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.
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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!
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The other day I was walking from our apartment to the OM headquarters, and the wind was so fierce that I walked in a zigzag—when I lifted a leg the wind blew it off the course I had planned. I was almost knocked off the sidewalk, and was laughing at how powerless I was against the might wind.
It turns out it was no laughing matter, as this wind killed many and did much damage across the continent. Stones were blowing off buildings….
Yesterday we had a day off and went to Ghent. No rain and no wind—a perfect day for a family outing. We discovered a beautiful city, and you can see lots of pictures here. Although many of the pictures are nice, you won’t see any pictures of the most amazing thing we saw: St. Baaf’s Cathedral. They did not allow photographs.
St. Baaf’s turned out to be much more than I bargained for. I originally went there to see Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb—a painting I had fallen in love with a few decades ago when I saw it on the cover of Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? It was glorious indeed—but the rest of the cathedral overwhelmed me with its beauty. (more…)
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 1Â Enjoy!
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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:
Two highlights from today: the sermon, and there were no clouds in the sky (first time since we arrived). Since I assume you’ve seen a clear sky before, I’ll only record here my sermon notes for your nourishment.
The sermon was preached by a man named Ted, who took his text from John 17 – the basic idea had to do with leadership, particularly of our children. He asked the question from verse 4, “Wouldn’t you like to say this at the end of your life: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.†I can answer that: Yes!
Ted illustrated leadership from Christ in this prayer in seven points:
Saturday morning we went for a “pray-walk” through Quartier Marolles. This is an area in which the Bennetches are hoping to put in place a new ministry like a coffee house or welcome center—so while we walked and prayed, we kept our eyes open for rental properties. This section of the city was outside the wall in the middle ages, and since then it has been home to the marginalized and the lawless. Yes, there are some posh boutiques there—but many of the residents are on the other end of the social spetrum. We also saw Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s home (closed for some work), the humongous supreme-court building, the famous flea market, and, on the way back from the Marolles, chocolate by the man voted the world’s greatest chocolate maker last year.
We had a leisurely lunch at a Turkish restaurant with the Bennetches, then Ethan and I toured the Musee Royaux des Beaux Arts (he endured it like a trooper). Although I went to the museum to see Brueghel and Reubens, I discovered a lovely cubist painting of a writer (see the small image above).
You can see pictures of all this at our new gallery.