Itsara

If you haven’t already noticed, our “Estimated Departure Date” on the sidebar has become somewhat more precise - to the minute, even.

Background: The makers of the New International Version of the Bible have recently announced a new translation (called Today’s New International Version, or the TNIV). Many smart people and respected leaders in the church support this new translation, and many other smart people and respected leaders are against it. Those against it are primarily concerned that because the TNIV is being marketed as the new NIV, it will become the church’s commonly accepted Bible, and as such they are concerned that the changes it makes are not faithful to the original manuscripts. Mark Roberts has been doing an excellent series on this topic for a few days now if you would like to know more about it.

What concerns me the most is not that there’s yet another translation, but that this has become such a big deal. The modern church has been fragmented time and again by people getting worked up over little things like this. We can talk about the goodness or badness of the TNIV, and in fact we should, but if we’re not talking about it in love then we are wasting our time and inappropriately dividing God’s kingdom. I think there are two primary diseases causing this problem: pride and fear. (more…)

There’s no immediate news on the Thailand front (not from me, anyway). Cindy has her passport, so the next big obstacles are to get visas for me and Sean and to deal with all of our stuff (either give it away or figure out how we’re going to get it to Thailand). We’re also applying to Im Jai to work with them long term.

In lieu of more pressing news, I was looking at some of my notes and half-finished writings, and I had the idea to ask for your opinion on what you’d like to read about. Here are some working titles/topics I’ve thought about at least a little (enough to jot down some notes for later). Feel free to suggest anything of your own too.

Waiting for God’s call
Miracles
Reading the Bible clearly
At the throne (sort of an allegory)
Bible translations
Giving and living on support
Worship
Hell
Salvation and Church Membership
Making decisions without fear

Okay, I admit those titles aren’t always very helpful. Consider it sort of like gambling. Or maybe like a box of chocolates.

After a few months sabbatical (where we reclaimed our table for regular use), the Table of Free Stuff has returned. We are beginning a new wave of giving things away, so come by and see if there’s anything for you. We also have a list where people can sign-up for things that we will (or might) give away in the future. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what’s being given away this time. Click on any of the pictures below to enlarge.

We would like to apologize if any of the stuff you see was something you had given us as a gift at any time. We hope you understand that we’re trying to take as little as possible with us and in no way wish to disrespect past gifts. If you really want us to have your gift, then I’d recommend that you come take it and then visit us in Thailand and bring it with you as a housewarming gift ;-).

In other news, Cindy is officially a dual citizen now. This has come over a month earlier than we expected. Don’t worry, we’re not going to leave earlier, but we are implementing our plans more quickly now (hence the reinstatement of the Free Stuff). We now have a tentative departure date of March 31st. When we have our tickets (which will be soon), I’ll put the date on the sidebar.

Finally, today I’m adding our support letter and budget to the support page, as well as our online donation button to the sidebar. I wanted to wait for our custom donation button to arrive, but I promised I’d have it up this week so here it is. Watch for a cooler button than the one that Amazon provides.

Throughout childhood, I never knew what I wanted to do when I “grew up”. All the jobs that I had heard of didn’t really appeal to me. Then one day at my high school youth group, my pastor spoke of a woman he knew who ran an orphanage in Mexico. My immediate thought was Wow! That’s the coolest job ever! That’s what I want to do when I grow up! For some reason, that thought didn’t really stick much after that day, probably because I never told anyone about it. Although I had never forgotten about that thought, I didn’t try to pursue it until much later.

During college, I had times of remembering that “call” from high school, usually followed by thoughts like That was a cool idea, but… no. That would be too hard. During college, God did have me go on numerous trips to an orphanage in Mexico with my old church, and though I enjoyed helping out, I still thought it was a bigger idea than I could ever realistically handle. I just couldn’t imagine giving up the expectation of living like a normal American. During my last year at UCSD, I decided I wanted to go on a short-term mission trip abroad after I graduated. I knew God had placed some kind of desire in my heart to be a missionary abroad, so I thought I should try a short one out and see. My campus fellowship (InterVarsity) had a trip planned to China that summer. I considered going on that for about 2 seconds until I thought… What? If I’m going to go all the way to Asia, I should just go to Thailand and check out my roots! So I applied with a missions organization called YWAM to work at a Thai orphanage. Why not check it out?

So, in the summer of 1999, I went to Thailand and stayed at Im Jai House, an orphanage for kids whose parents had died from AIDS. It was such a strangely awesome experience that was completely different than any other orphanage experience I’ve had. The way Im Jai House ran was amazing. They worshipped God in singing twice a day, the kids were well-behaved, they did their homework and chores without complaining, and they were just plain happy! The staff and the kids had close relationships with each other. And the building! It was extremely clean and organized. It was like a huge, warm home with several parents and lots of kids, instead of a run-down building that housed complaining orphans (which is what I assumed many orphanages were like).

The more I think about it now, I realize it was God giving me peace about His call for me. I felt at home being with kids who were from my own culture, and I had never before felt this in my past orphanage experiences. Most of you know that I feel very American in many ways, but being with those Thai orphans reminded me so much of the Thai part in me that I sometimes forgot about or even wanted to ignore. In that visit, freedom broke loose - freedom to be the Thai girl my parents wanted me to be, and at the same time freedom to be the lover of orphans that God wanted me to be. These used to be completely separate entities, but God molded them together into one to show me that He had a plan all along.

Those realizations hit me rather gradually, so I didn’t pursue this path right away. After I got back, I sort of pushed these feelings aside and started down the teaching path, mainly because I had already planned on it before the trip. Little did I know, God would later use teaching to push me back into the call. I taught in elementary schools for five years and to sum up: I loved hanging out with kids and I loved caring for them, but the bureaucracy and tough parents really took away a lot of the joy that came with working with those kids. All I really wanted to do was love kids and not have the demands of the administration and parents on my back.

During the summer of 2003, the summer before my last year of teaching (though I didn’t know it was going to be my last year), I attended a conference with Adam, which he mentions in “The Call: Part iii”. This resulted in the summer 2004 trip to Thailand, which Adam discusses in “The Call: Part iv” . You can read those since Adam did a great job in describing those parts of the call. All I want to add is that the decision to move to Thailand was completely God. I don’t recall ever asking Adam: So, you wanna move? Or what do you think about this? I don’t remember him asking me either! It was just an understood thing between us during our summer trip. It was like God told us to, so there wasn’t any reason to discuss anything else.

So… we’re going.

Read Sean’s take.

Read Adam’s call.
Read Cindy’s call.

Ray has a post here about a book called Vagabonding. It talks about the unnatural link we have created between work and life, as well as money and life. Ray also mentions the lifestyle of our good friend Emmet, who has been living with us for about two years. He works simply, lives cheaply, and takes off on mission trips for a few months at a time once he’s saved the money. It’s a great life really.

Anyway, Ray’s post made me want to share an old Calvin & Hobbes strip that I have taped to our computer here. I won’t risk copyright issues by scanning it (plus, I’m lazy), but Calvin talks the whole time so it’s easy. His Dad is just getting ready and leaving for work, as Calvin talks to him:

Gorgeous morning. Huh Dad?

These summer days sure slip by, don’t they? Too bad the daily drudgery of making a living has to keep you from appreciating these sublime moments of life.

Well, best not to think about it! If you stay healthy, you can enjoy days like this when you retire! See you tonight!

(After his Dad has left) Ahhh, summer!

There are people I respect a lot (not the least of which is my own Dad) who work so that their family can live the lives they want to live. This is a personal choice, and a good one, and I want to be clear that what I am about to say does not refer to this choice.

But there are a lot of us (and I used to be one of them) who haven’t really thought out our life plans. We work hard now with some vague hope that we won’t be doing so forever, but for most of us that hope lies far off in retirement. I realized that living for retirement simply doesn’t make sense. (1) I don’t know if I’ll even make it that far and (2) if I were to plan out my ideal life, I doubt it would be: 22 years of school, 40 years of tedious work, 10 years of living the life I want. But that’s the life I was aiming at (along with the vain, and statistically stupid, hope of getting rich quick).

I think the answer is to look honestly at what we’re living for and why. Where does our joy lie? My life is about to change drastically, so I’ll have to reevaluate this question multiple times soon enough, but before that my joy was in my immediate family (spending time with my wife and allowing her to live the life she wants to live) and my extended family (leading worship and pastoring at Coast). So even though I had to make some financial sacrifices to do so, I was glad to work part-time at my “real job” and part-time at Coast. To be honest, I would have made far more financial sacrifices for the joy that that kind of life brought me.

It seems like everything I wanted was down yesterday. Homestar Runner was crippled because of their Peasant’s Quest trailer, Penny Arcade (which I haven’t read in over a week) has been down for at least a day now, they shut the water off in our complex, my picture host was undergoing maintenance the one time I wanted to upload our pictures, and they shut the water off in our complex!

You never truly appreciate water until you don’t have it. Cindy took a shower at a friend’s house, and Ray and Kaoru (who are staying with us until they leave for their big trip) taught us that Von’s has bathrooms open at midnight.

Anyway, the picture host is back up, so I’ve been able to upload some of our pictures. You can view them here. It was a 7-night cruise down the coast of Mexico. We stopped at Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta for a day each. It was nice visiting a country and feeling mostly comfortable with the language, not that I needed it - everytime I tried to speak Spanish to somebody, they replied in perfect English. Of the three ports, I think we both liked Mazatlan the best, though that may have been because our random-exploration method worked better there than in the other cities. But if you’ve ever been on a cruise then you know that it’s not about the ports anyway, but that it’s really about the ship.

Well we’re back from the cruise and we had a great (and very relaxing) time. I wanted to have some pictures up for you, but my picture host is down for the moment so you’ll have to wait. In the meantime, Tracey has linked to an excellent series on worship by another blogger named Ken. Ken expresses a lot of stuff about worship that I have struggled with myself as worship pastor. In particular, he points out the fact that “worship” seems to equal “music” (when it’s not), and that the role of music in worship is often elevated so high above where it should be that the true definition of worship is only a tiny, forgotten speck on the ground below. There are currently four parts in the series: one, two, three, and four.

Now that we’re back, I feel like I have so much to do and not enough time to do it. Which is really ironic considering nobody is paying me to do anything anymore. I’ll have more to say about what’s going on later this week, after the pictures and maybe some other stuff. Maybe more of my own thoughts on worship.

My last two posts have been about the Defining Moment in my life when Jesus called me to get rid of all my games. To make any sense of that statement, you’ll have to read the previous two posts. This post is about what I had to face to do what Jesus was asking and the consequences of doing so.

When I thought about what I would have to do and who I would have to tell, I began to panic a little. For example, we had just started collecting and playing Warhammer (a tabletop wargame played with miniature models). I gave Matt a hard time when he started Warhammer because we have a history of expensive obsessions that we later lose interest in, and now I was going to tell him that I was the one backing out.

But I realized that I was most frightened of the questions: “Why are you doing this? You, of all people? You’ve been playing games your whole life. You know so much about them. You look down on people for considering games to be childish. How can you do this?” Underneath it all was a single question: “You’re not a gamer anymore, so what are you? Are you anything?”

It was an identity issue. If the glimpses of freedom were the deal-breaker, then this was the signature on the contract. The fact that it was about my identity as a gamer convinced me once and for all that this was Jesus talking to me. And in order to kill that identity, I had to publicly rid myself of the games.

The hardest people to tell were those it affected the most: Cindy, Emmet, and Matt. I also found it difficult to tell Jamie. Once I had told them though, the rest became easier. With the support of these people behind me, I no longer feared the questions - or at least not as much. Still, it was a sad task to catalogue all of my games and cross them off the list as I gave them away or sold them. (more…)