June 2008 – No Small Talk

5 years ago today.

On this day in 2003 Alexis and I began our courtship. In about a week and a half (July 9th) we’ll celebrate two years of marriage. God has been amazing through these years, it has been far from smooth. At times it seemed it would end in disaster, but as long as we hung onto what we knew was true of God we slowly began to realize what God believed in each of us, by using each of us to see our human flesh through another’s eyes. This picture is from that very day.

Also Emma will be three months old on our anniversary! Time is flying so fast.

Portland Polish community in the news

Was just searching the internet and found an article in the Portland tribune on the Polish community here. I was looking for the hours of the Polish Cafe and found an article dated June 12th, 2008! Some friends of ours and us are going there today, hopefully we’ll be able to check out some DVDs from the Polish library right above the cafe.

Polska w Pazdzierniku (Poland in October)

I know this doesn’t apply to many of you, but for those that may be available!

We would like to have a finalized team of 4 people for our trip in October (we leave on the 4th, arrive on the 5th and leave on the 18th). While we are leaving for 2 weeks it is possible for you to either come late or leave early during our time there. So if it is vacation time/schedule problem we are flexible! Please, don’t worry about the money, the sooner we know the full size of our team the sooner we can properly plan fundraising events. We have only had to self-fund a very small portion of our trips, God provides in so many amazing ways.

So what might we be doing, you ask?

Our passions that we would like to bring to the younger generation revolve around small group ministry. We have been using John and Sonja Decker’s book “Holy Spirit Empowered Small Groups” in our own home group, and have seen amazing results with our group going and growing deeper in ways that unhide our shame and speak grace into the dark parts of our past and present.

We will be doing Language School as well, so that will take up a chunk of our time in the day time (Mon thru Fri), our friends who come with us will be watching our daughter, but will be available in any tangible way to serve the Polish people (moving, painting, etc) if there is not anything along those lines than they’ll be having prayer walks around the city and whoever wants to join them is welcome.

Also we are open to meet with people/couples for coffee or in their homes, simply to encourage them and build relationships. We envision taking 3 or 4 nights a week doing a home/small group intensive based on the book. The rest of our time and focus would be on language, sharing with our team mates Poland, praying, and serving in whatever ways we can, by meeting with people and anything else that may come up. We want to focus on character discipleship.

We hope to visit the Nowy Targ/Zakopane area on the weekend of the 10-12 (Fri-Sat), but the details of this are sketchy at best. We are looking into staying at a hotel, and are also open to the possibility of staying in host homes, but we do not want to be a burden on anyone, so only if there are people who are desiring to host us, otherwise we are fine with staying in a hotel/hostel.

Please respond only if you are truly interested, for this to work for us, we really need 2 more people. Thanks and blessings!

This sums up my last two days…

Yeah, thankfully I didn’t do anything like this, just everyone else around me did… I guess that’s what happens when you’re the IT guy trying to get an entire network back up.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4a1z7NLnNk&hl=en]

How do you herd cats?

People are incredibly hard to motivate. In fact, while we try to fund raise it feels we are trying to herd cats. This little video demonstrates how effective we feel:

So the question becomes; how do we effectively fund raise? Our resources are scarce and we have even less time.

Here’s our list of ideas:

Doing a Polish dinner/dessert fundraiser night (people come expecting to donate and hear what we are doing, in person, and relationally based) – requires money to make money and time consuming.
Making a video of Alexis and I on what we do in Poland, that we upload to all of our different social web places. – free, except time consuming.
Send out support letters in the snail mail (electronic ones just don’t seem to be doing the job) – medium amount of time and money.

We may have to do a combination of all of those. Our goal right now is get our airfare paid, it keeps going up, and we can’t have more of that!

Gotta pray, gotta ask, gotta receive.

There’s going to be a loud explosion.

In a number of places I have a few ideas… now I’m hoping they are explosive, but they just might thud, but that’s okay. Taking risks always leads to growth when you’re living in the Kingdom.

If only trains worked in America

I love trains, I would love to see high speed, competitively priced trains in America… but we would need so much investment to make it work, and even then Air travel is much more efficient for a nation the size of ours. Now if we all agreed to sell every straight path between all our major cities, and somehow paid for all of this, than it might work… here’s an interesting article.

Voice from the past

Every once and a while I browse my archives, sometimes I’m embarrassed by what I have written, and I’m tempted to change old posts, but I never have. Other times I’m in awe of the stuff I’ve written, and think to myself “what happened”? Then there are some entries that I think, “why on earth did I ever write that“?

But alas, for whatever reason (maybe possession?) I felt the need to write those things and so they will forever (unless Google dies) be here, for whoever to see. These words are me, my past, my present, and my future. The voice of my past, does not define who I am today, nor does it define my future, but it does show the fingerprints of God on my life. Every blessing he poors out I will turn to praise, and no matter what I have, or what I don’t have, I will say blessed be his name.

When God speaks… courage is needed.

This morning at church God spoke to me about some pretty crazy things. Asking for sacrifices in mine and Alexis’ life that just would never make sense on paper. Could certainly use some prayer on these ones. It all fits into our calling, doesn’t change who we are, nor does it look that different on the surface, just requires us to communicate more of our hearts.

Stay tuned, courage is needed because sacrificing hurts.

You want me to what what?

Life (or God, haven’t figure out which yet) seems to keep putting me in the midst of inter-relational unrest lately. For the most part this doesn’t freak me out, but when it happens at work, at home, at church, and amongst friends, than I get a bit fatigued.

It is in these times that I must remind myself and live by God’s prompting that true love is a love that loves through these things. A love that corrects, a love that remains faithful to God’s character, a love that is humble, and a love that has no end. Will everyone accept correction, no, but it is still my responsibility to speak what God puts on my heart, but it is not my responsibility for someone to correct themselves. I will speak truth in love with grace.

I will not continue to throw pearls to the swine, I will not continue to invest in those that can’t accept the loving truth, but I will plant the truth when the soil is fertile. Even when I am fatigued from the energy of it, for relationships are the fabric of life.