Monthly Archives: March 2010

was an awesome time, which centered around good conversations and investing time in friends including the Uhrins, Azzolis, Cheesmans, and a flat full of folks for ICF at Erik and Sara’s for pizza, salad, cake and teaching (2Cor 2.14 on fragrance)… got to go to Z Nagy TWICE! and Cafe Stephania, and had the whole cottage cheese-esque, sour cream and bacon thing with palacintas at Boci (for 550HUF!!!!!) Gabor did an amazing lunch before I rode the train back (sleeping half way) to Budapest. All in all a great trip. There.

Here in snowy Szeged, I suddenly have a couple of minutes of quiet with the Internet so, at the half way mark of this trip, I thought I would reflect on this trip so far… what I’ve seen God do:

He has:

rescued a ton of kids and placed them in loving places in central Ukraine in the Vinnistya area in the Chance Shelters, it was awesome to visit them…

given a couple of Ukrainian folks a heart for missions, I hope I was able to encourage them to leae their comfort zone to serve in needy places (like Bosnia!)

began the healing of a relationship between two brothers

taught me more about prayer and fasting and faith

really shown Himself to me in fresh ways

given me some new friendships

helped me understand patience

healed a brother who had a tumor and blown the doctors minds

encouraged a bunch of Europeans on a mission trip to the Balkans

fought off the darts of the enemy on our behalf: these darts were in the form of: flat tires, broken car suspensions, and other things intended to delay and distract us from our mission, the enemy also sought to distract with discouragement and frustration which resulted in words not meant which were spoken in the heat of a moment… God prevailed through patience and love… How DO you disassemble an atomic bomb? Love, pure love.

God has given new, great connections with people who are making more good connections for us and our work to bring justice

He also gave me a blessing writing the first lesson in a GCL style study of Romans which was a blast to write!

as I write this the sun has just come out! God is good indeed…

These are two views I chose to illustrate my trip today…

the first is a view of the Bosna River which the train follows through from Sarajevo almost all the way to Croatia; the second is a view at the Croatian border just before Hungary…

Sarajevo at night.

if you follow me on Twitter or Fb you know that I finished Sabbath today and enjoyed it very much, good reminders about this very important practice which is far less about doing than being…

So I put it in the finished pile (currently in an almost empty suitcase) and, since I’m all packed for the Bosnia trip and just hanging around waiting for the take off, er… drive off time to arrive, I picked up Justification and began reading.

This book is a response to a response and since I like that kind of thing and I like the writing of N.T. Wright (or Tom Wright, who is bishop of Durham of the Church of England and a prolific writer – the publishers seem to divide between N.T. and Tom depending on the scholarly/ more popular tenor of the volume and who they are going to market to), I am anticipating this book more than any I have looked forward to in a while. In the Introduction (I am a firm believer that one should read the introductions to books) the Bishop does not disappoint me. Here is my first qoute from the book:

“Part of my plea in this book is for the Spirit’s work to be taken seriously in reltion both to Christian faith itself and to the way in which that faith is “active through love.” (pp.10-11)

This resonates with me deeply because the work of the Spirit is so seldom described in thoughtful way and so often ignored altogether by the branches of the body of Jesus followers who are in, what I describe as the post-enlightenment, rational, modernist mode of thinking instead of feeling and losing a beautiful part of what God designs: thus faith and God are put in a box and some of what He wants for us gets lost… well, now… if that’s not a rambling rabbit trail, I don’t know what is…

more rambling later