain in the morning, Sunday started off as normal as any day I’ve seen here. I got up around 6:30, went to church at 8:30, and then talked with friends afterwards until about 10:30. I was looking forward to an afternoon of visiting Cerro Lambare, a tall hill overlooking the River Paraguay and much of Asuncion, Paraguay’s capitol. I had visited the small and seemingly illogical mountain the previous Wednesday, but my North American travel party (me, Ellen Sabo, her brother, Peter, and her cousin, Larissa) had to leave early to make it back in time for classes at the collegio. This second visit, we were all going once again with some guys from the church and Ellen’s Paraguayan roommate, Emmy.

We walked to the Cerro Lamabare by way of Cacique Lambare, which is the main road through plain-old Lambare (the suburb of Asuncion where the church and school are). The walk was about an hour long and was peppered with conversation in three languages, with discussions ranging from the history of the Apostolic Christian Church to Paraguayan saints. We purchased a picnic lunch of bread and roast chicken and soda to enjoy when we reached the top of the mountain by foot. It would be a well-deserved lunch after a long hike.

About halfway up the Cerro, our group decided to spilt up. Unbeknownst to us, this choice sealed the fate of our trip. The three Paraguayan guys and Peter decided to go straight up the mountain, cutting through the woods and climbing up at a steep angle. This left the two Canadian ladies, Emmy, and I to take the winding and paved road up the hill.

Emmy and I were in a lively chat about Saint Roeca, a martyred Paraguayan Jesuit, when I saw something move behind my back. Having traveled the world and considered myself a safe tourist, I quickly glanced behind as a precautionary measure to make sure no one was following us. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw a few steps back.

There quickly catching up to us was a sixteen year old youth in a brown shirt with a pistol in his right hand. I did a double-take to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, and then announced to the group that there was a man with a gun following us. We all four turned around just as quickly as I mentioned it. Facing our pursuer and forming a semi-circle around him as he came up to meet us, the youth pointed his gun at all our fragile frames and began demanding cell phones.

The next couple minutes are a complete blur in my mind, but I do remember a few things distinctly. Being the only brave man in the group, I did the best thing that I could to help the situation. Promptly losing all control of bodily and mental function, I passed a gas that was entirely uncalled for and indecent in such mixed company. I then proceeded, in as cowardly and terrified a voice as I could muster, to beg for our lives in strained and broken (yet incredibly fervent) por favors. My voice, in utter terror, sounded like that of a small child who, fearing for his life, runs away from a giant farm animal chasing him in the pasture. It kind of sounded like “eeaaauuhhhhhhh.”

Our assaulter then went to each one of us, demanding once again our cell phones and cash with all the authority he had in his pistol. Since he didn’t believe us when we told him that we had none (three North Americans without cell phones? Come on, give me a break), he promptly groped us to make sure we were telling the truth. In the course of the assault, we did as much as we could to please the thief and pacify his gun-wielding self. To prove to him that I had no cell phone and in an attempt to make him happy, I began taking off my shirt and pants and offering them to him. He didn’t want my clothes, though, and I ended buttoning my pants back up only after the ladies told me I was undressing unnecessarily.

The ladies, by the way, were calm the entire time. Emmy was more afraid that I had lost my mind than she was of the robber, so she did her best to keep me quiet and controlled. I’m pretty sure her calming words of “tranquilo, Jason, tranquilo” to me during the ordeal were the only things that kept me from getting us all shot.

In the end, I offered the crook all my cash (about $6) and my watch, a cheap $5 WalMart timekeeper that he didn’t even have to ask for. Larissa lost the most in the mugging when Ellen offered the crook her backpack which held Larissa’s camera, Larissa’s $300, and Larissa’s credit and bank cards. Be that as it may, the gift seemed to appease our criminal. He took it and then, with a flurry of Spanish and Guarani words, cursed me as a cowardly American man, pointed the gun at my head, and then inexplicably left just as quickly as he arrived.

The entire time, I thought for sure I was going to die. To my shame, I didn’t even think to pray. Unreasonable impulse took over, and the only thing I could think of was how sad and senseless my death would be on this Heaven-forsaken mountain in Paraguay. I felt real sorry for myself, and got real scared.

Afterwards, we ran up the hill and met with the other guys. A motorcycle club picnicking there saw our plight and promptly went out riding in search of the assailant. He wasn’t anywhere to be found. Fifteen minutes later the Paraguayan police came by and gave us all a ride in the back of their truck to the police station, where we signed our names on a piece of used, wrinkly paper. I’m pretty sure, though, that it was just a formality. The police had no idea how to even contact the Canadian Embassy, and I’m certain our cause and justice’s cause was lost from the moment we were robbed. What we lost was lost for good, swallowed by an ocean of poverty and crime.

Still, though, I consider us all very lucky to have even survived (and without being shot once, a miracle!). In spite of my best efforts to make the situation turn out badly, God’s protection over us all trumped all. There must have been an army of angels with us that day, as our safety through the robbery seems to defy all logic. I call it a miracle that I’m still here after staring into the barrel of my assailaint’s gun, and can only thank God that I’ve got more time to serve Him here on Earth.

Just Gotta Wait

2007-10-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a blog entry in the making that is quite a story. So, to get you excited about it ahead of time, I’m offering some possible titles for the tale as a sneak preview:

1. The Worst Idea Ever: A Paraguayan Travel No-No
2. The Incredible Adventure of Jason and the Three Ladies
3. Where’d that Drunk with a Pistol Come from?
4. Why Don’t They Teach You the Word “Assault” in High School Spanish?
5. I Wish I Had Thought of This ahead of Time
6. Yes, Junior, People Really Do Lose Control of Bodily Functions in Terrifying Situations
7. Staring Down the Gun Barrel
8. My Own Personal Portal to Glory
9. At Least I Thought I Was Ready to Go
10. Someone’s Prayin’, Lord
11. Yes, Sir, Please Take My Pants, Too
12. American Cowardice
13. If I Were a Cat, I’d Have 8 More Lives
14. Angels Watchin’ Over Me, My Lord
15. Every Day Now Is a Gift

I bet you can’t wait to hear what happened. For me, it’s still kind of fresh, so it may take a few days for me to process everything and write about it.

Straight Talk

2007-10-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Being in a foreign country makes me feel very fragile, helpless, and human. For someone who’s been told all his life that he can do anything he puts his mind to, it’s a good but tough lesson to learn that I have my limits. I’m being humbled very much.

For instance, when I try to converse in Spanish, I’m sure I sound to native speakers more like a crazed pagan with Turretts than a sane and healthy Christian. Because of the all too-slowly dissolving language barrier, I’m holding on to many un-communicated thoughts in my mind like my dad holds on to the oversized and unwanted zucchinis in his August garden.

I often feel like a helpless fool, tripping over pronouns and conjugated verbs and my very own tongue (who seems to have gained some measure of independence in this foreign land). No longer does my tongue listen obediently when I try to say something smart. Instead, he now squeaks and squabbles and hobbles and does his best to make a fool out of me. I’m certain my tongue is not Spanish. Rather, he’s got to be Hungarian, German, or Irish just like me, because he’s very stubborn and is obstinately taking his time in adapting to the new life here.

Already, I’ve said plenty of things in Spanish that I look forward to laughing about in a few years. When I was in the first grade class sharing about my favorite food, for example, I told them I like ensalada taco, taco salad. Unfortunately for the Paraguayan pupils, they were unfamiliar with the Mexican taco tradition and thought I meant shoe heels salad, the literal translation of ensalada taco. They got a good laugh from it.

Another Spanish-blooper moment, shared with a young lady from the church in a much more serious conversation, was also a much more embarrassing mistake. She asked how my transition to life and to the church here was going, and I responded as best I could that the church was amazing and welcoming me with open arms. The trouble was that I accidentally substituted the Spanish word for “legs” when I meant to say “arms.” I very quickly realized my mistake and profusely apologized for what I said. She understood that I was a bit confused with my words and was very gracious in correcting me, but it still didn’t help the embarrassment of the whole thing.

Here, I am no longer the eloquent and intelligent fellow that I am in English-speaking lands. My trendy idol of speech, built from flashy smart words and large clever turns of phrase, has been smashed to smithereens by the blunt and often traumatic force of this new language. I know neither the tongues of men nor angels in Spanish, but praise God that, as 1 Corinthians 13 suggests, this isn’t the most important thing. Although my speech in Spanish isn’t worth anything, I am getting to know better the privilege and opportunity of sharing in the love of God, which is worth everything. It’s a love that I’ve felt through all the awkward times when I stand alone, when my tongue fails me and I can no longer speak. Wonderfully, it’s a love that is stable and strong and persists. When all my showy plastic English words cease in silence, this life-giving love springs from within and speaks something different and true. For me, el amor de Dios, the love of God, gives the grace to “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, (and) endure all things,” even when my words cannot.