Good Friday

We spent some time with some Americans on Good Friday night for a small service. I was supposed to feel the weight of the day, mourn Jesus' death, but it's hard to mourn when the best thing ever is just around the corner. Good Friday is like a cloud crossing the sun. Sure, it's chilly for a moment, but something dazzling is coming... right... now.

Clouds

Clouds
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

Sometimes I wish I could eat clouds. Especially this one.

Coca Cola

Coca Cola
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

My grandfather is in the process of dying right now and I'm in the States with a short shopping list. Coca cola is not on that list. I think it's the one product you can find anywhere in the world.

I am getting Cadbury Creme Eggs though.

3 weeks of growth

3 weeks of growth
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I put off mowing for a single week. One week. Then it rained hard for two weeks solid.

I found Jimmy Hoffa. He's been in Africa all this time.

trufflewogs

trufflewogs
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I know it's difficult to see at first, but imagine these beauties dipped in melted chocolate and decorated with a white frosting swirl. These are peanut butter truffles in their drab larval stages.

Interesting cultural note- almost everyone here turns their nose up at the idea of a peanut butter-chocolate mix. They think it sounds gross. But then I don't think much of that oily pickled green mango-chili chutney they serve.

Also the Honest-to-Goodness true blue KFC at the mall by our house always has a line out the door and around the corner. Go figure.

pollywogs

pollywogs
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I know it's difficult to see at first, but look at that black cloud under the surface. They were following each other pointlessly in swirls and billows of slippery black almost-frog. Some caught in the algae at the edge and died there.

I'm nothing like a pollywog. I hope.

Sleeping orphan

Peniel
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I was taking pictures of orphans for sponsorships and this one smiled at me while we were filling out her papers. After I took her picture for the file she fell asleep in this woman's arms. When I asked if I could take a picture, the woman misunderstood and tried to wake her up for the photo. Fortunately, she went right back to sleep.

Dung Beetles

Dung Beetles
Originally uploaded by Bad Fishie

I saw these dung beetles at a game park on Saturday. They were completely fascinated with their ball of dung. I am not interested in dung. Well, maybe I am a little interested if it is a very perfect ball. If the crap is in a very perfect sphere, densely packed and beautiful, I have been known to become fascinated with it.

One thing Americans do better…

There are acceptable substitutes for just about everything but lawn mowers.
Granted, my grass was very long, but it took me three hours to mow my lawn with the borrowed plastic electric mower in the picture. The blade has a small swing, the bag is small, and it is underpowered. It is a vile color.
When the container came, I blessed the lawn gurus in my native land. Made of metal, the beauty that we shipped has a 4 horsepower gas engine with a big swing, a big bag, and it's painted red. I haven't offered to mow the neighbor's lawns yet, but I'm tempted. It decadent, egotistical, and a great joy to be pushing that much muscle all over the yard.

Keys Again

Lately I'm finding that the absorbing problems of life are not the big things, but the small irritations of trying to learn to live gracefully in another culture.
Chief among these frustrations is the sheer number of things I have to carry in my pockets. I have five remote controls for various doors and gates, three keychains, an electronic ignition key, a wallet, a flash drive, an iPod, and a cell phone. I am always juggling all this jingly stuff (I need this keychain and the black remote to start the car and I need this remote and the silver set of keys to get into the office.)
I am considering getting a man-purse. I have rejected out of hand the idea of a carabiner on the belt buckle with iPod and phone holsters. I am a self-respecting geek. But a man-purse is still a stretch. They have those cute little wrist loops, I could find myself at the mall, say, swinging the wee bag along like Little Red Riding Hood.
Maybe a satchel of some sort- then I could pass for a Canadian, or maybe a hip Swede. Of course, then I would need a moleskine which I know I wouldn't use. I barely even use a blog.

I expected...

Okay, so we're in Africa and there's tons of stuff I didn't expect. I didn't expect Ubuntu Linux to be such a great friend. I didn't expect bananas on pizza (it's not as good as it sounds.) I didn't expect to have to do Information Technology as much as I do. I have to authenticate myself a lot. I counted twelve times that I have to use a key, a security remote, or a password between the time I get up and the time my computer boots at work in the morning. I didn't expect that.

I also didn't expect to love the smell of the red dirt, the goosy sound of the hadida ibis birds at 5:30 in the morning, fresh flaky bread at the Super Spar bakery and butterier butter. I didn't expect to shop in a mall that could house Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto twice over. I expected more iPods, fewer cell phones, cheaper cream cheese, more expensive steak. I didn't expect to get hooked on rugby so fast. And some people tell me cricket is even better. We'll see.

September 10 is our departure date

and I'm not counting down. I have to go to my calendar and count days to see that it’s... 24 days away. I should be counting down. I’m excited, I'm tired of living in other people’s houses, I haven’t had a workstation in six weeks and I haven’t had a computer of my own in a week and a half. I should be counting down.

I feel guilty that I don’t know the countdown at any given moment, as though that means that I am not sure we should be taking off.

Well, I am excited, and I won’t count down.

I remembered one of my most embarrassing moments this morning. I was running a television camera at a large church on Mother’s day. I skipped breakfast and halfway through the service I passed out on the lap of some poor lady.
What’s strange is that I remember when I woke up there was a circle of faces over me and someone was wondering if they should loosen my tie because it was tied so beautifully. I have never thought about how unlikely that comment was until this morning, and now I wonder if someone actually said it, or if I’ve fabricated that part of the story and stored it as an actual memory.
It was a very good knot, though.

Carrying my homelessness on my back

I'm what they call a third culture kid- and as a category, we tend to make home out of wherever we are. I am also finding that I carry a sort of homelessness around too. I don't seep into the earth that I inhabit. I am shallow-rooted.
It is a good thing when it is time to move (now is one of those times), but I long for a place and time when I love where I live and I won't have to worry about needing to move away or having the place change and become something other than what I love.
Home and Homelessness share the same uneasy space in me. This tension, I think, is universal to one degree or another, but I think that we who follow Christ have a hope of resolution in time, or at least beyond it.

Keys

In Orwell's 1984, the government was trying to simplify the English language with the ultimate goal of reducing it to a single word. I don't know about language, but I want to do that with keys. I want one key that will get me into anything I need to get into.
Since my family is moving around right now, I have a fluctuating keyring. A borrowed house key finds its way onto my keychain for a couple of weeks or months, then is returned to its owner. Occasionally I borrow a car and pick up an extra key for a while. I feel my keyring in my pocket when I walk now. It isn't a stable shape any more and it tends to poke and bulge.
Yesterday I handed over a work key I'm not going to need any more. One by one the keys to the cars, the office, my parents' house will get sold or returned and when I get on the plane to Africa I will have an empty keyring with just a flash drive on it.
I don't know how to feel about that. I should feel light and free, but today I just feel like the doors of my life for the last 15 years will be closing and locking behind me and I won't have the keys to open them again. I will have no keys, no means of opening locked doors.

Great News

I’m finding that I don’t want to know what’s going on in the world so much any more. An average television newscast has an astounding amoung of deep tragedy. Any one “bad news” item would be catastrophic in my family. How am I supposed to process it all with any semblance of empathy? The only options I can see are callousness or ignorance. There’s enough tragedy on my own street to keep me busy.
I don’t want to drop out completely, I care about what happens to the world, what happens to people, but I can’t handle every child that drowns in a swimming pool in the United States. I can’t process every murder/suicide rampage and train wreck. This is the downside of RSS feeds. All the disaster of the world shows up on my desktop in real time. If a father burns down his house with his children inside in New Jersey, I know about it before the ashes are cool.

Finishing

I have an aversion to finishing. I like to keep my options open- something better might come along. I might get a better idea, or I might get stuck with something I don't want. This is also the classic male failure to commit. I did get married though. I wouldn't recommend waiting too long on that one. It's worth it.
By the way, I'm an INTP. If that doesn't mean anything to you, congratulations! You aren't in a box.

I invented

I invented the concept of density. Minus the mathematical formula, I figured out that the ratio between mass and volume could be valuable to know. I was too late by a thousand years or so. I also invented postscript before it was actually made by Adobe, but I had the idea. My dad invented turbo and also a rocket platform. He was disappointed to see that someone was already doing turbo. NASA ended up building a rocket platform, but not my dad's.

I don't speak up enough. I invented this thing where On-Star collects traffic statistics between points for live, extremely accurate route predictions. Someone probably already thought of that.

We are the Experts

I've worked in media at a church for almost fifteen years and we have made just about every boneheaded mistake possible. I have personally made horrible typos, I have sometimes created bland art, lousy video, flat websites. I have missed deadlines.
The team at the church has had at various times mediocre administration, self-serving individuals, lapses in focus, petty infighting, and feuds with people working at cross-purposes.
God seems to be completely unaffected by all of this. When He decides to speak to someone, he does it in spite of all our screwups. We have often come off of a weekend bloodied and battered, with nothing having gone right, and we'll get a note from someone in the service thanking us for speaking into their lives, for bringing them into the presence of God. I don't believe we have any such power. It may be that God blinds people and deafens them to what we are doing and speaks to them directly sometimes.
And still we aim at excellence, even though it doesn't seem to make a difference, like Milton said, "God doth not need either man's work or his own gifts..."
So why bother if there is no strong correlation between our effort and the results? Because God made us for something, and the better we do that thing the more pleased He is. And when I'm doing what I'm designed for, the more fulfilled I am.
So there's another tension- excellence vs. trust.

More nametags

I was at a baptism one time where the people being baptized (baptizees?) had adhesive name tags. When they came out of the water, their nametags had soaked off, so when it was done there were ten or fifteen name tags floating on top of the water. It was an interesting picture of the idea of "dying to self", but I've noticed as well in my experience as a follower of Jesus that I become more uniquely myself as I follow him. The life of faith is full of tensions, this is the tension of conformity vs. individuality.