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The good thing about our traveling has always been the people we have met. I believe that will remain the same over the next few months. Here is our itinerary, which I ask you to commend to God in your prayers.

• May 18-20: South Dayton PCA, Dayton, Ohio, Enemy Within conference
• May 27: All Saints PCA, Austin, Texas, Present the Slovakia mission
• Jun 3-8: Ridge Haven, North Carolina, MTW Living in Grace Conference
• Jun 9-10: Grace PCA, McAllen, Texas, Present the Slovakia mission
• Jun 15-17: Grace PCA, Shreveport, Louisiana, Enemy Within conference and present the Slovakia mission
• Jun 22-24: South Baton Rouge PCA, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Enemy Within conference and present the Slovakia mission
• Jun 29-30: Vista New Life church, El Paso, Texas, Enemy Within conference and present the Slovakia mission
• Jul 1: Grace Covenant PCA, Las Cruces, New Mexico, Present the Slovakia mission
• Jul 7: Calvary Chapel DC Metro, Falls Church, Virginia, Enemy Within conference and present the Slovakia mission
• Jul 7, Columbia Baptist, Falls Church, Virginia, preach their Saturday evening service
• Jul 8: The Harvester PCA, Springfield, Virginia

If you prayed for our ministry in Midland this weekend, you can take great satisfaction in knowing that your prayers were answed—and certainly beyond anything I expected or imagined. We were in Midland, Texas, and ministered at two different venues. I’ll write about the first in this post.

The Christian Life Center hosted an Enemy Within conference Friday evening and Saturday. Billy Raies, the pastor, was a close friend of mine in high school, and has grown into one of the most loving servants of Jesus I’ve ever met. He looked out for our every need and desire with a doting but sincere affection and joy. He also showed keen insight as a shepherd of God’s flock: between my talks he was able to find key points for his own congregation and apply them—all done with the greatest encouragement imaginable.

The worship team at CLC enriched our time together with songs of depth and joy. Each time they led us in worship, I had the feeling that when they finished there was really no need for me to even speak. For just a dim taste, you can enjoy the theme song here. Look for “O Great God” in the song list at this link. You can listen to it, get the sheet music, buy it, download it, read the lyrics. The album is based on a book of puritan prayers called Valley of Vision.

God is good!

We were required to write a reflection paper at the end of our month of training in Brussels. Here are my concluding paragraphs:

After a shower the mirror is fogged over. In order to see something, you can take a cloth and wipe a little “hole” in the fog—enough to see your face and shave. Over time the mirror clears more and more—if you open the door and a rush of dry air comes in, a large section of the mirror might clear up quickly.

I took a shower when we visited Slovakia in May. When I came home I knew what I wanted to do, but my view of it was all fogged over. At REV in August, when Tom Courtney said “Welcome to MTW,” he took a cloth and wiped some of the fog away quickly—and in my heart I said “What have I done!” (To mix my metaphors, I was like one of the ghosts on the bus tour of heaven in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, and when I stepped onto the real grass of heaven it hurt my feet.) (more…)

Here’s the fourth and final edition of our internal newsletter at PFT: Rainy Days 4

To view the PDF, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader:

Here’s the third edition of our internal newsletter at PFT: Rainy Days 3 I wrote the thing about truth in the museum—Auden’s poem is great. There’s also an odd picture of me working on some vowel-pronunciation in our language-acquisition training.

To view the PDF, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader:

Perhaps in Belgium there are no truth-in-advertising laws. Although we like Dr. Pepper and are glad we can get it, the promise on the can (“Solves all your problems”) seems a bit much—and it hasn’t held true so far.

I haven’t written in several days for two reasons: 1) Paula and I have been sick all week and 2) we have been in language-acquisition training all day every day. Paula and I are now on the mend, but Kristian is coming down with it. In fact, about half the trainees here have been sick this past week, some of them much worse than we. And we understand it is a kind of tradition—it has happened every time MTW has done this pre-field training, except once in New York.

But being sick is far less interesting than the language-acquisition training. We have been taught this week by two utterly amazing people: Dwight and Barbara Gradin. They are PCA missionaries that work with Mission Training International in Colorado Springs. They lead the PILAT program (Program in Language Acquisition Techniques), and have done so for many years—so many years, in fact, that they did the training for some of our mentors here who have been missionaries for thirty years.

In fact, the Gradins look like just another nice elderly couple when you meet them. They don’t look like superstars—they look more like someone’s grandparents. But this week they oozed wisdom out of their fingertips, and gave us their profound insights into language, mesmerized us with their stories of missions before they founded the PILAT program, and transformed our perspectives on the way we will approach learning our languages when we get to our respective fields. (more…)

Here’s the second edition of our internal newsletter at PFT: Rainy Days 2 I wrote the little article on chocolate. The mini-interview on the right column with a comment from me gets a few facts garbled—just like professional journalists!

To view the PDF, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader:

We played an interesting game today. We were divided into five groups, each sitting at a different table. We were given instructions to read for a card game we were to play. We were given five minutes at the table to study the instructions, then they were taken away and we were not allowed to speak at all for the rest of the game—though we could make hand and facial gestures.

One of the rules was that at the end of a round (five minutes), the person with the most points at each table would rotate to the next table (clockwise), and the person with the least points would rotate to the next table (counter-clockwise). Then we played the next round.

Perhaps you know how this works: each table was given different rules. So you can imagine the disorientation when I moved to another table and expected the Ace to be high card, when in fact it was low—and that the trump suit had changed from diamonds to clubs—and that there were now duplicate cards in the deck, so some tricks were one by playing paper-scissors-rock. And then imagine my frustration when I finally figured out the new rules by which to play, and the round ended and we rotated again!

Of course, this was an object lesson about how we learn the “rules” of a new culture. And it was fun.

I’m on the communications team here in Brussels, and our primary task is to produce a weekly newsletter. Here’s the first edition, which includes a handsome photo of Ethan and a lead article by yours truly: Rainy Days 1 Enjoy!

To view the PDF, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader:

Today was solid classroom—and the kind that gets you hungry to get out and test what you learn in real life. John Leonard of Westminster Seminary lectured. Tons of meat, very provocative, and I hope to put much of what he said into practice someday. Too much to capture, but here are some key insights:

• Western individualism is a heresy. What western evangelistic presentation emphasizes the importance of the church? Yet the reformers insisted that outside the church there is no salvation.
• Salvation is by grace, and we have all been given grace upon grace, so our mission is to give grace to others. But is this the way we approach coming to church—is this why we come to church? We should come because we have grace to give others, and because they have grace that we need. (more…)