Yes, we’ve been playing soccer up at the fields for a couple weeks now, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 am-12 pm. There’s a group of guys that get together to play and we’ve kind of insinuated ourselves into the mix. So we’re having fun, getting better at soccer (not saying much), and getting to know a bunch of regulars. I suppose the next step will be to get onto a team in a league. Eddie’s turning into the Enforcer on defense, and I’ve actually scored a few goals, mainly because people are too astonished that I’m shooting in goal to do anything!

So this is just one more thing we’re doing to get out into the community and make friendships. We’ll see how God uses it, hopefully to touch lives with the gospel in the long term, but in the short term at least to get us into shape!

Here’s another Chesterton quote (I really think C.S. Lewis quotes this or says something similar, somewhere, in Mere Christianity, maybe, or Surprise By Joy. But I’m not hunting it down.):

it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.
His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

A good excuse to try out a feature. While big brother Drew spent the week at Camp, Gavin and Fiona did VBS at El Camino. Here’s the final song.

One of the great features of an iPod is the Kindle app. I’ve been pulling old classics off the Internet and actually reading them, instead of just saying I should (ok, I’m still stuck at about 20% of Moby Dick; it’s hard). So lately I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by GK Chesterton, and it is indeed good. Chesterton is one of those authors that everyone quotes and talks about how great he is. I think he’s meeting expectations. Orthodoxy isn’t really what I expected–rather than being a sort of theology primer, it’s kind of a personalized apology for the faith, looking at issues that were important to Chesterston’s own arrival at the Christian faith. He likens his journey to a man sailing to discovery a new country, and ending up the last to arrive where everyone else already is. “I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been
discovered before.” What makes the book especially interesting is that Chesterton is sailing philosophical waters that have led to contemporary post-modernism–and is anticipating the destination of the thought of his age. His influence, or at least, shared thinking, with C.S. Lewis is evident in his reflections about fairies and beauty in “The Ethics of Elfland”. My goal isn’t to write a complete review here, but only to set the stage for posting some good quotes. As follows from chapter VIII, “The Romance of Orthodoxy”…

The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe. And those who assist this process are called the “liberal theologians.”

Freedom of all types was obviously one of Chesterton’s dearly held values. To which I say, “Amen”.

Well, we finally broke down and got on Twitter…in the last few weeks I noticed that several of our activities would be perfect to mention in 140 characters or less and decided that I should sign up…actually, I thought that it would be nice to mention what we were doing (with Caleb and Ethan, or school activities) without, you know, sitting down and actually taking the time to write a WHOLE paragraph. In other words, we want the attention, but we’re too lazy to put the time into writing coherently about our work!

So you’ll notice on the left sidebar that there’s a Twitter feed. Eventually I’d like to incorporate it in a different spot (on a right sidebar, for example), but that’ll have to wait. For now, we’ll be putting up the briefest of comments on our activities, prayer requests and other minutiae from life here. We’d really like this blog to give a realistic portrayal of (one family’s) missionary life and work here in Mexico. And Twitter might just be one tool in our box.(50 characters)

Well, the latest prayer letter is out. We debuted GoogleGroups to send it out. One email, 30 seconds to send, vs, 650 emails, all day, one hundred at a time. We’ll see how that goes. I’m happy, though, and less time on that make Barbara-Lee happy, and THAT makes the whole family happy!

Here’s the link and we’ll throw a teaser here…

[
By and by
Washington’s motto is “By and by”, which struck us as a very good motto for our prayer letter in June, as in, “We’ll write it by-and-by.” What a month-and-a-half it’s been! Let’s fill you in.

Medical team
We had a medical clinic scheduled for a Wednesday-Friday, June 15-17, in partnership with another church here in Puebla (they were very gracious to include us in their plans). We were pretty ready to go on Tuesday…until we got word Tuesday afternoon that the Health Department was shutting things down, due to a paperwork misunderstanding. So Tuesday night and all day Wednesday we worked the phones, followed contacts and prayed. We opened up on Wednesday, but only took vital signs and explained to people why we couldn’t treat them. At the same time we gave away all but 4 of our Gospels of John and many tracts—with a pretty low-key approach of explaining why we were doing this. We managed to get permission via email to continue with the clinic, on further review our ministry partners didn’t feel that the email gave us enough coverage against health inspectors and severe sanctions. I met with a lady from the local Heath Clinic in a last-ditch effort to see if they could do the clinic under their own auspices with us providing medicine and doctors. The meeting was brief and the lady explained it just wasn’t possible. So, not willing to expose our partner church to sanctions we called everything off…

But the story doesn’t end there …
]

Follow the link to the rest of the story (and photos)…

This week (after saying goodbye to Mom & Dad) we were supposed to do an English camp for the teachers at the elementary school where Tim does computer classes. However, coming into this week, we were picking up pretty clear signs that it wasn’t going to work out. First, the Education Department extended the year by one day, Monday. Then, about half the teachers were telling us that they had a continuing education class to take. Finally, they all had (somehow unexpectedly it seems) to turn in their grades in the few days after school got out. So we’re going to reschedule for the first week in August.

It remains to be seen how well English plays with the teachers, but there’s interest. Eddie may have the chance to teach one of the principals one on one.

So yet another lesson in flexibility and adaptability. And an unexpected week off (at least in thus area).

Ok, just a quick last word on things. I’ll get a longer post-mortem up later.

Bueno, or not…we shut it down so as not to jeopardize the doctors and the church that was organizing things. We didn’t have enough confidence in the permission we had. But we have some great new contacts. It wasn’t a loss.

Well…quisa no…lo cerramos para no tar el riesgo de perjudicar a los doctores ni la iglesia que organizaba todo. No sentíamos suficiente confianza en el permiso que obtuvimos. Pero ahora tenemos muy, muy buenos contactos en la comunidad. No perdimos el tiempo.

Thanks everyone for your prayers!
¡Gracias a todos por sus oraciones!

Why is it that on the days that are worth blogging about you’re too tired to write anything. Today was really ome of the most insane days I’ve had. Ever. Period.

It started out with just the regular busyness of getting ready for the clinic: picking up furniture, supplies, equipment. Then Ethan and I got home and there was a phone call waiting for me. It was Juan Manuel, the pastor in charge of the medical work. “They’ve closed us down,” he said. It seems every year they’re getting stricter and stricter and changing the requirements and this year they’ve changed somethig else–just paperwork, nothing to do with actual medical work. I could now write paragraphs and more, but suffice it to say we used wvery contact we have, got the new president of the area to go to bat for us, but it looks like we’re not really going to be able to do a real clinic. Instead we’ll try to explain what happened, take basic vital signs, and reschedule. That’s a real bummer, especially for those, like Hannah who came down from the US, but it’s a good reminder that God is in control and we really need to be praying a ton.

Well. That’s enough of that.

As mentioned last week, we have two college students with us for two weeks, Caleb and Ethan. Thet have been just great. Their first days they went to a late night Bible study, a three hour football camp under the blazing sun, new food, a strange roommate (Eddie:) and aced everything. They helped Eddie get the dividers ready on Saturday in record time. Then, yesterday they went to school with me and were just great. They don’t speak a lot of Spanish, but they use what they’ve got, learn new words, and aren’t scared to try. They jumped right into helping the second graders with their typing, showing them, talking to them, and helping them. They were a huge help!

Then, in the afternoon, they went up to play soccer at the sports fields and got invited to join a team for a game next Tuesday! (they both play for their college, BBC).

Way to go, Caleb and Ethan! It’s great to have you here!