Swedish Update #2

Part I: Why I am spending a year of my life living in an orphanage studying the bible.

If this season along the banks of the Skaggerak is a chapter in my life, it is a part of a book of my life, one that started in September of 2010, and it started with a choice. I was lying in my bed, facing the imminent terror of graduating college and not knowing what was next. The dilemma I faced was centered both around how uncertain all of life can feel and about what it meant when I believed to myself that I was a Christian. In a way, the second part was easy - It didn’t trouble me that I was a Christian, I had come to a point in my relationship with God that I knew that was what I needed, but I didn’t know what that implied for the actual patterns in which I lived my life. I found myself torn between how safe and easy it would be to just go and find a job somewhere, earn some money, be comfortable. I knew in my heart from the beginning that this wasn’t going to be an option for me; life is too short and too filled with wonder to squander on comfort and security. The other option was to legitimately give up all resemblance of a normal life and legitimately depend on God and earnestly try to fulfill his commandment: to love him and to love others. 

A premise tempted me, though, one perhaps more dangerous than before. Live wild and free, for a year or two. save some souls, feel the air as it radiates off the hot pavement of a long road - then pack it in, go home and be normal. Get some degree that assures me a comfortable life. I am convinced that this is the more dangerous lie for me, because of how nice it sounds. But it worked for good, getting me out of the door. I spent those lovely seasons in Kirksville and Thailand, enjoying every minute of the air through my skin, as though I needed to get it all in before the road ended in some place of comfort where I didn’t have to think so much about how life can be so beautiful and yet so ugly, so joyful and yet so sad. But through the whole thing, something even more dangerous and wonderful happened. I realized that I had been set free, free from normal. As a good friend of mine put it, “We have enough people choosing the life that comes to them when they don’t put up a fight, and I don’t intend to be one more.” And it was as if I was climbing a hill, thinking that the place I was reaching towards was just over the ridge, and when I came to the peak, before me the path of discipleship stretched endlessly into the future, across a thousand peaks and into the horizon. None of that is to say I have my whole life figured out, I don’t. I don’t even know what happens in July when I finish my studies here. I only know that I want to be kind, not as a hobby but as something I do with my life. I gave up that normal life, and the new one is as exciting as it is terrifying. 

And there were a few things that occurred to me when I decided to give up the normal life. It meant that I had to trust God to be my provider. It meant that I wouldn’t always be comfortable, and that I would even be risking my neck, knowing that if God is real whatever happens is his will. I have learned to be grateful for everything. But let us not be naive: it meant that I needed to be equipped. When I would say that I believed in God and Jesus and what it said in the bible, I really meant it, but there was this part of the truth that rang hollow. I believed in it, but I didn’t really know what it said, which robbed me of any sense of authority. I believe in the church, not as a bureaucratic institution but as a literal family. I believe that if the church fulfills its’ calling, we can provide solutions to the great problems of the world. But I don’t think we are what we ought to be, I think something is terribly wrong with what we’ve done here, and I think our generation can fix it. And if I am to speak that with authority, I ought to know what I am talking about. And the thing is, I don’t think this is just for me, I think it’s something at the very heart of discipleship, that most believers neglect at their own expense. That isn’t to say SBS is for everyone, but that inductive study of the bible is for all believers. I am convinced that the reason why the gospel isn’t appealing to many people is that many of the people that proclaim it don’t actually know what it says. I intend to contribute to the solution to that statistic.

So I knew I wanted to study the bible. Here’s why I chose SBS: It forced me to give up all of the bad reasons. It isn’t accredited, so I won’t have a shiny piece of paper to wave around to anyone to show how qualified I am. It isn’t preparing me for some specific occupation. It’s preparing me for life. SBS is an inductive study, which means we emphasize with everything what it actually means for the way we live our lives. Every day I am confronted truth that I’m forced to deal with. I don’t know what happens from here, but I know that what I’m learning is important because what I’m learning is about who I’m becoming.

Part II: The Restenäs Life

It’s hard to know what to say in a way that could translate, so much of it it feels as if one would just have to be here. 

I am grateful to God. for everything. For the little patch of Sweden I call home, for this place and these people, for all of the people and places on all the paths I have traveled that brought me to here. I’m grateful for the morning walk to breakfast, hours before the sun will rise, to eat muesli and drink coffee and appreciate waking up as a sort of an act of worship. I’m grateful that I get to do this, to set aside time to grow and to wonder and to rest and to explore. I’m grateful for the path to the sea, the path to the mountain, for undiscovered corridors and attics filled with wonders, like flags and newspapers in swedish from a century ago. I’m grateful for long walks into town that take me over large hills, and how from the top of them I can see the ocean, and for the detours along the path that let me walk along the rocky coast. I’m grateful for fika, the lovely Swedish tradition to emphasize how important it is that every day we make time for each other. at 10:30 every morning the entire base (and all of Sweden) drops what we’re doing and we sit at a table with one another drinking coffee and sharing life together. I’m grateful for how hard it is, how studying the bible 50 hours a week pushes me and forces me to grow, and how there are days that I wake up and I don’t feel like it, but I find the strength to do it anyway. I’m grateful for how cold it is getting, how short the days are becoming, how our scarves and coats become more and more mandatory. I’m grateful to have a home, a room that overlooks a lovely valley, and the feeling that I can settle for a while and invest in this community. I’m grateful for how simple my life is for this season, how I never have to drive anywhere and all of my meals feel as if we’re sitting around a family dinner table. I'm grateful for how kind people can be, for friends who take care of me when I'm sick and who share life with me. I’m grateful that learning about the meaning of life is my job. I’m grateful for relying on I’m grateful for all of the many people I miss so dearly, because the longing reminds me of how much I love them. And I’m grateful for Jesus Christ, who not only saved me from death, but saved me for a life of meaning and beauty. I am grateful for the life I have, and I am excited to find out where it goes from here.

There’s more I could say. I find it hard to write because I’m very busy studying the other six days of the week, and life is too short to spend so much of it on the internet. If you want to know more about my life in this season, actually get ahold of me! Send me letters! Draw me pictures to put on my wall!

Austin Roberts / SBS Sept 2012

Restenäs 239

459 93 Ljungskile

Sweden

(All YWAMers depend on support and are basically unemployed vagabonds. I am committed to providing for my school, but if you want to help let me know! If you can afford but a postage stamp, send me a letter and say hello and that would be blessing enough. End of plug.)

pictures only prove you can't convince.

Hello again, dear readers. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It has been a long summer, one I decided to take a sabbatical from blogging for, and now the summer is over and I will do my best to bring you inquisitive ones up to speed with where I am now.

Greetings from my new home. I’m sure at some point pictures of my new home and my family here will come, but I will indulge myself with a description. I like that better, because even if I could transport you to where you could fully picture this place, to stand in a photograph isn’t the same as to dwell in a place. I live in a small village in Sweden called Restenäs. It is about an hour’s walk to the closest town, Ljungskile (pronounced Yew'ng-skeelay). All around me are bouldering hills and clouds and wildgrass and tall trees. I live in a big brick building called Solbacken, which began its’ life as an orphanage but now houses disciples of all kinds who come here to Restenäs to study in the various schools that are taking place. We have four schools going on right now as well as many people who live here in positions of ministry, so the whole campus is alive with people of all kinds from all places. Our collective home for this season consists of a large handful of buildings which dot the circumference of a large field where several cattle endlessly chew away at tufts of wildgrass. Across the road and through many yards of wooded glen, there lies a saltwater bay, and beyond that the island Orust, and beyond that the Skaggerak straight which connects the North sea to the Baltic. The sea is filled with plankton which shimmer out with bioluminescent light when one runs their hands through the waters.

Every morning begins before the sun has made its’ way over the hill, and by 6:50 I’ll be bundled up and on my way across the field to our dining hall for breakfast. All of my days are filled with all sorts of wonderful disciples and servants from all over our lovely planet that fill my life with joy. I get three lovely meals each day prepared by our cooks Maarten and Pierre, and I have a warm bed and our village has wonderful trails that allow us to see all the pastures and hills that surround us. Every morning we have fika, that grand swedish tradition where all of us sit down as a big family for tea. All of our days are spent in fellowship - walking and having fun, fulfilling our daily chores. My chore is to help run the café in our main fellowship building - brewing fika and cleaning so that everyone can have a place to fellowship. In addition to this - the reason I'm here, in fact, is a nine month inductive study of the bible through the School of Biblical Studies. It's going to be a long and lovely winter.

To have a home on this earth is one of those most tenuous and special things for me, and I can’t say how grateful I am to get to have one here for a time. I will speak more of all of these things later, dear friends. I’m glad you’re reading! I don’t know how often I’ll be able to update and muse during these next few seasons, as things are about to get very busy. Give me grace as I do the best I can, and if you haven’t subscribed do so as this is the most frequent way I will be updating. More to come soon.

Tack för läsning!

unread books and unwritten essays

Creating something beautiful and meaningful is hard. I know I haven't blogged in a while and it's no accident; I've made a few basic attempts and thrown them out. I find that whenever I "want to create something beautiful" I end up with rubbish, and it's only when I let the chaos take over and the order of the universe throw something beautiful in my lap do I have any odds whatsoever of coming up with something that someone else would gain anything from reading. Otherwise this whole thing, writing in general, becomes politics. "What can I say to somehow win people over?" It's all vanity. Therefore I must approach this whole business not like a general bent on conquest but rather like a meek child staring into the night sky, filled with all its' distant unreachable stars, shouting a verse into the universe in hopes of coming up with some meaning to it all. This isn't just a metaphor, I actually did this once, in the middle of the night with the new moon bringing clarity to all the sparkling stars and the peaceful riverside along the Nam Kading river as it merges so peacefully into the Mekong. And it was odd how such a scene takes the shouts out of my mouth and reduces me to whispers. And even if that's all I have to work with, here's a few whispers into the darkness.

I'm back in America now, and it's always a thing that causes me much inner wrestling; not so much the specifics of the place itself but what it represents in my mind. 'Home', perhaps, and many of the things that word might imply, but also the old self, the me I used to be. I walk down roads I've walked before and I think of the ways my mind used to work and what used to matter to me. The unimportant things I used as foundations for my decisions, the selfishness that seemed to cripple me. It's as though I find myself in an old faded photograph from a time a part of me never wanted to remember. There's this weird irrational fear in the back of my mind that the mystic properties of the place itself might cause me to relapse, to take a step back into the old me that was capable of such silly and damaging mistakes, to be so careless and thoughtless and foolish. I had these same feelings last summer when my entire world seemed to be falling apart, so I printed out about 40 pictures from better times in my life as a sort of a constant reminder that the past happened - even the good parts. especially the good parts. And it gives this neglected room some color and some warmth in spite of itself.

It's odd to me how a bedroom can take on a sort of mythical symbolism to it. It's "my room", this brick of space about 12 feet by 10 feet by 8 feet that's specifically designated to me. As one inhabits a place for a decade or two all of the charachter of it begins to bend to the character of the one who occupies it. The dings in the walls and the new paint job from when the 8-year-old version of me would have temper tantrums and kick the wall until it was brown. The old furntire, some of which was given to me and some of which was cast off by others, only to be rescued. I have all these books in my room. Stacks of them, and the sad thing is that I haven't yet gotten to most of them. I wonder if I'm really the best steward of them, wonder if I should give them away so they might get read and appreciated by someone who doesn't spread themselves so thin.

The old things intrigue me in a new way. What was once the future is now the past, and what once seemed so mysterious and dangerous and risky now feels conquered. This feeling that I made it to this point in spite of all of life's twists and turns gives me hope as I look ahead, into the dark speckled night sky that is our future, something that at once seems both so mysterious and yet so inevitable.

the things you carry.

The old things ending are only a sign of something new.

Ohh, haven't forgotten about you, friends. I've actually written a handful of drafts for different blog ideas I've had floating around, but every time I ultimately decided this wasn't the venue. I'm pretty sure that most of my readers are in some way related to me, and so this seems like an odd place to discuss what how my heart is broken for the sexual slaves of southeast asia and how this is a dirty broken world that has a way of leaving one jaded about where it's headed. So many of my experiences here have been very profound, and yet in a way it's very hard to make them translate. I do my best to put you in my shoes, but with much of this stuff you'd just have to be there. There's the easy gross-out stories about getting vomited on in the middle of a twelve hour bus ride or what it's like to use a squatty potty, but I think those miss the point. I've gone through some really uncomfortable stuff, true, but oh, how the joys do outweigh the sorrows. So instead, here are some thoughts. And the funny thing about them all is that so much of it are tiny little lessons, the little things one picks up over the course of a day. But they all add up somehow into a grander wonderful truth, and life made beautiful.

It starts here: With everything in life worth doing, there's this moment. You take the step that can't be undone, can't be partially refunded, where suddenly there is no going back and undoing. It's no longer ideas, or plans, but what you're doing with this part of your life. And for me it meant to get on the plane, one that sends you far away from everything that seems normal to you. and it's just you, sitting there by yourself. and you feel very alone, helpless, and nervous. Don't panic, it gets better from here. The hardest part is over. And yet so much of the wonderful things that can happen in our lives hit the roadblocks here. Often it feels like too much work, too much to give up, just to get to this point. Getting past that moment is a prerequisite for living well.

A true friend is something precious. The kindness of strangers is a humbling and life-affirming thing that restores my hope in times where I feel like accepting cynicism. I have so much gratitude to the friends I made along the way. Living in community is just beautiful, and can't be replicated. The way a group of strangers can turn into a family is something to be treasured. Being so far away from home, it's nice to have a few familiar faces to see every once in a while. Many of the things that seem like they'll be a big deal about living in a new culture, the things about comfort and food and what you will and won't be able to buy - that's the easy stuff. Being a tourist is easy, living somewhere is different. It's hard and frustrating, but it's beautiful and it's worth it.

Designer clothes and luxury cars are boring. All-inclusives are for those who don't want to actually experience anything. Many people don't understand what gives things value. There's a beauty to the dirt of humanity. We're all just dust anyways. There are few things that are as shocking as just how little care is given to the poor in this world and how little people think about where their money goes when they spend it. Scrapping your plans and having to do something completely different can sometimes be better than anything you could have planned ahead of time. If you really want to live fully, you have to accept that sometimes it will be smelly, sometimes it will be uncomfortable, sometimes you'll feel very alone. If you aren't ready for that, stay home. Sometimes the experiences won't be happy things, and they won't be nice or pleasant at all. Sometimes life can downright hurt, but the whole trick to joy is to take even the bad things and use them to get better and to learn. I'm learning to appreciate the good in everything.


It's weird to pack everything up, to see everything in your life fit into a few bags. But that's ok. it was never the stuff that made life fulfilling anyways. What I really carry with me are the stories, the memories. thousands of pictures. places I'll remember all my life. And most of all, the people, and the way they changed me. I love Thailand, and I'll miss this place very much. Mostly I'll miss the people. I have been shown amazing kindness, and my time here has changed me for the better. Those who've been a part of my life in the past six months, thank you so much. America, see you soon!

Other things I should mention.
What I've been up to: Traveling. When I was booking the plane ticket last august I decided to stay late, and booked my return flight about 8 weeks after DTS ended. Originally the plan was to stay in Bangkok the whole time, find something to do. When I made the decision to pursue a School of Biblical Studies in the fall, it meant that suddenly the next year and a half of my life is looking very busy. So I decided to take a break, and took two trips, taking up about half of my time. I went to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos on the first trip and Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore on the second trip. It's been crazy, and while I scribbled journal notes all along the way I'll probably save those thoughts and stories for elsewhere. But it was good. My mind works better when I'm moving, which is as it should be. And in the last few days being back in Bangkok with not much to do, I see it's been good that I had something to keep me occupied.


What's next: I'm going HOME. On Wednesday. I'm going all out and I'll be scraping my heels to the finish line. My amazing charles schwab use-it-anywhere-for-free debit card, which is ever so handy and I'm so grateful for, expired at the end of january - so I made one last final withdrawl at the end of last month to cover all my expenses to get me home. I'm down to 254 baht with 3 days to go. (I'll need to save basically all of it for the cab ride to the airport at three in the morning, so if anyone in Ramsong wants to buy me a meal, let me know!) I do have a loaf of bread, though, and some coffee grounds, and a can of baked beans (leftover from my flood survival kit), and some peanut butter. Gonna make it, kids. As soon as I get home I'm going to sleep for two days, and then subject myself to CCF spring break. I'm pretty excited about seeing many of your lovely faces. After that I have a window of about six months. It's gonna be good, I've applied for a few internships and will otherwise plan on finding some job somewhere (can't be too picky, I suppose). If anyone has any ideas, or is looking for a housemate, let me know. Then, if all goes well, Sweden in mid-september. More on this later.

I do love you all, by the way. Thanks for reading and caring.

on self-serving blogs about travel.

ohhhh, dear readers, I'm not even gonna post this one to facebook, because it's just a thought, for you.

I'm in Penang, Malaysia. It's lovely here. And I could wax poetic about all these lovely old brick buildings, and I know that I'm supposed to blog about my adventures, but the subtext of all of those blogs written by everyone has always been "hey, look at meeeee...."

and so much of what I do isn't just to brag to my hypothetical readers. Several times now people have said that they were jealous of my travels, and it makes me reconsider everything, because what my entire generation seems to be fixated on is doing stuff just so other people will think highly of them. and that's stupid. I never want to be a part of that. ohh, I have stories, mind you, but I'd much rather like it if you asked me about them instead, because wheras bragging is stupid, stories are beautiful. It's lonely sometimes out on the road, and getting on here and writing to nobody doesn't seem to help with that all that much.

anyways, off to Kuala Lumpur.

lessons learned, part 1.

I'm a few weeks from going back to America, the land of my birth. I have one last adventure in me yet, but even now I've begun to do more to reflect on my time here in Thailand, to make sense of it. to think about what it's meant to me, specifically in terms of the lessons learned, and how it should affect me going forward. So here are a few thoughts I've had. I'm going to save my more sentimental "aww, I'm going to miss Thailand" thoughts for a later post, this is going to focus on two lessons.

Lesson #1. Places are just places, and people are all people.

in a few of the interactions I've had with people back home, one of the most striking things that I've noticed is that being here in Thailand, many people back in the comfort of the developed western world seem to be under the basic assumption that I miss all America has to offer.
Meals with cheese and bread, readily available air conditioning, my own room, my own car, having a lot of control about how I spend my day, never getting sick, bathrooms where the toilet and the shower aren't the same thing, being able to read the signs on highways, being able to communicate using big words that express myself. Want to know a secret? I don't miss any of that. at all. I would give it up willingly again without much thought. Oh, dear friends, please don't take it personally. If I say I miss America, it's no lie, but it's you that I miss. If you were all here I might never go back.

Some of my reasoning for this is just as surface-level as the assumptions people have come to. for example, I don't miss american food because thai food is great. Every restaraunt sells only fresh food, and the reason the markets sell the meat and fruit and vegetables on hooks and on tables instead of in refrigerators is because the food was harvested and butchered only a handful of hours ago. Thai food involves more creativity and variety in a single dish than in an entire western buffet. Western food is built around french cuisine, which is a bit like science: mix exactly the right amount of each ingredient in order to replicate past perfections. Thai food is truly a bit more like art. Work with what you have, be daring, create something new and wonderful every single time. At every table there's an arrangement of peppers and oils and sauces so that you, the eater, can go even farther if you want to.

but there's something deeper. I could make a line-by-line comparison of my Thai experience and my American experience and try to measure them up, but I think that would be missing the point. It goes down much deeper than our daily conveniences and into the things our heart believes. One natural thing we as humans seem to be ingrained with is the idea that our experience - our country, our particular sports team, our school, our city, the little unique things about the way we live our life - is somehow intrinsically better than the next guy's. American politicians are quick to pander to this line of logic, often reminding us that "America is the greatest nation in the history of the world." But living cross-culturally, that pride only serves to humble me frequently. America isn't somehow magically better than other countries. (I would even go so far as to say that while I was in Laos I couldn't help but feel great shame for my country, who "secretly" carpet-bombed a beautiful country out of xenophobic paranoia.) And the thing is, it's not that we're better or worse than other people, it's that when it comes down to it, nationalities are kind of imaginary. There's really no such thing as an American or a Thai or any other nationality; on some level we're all just people. Trying to use words to further qualify that definition isn't a good thing.

So what to do with this knowledge?
walk humbly. act justly. love mercy.
be kind.
love your neighbor.

it's always the simple lessons that are the most profound.

Austin's new rules for personal photography.

I'm angry at my former self.


cutting down my photo library to "things that aren't awful" is taking WAY longer than it should, in no small part due to the fact that I've gotten a lot better at photography than I used to be. In other words, a lot of pictures that are in some way or another greatly flawed. So I'm setting forth some new rules for my own picture-taking-and-library-maintaing practices:

1. Go through and delete duplicates and unnecessary pictures from the rolls within a month of adding them. don't wait for them all to stack up.
2. If you're taking pictures of food, and there aren't any people in it, it better be some really interesting-looking culturally informative food. No pictures of the soup you ate. ever again.
3. if you stay in a hotel room, you get one picture of the room. one. find a way to fit the stuff in the frame. if the view is notable, that's your picture. bathrooms aren't worth remembering.
4. less is more. three thousand pictures aren't as good as twenty pictures. ever.
5. if the subject matter is important to you, but the picture didn't come out, delete it. tough cookies.
6. Just because you're ashamed of past haircuts and overall sense of style doesn't mean you get to delete every picture of yourself from 2004 to 2009. The past happened, and you need these pictures as a way of keeping you from regressing.
7. Don't be lazy. don't settle for the most convenient way of getting the shot possible. stop your car and get out and take a picture. don't upload pictures to facebook without cutting it down to the top roll or two of shots (I'm SO SORRY, Cape Town '09 team.)
8. When using a camera in a historical museum, don't use your camera in such a way that you attempt to replicate a walk through the museum, complete with every single title card and object. If you use a camera at all, stick to artistic shots and things you can't just look up on wikipedia.
9. If you're looking at a way to frame something, involving people in the subject and not trying to isolate something from its' environment nearly always makes a picture better. Capture moments, not things.
10. If, looking back at a picture from 5 years ago, you don't have any idea what is going on but you clearly did at the time and there's no way to jog your memory, delete it.
11. If you have a picture that encapsulates a friend looking particularly unphotogenic compared to normal, it doesn't matter what else is in the picture. delete it.

Meta-rule #1: You can make exceptions to the rules, but they have to be actual exceptions and not just a recursion to arbitrary decisionmaking.

life in transition/stories from the road

Hello, friends.
I haven’t been blogging much lately. I spent those weeks on the road, and ever since I’ve been back in Bangkok I’ve been living at BJD, a lovely campus ministry in my neighborhood in Bangna. It’s community living, which means that the internet shuts off automatically at 10:30. This has unintended consequences for my blogging, because I work best when it’s really late and I’m sleep deprived and I turn off my filter and wing it and just do the writing equivalent of vomiting awesomeness. (I don’t think that’s the first time I’ve used this phrasing.) It’s an awful tendency I have when I’m fully awake, to play literary softball and just hope I end up with something that makes people think highly of me.

but I’m tired now, and so I don’t really care what you think of me. The internet has indeed shut off, so I’m mashing it into a pages document and if it’s any good I’ll throw it on in the morning. I guess I’ll just say how things are going and inevitably it will spiral into my own hokey philosophy-theology. Also, my grammar might get worse and worse as this thing goes on.

ok, fine, you win. a few stories from my wanderings.

I prayer walked in the ancient hindu temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It’s a weird thing prayer-walking in such places, I don’t mean that in a bad way though. I don’t feel weird about it in a spiritual sense, because, let’s face it. Temples aren’t really about worship. They’re about one-upsmanship. We need to have bigger temples than the neighbors. even the people who give offerings at such places aren’t offering true worship. they believe in a god, so they go and give it stuff that they think will make it happy. Not because they love it, but to “make merit”. In order words, there’s something in it for them. I’ll give you incense and orange fanta, and you will bless my business and help me conceive a child. it’s a business transaction. As christians, we can look at this as phoned-in idolatry, but wait: often this is what we do with our worship. We give god portions of our time, perhaps enough to feel inconvenienced, and then we look for the tangible benefits. I’ve learned in the past few years to get away from this with the God I believe in. If we really trust God, it means that we trust him to provide us with what we need. In my prayers, I often say, “Hey God, I think this is what should happen”, but I’ve gotten away from all the demand-making like when I was a child. and I don’t mean I found a proper balance, I mean all of it. Who am I to dictate orders to God. It’s me who follows him, although often I need to be reminded of that. I’ve found that the more I rely on him, the more joy I have, even though I have less than I would otherwise. Occasionally I’ve thought about what my life would look like if I did the pragmatic thing and got a job and started climbing ladders. I could own my own car at this point. I might have a promotion or two under my belt, and a budding resume that could attract some better salary options. But the conclusion I’ve come to is that my life is filled with so much more joy without all of that stuff that I would choose this again without much thought. Joy, perhaps, in spite of the tangible benefits. Since the end of DTS, I’ve spent nights in some of the seediest places in the world. I’ve eaten on about two or three dollars a day for the most part and lost about somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds pounds in a few weeks. I’ve been alone for the vast majority of my time, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest person who would recognize my face. I’ve gone weeks on end without legitimate fellowship with anyone other than God. I’ve felt alone, at times as though more than ever before. By all worldly standards, I’ve given much and gained nothing. And yet, I have this joy. This stubborn light that refuses to go out. And in a way, it affirms everything. All the hardships chip away at all my imperfections, and I manage to learn from everything.

Umm, what else happened? These many weeks feel like a blur. Time passes faster when you’re alone. Oh, I saw my lovely friends in Phnom Penh. Thearith and Angela are kind people, and introduced me to even more kind people. I’m not allowed to return to Phnom Penh as a single man without being prepared to marry one of Thearith’s cousins. I ate a handful of duck eggs, the kind where the egg is fertilized and the fetus is allowed to grow a bit before they boil them. Not bad, better than a regular boiled egg.

...Saigon. a city that aches, and my heart aches for it. I stayed in a small dormitory on the walking street, the kind of place where a child can be starving and sleeping in the ledge in front of the closed entryway to a building, and across the street tourists can be drinking 4 dollar mixed drinks and soliciting prostitutes. And yet there is hope. I can’t tell you why here, I started to write the next story, realized I couldn’t. I’m not being elusive, just protecting some friends of mine. I bought the child a meal, by the way. I’m not trying to bring light to my good deeds, I say that to make a point. If you see someone starving, give them something to eat. That’s what separates us from the lower primates, and, well, Mitt Romney.

I then went to Nha Trang, which is where young men who have dignity and self-respect go alone to - no wait, I lied. I am the only young man with dignity and self respect who travels alone to ever go to Nha Trang. It’s a place one can go to turn down offers for prostitution to build one’s own self-esteem regarding such matters. Travel note: if you find yourself in southeast asia alone and you’re a young man, wear long dress pants and wear collared button-up shirts, and show an even remote respect for the culture. eat at the restaurants where only locals eat and order what they’re ordering. The locals will like you, and try to set you up with their daughters.

I took the bus to Hue. Oh, did I mention that I had to completely reorganize my entire itinerary because there’s no way to get from Saigon to Hanoi directly during Tet without booking weeks or months in advance? the mental notes are stacking. anyways, picture this for me. You’re laying down. There are two iron bars on either side of your knees. if your sleeper-bus chair is laid flat there’s about two feet of clearance between the ground and the peice of plywood above you, which has more people on it. There are two people lying directly on your right side. There are two people lying directly on your left side. As though you’re sharing a king sized bed with four other people. There is no air circulation whatsoever, and after about 15 minutes you and the other four people are all sweaty and emit all sorts of awful smells and heat. Now imagine the bus ride is 12 hours long. Yes, I’ve done that. Special thanks to the lovely australian couple on the right side of me for being sociable and good sports. The weird thing was that it didn’t phase me at all, I never thought to complain. It was another in an endless succession of ridiculous things to go through. Shake it off, move on, get stronger.

Hue is a nice place, as far places go. there are ancient walls made of the most wonderful crumbling bricks that have slums and gardens on top of them now. The locals will let you walk through and even smile at you as long as you aren’t a jerk about the way you use your camera and you wai at everyone who’s an elder. Also, wear collared shirts and dress like an adult with respect and dignity. you’d be surprised at how many western people miss this memo, and stand there shell-shocked, entering into non-touristy neighborhoods wearing flip-flops, swimming trunks, and a beerlao t-shirt. On behalf of all self-respecting people with white skin who get treated with suspicion because of your self-disrespecting behavior, “This isn’t Bonnaroo. Please leave Asia.”

halfway through the 12 hour bus ride from Hue to Savannakhet, the poor lao man behind me began projectile vomiting all over my seat and got a good splatter all over my back. Remember how I said nothing shocks me anymore? I’m dead serious, nothing shocks me anymore. All I could think about was how bad I felt for him, as he lost some serious face. The kind woman across from me donated several of her wet wipes to clean me up. Lao people are so kind.

I spent 6 nights on the Mekong: 2 in Savannakhet, 1 in Thaklek, 1 in Pak Kading, and 2 in Vientiane (pronounced Wiang Chan). Met many lovely people. Pak Kading was my favorite, as I was perhaps the only barang in the town the night I was there. In a sandbar along the Nam Kading I got to play football with some kids, and the next morning I had breakfast with the town primary school’s english teacher. Lao people are among the kindest, most welcoming, and most considerate people I have ever met. That is perhaps the best summation of my time in Laos, so I will leave it at that. There are other stories you can ask me for, though.

..And now I’m back in my lovely neighborhood, Ramsong. Being here makes me miss my friends, but I am glad to be here.

I’m sitting in on a week of the Applied Principles of Communication school this week. It’s very good. We’ve been talking about basically the way we as humans process information and come to assumptions about the world and derive conclusions and meaning from that, and in that context asking what it means to learn and to improve, and to break out of our patterns of false thinking and to break away from false masters.

I’m also working on my resume, and I’m in the process of applying for both the SBS in the fall and internships for my time in america. I need something to do, might as well do something constructive. If anyone has any ideas shoot them my way.

OH MAN YOU GUYS. so I was writing all of this late last night, as I said, and whenever I write like that I reach this point where the brilliance just takes a dive and I just go off in a completely tangent direction. It’s a way of knowing that it’s time for bed. The stuff I wrote from this point on is pretty good, but it needs a good editor and I need to add to it and clearly define a thesis and turn it into something else. So I’ll fix it up and post it later.

growth.

surely these thoughts will be rendered outdated as the years go by, just as thoughts I've had before that seemed so eloquent and enlightened at the time no seem cheap and shallow and thoughtless. No matter:

I have some time on my hands. It's a sensation I'm not used to anymore: I haven't had more than a few days to do fully as I please since about August of 2007, and the freedom of it all is a bit fun and also a bit uncomfortable, but I'm making the best of it all.

The first thing I did was to take a trip. I spent 17 days wandering across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. For my own false-humility's sake, you'll have to ask for these stories on your own. I have tons of stories from my time in asia, but I've chosen to omit a lot of them here because I want you to ask me about them instead of stalking me from over the cyber-fence. That isn't to say I'm not glad you're here, just that I often save many of my favorite parts for those who ask for it. I might get around to it, but if you really want to know, ask me for it. Life together is more special than reading things on the internet. But I digress..

Now I'm back to lovely old Bangkok, along with a few remaining friendly faces. and the next thing I'm doing is going through everything. The chaos of the last many months has left my organization in a shambles. You know how when you're on vacation you take seven of the same picture and you think, "oh, I'll go through and whittle them down later." this is later. and it's a mess. and one feeling I especially can't help but feel as I go through all the pictures and documents and music on my computer (only the first stop on the organization express) is just how much has changed in the last four years. for one thing, I'm a much better photographer than I was 4 years ago. Although I lament the current sad state of my camera, it's taught me well. and by that I mean, my topic selection and the way I would frame a shot used to be really bad. minimalism, dear children. And looking at old papers that I wrote (which deserved lower grades than I received, which were lower than what I thought I deserved at the time. Thanks, Dr. Quinn.) and old albums that I thought were great and would share with friends that now seem unlistenable, and poetry that I wrote that I thought was pretty good at the time, that wasn't. Beyond all of this are the emotional things that come up. Mistakes I made, things I would have done different. People who didn't get to see the best sides of me.

And the first instinctual reaction to all of this is to cringe, in a sort of embarrassment for the past self. but I've quickly gotten over it. It's not that you can shrug it off, it's the comfort you can take from the fact that that's who you used to be. and if that's who you used to be, and you are where you are now, and all of the steps both false and true along the way brought you to become someone better than you were all the way back then, imagine what tomorrow might bring, and what further refinement might come. When even the sorrows become ingredients for joy, our joy is infinite. Therefore, I will not stop wondering, and I will not stop learning. Mistakes are sure to be had, and we will learn from them. And in that all despair flails under the weight of our great hope.

a place I used to call home.

It's all very odd, this living business. It's especially strange if you do it right. It seems very basic that a natural part of life is to allow people in, to see at least parts of you and come to whatever conclusions about you that they may. That is really beautiful, but it's also scary. In allowing yourself to feel anything at all, you run this risk of not measuring up in the eyes of others. The fear that they might not see in you all that you hope is there can be a crippling one. But with diligence and patience, all the little things about you and them that aren't perfect begin to fade, and all of the differences that seemed so staggering and impossible to overcome seem small and petty.

Five months ago I landed on a very large, strange, and foreign continent, feeling very alone in the world. And then something happened. Over the few days that followed, I met 23 people. These 23 people were born in 8 different countries. Together, collectively, we speak somewhere between 9 and 11 languages. At first, it didn't seem how it would all work. These were people I just met. Acquaintances. On the surface they all seemed very neat and different, in some ways like a new toy still in its' packaging, but also with the sheer mystery. It was easy to make first impressions, I found, but as time passed I found also that many of my first impressions were wrong. It's a strange process that happens when you live with someone, when you spend every waking moment with them and share in all of life for a long time. It's something deeper than the sort of "getting to know them" that only takes a conversation or two, where you can say you know someone, add them as a friend on facebook, and have a little common ground for when you see them in passing. Living with someone exposes them, shows them to be who they truly are. You can dress yourself up for a time, but eventually all the cracks start to show themselves: the flaws, the dirt, the insecurities, the pain. The good things too, are all the more evident. it's in this intimacy of living together that great attributes like joy and generosity and kindness can reveal themselves in a sincere way, because it's here that you get to see them when nobody's looking. If you live with someone long enough, you truly know them. Deeper than the surface, there lies everything about them which is now revealed to you: hopes, dreams, pain, flaws, and the alchemy of joy and sorrow that all of us share. Down at the heart of it we're all flawed, beautiful creatures. When you live with someone you get to understand a little more about what that means, and it's wonderful.

but there's something even more wonderful than this. These countless interactions, big and small, that make us get to know someone and allow us to love them does something more than inform us about the truth of something outside of ourselves. It changes who we are, too. It's something my dad once said to my grandfather as the time was growing short: "Everything I learned I learned from you. The things about you that were great, I did my best to take as my own. The things about you that are flawed, I did what I could do differently." And perhaps that's the true joy of sharing life with other people, is that you find the good in them rubbing off on you, and if you're wise about it even the bad in them can be a teaching to you.

I've struggled with the term "grown-up." not on some emotional level, as though I'm either in a rush to grow up or want to stay a child forever, but I don't get it on a definitional level. I don't think it means anything. I don't think there will ever be some point in life where you cross over from being a child to being an adult, despite what professional graduation and wedding planners might tell you. It's a process of change, and it's up to us to make the choice to think about what it means to live well and change towards that. To take what's good about life and expand on it, and to realize what isn't constructive towards goodness and expel those things from our life. This is a truth I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't lived with others.

The other part of living with people that requires all the courage we can muster is this: you live with someone long enough and you just get used to them and you find comfort in them. Life's more fun together, and it's nice to just exist together for a while with people who know you. You get to the point a few months in where a lot of the hard work is done and the rewards of just being able to love each other and live together begin to pay off. It's nice, and nothing to complain about. But sometimes, life together has to end. When you live with someone, they get this piece of you that nobody else can take and that time can't erase, and it makes saying goodbye and looking into the uncertainty of the future painful.

It's especially hard in this case, because it's 23 goodbyes all at once, and my family scatters off to 5 different continents, leaving me in peace to wander southeast asia alone. In all of my previous goodbyes I had the well-founded hope that there would inevitably be times in this life where our paths would cross again. And I can still have those hopes, of course, but this time I know in my heart that many of these goodbyes are the real thing, and that no matter how much I love this person from the bottom of my heart, most likely I'll never see them again in this life. and that's painful, but I find joy in it because although the future is so uncertain, the future can't change the past. In the times we shared together I was left changed, and the love and life that we've shared will carry on with me in all the time to come.


This post is dedicated to Abraham, Aom, Art, Austin M, Ball, Benz, Brittany, Caleb, David, Esther, Eve, Gift, Isabel, Josch, Rebecca, Ribka, Samm, Stephanie, Taay, Tadam, Taylor, Thearith, and X.

Life as an experiment.

(Vagabond Discipleship, Part 5)

Times come and times go. Life keeps changing. Life always changes. And even though it's hard, it's a sign of something good. I think of what my life would look like if it didn't change, if I resigned myself as an 18 year old to cowardice, hid myself in my parents' basement, and played video games. It would have been a very easy life, assuming mom and dad would have ever gone along with it. None of the pain that comes along with growth would have ever affected me. The photographs that make me long for people and places in my memory would either not have been taken or simply not meant anything.

Outreach is over. Six weeks of endlessly wandering all over this lovely country have taken their toll,
and it's a relief to be back in Bangkok. The final two weeks, which I didn't get much of a chance to blog about, were life-filled ones. I don't mean that as a neat feel-goody sentiment, I mean it in the real sense. Exhaustion, heartache, and staggering beauty, all in the context of burmese migrant slums, public hospitals, minimum security prisons, buddhist and christian schools, improperly equipped internet cafes, the homes of friendly strangers, and the streets and highways of this beautiful land.

I'm sitting on the lovely, rock hard matress on the second bottom bunk of the men's quarters. I used to complain about this matress, how hard it is and how when I was getting used to it I would toss in bed endlessly before I could sleep. I don't complain about it anymore. I love it. It's not that it's any more comfortable than before, it's just that I've grown. I see something more in this mattress now: I see the memories in it. I think of the countless times over the past many months when I would come in, expecting to take my rightful claim to the 15 square feet of space on this continent that I have any jurisdiction over, only for it to be filled with four kids from three continents watching youtube videos.

These were two seasons. Lecture phase, and outreach. Before that was a season of mental wandering in the midwest, and before that were the many seasons of my time at Truman State. I have mental images of the next three seasons, of my time serving in thailand, of the six months in America, and then moving to Sweden and studying the bible for nine months. And the thing about all of these seasons is that while I could make meaningless bullet points about the differences and similarities of each, as I continue to move through them I've begun to notice something. Growth. Time seems to stack itself onto the past like bricks in a building or rings in a tree. Sometimes we don't notice the details, but the growth is there; if you pay close enough attention, you'll see it.


Since the seasons of life seem to break off, to have that line of clear difference that distinguishes between the two times, it's easy to think of them as almost unrelated, but the past informs the present like the foundations of a building keep the roof stable. Even the seasons that didn't go the way you planned are important as long as you take the lessons and learn from them. This is what our lives on this earth are: messy experiments. In living, we learn how to live. If we're good about it, we learn what it means to live well, to find meaning in it. To find meaning in it all, everything that we experience - some great and hidden truth that's eluded us that finds us in the midst of the chaos. Life can be messy and gross and painful and often in the short term it doesn't go the way you might hope, and sometimes you learn that the things you had put hope in weren't ever the things that could give you peace and fulfillment. Recognition, security, material possession, affirmation among peers - To center one's identity around these things has always meant to buy into a lie. One day, our bodies will perish and succumb to decay and none of these things will really matter, which is to mean that they never mattered, not even when it felt like they did. My conclusion about that while I'm still young is that I get one life, and I'm not going to waste it pursuing those false gods.

So what should we pursue with our lives? The campy sunday-school-answer way of putting it is to follow God. This seems too simple, though, so perhaps I'll phrase it this way: If to follow those meaningless things that we've been taught are important is like bowing before a false god, then what we need to do is find the true God and spend our lives pursuing whoever or whatever that true God might be. In this sense I'm not referring to God so much as a sentient being (although I believe he is), I'm referring to "God" as a metaphorical representation of "the meaning of life." Every person seems to have their own ideas of what that means, and while we can gleam insight from their understanding (or misunderstandings), ultimately the only way we can develop our own understanding is to do it ourselves: to experiment. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it means to follow gods, realize that they're fake, and to have to come to a moment of painful humility and say, perhaps to ourselves, "The thing I thought was so important was a lie. I'm going to stop spending so much of my short life pursuing that thing." My days of experimenting aren't all behind me, but here are some of the conclusions I've come to so far:

• Life isn't about accomplishing anything, at least not the way I thought. I used to think that it was really important to do big things in life, for the sake of being a notable person who does big things. That's stupid, because it's coming from a perspective of thinking that reputation matters. When you die, the opinion that some people had of you at one point in time simply doesn't matter. It's not a bad thing to have a reputation, though; it's just that it should be a symptom of a life well lived, and not the other way around.
• We should still do those big things. We should do good things, things that are worth doing, as long as they are grounded in proper motives. What are proper motives? Obedience towards the Lord. Love towards other people. That's it. all other motives are evil.
• Life is something to find joy in. Not just pleasure, although that's a part of it. Even in all of the sad and painful things, there's joy, because even the sad things can remind us that we're alive and life is something worth living.
• Life is better when you share it. We humans simply aren't made to be left alone all the time, or to feel forced to hide ourselves in the name of social etiquette and external expectations.
• Television and the internet and what we eat and other sources of pleasure can be good things, but they're nothing to live for or put hope in. We aren't made to merely consume for our own pleasure's sake. We can try, and at some point we'll be miserable for it.
• Our mistakes can either be our downfall or our teacher. If we learn nothing, all is tragedy. if we allow ourselves to grow from our experiences, even our worst mistakes can be what make our lives better.

There are many other things. Perhaps I'll get to them in a follow up post, or a book. This book will be designed especially to fit in among the other books of the "christian living section", not drawing attention to itself but hopefully giving the bookseller the appearance of a well-rounded selection.

Every once in a while I have to remind myself that I'm young and that it's all right that I don't have everything figured out yet. That's what life is for.