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Not only did we miss our conference when we missed our connecting flight on Friday, but we missed a chance to play in the snow! Here’s a snapshot from yesterday, taken by some friends we were hoping to see:

Here’s a lovely aerial view of Trnava, the city in Slovakia we hope to call “home.” This view is looking toward the southeast.

Click on the picture to see a larger version, and to browse some other pictures of Trnava and Slovakia. In the larger view you will be able to see that the center of the city is marked by churches, spires, and interesting old architecture. That center is surrounded by the ugly communist-era high-rise apartment buildings called Paneláky. They are everywhere in eastern Europe.

By the way, you can see the soccer stadium on the far right-had side of the picture, about halfway up (or down)—the seats in the stadium are colored to spell “Trnava.”

When I was in the sixth grade I read some Sherlock Holmes and a few terrifying stories by Edgar Allan Poe. I only remember one book I read in the seventh grade: The Yearling. I don’t recall anything specific from eighth grade, but I know I read The Last of the Mohicans in the ninth.

I’m going to list below the books that Kristian and Ethan have read so far this year. Keep in mind that Kristian, at 13, is about the age I was in seventh grade. Keep in mind also that they aren’t just reading these books, but studying them—Kristian in particular has many challenging writing assignments to help him reflect on what he reads.

And one question for you: how many of these have you read? I confess I have not read all of them myself! (more…)

With all the preparations for preaching and presenting the Slovakia mission, and all the cross-cultural studies, I think I’ve been coming down with a case of PDS – Poetry Deficiency Syndrome. This is a rare disease – there are maybe two or three cases of it in the world each year, and those usually go unreported. It’s brought on by prolonged periods during which the one who is afflicted is distracted from his poetry books and unable to find half an hour alone to read something with richness and rhythm.

The symptoms often go undetected: impared speech (talking in mono-syllables, inserting filler phrases such as “you know” and “it was like”), blurred vision (inability to see beyond the next task on the to-do list), and restless but dreamless sleep. I finally had to resort to some Auden and Keats the past few days. But since I’ve been studying how different cultures perceive time, I’ll stick with that theme and treat you here to a haunting dialogue between a lover and Time.

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
  I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
  “Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

“I’ll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world.” (more…)

I’m continuing to read Edward T. Hall’s The Dance of Life, and I’m astounded at some of his insights. He’s helping me to see, for example, how in some ways Paula and I have veriy different concepts of time—not unlike some of the differences that often frustrate people from different cultures when they try to work together. In Hall’s terminology, Paula lives primarily on polychronic time, while I live primarily on monochronic time. Monochronic time is that of the northern Europeans—linear, one activity at a time, with a clear beginning and a clear end. Polychronic time is experience in many simultaneous activities, never really beginning or ending, simply weaving their way through life. And along those lines I’m mulling over the following quotation that describes our American and European conception of time. I’m trying to figure out how it relates to a biblical view of time. Perhaps you could offer some insights in comments. (more…)

I’ll get to the kissing in a minute…. 

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, in the introduction to his study of time and culture called The Dance of Life, describes a Primary Level Culture (PLC) as a “hidden cultural grammar” that “defines the way in which people view the world, determines their values, and establishes the basic tempo and rhythms of life.” Then he makes this telling comment: “One of the principal characteristics of PL culture is that it is particularly resistant to manipulative attempts to change it from the outside.”

We discussed some implications of this in our cross-cultural training in Brussels, but rather than explore it abstractly, I’d like to illustrate it….

While we were in Brussels last month we were assigned to a French-speaking congregation. We were introduced to the church by a US missionary who works with them. He carefully explained to us that in this congregation the greeting is a kiss: place your right cheek against the right cheek of the person you are greeting, and make the kissing sound with your lips. He also explained how he was uncomfortable with it when he first arrived, and for a while extended his hand to shake, in order to avoid the kiss. (more…)

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:

But how about this:

We found one in a shop in Brussels. (Mom should be warned that we bought her birthday present in this store.)