Local time: 22:49
I only have 11 minutes until the internet cuts out for the night, which seems to be about the time I get ready to start updating this thing on any given night. I'm just going to write as much of an update as I can in that time.
We've had two full weeks of class already, and I have pages and pages and pages of notes to peruse and distill and compile. I do intend to pass on a little of what I learn here to my remote audience, but that will not happen in the next few minutes.
We have two hours a week of language study included in our class schedule, but we had to fill the first couple weeks of allotted language time with improvised lesson plans while we waited to get licensing to use Rosetta Stone for our whole class. The first Monday, Martina taught an hour lesson, basically going over uses, spellings, and pronunciations of key words and phrases in French. On Thursday, the plan was for her to expand on that for another hour. Unfortunately, she'd also committed to taking a few students into town to buy some essentials during the time preceding class, and she called Magdy to tell him she wouldn't be back in time to teach. So I found myself 5 minutes before class in front of all my peers preparing to teach them to speak French. I had no lesson plan, and no clear ideas for what would be a helpful curriculum, so I asked everyone what they would like to learn how to say.
By the time Martina entered the classroom, the center of the board featured the ever-useful language-learning staple question "Where is your cow?" along with the many possible answers: "here," "there," and "everywhere." Over the course of the lesson, my students filled their notebooks with the phrases "chocolate bear," "wooden rabbit," "rabbit in the woods/in the forest," "unicorn," "unicorn of the sea" (because Kevin asked how to say narwhal in French, and I didn't know), the numbers from one to ten as well as sixteen, the colors in masculine and feminine, both the French and the Swiss manners of saying "one-hundred and eighty," and "Do you think you could, perchance, possibly repeat that, if you please?"
I really tried to work with everyone on their pronunciation. I had everyone clear the phlegm out of their throats for 3 full seconds to practice the french R sound. The numbers five through ten, I told them, were pronounced "sank, cease, set, wheat, 'nuff, and like cease but with a d." Then, I explained that the end of the word "quatre" was suppose to sound like skidding your bike tires on a gravel road. Martina was horrified at what I was doing to her language.
Some of my classmates mentioned later that my French lesson was a highlight of week 1 at YWAM. I felt that way, too. I doubt the effectiveness of my methods in that particular instance, as I was basically translating unordered and thematically unrelated tripe of which it would be impossible to remember much, but I found that I really enjoy teaching. Having enthusiastic students who asked me to translate useless phrases was certainly helpful to the experience, but I think I've discovered a legitimate passion.
On our first Tuesday night here, we had Swiss Night, which meant that dinner was cheese fondue and dessert was chocolate fondue. This was to be the first of many meals that Matt thought was lacking in meat. The following week, we had cheese soup, served with bread. It's not the same as fondue; it's way more delicious, according to no one but me. All the food here has been delicious, down to the sandwiches inside our backpacks that get smashed when we snowboard.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Why I came to YWAM Lausanne
School wasn’t ever too great for me. For most of my teenage years, I held firmly to the belief that school wouldn’t ever help me to get anywhere. When I was 13, I started playing bass guitar because I wanted to be a rock star, and I didn’t need school for that. When I was 14, I started playing rugby, and I decided that here was a second thing I’d like to do professionally that didn’t require an education. When I was 15, I thought maybe I’d just buy a chemistry set and screw around with it for a living. Once I started my junior year of high school, it seemed equally plausible that I’d like to just think and talk about formative events in human history for the rest of my life.
There was a girl I dated through most of high school, and her view was that I was too smart not to go to college. As it happens, we broke up in the spring of my senior year, about when I needed to finalize all of my college applications. Firstly, this made moot the point of looking at schools where we could be near each other, which included all the schools I’d bothered to visit. Secondly, it put me in an emotional state where I didn’t really have interest in pushing through the mundane and stressful portions of the application process. Thirdly, I was concurrently enrolled through PSEO in a college literature course during my final semester of high school classes, and suffice it to say that I wasn’t faring well. This all came together as a pretty strong case for not bothering to complete any of my applications.
Once June rolled around, I was free at last from the tyranny of compulsory education, but was also far from realizing any of my above-education dreams. I hadn’t been disciplined in practicing my instruments to anywhere near virtuosity and had only had short stints in a couple musical collaborations without writing an original song. Since the beginning of my rugby career, I had sprained both ankles pretty seriously as well as one knee, and I didn’t even play the sport during my final year. I was nowhere close to becoming a mad scientist, and Historian is the biggest, most daunting archive binge of a career conceivable. So, I kept working at Davanni’s Pizza and Hot Hoagies and went Frisbee golfing in my spare time, as well as occasionally sledding down a ski hill at 3 a.m.
By the Fall of 2008, I was jobless and ready to maybe try school again because working in pizza shops sucks. I enrolled at the local community college and took Music Theory and Jazz History classes. I was late to class pretty much every day and didn’t do half the homework. I didn’t take any classes in the spring. In the summer of ’09, I thought I’d take a whack at a full-semester-in-5-weeks Spanish course, and that went alright, so I shifted my focus of study and took Spanish in the Fall along with choir, logic, and a class about mythology and world religions. At some point, I took Middle East Politics, which was essentially a class about the history of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and turned out to be much more intensive and less oriented towards political theory than I’d either anticipated or desired. Finally, I spent most of one semester on 3 different Psychology classes at once before deciding that school still wasn’t the way for me to do anything interesting or useful in the world.
That second Fall semester, when I was studying Spanish, logic, and mythology, I attended the Missions Festival at Grace Church in Eden Prairie Switzerland , I was immediately on board… except that I was already committed to a short-term missions trip to Kenya Switzerland
However, I did go somewhere in January: Minneapolis
During my residency there, I once again changed employers. The transitional period and an impromptu Spring Break snowboard trip left me having to rebuild my savings pile near the middle of the year. Comparing income to expenses and checking the skyrocketing midyear CHF exchange rates, it seemed completely out of the question that I could finance the trip this year, either. I stopped thinking about it, and thought maybe in my new place with my new job and my new church, I could just settle in for a while until I decide what to do next.
A few months later, I got a raise. Following not too far behind that, the Central Bank ofSwitzerland
A few months later, I got a raise. Following not too far behind that, the Central Bank of
It still required a stretch, though, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go for it. There’s always next year, right? After all, if I had an extra year to save, I could set aside a much bigger pile of cash to have some left over at the end of my trip. I could add some value to my Roth IRA for fiscal years 2011 and 2012 instead of spending all my available investment capital. I could get more job experience learning useful things about home repair and have more time to settle in to my new relationships with my new church community.
I sat on the fence for months. It seemed more prudent to wait. Proverbs is all about being prudent, isn’t it? It was hard to be sure, but I didn’t think God would want me to lunge recklessly towards something I’d wanted for a few years just because I was getting impatient with the “perfect timing.” I could handle waiting and saving for another year; life was going well. Well, it was going alright. I mean, it was good until I started thinking about too many obligations and responsibilities at one time and became petrified in anxiety.
I sat on the fence for months. It seemed more prudent to wait. Proverbs is all about being prudent, isn’t it? It was hard to be sure, but I didn’t think God would want me to lunge recklessly towards something I’d wanted for a few years just because I was getting impatient with the “perfect timing.” I could handle waiting and saving for another year; life was going well. Well, it was going alright. I mean, it was good until I started thinking about too many obligations and responsibilities at one time and became petrified in anxiety.
I intend to fully engage things. I’m not always good at it, and sometimes there are too many things competing for my full engagement, but I am always theoretically in favor of fully engaging worthy pursuits. Here’s the thing, though: “worthy pursuit” has to be narrowed down further every time I have two competing interests. It’s natural selection applied to life decisions, with the end result hopefully yielding a perfect set of criteria so that I’m sure that I’m making the perfect set of decisions. After all, the word “decision” is just the word “incision” with a different prefix: it means “to cut off” rather than “to cut in.” Fully severing possibilities is like amputating body parts: you’d better be sure, ‘cuz they don’t grow back.
So, Jesus is a worthy pursuit. Jesus and wisdom and maturity and security. Yeah, that’s a good list. So what else needs to be cut out? Everything. Feeding myself and going to bed on time and enjoying friendships and being invited to things and having to be ready to work the next day. Remaining functional was taking up all the time I wanted to spend on being alive.
Remaining functional isn’t something I would call a worthy pursuit, but I would call it necessary. Therein lies the problem. Do I decise my own means of providing for myself because it prevents me from relying on provision from above, or do I consider that the means I’ve been given to attend to myself are in fact my provision from above? Do I do what is necessary or what is essential?
I think the essential holds more weight than the necessary. The essential is a need, while the necessary is a comfort. Thirst kills a lot more quickly than hunger.
At the end of it, I don’t think I was prudent about my decision. I was frustrated, and I wanted to abandon everything ineffective and distracting and time-consuming and just leave. I didn’t evaluate a perfect set of criteria as such when I decided to come to Switzerland
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Evening
Local time: 22:54
The days here are long and full. I'm really surprised that it's only been 5 days at the YWAM base here, and only 10 hours past a week since I left Minnesota.
Thursday was arrival day, and the following three days were introduction and orientation. There are 12 students and 4 staff in my Discipleship Training School, representing 9 different nationalities. Magdy, the school leader, is from Egypt, and apparently well known and highly regarded throughout YWAM's many locations. He looks like a young Saddam Hussein. He's made multiple allusions to having spent "the past 50 years" doing things, but I think that's counting from birth, not from the start of his time with YWAM.
Viktoria, from Sweden, was going to attend a completely different YWAM school in Finland, but that program was rather suddenly cancelled due to lack of enrollment. I think she signed up to come here on January 1st, 4 days before arrival day. Her coworker just happened to have an extra snowboard she could take for 5 months.
Kevin is from Florida. He enlisted in the Army at 19, and spent two and a half years in South Korea followed by a year training Iraqi police. He bought a GoPro video camera and wants to edit together a bunch of awesome snowboarding footage. He showed me a video he shot of himself kite-surfing, and I'll probably be really excited about kite sports for at least a week.
Tabea is from the German-speaking part of Switzerland. She's 16, making her the youngest person in our class and the second-youngest person enrolled in the classes on our base. Apparently, because most of Europe's educational systems are much more focused on specialization, finishing secondary education at 15 and taking a gap year to learn a language or whatever is pretty common.
Luke is from Canada. Everyone else thinks his speech sounds the same as us Americans (the way the grammar collides in this sentence makes me cringe), but I know he doesn't. His speech is a wealth of tally-markable words. He'll finish (or interject) a sentence with a "Right?" that is not a question more often than the expected "Eh," but will at times change it up with a random and unnecessary "Yo." He used to play guitar and sing in a hardcore band, but left partly to come here and partly because he wanted to do more ambient stuff. Back home, he works for a community program to integrate mentally- and behaviorally-challenged teenagers with the rest of their peers, and currently holds the top spot on my Amusing Anecdotes list:
"I work with kids that have all sorts of behavioral issues, and sometimes we'll be in the swimming pool and a guy will decide 'Hey, I think it would be a good idea to drop my trunks and run to the library right now' and they're like 15, and I have to say 'No, it would not be.' When I applied for the job, I was sort of thinking about when Jesus said 'Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done for me,' but then I find myself wrestling a naked kid in the library and wondering how this possibly relates."
"I work with kids that have all sorts of behavioral issues, and sometimes we'll be in the swimming pool and a guy will decide 'Hey, I think it would be a good idea to drop my trunks and run to the library right now' and they're like 15, and I have to say 'No, it would not be.' When I applied for the job, I was sort of thinking about when Jesus said 'Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done for me,' but then I find myself wrestling a naked kid in the library and wondering how this possibly relates."
Leah is from the UK. She calls grenadine "squash" and refers to pickled cucumbers as "gurkens." No one thinks she sounds like the Americans, except when she puts on a phony accent, at which point she is quickly accosted by five apparently torturous British accents. Previous to coming here, she worked five different jobs concurrently "extremely part time," though she later amended her statement to specify that she worked 6 at once for two weeks during that period. She doesn't like tea, even though she's British. Apparently, I was the last one to point that out to her.
Logan is from Forest Lake, MN. He's tall enough that he looks tall from far away when there's no one next to him, but not tall enough that I have to look into the sky to hold a conversation. I'm gonna guess 6'4" and ask him tomorrow. He took a gap year after high school, applied to the U of M for this past fall, and then deferred his application for another year. He might hate school as much as I do.
Nienke is Dutch and sounds like a Dutch person trying to speak with a British accent. She's at least as proficient in English as everyone in the Amsterdam airport. She's been studying architecture in hopes of entering the burgeoning field of unemployment. She takes notes feverishly and engages a lot in class, which I'm guessing comes from a "real school" mindset. She told me that you can't get Gouda cheese in the Netherlands if you pronounce it like that.
William is from the former British Commonwealth. I guess he went to school in Melbourne for an unspecified number of years, but he has said he's from Canada, and Skyping with his parents is easy because they're only one time zone away, in England. When he arrived, a Kiwi staffperson told him he didn't have a normal Aussie accent. He really holds a high regard for waking up in time for "brekkie," even though there are no gurkens involved. He turned 18 in December, and he wants to fly helicopters in the Australian Air Force, I think, but he "got nervous" during one of the interview phases and was told to go out and get life experience and reapply in a year. He's been generous with the chocolate he bought at the Swiss grocery store down the street.
Rachael is the only female Canadian. She lived in a couple of places growing up, so her only distinguishable accent is mumble and she doesn't say any weird things except stuff like "from A to Zed." She's family friends with one of the people on permanent staff here, but it's her first time working with YWAM.
Matt is the third Minnesotan, from Plymouth. He's played hockey all his life and went to the University of Nebraska for three semesters before coming here. He and some of the other guys have spent free time lifting weights. I might join them some day.
Ah Young is from South Korea. If you've been keeping track, that means that all the girls are of different nationalities and all the guys are native English speakers. Ah Young wanted to come to DTS at the Kona, Hawaii base a year ago, but for whatever reason wasn't able to, so she ended up being here now. Her home church back in Korea actually doesn't believe in parachurch organizations, or whatever you wanna call YWAM, and she was discouraged from enrolling. However, she spent the last semester studying in Toulouse, so she was only a train ride away from here and planes away from criticism.
Thomas is Swiss German, born near Zurich. He has torn the ACL in his right knee twice (though technically it wasn't his ACL the second time). And of course I kicked him in that knee the other day because I was pretending to be a kangaroo. I mean, I didn't kick him super hard, but he only had surgery like 2 months ago. He was a good sport about it. He's a very interactive and talkative guy, and it's cool to have him on staff.
Martina is the cousin of Thomas and the daughter of Markus, the base leader. She reminds me of Katrina because she loves Jesus and is good at everything. She is the only female staffperson for our class, and speaks Swiss German, High German, French, and English. Magdy has said that English is her worst language, and yet she's still good enough to discuss deep spiritual matters with people and to be married to a Canadian.
Jon is the other guy on staff for our class. He is from British Columbia and likes the Vancouver Canucks, which is a point of contention between him and Matt. I met him and Martina's husband Jordan on arrival day and thought they were brothers because they were both from "near Vancouver," both mentioned the Canucks playing the Wild, and are both tall and lanky, with similar teeth. Jon is the leader of the Maintenance Team with myself and Matt and stays in the room across the hall from our three-bunkbed hovel.
Since all my experiences for the next 5 months will include these people, you may want to read over this post repeatedly, to get to know them. Form a picture in your minds.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
I Missed Two Trains and Bought a Dude Lunch
First Day, Part 2:
When I arrived in Paris, I was carrying appreciable quantities in four different currencies. When I left, I had $5 and 0 Euros.
It's curious. I went to a membership class for The Rock a few months ago. I grabbed the reading materials they offered, intending to really delve into the philosophy of the GCC movement and The Rock in particular, and hoping to become convinced of its Biblical basis, before pledging to become a member. Like all things I grab and intend to read, they ended up in the living room, in the kitchen, on my desk, in my car, on the floor, next to my bed, in my backpack that spent equal time in all these places, and generally distributed about my residence in a similar fashion to everything else I own, unread.
I really do intend to read things. If I believed it to be possible, I would read just about every book I've ever heard of. As it stands, my list of "half-reads to finish sometime" has stopped growing, because I'm focusing on building up my "grab hard copies at garage sales and never read" list. I guess I have trouble getting started on things, but only because I realized that I have trouble finishing things, and so I don't want to make the commitment. I digress. I feel like every paragraph should end with "I digress," every time I speak.
For convenience and economy, my guitar became my one carry-on item. This meant, therefore, that I had to find away to stuff all my traveling reading materials and snacks into the pockets of my jacket and the narrow front pouch on my guitar case. It so happens that, among the free reading materials I received at the membership class, there was one rather small and narrow book, just under 100 pages, which was exactly the right size to squeeze in on top of my guitar. So, I ended up with Randy Alcorn's "The Treasure Principle" among my only reading material for my travels.
Needless to say, I have read it in its entirety (though I admit I skimmed over the "31 Questions to Ask Yourself" without considering them all in depth, because that seemed like too many questions to answer right in a row.) It is different. It's interesting. It's inspiring. It makes sense in the perfect way. Like the way where I'm sure I'll be ridiculed if someone finds out I believe it.
There are too many good points in this little book for me to adequately sum it all up. One of them concerns the meaning of Matthew 6:21: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Where you put your money shows what you consider important, but it is also the case that when you put money into something, it becomes important to you. We want to protect our investment and to see something come of it.
Another principle is "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems." The author shares the story of a man rushing to find John Wesley with distressing news: Wesley's house had burned down. His response, paraphrased, is "That wasn't mine anyway; God granted me its use. Now, it's one less thing for me to worry about."
Anyway, this book really made an impression on me, and then I got off the plane.
Weeks ago, I found the cheapest ticket I could find for a bullet train to take me from Paris to Geneva and ordered it online. There was another train on the same itinerary an hour earlier and an hour later, but for some reason the 11:11 train was a better deal, so I booked it. Today, as my plane landed at 9:30 at the other end of an hour-long bus ride from the train station, I was left with very little time to get off and clear customs. Arriving at Gare de Lyon at 11:40 and having to wait in line for an open booth, I asked if I could change my expired ticket to the next one at 12:11 (this was expressly in the terms of my reservation.) Of course, the already-more-expensive midday train also seemed to not have a youth ticket pricing option, meaning I had to put a balance on my credit card that took it from "Hm, I though European rail transport was supposed to be relatively inexpensive..." to "Uh, can I just get a 200-mile taxi ride?" prices. At 12:09, with a fresh ticket in hand, I attempt to put on my backpack, pick up my snowboard, guitar, and unreasonably-heavy jacket with books in its pockets, and run out onto the platform to find my train.
I learned something: 2 minutes is not enough time to both waddle around carrying too much stuff and be unsure of where exactly you're even headed. I never even saw my train on the platform. It left without me.
So I waddled back to the booth, swung my snowboard through the elaborate maze they use to keep people orderly, and asked to exchange my ticket for the next one, in three hours. Great, I miss a train, pay more to miss a second train, and now my trip is delayed by 4 hours, I have no way to contact the person who is supposed to pick me up and shelter me for the night, and I have to carry all this crap around Paris.
As I'm walking towards the entrance of the station with my new ticket in hand, wondering what I'm gonna do until 3:11, a man approaches me. I'm cautious but polite. He needs money to buy baby formula for his daughter. That seems like a reasonably achievable thing to do with God's money to bless someone in need. "Sure," I say, "I was going to try to find somewhere to eat out here, anyway. Let's grab some lunch and then we'll get the formula."
"Oh, thank you, brother! May God bless you, brother! Here, let me carry those for you. You're tired."
You know, he's right. I am tired. I just met this guy and he's trying to get money from me; I don't know how honest he is... but my snowboard and guitar are too heavy and awkward to carry for him to able to steal them.
We set my stuff down outside a little Greek deli or whatever and go in to order. Again, my stuff is too heavy for someone to just run by and grab it, and it's within my line of sight. I'll only be inside for 30 seconds, anyway. We pick a table out front on the sidewalk and sit down. When our food gets brought out, he runs inside to wash his hands before the meal, then comes back out to ask me if I'd like to do the same. We've been together for almost 10 minutes now, so I feel confident enough to leave my stuff with him because it will take me less time the wash my hands than it would take him to put on my backpack. Plus, I'm buying him lunch. I wouldn't steal a guy's stuff until after lunch.
As we eat, I find out a lot about this guy. He's from Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. He's 23 years old and has been married 5 years. He and his wife have 2 daughters: Angelica, age 3, and Alexandra, nearly 1, who needs the formula. When he told me "God Bless you," he meant it: Yugoslavia is a strongly Catholic country, and this guy has what seems to be genuine reverence and faith for Jesus. He told me about his siblings, about his mother that died when he was 13, about his alcoholic father who never took care of his kids. He came to France four years ago to try to make better money for the family he was starting. He's worked in landscaping and got some sort of certification or license to do that kind of work, but he's been unemployed for 6 months and he has to beg for money in the frequented places of Paris. I ask him his name, and I don't quite get it. He repeats it. It sounds like halfway between "John" and "Dio." It's just a one-syllable word with three diphthongs in it. I ask him to spell it for me. He says he's illiterate.
I tell him about myself, too. It was -5 Celsius where I'm from when I left. I have three siblings. I'm going to Switzerland to study evangelism. I'm in the middle of a book about stewardship of God's money. I tell him I've missed two trains in a row this morning so that I could buy him lunch, and now I'm here until 3 o'clock. He says that God set it up that way. I agree.
We were done eating, but it wasn't even 1. I had some time to kill. We walked over to a courtyard made of cobblestones and sat down and talked. We grabbed some coffee. He told me about some other needs he had besides the formula. He told me he lives in a trailer park at the end of the D line of the RER. His trailer is heated by gas, and he was almost out. He said it cost 50 euros for 2 weeks' worth.
Every time I start to trust someone who is drastically less privileged than I am, I wonder if I'm naif. Every time I give someone money, I wonder if they're taking advantage of me. Cynically, I could analyze the strategy that lines up with what he is doing, and that is everything that he should do.
Step 1: Go up to people at random and ask them for a small charity for a family in need.
Step 2: If they are charitable, try to build a rapport with them so that they trust and like you. Take as much time as they'll give you.
Step 3: Ask them to help you out with more substantial sums of money. Get as much as they will give you.
My father taught me something while I was growing up that I always thought was somewhere in the Bible. I did a search, and found Matthew 5:42: "Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."
Not wanting to take it out of context, I looked at the verses preceding it as well as the notes on that passage in my study Bible.
"But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."
I don't know what to make of this verse and this passage. There aren't quantifiers. Give to him who asks of you... All that he asks? All you can afford? Up to a set amount? Whatever number you see first when you close your eyes and spin and look up?
The theme connecting these verses seems to be "People are going to wrong you and take advantage of you, and if you are my servants, you will let them."
This is heavy.
I gave this guy money. I gave this guy all the money I felt like I could spare, but I stopped giving before he stopped asking.
Doctrinally (which means that it's supposed to be what's true but it doesn't make sense to me), I believe that God will provide for my needs, despite and above my naive, good-hearted mistakes. He put me in that situation when He could just as easily made my plane land early so I wouldn't have run into Djoh at all. Also, I happened to have a wad of cash on me that I had designated several months ago as "to be used for God's purposes" without knowing what that was supposed to be. And, of course the book I was reading. If I wasn't supposed to give this guy money, I don't know what I was supposed to learn in this circumstance.
Randy Alcorn's book makes the point that when we give money away (and this applies to anything,) we relinquish control of it. It's humility to give money to someone out of obedience to God when you have no idea if they're telling you the truth. But really, it's God's problem, if it's His money you're giving to the "wrong person," and it's His concern if that money leaves His child (you) in need, and He's big enough to handle both. We're small enough to trust and obey Him without questioning, arguing, justifying, or worrying. I believe God rewards faith and faithfulness in this.
I'm sure there are people who will read this who will call me an idiot and a fool. And, in some ways, I'm the worst kind.
Fool Type 1: Reckless, Thoughtless, Undisciplined Fool
I said above that I gave him as much as I felt I could afford. I use the word "felt" intentionally to indicate that I didn't really calculate what I could afford. This entire trip's budget is a little fuzzy, actually. In hard numbers with regular math, I could probably not have afforded to buy myself lunch in Paris, let alone lunch for this guy along with his groceries and utilities. I should have just eaten the stuff I had in my jacket pockets. I was already set up to rely on God's provision a little bit just to make it all come together, anyway. Now, my insufficient funds are even more not-$10,000. But that's what you're supposed to do: you're supposed to give. Not only have I heard countless stories of mysterious funds appearing for people who were faithful in giving, but it's in Malachi 3:10 "put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need."
Fool Type 2: Selfish, Faithless, Disobedient Fool
As I sort of left unresolved up there, when do I stop giving? I was willing to give a little. Baby formula; whatever. I was willing to buy him lunch, too. Yeah, that's not too bad. And, well, I had some Euros that weren't going to be useful to me once I entered Switzerland, so he would get better use out of them than I would. Also, the aforementioned wad of God cash. I would've felt guilty if I'd kept that with me and ended up spending it on myself. Yeah, so that should be enough for the gas to heat his home.
It felt good to unload some of the cash in my wallet. Then, he asked for something else, and I started to feel the sacrifice a little bit. I started to go "Hey, this is kinda a lot of money." I started to get a little more nervous. I went to the exchange booth and traded Dollars for Euros. Then I was out of cash besides Swiss Francs and Pounds, and he asked again. Well, I got the Swiss Francs for Switzerland. I'm gonna need those for me. And I probably wasn't going to cross the Channel just so I could get my money's worth out of 40 Pounds... oh, but they're old pounds, so the french currency changer doesn't want them. Oh, well, here are a few more dollars, cuz you can trade those in. But these Swiss Francs are mine.
He asked me to just get some more Euros out of the ATM. He knew I could; I knew I could. I didn't want to. I was nervous about getting surcharges, and I didn't want to deplete my store anymore.
What I currently have in my wallet, in Swiss Francs, is probably more than the total amount of money I gave him. I could have given it to him, and it would have been enough for him to get groceries for the week and fix (or upgrade) his trailer, he thought. But no. I'd decided that I'd helped him enough for one day at the beginning of 5 months of me not earning any money.
Sure, the rest of what I'd had was in currencies that aren't pertinent to my situation, but it's still money. I still could have traded it just like he did or saved it for when I went to the respective countries. Why did I trust God enough that he would be faithful to replenish the half of my cash that was less immediately useful to me but not the other half? I didn't really give til it hurt and then give some more. I more gave til it was uncomfortable and then got nervous and said "Ok, this has to stop some time, and it's about now."
At the end of every streak of success, there's a failure. At both ends. I have a tendency to focus on failures, both my own and others. But then I forget about the successes!
Djoh's daughter can have formula to drink tonight. That's awesome! He got lunch today. Honestly, I don't know if he bought a tank of gas to heat his trailer. If he did, Praise Jesus for putting that together! If he didn't, I was at least able to be unselfish for a while.
I have his phone number, so we can meet up at the end of May when I'm on my way back through Paris. In the meantime, pray for him and his family.
When I arrived in Paris, I was carrying appreciable quantities in four different currencies. When I left, I had $5 and 0 Euros.
It's curious. I went to a membership class for The Rock a few months ago. I grabbed the reading materials they offered, intending to really delve into the philosophy of the GCC movement and The Rock in particular, and hoping to become convinced of its Biblical basis, before pledging to become a member. Like all things I grab and intend to read, they ended up in the living room, in the kitchen, on my desk, in my car, on the floor, next to my bed, in my backpack that spent equal time in all these places, and generally distributed about my residence in a similar fashion to everything else I own, unread.
I really do intend to read things. If I believed it to be possible, I would read just about every book I've ever heard of. As it stands, my list of "half-reads to finish sometime" has stopped growing, because I'm focusing on building up my "grab hard copies at garage sales and never read" list. I guess I have trouble getting started on things, but only because I realized that I have trouble finishing things, and so I don't want to make the commitment. I digress. I feel like every paragraph should end with "I digress," every time I speak.
For convenience and economy, my guitar became my one carry-on item. This meant, therefore, that I had to find away to stuff all my traveling reading materials and snacks into the pockets of my jacket and the narrow front pouch on my guitar case. It so happens that, among the free reading materials I received at the membership class, there was one rather small and narrow book, just under 100 pages, which was exactly the right size to squeeze in on top of my guitar. So, I ended up with Randy Alcorn's "The Treasure Principle" among my only reading material for my travels.
Needless to say, I have read it in its entirety (though I admit I skimmed over the "31 Questions to Ask Yourself" without considering them all in depth, because that seemed like too many questions to answer right in a row.) It is different. It's interesting. It's inspiring. It makes sense in the perfect way. Like the way where I'm sure I'll be ridiculed if someone finds out I believe it.
There are too many good points in this little book for me to adequately sum it all up. One of them concerns the meaning of Matthew 6:21: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Where you put your money shows what you consider important, but it is also the case that when you put money into something, it becomes important to you. We want to protect our investment and to see something come of it.
Another principle is "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems." The author shares the story of a man rushing to find John Wesley with distressing news: Wesley's house had burned down. His response, paraphrased, is "That wasn't mine anyway; God granted me its use. Now, it's one less thing for me to worry about."
Anyway, this book really made an impression on me, and then I got off the plane.
Weeks ago, I found the cheapest ticket I could find for a bullet train to take me from Paris to Geneva and ordered it online. There was another train on the same itinerary an hour earlier and an hour later, but for some reason the 11:11 train was a better deal, so I booked it. Today, as my plane landed at 9:30 at the other end of an hour-long bus ride from the train station, I was left with very little time to get off and clear customs. Arriving at Gare de Lyon at 11:40 and having to wait in line for an open booth, I asked if I could change my expired ticket to the next one at 12:11 (this was expressly in the terms of my reservation.) Of course, the already-more-expensive midday train also seemed to not have a youth ticket pricing option, meaning I had to put a balance on my credit card that took it from "Hm, I though European rail transport was supposed to be relatively inexpensive..." to "Uh, can I just get a 200-mile taxi ride?" prices. At 12:09, with a fresh ticket in hand, I attempt to put on my backpack, pick up my snowboard, guitar, and unreasonably-heavy jacket with books in its pockets, and run out onto the platform to find my train.
I learned something: 2 minutes is not enough time to both waddle around carrying too much stuff and be unsure of where exactly you're even headed. I never even saw my train on the platform. It left without me.
So I waddled back to the booth, swung my snowboard through the elaborate maze they use to keep people orderly, and asked to exchange my ticket for the next one, in three hours. Great, I miss a train, pay more to miss a second train, and now my trip is delayed by 4 hours, I have no way to contact the person who is supposed to pick me up and shelter me for the night, and I have to carry all this crap around Paris.
As I'm walking towards the entrance of the station with my new ticket in hand, wondering what I'm gonna do until 3:11, a man approaches me. I'm cautious but polite. He needs money to buy baby formula for his daughter. That seems like a reasonably achievable thing to do with God's money to bless someone in need. "Sure," I say, "I was going to try to find somewhere to eat out here, anyway. Let's grab some lunch and then we'll get the formula."
"Oh, thank you, brother! May God bless you, brother! Here, let me carry those for you. You're tired."
You know, he's right. I am tired. I just met this guy and he's trying to get money from me; I don't know how honest he is... but my snowboard and guitar are too heavy and awkward to carry for him to able to steal them.
We set my stuff down outside a little Greek deli or whatever and go in to order. Again, my stuff is too heavy for someone to just run by and grab it, and it's within my line of sight. I'll only be inside for 30 seconds, anyway. We pick a table out front on the sidewalk and sit down. When our food gets brought out, he runs inside to wash his hands before the meal, then comes back out to ask me if I'd like to do the same. We've been together for almost 10 minutes now, so I feel confident enough to leave my stuff with him because it will take me less time the wash my hands than it would take him to put on my backpack. Plus, I'm buying him lunch. I wouldn't steal a guy's stuff until after lunch.
As we eat, I find out a lot about this guy. He's from Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. He's 23 years old and has been married 5 years. He and his wife have 2 daughters: Angelica, age 3, and Alexandra, nearly 1, who needs the formula. When he told me "God Bless you," he meant it: Yugoslavia is a strongly Catholic country, and this guy has what seems to be genuine reverence and faith for Jesus. He told me about his siblings, about his mother that died when he was 13, about his alcoholic father who never took care of his kids. He came to France four years ago to try to make better money for the family he was starting. He's worked in landscaping and got some sort of certification or license to do that kind of work, but he's been unemployed for 6 months and he has to beg for money in the frequented places of Paris. I ask him his name, and I don't quite get it. He repeats it. It sounds like halfway between "John" and "Dio." It's just a one-syllable word with three diphthongs in it. I ask him to spell it for me. He says he's illiterate.
I tell him about myself, too. It was -5 Celsius where I'm from when I left. I have three siblings. I'm going to Switzerland to study evangelism. I'm in the middle of a book about stewardship of God's money. I tell him I've missed two trains in a row this morning so that I could buy him lunch, and now I'm here until 3 o'clock. He says that God set it up that way. I agree.
We were done eating, but it wasn't even 1. I had some time to kill. We walked over to a courtyard made of cobblestones and sat down and talked. We grabbed some coffee. He told me about some other needs he had besides the formula. He told me he lives in a trailer park at the end of the D line of the RER. His trailer is heated by gas, and he was almost out. He said it cost 50 euros for 2 weeks' worth.
Every time I start to trust someone who is drastically less privileged than I am, I wonder if I'm naif. Every time I give someone money, I wonder if they're taking advantage of me. Cynically, I could analyze the strategy that lines up with what he is doing, and that is everything that he should do.
Step 1: Go up to people at random and ask them for a small charity for a family in need.
Step 2: If they are charitable, try to build a rapport with them so that they trust and like you. Take as much time as they'll give you.
Step 3: Ask them to help you out with more substantial sums of money. Get as much as they will give you.
My father taught me something while I was growing up that I always thought was somewhere in the Bible. I did a search, and found Matthew 5:42: "Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."
Not wanting to take it out of context, I looked at the verses preceding it as well as the notes on that passage in my study Bible.
"But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."
I don't know what to make of this verse and this passage. There aren't quantifiers. Give to him who asks of you... All that he asks? All you can afford? Up to a set amount? Whatever number you see first when you close your eyes and spin and look up?
The theme connecting these verses seems to be "People are going to wrong you and take advantage of you, and if you are my servants, you will let them."
This is heavy.
I gave this guy money. I gave this guy all the money I felt like I could spare, but I stopped giving before he stopped asking.
Doctrinally (which means that it's supposed to be what's true but it doesn't make sense to me), I believe that God will provide for my needs, despite and above my naive, good-hearted mistakes. He put me in that situation when He could just as easily made my plane land early so I wouldn't have run into Djoh at all. Also, I happened to have a wad of cash on me that I had designated several months ago as "to be used for God's purposes" without knowing what that was supposed to be. And, of course the book I was reading. If I wasn't supposed to give this guy money, I don't know what I was supposed to learn in this circumstance.
Randy Alcorn's book makes the point that when we give money away (and this applies to anything,) we relinquish control of it. It's humility to give money to someone out of obedience to God when you have no idea if they're telling you the truth. But really, it's God's problem, if it's His money you're giving to the "wrong person," and it's His concern if that money leaves His child (you) in need, and He's big enough to handle both. We're small enough to trust and obey Him without questioning, arguing, justifying, or worrying. I believe God rewards faith and faithfulness in this.
I'm sure there are people who will read this who will call me an idiot and a fool. And, in some ways, I'm the worst kind.
Fool Type 1: Reckless, Thoughtless, Undisciplined Fool
I said above that I gave him as much as I felt I could afford. I use the word "felt" intentionally to indicate that I didn't really calculate what I could afford. This entire trip's budget is a little fuzzy, actually. In hard numbers with regular math, I could probably not have afforded to buy myself lunch in Paris, let alone lunch for this guy along with his groceries and utilities. I should have just eaten the stuff I had in my jacket pockets. I was already set up to rely on God's provision a little bit just to make it all come together, anyway. Now, my insufficient funds are even more not-$10,000. But that's what you're supposed to do: you're supposed to give. Not only have I heard countless stories of mysterious funds appearing for people who were faithful in giving, but it's in Malachi 3:10 "put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need."
Fool Type 2: Selfish, Faithless, Disobedient Fool
As I sort of left unresolved up there, when do I stop giving? I was willing to give a little. Baby formula; whatever. I was willing to buy him lunch, too. Yeah, that's not too bad. And, well, I had some Euros that weren't going to be useful to me once I entered Switzerland, so he would get better use out of them than I would. Also, the aforementioned wad of God cash. I would've felt guilty if I'd kept that with me and ended up spending it on myself. Yeah, so that should be enough for the gas to heat his home.
It felt good to unload some of the cash in my wallet. Then, he asked for something else, and I started to feel the sacrifice a little bit. I started to go "Hey, this is kinda a lot of money." I started to get a little more nervous. I went to the exchange booth and traded Dollars for Euros. Then I was out of cash besides Swiss Francs and Pounds, and he asked again. Well, I got the Swiss Francs for Switzerland. I'm gonna need those for me. And I probably wasn't going to cross the Channel just so I could get my money's worth out of 40 Pounds... oh, but they're old pounds, so the french currency changer doesn't want them. Oh, well, here are a few more dollars, cuz you can trade those in. But these Swiss Francs are mine.
He asked me to just get some more Euros out of the ATM. He knew I could; I knew I could. I didn't want to. I was nervous about getting surcharges, and I didn't want to deplete my store anymore.
What I currently have in my wallet, in Swiss Francs, is probably more than the total amount of money I gave him. I could have given it to him, and it would have been enough for him to get groceries for the week and fix (or upgrade) his trailer, he thought. But no. I'd decided that I'd helped him enough for one day at the beginning of 5 months of me not earning any money.
Sure, the rest of what I'd had was in currencies that aren't pertinent to my situation, but it's still money. I still could have traded it just like he did or saved it for when I went to the respective countries. Why did I trust God enough that he would be faithful to replenish the half of my cash that was less immediately useful to me but not the other half? I didn't really give til it hurt and then give some more. I more gave til it was uncomfortable and then got nervous and said "Ok, this has to stop some time, and it's about now."
At the end of every streak of success, there's a failure. At both ends. I have a tendency to focus on failures, both my own and others. But then I forget about the successes!
Djoh's daughter can have formula to drink tonight. That's awesome! He got lunch today. Honestly, I don't know if he bought a tank of gas to heat his trailer. If he did, Praise Jesus for putting that together! If he didn't, I was at least able to be unselfish for a while.
I have his phone number, so we can meet up at the end of May when I'm on my way back through Paris. In the meantime, pray for him and his family.
Beginning
Part 1:
Local time: 20:51
I've been in the same clothes for 34.5 hours. During that time I've slept for a total of what can't be more than 4 hours on 3 different vehicles. One thing I learned on my trans-Atlantic flight is that you're never going to find a comfortable sleeping position. You have to fall asleep first, and then your body will relax and fall into the best way to slump or lay or lean in your seat. I woke up in positions that I didn't realize were ideal until I moved, at which time I immediately regretted it.
There is much to be said, but first, I am going to shower.
Local time: 20:51
I've been in the same clothes for 34.5 hours. During that time I've slept for a total of what can't be more than 4 hours on 3 different vehicles. One thing I learned on my trans-Atlantic flight is that you're never going to find a comfortable sleeping position. You have to fall asleep first, and then your body will relax and fall into the best way to slump or lay or lean in your seat. I woke up in positions that I didn't realize were ideal until I moved, at which time I immediately regretted it.
There is much to be said, but first, I am going to shower.
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