London!

When I was stateside at Christmas one of my childhood best friends, Charles Trammell,  told me he and his son would be in London for Spring Break with a team of teenagers from his church, Hunter Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, AL.  I started making plans then to join them for a few days because, generally speaking, airfares within the EU are pretty cheap.  Sure enough, I was able to get a round-trip flight from nearby Debrecen, Hungary for under $200.

So off to London I went last Tuesday.  I took a cab to Chop, along the Ukrainian-Hungarian border and then caught the train to Debrecen.  My IMB friend Darrel Hathcock picked me up at the train station and got me to the airport on time.

I arrived that evening in London in time to catch a movie and begin a week of eating western restaurant foods.  (Actually, I ate a Kebab from a street vendor that first night!)

I spent all day Wednesday shopping and then met up with a friend that works in the neighborhood of Southall; it's a community dominated by Indian Sikhs and Pakistani and Somalian Muslims.  It's a pretty rough place, at least after dark.  I was blessed to attend a Bible Study at her church that night.

On Thursday morning I met my friend Charles and spent the day with the mission team from Hunter Street.  Charles and I spent most of the day with 3 of the girls on the team and together we prayer-walked the Camden community in London and the girls engaged British teenagers in conversations.  They did a fantastic job and learned a lot and sowed some tremendous gospel seeds.  In fact, the British teens were so open and civil in their conversations that the girls were able to very freely share the gospel with them.

HSBC Girls and some of the Brit teens they shared with.

On Friday the team (9 teens and 6 adults including me) spent the day and night being "tourist".  We visited The Tower of London, the Passion Play at Trafalger Square, Buckingham Palace, a river cruise on the Thames, the London Eye and some other places.  

Great kids and adult leaders from Hunter Street, including youth minister buddy, Smokey Gibson.

The team returned to Alabama Saturday morning and I slept late before going back into Central London to be a tourist.  The city was EXTREMELY crowded because Easter weekend is such a big holiday, not so much because it's Easter, but because it's a long weekend.  Anyway, it was terribly crowded everywhere.  I ended up seeing two movies because I have so little opportunity to see movies in English.

On Easter Sunday morning I attended Hillsong Church in Central London.  It was awesome of course and had a very Revelations 7 feel to it...ie, people from LOTS of tribes and tongues were there!  After church I met enjoyed an amazing Easter Dinner with the ITeams-London Team. It was awesome! I'm looking forward to seeing them all again in August in Germany at an ITeams Conference.

Finally- I had to catch a cab to my bus stop at 3 am yesterday morning to get to the airport and catch my flight back to Debrecen.  Darrel again picked me up and I stayed the night with him and his lovely family.  I caught the train back to Chop and a taxi back home this afternoon.  I'm tired but it was a great week.  Now I have to get ready to "go" again.  Lots of traveling in the next few weeks!

I HATE being sick

I do.  I hate getting sick.  And to make matters worse, I am, essentially, a wienie.  The only thing that kept be from being a complete whiny-baby-patient back when I was married was that whenever I would get sick, Kim would vacate the premises.

It was great being married to a Nurse.  I remember the first time I got sick after Kim died.  I went to the pharmacy section at Walmart and just stood and stared at over the counter medicines for 45 minutes.  I didn't have a clue what to get.  Kim always hooked me up and told me what I needed to do...and then she'd go stay with her sister for a few days!  She was a Nurse and a great caregiver but her own compromised immune system necessitated her hitting the road whenever I'd get sick.

So this past Thursday night I had a bout with food poisoning.  I knew almost immediately that's what it was.  It could have come from any one of 2 or 3 leftovers I had earlier that day.  (Time to clean out the refrigerator!)  Anyway, it's been a long time since I've felt that bad.  By 3 am I was dispensing liquids from both ends.  That's graphic, huh?

By early morning I was kinda scared because I couldn't keep liquid (or medicine!!) down for more than 5 minutes.  I knew where that was headed so I texted my team leaders wife (She's a Dr.) and sent out a Facebook plea for help.  Within a couple hours I had several people offering to pick-up medicine and bland foods for me.

Realistically, I guess food poisoning would have run it's course within a 24 hour period.  Maybe I could have toughed it out.  But I'm glad I didn't have to.

This episode made me think though:

1.  My landlord is battling cancer.  She brought some toast and berries downstairs and told me that she's had the same symptoms for 4 days because of her treatments (see? I'm a wienie!).
2.  What about all those people in the world without clean water who battle constantly with diarrhea with virtually no chance to recover.  People die from what could so easily be treated.
3.  I watched a movie a few weeks ago about Jews that survived in the sewers of Lviv during World War Two.  Many times they would have to eat terribly rotten food.  What would you do if you were starving and the only food you could eat was rotten and would make you sick?  If you don't eat, you're going to die.  If you eat, you're going to get sick and might die.
4.  I'm thankful for friends here in Ukraine.  Medicine isn't sold in grocery stores here.  You can't go to Walmart and grab some Imodium and some Bananas.  You have to go to a Pharmacy and tell them what you want and you have to go to the market or a grocery store.  And not many of my friends have cars so that means they have to get out and deal with public transportation and walking and I do live off the beaten path out in the "burbs".
5. I'm a wienie.

I am about to get really busy for a few weeks!

We're leading worship again this coming Sunday morning.  I've had a lingering Cold and cough now for about 2 weeks.  But life doesn't stop just because I don't have much range in my voice!

Next Tuesday (March 26) I'm catching an early morning Marshrutka (overcrowded mini-bus) from here to Chop where I'll buy a train ticket to Debrecen, Hungary which is only about an hour and a half away once you get over the border.  From Debrecen, my friend Darrell will take me to the airport where I'll catch a plane to LONDON!  Woohoo!

I'll be in London nearly a whole week visiting my friend Charles and his son, Josh and some other folks who will be there on a Spring Break mission trip.  I have some other friends in London, too and hope to catch up with them as well.  I also plan to eat things I can't get here, go to some museums, maybe some Plays or Musicals, take lots of pictures with my new camera and go to an English speaking Church or two!  Probably Hillsong London!

When I return the following week to Ukraine (April 2) I'll have a 3-4 day turnaround before going to Kalush with Christina to coach the church there for the weekend (April 5-7).  Afterwards we plan to spend a night with the Blessing family in Lviv and learn more about their ministry.

From Lviv, I will go to Kiev by train where I will meet Douglas (April 10) a couple days later and where we will meet a team from two US Churches coming over for a vision trip.  We will visit some ministry sites there, in Ternopil (April 11) and back here in Uzhgorod (April 12)  and then go back to Kiev (April 14) where we will fly to Kyrgyzstan (April 15-18)!  I'm really excited about that trip!  We will have long layovers in Istanbul going and coming and I'm hoping to connect with some friends that are in ministry there!

Upon returning to Uzhgorod at the end of that trip (April 20 or 21), I will have another 3-4 day turnaround before working at and speaking at our Spring Youth Ministry Conference in nearby Mukachevo (April 26-27)!

The day after the Re:Fresh Conference, I will welcome a team of World Racers (April 28) who will stay with me in May!

What's your calendar for the next month look like?

Has it really been 7 years?

I've been without Kim for 7 years today.  We were married a few months short of 9 years.  In just a couple more years I will have been without her for longer than we were married; a couple years beyond that, if the Lord keeps me here, I will be without her longer than I knew her.

Surreal.

I went to bed last night with these thoughts.  I woke up with them this morning.

I'll spend a couple hours tonight playing Uno and Jenga with college kids but these thoughts will be on my mind.

Inescapable.

What would life be like if that day had never happened?  You can't really play that game can you?

Rick Warren might say that these are the cards I've been dealt.  I have no control over my chemistry, connections, consciousness, or circumstances...but I do have control over my choices.

I've made good ones and I've made bad ones.  I'm probably not through yet with either.

But I keep saying, I keep telling people that I'd do it all over again.  It was the choice I made to marry Kim knowing full well what the outcome would be.  I'd do it all over again.

I keep thinking that someday the story will be complete.  Someday it will make sense.  Someday I'll understand why on the verge of 50 I'm still not a Daddy.  Someday I'll understand the apparent contradiction between desiring to be a daddy and marrying someone that precluded that possibility (and believing that if I had it to do over again I'd make the same choice).

Someday.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged...

Funny how quickly time can go by between blogs!  I didn't mean for 2 weeks to pass since the last time I was here.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I've been grocery shopping 5 times.  My grocery shopping is almost always limited to what I can or want to carry in my daypack or in bags.  A lot of times, just for the exercise, I walk to the grocery store.  It's a little over a mile.  I seldom walk home though burdened as I am with $15-20 worth of groceries so I walk about a quarter a mile and catch a bus back close to home.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I've been to the Children's Hospital and held abandoned babies 3 times.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I've hosted 3 dinners at my house- Valentine's Night for some friends, a Sunday afternoon for the kids from the Messianic Church and then again last Sunday for the guys/girls in our worship band at church AND I had brunch at a friend's apartment with a bunch of the same friends.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I got a haircut and participated in an all-morning staff meeting.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I've had 2 language lessons and 3 band practices.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I helped lead worship for a youth meeting and spoke at a youth meeting and attended a meeting about refugee ministry in Uzhgorod.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I've started working on 5 new worship songs in Russian.

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I took 2 days off; one of them I think I slept pretty much ALL day long! (My pedometer says I walked 129 steps that day).

In the 2 weeks since I last blogged I met two different Ukrainian friends for coffee.  That was only part of the coffee I drank in the last 2 weeks.

And in the last 2 weeks I since I last blogged I walked about 102,000 steps or about 45 miles.

Tie tying contest...um, yeah, Ira is showing them how to tie a Tie.

Qwiki

This is kinda fun.  I created this brief slide show thingy with a new App called Qwiki.  To me it looks sort of like a slide show/ mini-movie version of Instagram.  It's really pretty clever.  It can automatically pull pictures/videos with the same approximate date (or maybe some other identifying information) and then add stock music or pull from your library.  Or of course, you can exercise manual control in creating the sequence and adding music...like I did below.  

One drawback is it's necessarily pretty short...I'd love to use it to make a full length slide show.  

Qwiki is not just a multi-media App, it's also a Social Network like Instagram so you can follow and be followed.  Neat concept.

Another "Semester" is in the books.

We call our "Bi-Monthly" coaching sessions "Semesters".  I don't know why.  When I think "semester" I think of two units in a year.  We meet with the churches we're coaching every other month for 14 months and call each session a "Semester".  Again, I don't know why.

But I digress.  We just finished our Third Semester with the church we're coaching in Kalush and I have to say I think it was the best.  I absolutely meant it when I shared with the whole church Sunday morning that with each successive visit I love their kids and Youth Leadership team more and more.

I'm sure that's the reason why this past weekend was so much fun.  We're starting to get to know them and they're getting to know us.  Their leaders and their students are sponges soaking up the training and working hard to implement the strategy.

When we go back in April for the 4th "Semester" we get to do something with them all day Saturday "just for  fun" in order to both emphasize the importance of fellowship in their team and to give us all a little break.  You know? Teams that play together stay together.  That's the idea.

It's hard to imagine a weekend being more fun than this last one was though.

Be in prayer for them.  Their teenagers face all the issues kids back in the States face with one really noticeable difference: Most Protestant churches here are likened to a "sect" which really makes sharing their faith a challenge.