Jeff and Gretchen Go Dutch

Goodbye

2010-03-21T02:17:00.000-07:00

Spring has come to the Netherlands and yesterday was about as nice as it gets. It was warm and windy and there were moments when you could even feel the sun. As is our custom, Maury and I went out for a walk, and since it was so nice I decided to take the long way around our neighborhood by veering left instead of right and going up on top of the dike that circles our polder. Almost every dike has a road or trail on top of it, and this one is no exception. Occasionally cars come along, but most often it is bicycles or people walking like me, often with their dogs. Walking high up on a dike with a dog at your side is very nice and I will miss it.

We walked most of the way in solitude, with only an occasional biker going by. At one point a man came along riding quite fast, and his large dog was running just out ahead of him. The dog passed us on our right and the man approached on our left. The dog paid no mind to Maury as he ran by, but Maury lunged out towards him, and then must have become twisted around by his leash because the next thing I heard was a yelp. Maury had flipped himself about 270 degrees into the path of the bike, and was hit. The whole thing happened in an instant, and I only heard it because it was all behind me. Fortunately the bike rider didn’t fly over his handlebars. He had stopped and was very concerned about Maury, who had a visible tire track imprinted onto his side. Maury was bit gimpy on his back legs, but seemed all right. I told the man it was okay, and he said, “No, I do not think it is okay. I think he is hurt.” We looked at Maury for a while and he was a bit shaken by the whole thing, but still seemed okay to me. “It’s okay,” I said, and once again the man said, “I don’t think so. I think you should take him to see a vegetarian.”

I smiled inside at this wonderful moment of translation misfortune. Maury is okay, he’s sitting next to me in a room full of moving boxes as I write this, and we have to go see the veterinarian (who may or may not be a vegetarian) tomorrow anyway, to get a certificate that will allow Maury to fly. We went to the “dierenziekenhuis” (animal hospital – do you see the word is more or less dieren (animal) sick house?) a few days ago to get the certificate, since the instructions on the internet said you must have the certificate signed within ten days of travel. When we got there, they wouldn’t do it, they said it must be within three days of travel. Sort of like when we went to City Hall on Friday to “un-enroll” as residents of Dordrecht because their web site said you must un-enroll within five days of leaving and were told when we got there we must come the day before we leave. For one last time we have been getting slapped around by the world of bureaucracy, and I can assure you this is one thing we won’t miss about living here.

We’re pretty much packed and I only have to take apart our infamous box spring and move it downstairs and then reassemble it. The movers come on Tuesday and Tuesday evening we are heading to Amsterdam because we fly out fairly early Wednesday morning. I can hardly believe I am going to be able to watch March Madness next weekend! I’m excited about that, and excited to be with Amanda (who is in the US for a wedding) and Jesse again. It feels really good to be going home.

This has been a grand adventure with twists and turns I never could have imagined, and I cannot adequately express how much my life has been enriched by doing this. I am very grateful to have had this European experience. There is a famous quote by Thomas Wolfe that you can’t go home again, and we all know of course you can, that we go home every day. But what that quote means, I suppose, is you can’t go away and do something where you grow and change and expect to go back to where you came from and just fit in to your old life. I believe that is generally true, and expect it to be specifically true for me. So, G Rap, I am coming home, but I don’t think I am the same person, and, as Stanley Kunitz so eloquently said in The Layers, “I am not done with my changes.” Maybe that will be the fodder for another blog or something…I’m not going to post anymore on this one since this adventure is ending. Thanks for reading.

Here, There and Everywhere

2010-02-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

Penny Lane isn’t even my favorite Beatles song, but I found myself having some hard to describe emotions as I traveled down Penny Lane in Liverpool a couple of days ago. Yes, there is a roundabout with a barber shop on one side and a bank on the other. (The barber shaves another customer, we see the banker sitting waiting for a trim….) The shelter at the roundabout (where a pretty nurse sells poppies from a tray) was the bus transfer center for that part of Liverpool, and John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney would have met there most every day traveling to school. George’s dad (with the wonderful name Harry Harrison) was a bus driver, and they probably rode downtown often on his bus. Paul and George’s houses were down one main street leading toward that place, while John lived down another. Around the corner from John’s house, almost in his backyard, were the grounds of a Salvation Army home called Strawberry Field.

Monday afternoon I was on a bus called “The Magical Mystery Tour” sitting next to my son Jesse with Amanda and Gretchen sitting behind us, seeing these places and lots of others – like the house Ringo was born in, the house George was born in, Paul’s house where John and Paul wrote over one hundred songs and practiced them in the bathroom because the acoustics were great in there, and even the church hall where on a summer day in 1957 Paul was introduced to John at a performance by John’s group “The Quarrymen.” (There is a cemetery behind the church and yes, there is a gravestone there for a woman named “Eleanor Rigby.”) You could throw a stone from the church to Strawberry Field and pick it up and throw it again and hit John’s house.

One of my earliest memories is watching The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in February, 1964. My parents were scandalized by their long hair and loud music, and my brothers and I loved them. I remember seeing the movie “Help” in its first run in our local theater in Sharonville, Ohio, and being in awe of my older brother who saw The Beatles live at Crosley Field in Cincinnati in 1966. We bought every Beatles album when it came out, and I still have them all on CD. I saw Paul when I was a senior in high school on his Wings Over America tour and I remember learning of John’s murder while watching a Monday Night Football game in 1980. The Beatles and their music wove in and out of my childhood in powerful ways.

So let’s get back to my feelings as we were driving down Penny Lane. I felt a very strong emotional surge – maybe the best word for it is nostalgia, and I know I am not the first person to feel it or to be led to Liverpool because of it. The city has real problems keeping the street signs for Penny Lane in place, and this Monday, on a non-descript February afternoon, there was a bus load of pilgrims from all over the world on the tour. What is it we all were seeking? Some sort of understanding of our childhoods? Some sort of connection to our idols? I’m not sure. Maybe it is just the same feeling that caused Lennon and McCartney to write songs about Liverpool.

So, if Penny Lane isn’t my favorite Beatles song, what is? It all depends on what day it is and what sort of mood I’m in. There are way too many possibilities. Today, my favorite isn’t even technically a Beatles song, but a song by a Beatle, the song “Beautiful Boy” by John, written for his son Sean. Yesterday, sitting in the legendary “Cavern Club,” listening to a very talented John Lennon impersonator, we requested “Beautiful Boy” and enjoyed it very much. One line sticks with me: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Fatherly advice for all of us.

When a 90% Success Rate Means Total Failure

2010-02-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

I drove my car over the Rhine (Rijn in Dutch) river at Arnhem today. No big deal, hundreds of cars go over the bridge daily, but I went over it with a sense of history. This bridge is the famous “Bridge Too Far.”

You probably know that name, but may be fuzzy on the details. Here’s a little history. The Allies invaded Europe at Normandy in June, 1944. They got bogged down in France and Belgium by the end of the summer. Anxious to end the war by Christmas, the British General Bernard Law Montgomery devised a plan to attack Germany from the North through Holland. This plan became known as “Operation Market Garden,” and became the biggest Allied disaster of the war. The plan called for the largest deployment of airborne troops in history. The paratroopers jumped more or less on a line from Eindhoven to Nijmegen to Arnhem. Because Holland is an endless series of rivers and canals, these forces were supposed to capture several bridges along the way and hold them while armored divisions raced northwards out of Belgium and then massed together to pour into Germany. But the intelligence was wrong – the Germans had much stronger forces than the Allies imagined, the fighting was intense, the armored divisions were supposed to travel north up one highway and some of the bridges they were supposed to hold had already been destroyed. The Allies never fully got control of that highway. The paratroopers had been sent with two-day supplies of food and ammunition, and their relief never reached them.

The fighting was especially intense around Arnhem. British and Polish forces landed there and took the northern end of the bridge I crossed today. It was the furthest bridge in the plan, and they held it for several days despite brutal opposition. They were surrounded, and about one week after they jumped in had to retreat out of Arnhem. A bit over 2000 troops were able to escape by cover of night. 17,000 others were killed in Arnhem.

Arnhem was more or less destroyed. Looking today, I noticed that, with the exception of a magnificent church, every building around the bridge was recent. The Dutch Resistance, thinking liberation was at hand, came out of hiding and were decimated. The winter of 1944-45 became the worst winter in Dutch history – it is called “The Hunger Winter” here, and huge numbers of people starved to death.

There is a museum outside of Arnhem where the British headquarters was, and one of the most moving things I saw today was a monument given jointly by the UK and Poland to the people of Arnhem in September, 1994, on the 50th Anniversary of Operation Market Garden. I’m paraphrasing, but it more or less said “You expected liberation when we came, but instead we brought destruction and devastation to you. You have never blamed us, and we will never forget that.” I contrasted that honest statement to a quote I saw from General Montgomery inside the museum. He said, “Operation Market Garden was 90% successful.”

What a perverse way of looking at one’s own colossal mistakes that cost tens of thousands of lives.

It left me thinking that there is a gap between making a true statement and telling the truth. Monty could probably defend that statement statistically, that 90% of what was supposed to happen did in fact happen. But it was a horrible failure. The death toll of Operation Market Garden is one thing, but you also have to add the death toll of the Battle of the Bulge, the German counter-attack through Belgium that Christmas to the total cost of Market Garden. Monty was a small man with a huge ego, and unable to admit how wrong he was.

Why can’t some leaders admit mistakes?

Among the endless tragedies of Market Garden is that the Polish Commander objected to the plan from the start. He expressed his reservations that his men were supposed to be part of a surprise attack, but would be dropped some 10 miles from their target because the British felt the area around the bridge too marshy to jump into. The Polish Commander asked, “What could be surprising about landing ten miles away from where you want to go?” But in the military chain of command, after one expresses his reservations, he obeys orders. The soldiers under his command were decimated.

At what point is it okay to say, “I’m not going to follow. I am not going to lead others to their destruction”?

I have seen leadership bestowed on whoever has the biggest ego and is most aggressive, loudest, and most intimidating. But those sort of leaders never last, do they?

It was sobering to visit the area around Arnhem and think of all that happened there a generation ago. One wonders what we have learned from disasters like Operation Market Garden.

Making a Day Among Masterpieces a Masterpiece

2010-02-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

What if you lived in the Netherlands but knew you were only going to be there for another six weeks or so? What would you do?

Most of the people who read this blog have found out through other channels that we are returning to the US in March. But if you didn’t know that, now you do. I won’t explore why here, but if you read this blog carefully, it’s pretty much all there.

So, if you’re me, you say to yourself, “I’ve got to go visit The Girl with the Pearl Earring.” She lives on a wall about thirty-five minutes away in The Hague. Today, because the sun was shining, we went and saw her. (We had to walk a bit from the train station and I waited for a decent day to make that walk.) She lived up to expectations. The light in The Girl with the Pearl Earring alone is worth staring at for a long time. As is her blue turban. And her beautiful face. What a thrill to see the real thing! She is the “Mona Lisa” of Northern Europe, and she is stunning. And not only her, but lots of other incredible masterpieces, like Vermeer’s “View of Delft,” a bunch of paintings by Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, along with masterpieces by Jan Steen and Frans Hals and many others. We went to the Mauritshaus today and it was magnificent. I could feel my soul expanding as the day went on. I am so blessed to be able to see these incredible paintings in person.

What crossed my mind is, “Why don’t we live like this all the time? Why don’t we take advantage of our days and make them special instead of just plodding along?” I’ve heard this message a thousand times in a thousand ways. John Wooden likes to say, “Make each day a masterpiece.” Jesus said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were going to live forever.” (I’m sure John Wooden would enjoy being included with Jesus and Gandhi!)

This attitude of making where you are right now count is called mindfulness in Eastern thought. It is a very positive way to live. The secret of contentment and happiness, according to this idea, is to remain in the present moment. This idea –this discipline-has come to mean a lot to me over the past few months. Here’s a quick primer on the foundations of mindfulness:

Non-judging – Turn off the part of your brain that immediately sorts everything into “good” or “bad” and instead impartially accept your own experiences.

Patient – A form of wisdom, patience demonstrates that we understand things must unfold in their own time.

Innocent - To see the richness of the present moment, we need to see it as if we are seeing it for the first time.

Trusting – Trust your intuition, your feelings, yourself, your gut, your own wisdom.

Non-striving – Getting over “if/then” thinking is the key – “if this happens, then I will be content or happy or fulfilled.” We tend to live expecting some future thing to make us content – “if” I get this job or this house or this whatever, “then” life will really work. So we manipulate things so we get what we want …and it NEVER fulfills us.

Accepting – See things as they really are in the present. We spend way too much energy denying and resisting reality. Accept reality and start from there.

Letting Go – Detachment is the key to all of the behaviors described above. Let go of people, events, things, the past, the future…whatever it is we hold onto. Peace is found in letting go.

Cultivating mindfulness means to cultivate “being” instead of “doing.” It is a rich way to live. What’s stopping you from enjoying something beautiful close to you?

Stanley Nailed It

2010-01-31T00:32:00.000-08:00

I read this line from Stanley Kunitz last night:

All creativity is a process of giving meaning to what is on a universal scale meaningless.

If I had known that line a couple days ago, I could have saved all the words of my last blog entry. Stanley nailed it.

All of which reminds me of Ecclesiastes 6:11 - "The more the words, the less the meaning."

Don't Worry, Donny

2010-01-29T13:26:00.000-08:00

Today seems as good a day as any to talk about meaninglessness. I love the line in the movie “The Big Lebowski” when some men with German accents attack the Dude and his friends and Donny asks, “Are these the Nazis, Walter?” and Walter answers, “No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There is nothing to be afraid of.” At another point Walter says, “Nihilists! I mean say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos.”

I love Walter, Donny and the Dude in “The Big Lebowski.” Take the advice of a friend and watch it. With them and the nihilists in mind, I read the book of Ecclesiastes today. Have you ever read it? It’s tucked away right between Proverbs and Song of Songs. The book begins, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Yes, that’s in the Bible. The old King James and other versions use the word “vanity” instead of "meaningless," but I think “meaningless” packs more of a punch. “Vanity” makes me think of personalized license plates and being conceited; “meaningless” makes me think of nihilists.

Ecclesiastes asks, “What makes life meaningful?” Is there are a more important question to ask?

A problem I have with Christian interpretations of Ecclesiastes is that we tend to lay some sort of Christian message on top of it that doesn’t recognize what the author was saying at the time the book was written. Ecclesiastes is the wisdom of the ancients, written hundreds and hundreds of years before the time of Christ. I pulled down a couple of fairly conservative reference books today and looked up what they had to say about Ecclesiastes and I was disappointed. One of them said:

Apart from the assurance of future judgment and life after death furnished by the historical fact of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the future after death is dark and obscure.

Of course you think that, but the point, to me, is that this book wasn’t written by someone familiar with Jesus. Plus this book is still scripture to Jewish people – people who don’t agree about the “historical fact of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.” The book meant something when it was written and still means something to Jews today. Take off your Christian glasses and try and figure out what that is. And while you are at it don’t make “assurance of future judgment” sound like something to look forward to. Judgment is scary! I mean what if there is a future judgment and it goes the way of the judgment in Matthew 25:31-46 instead of being about having an orthodox belief system. That isn’t comforting.

Then I read this critique of Ecclesiastes from another source: The book contains the philosophical and theological reflections of an old man, most of whose life was meaningless because he had not himself relied on God as he should have. Ouch. I know from personal experience, and from hearing it from hundreds of people, that we get “should on” way too often. Getting “should on” is another way of talking about letting another person define reality for you, being manipulated or influenced not by your own sense of what is right but by trying to meet the expectations of someone else. “Should” is an indispensable part of creating guilt. Let’s leave “should” out of it for the moment. This book is not by someone who should have been different. (Talk about judgment!)

So what the heck is Ecclesiastes about? I’d encourage you to read it for yourself. Go ahead; it will only take 20 minutes or half an hour. I’ll be right here when you get back.

(Musical interlude – I’m humming the Jeopardy theme for reasons not clear to me)

What do you think? Can you believe that’s in the Bible? (As long as you’re reading different parts of the Bible, go ahead and read the Song of Songs, too. It’s a lot of fun.)

This morning I got a kick out of thinking about “there is nothing new under the sun” while I sat reading in an office chair by electric light, listening to the washing machine whir in the background, while Gretchen was in another room watching a flat screen TV and my computer and cell phone sat on the desk next to me. Obviously, there are some new things under the sun, not just since Ecclesiastes was written, but since I was in high school. Heck, we didn’t even VCRs then and our car had a big old 8-track player. So, technology has changed. But has the core of being human changed? Has the question “What gives meaning to life?” changed? I think not.

My interpretation of the book is that the answer is found in 3:12 – There is nothing better for people to do than to be happy and do good while they live. Life is fleeting, everything and every thing is temporal, the future is not only unknown but unknowable; so live well in the present moment. To be alive is to live with hope, and to be fully alive is to know God. I think that’s it.

What do you think?

Synchronicity

2010-01-23T00:32:00.000-08:00

I was in Spain from last Saturday until Thursday – in Catalunya, actually: Barcelona, Banyoles, and Platja d’Aro. We had an all-Europe Young Life conference, and I got to be the final speaker on Thursday morning. I talked about my struggle to hear the voice of God that says “I love you.” We were celebrating communion to end our time together, so I combined communion and hearing God’s voice by borrowing a bit from Henri Nouwen’s book “Life of the Beloved.” In that book Nouwen talks about the spiritual life as one where we gradually grow in our ability to hear the voice that tells us we are loved, and then says the life of the beloved is marked by the same movement as when Jesus takes bread at the Last Supper; that like the bread we also are taken (or chosen), blessed, broken, and given.

I want to tell you the story I used for “broken,” and some more thoughts I’ve been having about it.

A couple of weeks ago when we drove from Grand Rapids to Chicago O’Hare for our flight back here, I found a great radio station on the rental car’s XM radio. It was a station that played folk rock songs from the 1970s. I spent that decade going through junior high, high school and college, so the popular music of the 70s connects with some pretty deep places inside of me. I heard songs that I love that have more or less disappeared from other radio stations – songs by Harry Chapin, Elton John, James Taylor, Carole King, Jim Croce, Linda Ronstadt, and many others. I was having a great time listening to these songs until they played the single most heartbreaking song from the 1970s – Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” That song always gets to me – the story of 29 men dying in a Lake Superior shipwreck is sad enough, but Gordon Lightfoot’s voice and the haunting melody of the song do me in. He has a line where the cook comes in and says, “Fellas, it’s too rough to feed you” and then the cook comes back and says, “Fellas, it’s been good to know you.” He sings about how the ship would have been safe if it had put only 15 more miles behind her, and that all that remains are the wives and the sons and the daughters. But the most devastating line to me is simply this, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes?”

I rode along I-94 in Indiana crying for about ten miles after that. My family has learned that’s just the way I am, and they gave me a Kleenex and time and space to be in my own little world of grief.

There is no satisfying answer to his question about God’s love in the midst of human suffering. If there were an answer, we’d all know it by now.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes when something terrible happens? This makes me think of Haiti right now, and my reaction to the tragedy there. I don’t know if you are like me, but I find it terribly difficult to want to read or watch the coverage of the disaster in Haiti. I’ve been asking myself this question lately: “Why is it easier for me to feel the weight of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald than the disaster in Haiti?” It’s like I can get my mind around the loss of 29 men much easier than I can get my mind around devastation that affects millions. I’ve been thinking of a line I read in Amsterdam at the Anne Frank museum – that one Anne Frank is easier for people to understand than the totality of the Holocaust. It is easier for us to hear and understand the horror of Anne Frank’s story than to try to imagine the suffering of six million people.

I’ve also been thinking this – while millions suffer in Haiti the rest of us go on about our lives unchanged. I spent a few days last week in a hotel room with an incredible view through some palm trees of the Mediterranean. I ate paella and had good Spanish wine and tapas and life was good. It was very, very comfortable. The world has been incredible rearranged for one country while life goes on for the rest of us. Isn’t that also a reality that is undeniable but somehow patently unfair?

A quarter century ago, after the ceremony on the day that Gretchen and I got married we got into a car to ride to the reception. We pulled out away from the church and as we rode down the street I saw a guy I went to seminary with named Hank mowing his lawn. There was this surreal juxtaposition there – my life had just changed forever while life went on unchanged for Hank. He can’t tell you what he was doing in the late afternoon on August 23rd, 1985, but I can. Hank would have to take my word that he was mowing the lawn.

I’m just trying to put this together and don’t know if I need to any more than this. While one of us sits by the ocean under a palm tree, another’s life turns in a direction that they never imagined, and I wonder if there is any connection between the two. That’s what I’ve been musing about on this Saturday morning.

Stanley, Maury and Jerry

2010-01-10T08:09:00.001-08:00

We are back in frozen Europe. I know the US is cold, but I wonder if people in the US realize what is happening in Europe. Well, do you? England, which rarely sees snow, is frozen over. It was -17 Celsius in Scotland last night, which I think converts to -394 Fahrenheit. The BBC is abuzz. The UK doesn’t have anywhere near enough salt. Rumor has it that they will stop serving margaritas until the crisis has passed.

Part of me thinks that there have to be more compelling subjects to write about than the weather, but a greater part of me sees the wisdom in the words of Stanley Kunitz – a poet whom I was recently introduced to by a reader of this blog. Kunitz said, “Weather is a form of communication. There is an exchange between the self and the atmosphere that sets the tone for the entire day…Each of us is a very sensitive keyboard.” So, against a frozen Dutch backdrop…

Yesterday there was a very strong wind here, and I braved the elements and took Maury out for a walk. He dons a blue argyle sweater for such occasions. I put on long johns, which sadly didn’t stop my glasses from freezing to my face. In spite of the cold and wind, I saw a dozen people on bicycles and lots of people skating on the canals. I was surprised at one point to hear a splash to my left, and turned and saw that a heron had landed in an unfrozen spot next to a culvert that went below a road. Apparently the road kept the canal from freezing at that point. The ducks have all disappeared from the canals (where did they go? Spain? Africa?), and this lone bird was the only wildlife I saw. The heron looked large, proud, fierce, and defiant. This is the sort of animal you have to be to survive out here on your own. I am no heron – although I have to admit I feel alone on this side of the Atlantic a lot. But I don’t feel anywhere near as strong or ferocious as this heron looked.

A short time ago, Maury and I ventured out again. It is yet another endlessly gray day – sometimes I think the earth has swallowed the sun. The temperature was similar, but we didn’t have the wind, and since my glasses weren’t hurting my face, we took a walk almost twice as long as we did yesterday. We walked down a path where the bank of the canal is actually an apartment building. The heat from the building keeps the water warm, and there was a long stretch of water that was not frozen. And there were the ducks. I tried to count and had totaled over 75 when I gave up. It looked like all the ducks from all the canals have come here. I don’t know much about ducks, but I imagine at night these guys all huddle close together and keep each other from freezing. Even if they don’t, it’s a nice image, and I’m going to think the ducks all work together to survive.

I am a duck, not a heron.

Jerry Drachenberg responded to my last blog by asking how to find community. I honestly don’t know the answer to that, Jerry. I suppose you start by realizing you need it. I saw a picture of you last night as a pall bearer at a dear friend’s funeral a few days ago, so I imagine you are a lot more connected than you give yourself credit for. This much I know. Take a look at the heron and the ducks. We’re ducks, my brother, we’re ducks.

Resolution

2010-01-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

As the calendar turns today and we welcome not only a new year but a new decade, I find myself contemplating two questions, one ridiculous, and one sublime.

Here’s the ridiculous – how do Europeans, who live in a “checkless” society, know that it’s a new year? The constant reminder I used to have was writing the wrong year on a check.

Here’s the sublime question – what does it mean to be spiritual? And what is the relationship of spirituality to religion? I’d love for this to be interactive and hear from you. And I want to warn you up front that I am going to deliberately try to be provocative in what I write below.

It seems to me that the opposite of the spiritual is the material. The material world is what is seen, the spiritual world is what is unseen. The material world is our outside life, the spiritual world is our inner life. It helped me as I thought about this to think of the most openly materialistic person I’ve ever known. This is someone I have not had contact with in ten or fifteen years, but she would do things like write the purchase price of her new home on her Christmas cards. She wouldn’t have any problem violating social taboos about money and would openly tell you how much money she made or her husband made. She’s been married three times, each time trading in her husband for someone more interested in accumulating wealth. The thing that strikes me about her as I sit and think today is that she was open about what most of us do secretly. We calculate our net worth, worry if we have enough, and think about what we can do to get more. That seems to me the opposite of being spiritual, because it is fixing our minds and hearts on what is material.

Being spiritual involves qualities that cannot be easily measured. How does one measure inner peace, a loving attitude, serenity, calmness, balance, innocence or modesty?

Material things are to obtained, and the acquisition of them is always empty. They never satisfy. What is spiritual cannot be obtained, you can’t buy spirituality. It is grown over time.

My resolution for 2010 and beyond is to grow my spiritual nature and put to death my material nature.

I am having a hard time today seeing how religion contributes to that. Here’s what I mean. I can imagine some religious people who are very spiritual. Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Corrie Ten Boom, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, the Dalai Lama, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel all come to mind. But I can imagine plenty of other religious people that don’t strike me as spiritual. Osama Bin Laden, for all accounts, seems to be a very religious person. There are plenty of other religious people that I can think of – some of course aren’t public figures but people I know, and I won’t list them, but three public figures I quickly think of are the late Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen, and Tammy Faye Bakker. Religion doesn’t seem to guarantee spiritual development. One can grow old, but one can always remain immature. I can also think of some very spiritual people who don’t follow any particular religion.

I’ve intentionally tried so far to be generic about religion. Now let me get specific and talk about Christianity, since that is my religion and the religion of most everyone who reads this blog. I’ll just make some statements and let you have at me.

Buddhism seems like a better religion than Christianity at developing spirituality.

Evangelical Christianity’s main tool for the development of spirituality is the quiet time, a daily 15 or 30 minute time of individual Bible study and prayer and perhaps journaling. Stanley Hauerwas, who makes a living by making provocative statements, said, “Individual Bible study should be discouraged because on their own people almost never get it right.” What I find astonishing is that someone can read the Bible daily for twenty or thirty years and not get that it is about so much more than “me and Jesus.” Or, specifically, my sins and the forgiveness of them. That seems more materialistically focused than spiritual.

The Bible is misused and poorly interpreted. For example, how can Christians seriously say to each other, “Song of Songs is a book about Jesus’ relationship to the church?” You must have never read the book to be able to say that with a straight face. Jesus wants to tell the church her breasts are the like the twin fawns of a gazelle?

What if someone said, “I’ve read the Bible every day for ten years, but only one book, Song of Songs”? What would you make of that?

Here’s the point – the Bible is so many books at once, and parts of it don’t seem to develop our inner life at all. Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t want people to quit reading the Bible, he wants them to read with the wisdom of a community, because a community can help us find what can nourish our souls in what seems so obtuse on the surface.

To sit down by yourself and daily read through something like Leviticus or Judges or I Chronicles or even Revelation doesn’t seem as likely to help your spirit grow as reading a really good poem, watching a beautiful sunrise, listening to rapturous music, embracing a loved one, sticking your hands into the earth, folding the laundry as an act of love, seeing a baby asleep, contemplating icicles, staying out of the mall, staying away from the television, eating better, or laughing really hard with a friend.

Go ahead and call me a heretic. I’m ready for it.

Home

2009-12-30T14:50:00.000-08:00

Mary DeYoung, a faithful follower of this blog, sent us a Christmas letter and wrote on the bottom of it, “Hope you are having fun at home, if Michigan is still home!” Mary (and anyone else who might wonder), this is surely my home. I love and appreciate Europe, but this is home. It’s home because when we drove up last Wednesday night, there were Christmas lights framing the doorway, and other lights in the windows and a beautifully decorated tree in the front room. Way to go, Jesse and Nanea! It’s home because we went down to Kalamazoo on Christmas Day for a wonderful dinner and that evening I had the longest serious talk with my dad that I can remember. It’s home because we’re heading back there this weekend to be among the throng of 29 family members who will overeat and give too many gifts to each other and, if past years are a guarantee of this year, laugh and laugh together. It’s home because the food tastes “right” and Meijers stocks more eggs in the dairy case of one store than you can find in the whole Benelux region (don’t let the “ij” in the middle fool you, there is nothing Dutch about that store). It’s home because I can turn right on a red light and don’t have to look for bicyclists in traffic circles (there are no traffic circles or bicyclists) and because our house feels like a mansion and our refrigerator is cavernous and our appliances have instructions in English and tonight we are going to see a movie and we have a choice of six or seven different times that one movie starts at various theaters around Grand Rapids. It’s home because I bought a pair of Levis for $18 and Gretchen got some leather boots for $45 (Thanks JC Penney) and I got over a pound of flank steak for my famous Japanese stir fry tonight for under $10. (Teriyaki marinade, onion, mushrooms, leek, sugar peas, zucchini, carrots and of course pineapple on a bed of brown rice. Thanks Japan for teriyaki. Thanks Hawaii for pineapple.) And Amanda bought a new sweatshirt yesterday for $8 (Thanks Target). You see, it is home because as much as I lament consumerism, I enjoy buying “good goods” for ridiculous prices.

Having said all that…there aren’t places to walk here. Today I went for a walk outside and barely avoided horrific falls twice. The Dutch have many, many walking trails and bike paths, and they keep them clear during the winter - it is as important to have clear walking and bike paths as streets. I found myself walking today like a fox on ice. I’ve broken down and tried mall walking this week. Come on. What are you breathing in at the mall? Not only some sort of manufactured air, but the posters at Victoria’s Secret, telling you sex is the meaning of life, the excess of the food court, telling you eating is the meaning of life, and Sears, telling you blandness is the meaning of life. Sorry Sears, but it’s true. As for Victoria’s Secret, my mind keeps going to Allen Levi’s song about a mall in Alabama where they put Santa next to Victoria’s Secret – both dressed in red and white, making promises neither can deliver. Thanks Allen.

As for the dairy section of Meijers – the Dutch don’t refrigerate eggs, milk or cheese, and their citizens seem to live healthy lives. How much energy would be saved if we stopped doing that?

And finally, this tidbit for those of you with eyes to see – I was delighted yesterday that my son Jesse listed his Facebook status as “out of alignment.” Ik ook, mijn zon, ik ook.

Baby It's Cold Outside

2009-12-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

Holy cow, winter has come to the Netherlands. I am so happy it isn’t raining anymore! It snowed a couple of nights this week and there is a solid inch of snow on the ground, enough to bring every Dutch kid outside and into it. Some have made little snowmen, reminiscent of the snowmen Calvin used to make in Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t know why the snowmen are small, maybe because there isn’t much snow to work with, or maybe just because economies of scale are so important here.

It’s cold – eight below according to the television, but I have no idea what that means in terms I am used to without looking it up. I do okay in my head on the positive side of zero with the Celsius/Fahrenheit thing, but am thrown off when it goes below zero. Whatever it is, it’s cold, and the amount of moisture in the air makes it feel colder. One reason it’s cold is the sky’s been more or less clear. The sun is welcome! I prefer this to the endless gray gloom we had.

And the canals are frozen, but not solid enough to bring the public out en masse to skate on them. That is a rare event, although it happened last winter. I see kids playing on the canals, and some forlorn ducks trying to figure out what to do.

Numerous kids are out on wooden sleds – the sleds look like throwback models and are really cool. Yesterday I drove past a pre-school at noon and dozens of parents had come to pick their kids up with sleds. You may ask yourself what the point of a sled is in the world’s flattest country. The answer is that kids sled down the sides of the dikes. Below every dike is a canal, so you need to be careful, and today I saw some kids lined up on a dike sledding down and a dad was down below, standing guard in front of the canal. That was a beautiful picture of parenting to me. It also reminded me of the book “The Catcher in the Rye” and how Holden Caulfield misunderstands an old Robert Burns poem and want to be the catcher in the rye. I think I read that book in 1976, so I might be a little shaky on the details, but that’s what popped into my head.

Next week we leave the Dutch winter on Wednesday and head into Michigan winter for two weeks. Amanda will fly from Stuttgart and join us in Amsterdam for the flight across the ocean. I’m looking forward to great times with family and friends over the holidays. We celebrate decidedly fewer holidays in the US than will be celebrated in Europe – Americans skip right over Second Christmas (aka Boxing Day in the UK) and Epiphany (aka Three Kings Day in Spain - word is you really should see Three Kings Day in Spain). But we’ll do our best with what we have. Merry Christmas. Gelukkig Kerstfeest. Joyeux Noel. Feliz Navidad. God Jul.

December Dutch Day

2009-12-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

I like to write. That’s a reason I keep a blog. As much as I like it, I am aware that I never had a lot of formal training how to write. I took some Journalism classes in college, but don’t really remember them focusing on the craft of writing much. And it’s been a long time since I took those classes.

I never studied poetry. I don’t know the first thing about it – what any of the rules are. Not being bound by the rules, I am free to do whatever I want, and about two and a half years ago I started writing poems. I had never written a poem except for a school project before that. The process is strange, because I never try to write them. They just pop into my head, almost always a result of either something I see or my mind tossing a distant memory around. I think if I sat down and said, “Now I am going to write a poem,” the page would either be blank an hour later or I would write something so repulsive I would discard it in the first 24 hours.

What I know about poetry is mostly experiential. I have discovered the challenge of poetry is to use an economy of words. A part of the challenge of economy is to quickly convey genuine emotions. A greater challenge is to hook the reader. I have to admit I find most poetry boring and not very easily accessible. But I have a short list of poets I love.

Having made those confessions, I thought I’d share a poem that popped into my head today. I don’t know if it is any good. A really good poem, in my humble estimation, should work on multiple levels. It should be about something on the surface, and it should be about something deeper, some sort of truth that it evokes images of. That’s what Gerard Manley Hopkins does in a poem like “The Windhover,” which is about a bird diving to earth, but at the same time is about the incarnation of Jesus. So, let me set this poem up by saying as an amateur I tried to make it about two things at once. It’s up to you to guess. What do you think I was trying to write about? Your responses will help me know to what degree I have succeeded. And, here’s another thing you could respond to – do you read poetry? Do you have any favorite poets? Why are they your favorites?

Here’s hoping I hear from you.

December Dutch Day

It is beautiful.
The sun
That most elusive of objects
Can actually be seen
And if you were feeling generous
The sky
Might even be called blue
The air
So thick and wet these past weeks
Is crisp and clean.

My dog and I stand on a dike
Above polders
That are filled with sheep
Who have blue spots spray-painted above their tails
I assume that is the farmer’s work.

There are canals on both sides of us
And I see
Three white swans
A heron
And some ducks
plus
A solitary horse and rider that
Trots along the dike to our right.
Between us stands a Nazi bunker

Which I suppose is there to
Keep me from getting carried away
To say there is a yin for every yang
A down for every up
A night for every day.
And as if on cue
The wind gusts
The clouds roll
The sun disappears
And all is cold and gloom.

But my dog
On a mission from God
Lifts his leg in the direction of the bunker
Reminding me
That the bad guys lost
The Nazis didn’t keep their power.

A farmer comes out of the bunker
Having beaten that sword into a plowshare long ago
And puts out feed for the sheep.

Miracle Man

2009-12-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

I spent the last couple of days walking around Paris with David Usrey. A few months ago I doubted I would ever do such a thing again.

David Usrey is a miracle man.

Last winter David, the area director of our ministry in Paris, began having a constant headache. His personality also began to change, he lost interest in many things and felt very tired much of the time. His nose ran constantly. His wife Kathy began to wonder if he was cracking under the stress of his international job. But then, in mid-February, he became incoherent and was taken to a hospital. A CAT scan and MRI showed a mass in his brain and the doctors said they suspected the worse, that it looked cancerous.

“We were told he had a tumor the size of an apricot pit and had to have surgery,” his wife Kathy said. “We felt much more comfortable having the surgery in the United States.”

Through an amazing sequence of events, David was hospitalized in Paris on a Monday, diagnosed on Tuesday, flown to the US with a doctor that Friday, and had brain surgery the following Monday in Atlanta. It is a miracle that he was cleared to fly. He could not talk, could not walk, and was more or less semi-conscious. Yet he was approved to fly overseas on a ten-hour flight.

In Atlanta, the surgeons discovered the tumor was not the size of an apricot pit, but more like the size of a peach, or of a grown man’s fist. They confirmed that it was indeed cancerous, GBM 4 – Glioblastoma Multiforme Stage 4 - the “pit bull” of brain cancers and a virtual death sentence. Kathy was told to prepare for the worse – that her husband would be dead within a few months and that until then, she should expect he would come out of extensive brain surgery changed. Chances were he would not be fully functional, he probably would lose the use of one of his legs and his cognitive processes would be severely limited.

But the surgeon who removed the tumor came out beaming. It is another miracle that the surgery itself didn’t kill David. His tumor was so big it had grown across both sides of his brain and if the vein that runs in the middle of the brain was nicked during the operation it would likely have been fatal. The actual surgery lasted four and a half hours and it went better than anyone had a right to expect. The surgeon was very pleased that as much of the tumor as possible had been safely removed.

Within a couple days of the surgery, David was walking and talking and his cognitive abilities were unchanged. He then needed follow-up treatment of radiation and chemotherapy. Perhaps the most prestigious brain cancer surgeon in the US operates an experimental treatment program at the Duke University Medical Center. Seventy-five patients had been allowed in the program, but – in an event of miraculous timing - last winter an additional fifty patients were admitted. David was number 123 of 125 allowed in.

He had several months of radiation. He knew, early on, that it was working. “I could hear it sizzling, burning the cancer out of my brain,” he said. “They say you can’t hear this, but I could.”

He also reached a point of spiritual peace, a point he describes as fully accepting either life or death. “I knew I was okay and felt God’s presence very closely. I felt I wasn’t alone. And even though I was okay with death or life, I felt pretty certain that I was going to live.”

In addition to radiation, David swallowed hundreds of chemotherapy pills and had multiple IV’s as well. These drugs cost thousands of dollars each, and David receives them all for free from the pharmaceutical companies because he is part of the experimental Duke program.

A few weeks ago a PET scan showed the unbelievable – that David is completely cancer free (something he was already intuitively sure of). His doctors are stunned – with GBM 4 you hope to slow down the inevitable. You don’t expect people to become cancer free. David and Kathy returned back to their ministry and home in Paris from Atlanta at the end of September. He goes back to the US every few weeks for chemotherapy treatments. His stamina is amazing – he is two years younger than me and I wilt under transatlantic travel. I can’t imagine adding chemotherapy into the mix.

He is cancer free – and he is also a new man. He is a better man. He says he has “fewer filters,” which causes him to be more direct and honest with people. I don’t think that is a bad thing. He speaks more slowly and carefully, and that also is not a bad thing. My observation is that he is gentler, more tender-hearted, more compassionate and warmer. And he already was gentle, tender-hearted, compassionate and warm. He’s grown spiritually – and the more I think about it, the more I think for any of us, but certainly for David, growing spiritually means we have less anxiety and are more at peace with the world and with God. It means we trust. It means we don’t worry. I felt that peace with David the last few days.

When someone is healed – when someone who was “supposed to die” doesn’t – it raises all sorts of theological questions. Why was he spared when others – especially innocent children – aren’t? Were the prayers of David’s family and friends somehow better, more acceptable, holier or more compelling than the prayers of someone else’s family and friends? My old professor James Cook wrote some wise words about this dilemma a few years ago while watching his son Paul wage a losing battle with cancer: “Jesus’ miracles had more to do with the kingdom than with healing. The health they brought to the sufferer and the joy they brought to the sufferer’s family were gracious, personal, but secondary, gifts. Their primary and universal import was as signs of the kingdom, pointers to the promised reign when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes…the root of the miracle lay not in the quality of our faith and life but in the mysterious reality of God’s grace.” In other words, someone like David is meant to remind us that in God’s kingdom, life is a stronger force than death. The reality of life is that all will die – even David, sometime, perhaps in a few years, perhaps in many years. But for now we are supposed to remember that even then death is not the final word. Because of that, we all should aspire to live with the peace and trust David lives with now. I know I aspire to that.

Monday we were at La Defense, the ultra-modern square arch on the west side of Paris. I touched his arm and said, “David, I am really glad to able to be here with you today.”

He smiled and said, “I am really glad to be here today, too.”

Guess Who Came to Our House Tonight?

2009-12-05T14:20:00.001-08:00

Sint and Piet

2009-12-04T07:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, friends and faithful readers, here is my attempt to explain what is happening this time of year in the Netherlands, as it seems fairly different compared to the rest of the world. Tomorrow we are hosting a Sinterklaas party at our home. In French, my understanding is that Sinterklass is translated Saint Nicholas, and in France and Belgium and parts of Germany, he doesn’t come tomorrow but the next day, December 6. The rest of the world more or less knows this character as Santa Claus, and I think it is easy to see the linguistic relationship between Sinterklaas and Santa Claus. But let me try to explain what happens in the Netherlands. It is a unique part of Dutch culture. I'm sure I will get a few details wrong, and all my Dutch readers can correct me.

The real St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children, lived in Turkey. For some reason over the years, the Dutch Sinterklaas moved to Spain. For three weeks every year he comes to the Netherlands, for the rest of the year I imagine he enjoys sangria, tapas and Spanish beaches. He arrives in mid-November by steamship and is accompanied by his helper Zwarte Piet. Somehow, Piet has evolved into more than one person, so there are all sorts of Piets, and they are everywhere. You can see a band of Zwarte Piets in the picture above, taken three weeks ago on the day Sinterklaas’s ship came to Dordrecht. “Zwart” is the Dutch word for “black,” and Piet is black because he is a Moor and because he is a chimney sweep. A couple of days ago there was a Piet in the grocery store, wearing black face, dressed like a fop, making balloon animals for kids. It is not unusual to see children wearing Piet hats with their faces painted black. There is short TV show that Gretchen watches every day where various Piets are trying to stave off a villain who is trying to stop Sinterklaas from giving gifts to children. This year the bad guy is trying to deliver Brussel sprouts dipped in chocolate to all the kids and all the various Piets (like Music Piet who wears Elvis’s hair, Hocus Pocus Piet who does magic, Chef Piet, etc) are running around in with bright red lips and black faces trying to save the day.

As an American, I have to ask the simple question, “What the _____?” He looks like a cast-off from a minstrel show, like Al Jolsen with a funny hat. I simply cannot imagine the outrage and outcry in America if Santa didn’t have Buddy the Elf but instead had a little black helper that was portrayed by white people in black make up. The story is that a few years ago the Netherlands tried to create a rainbow coalition of Piets – purple Piet, red Piet, green Piet, etc, but it didn’t take. He’s back to being black. So, in the country known as perhaps the most liberal country in the world, a national symbol is a guy in black face. One reason, I suppose, that this is accepted is that there is no history of slavery here. (Although the “Golden Age” of the Netherlands was financed in large part by their involvement in the slave trade.)

Piet seems a bit on the mischievous side, but he’s evolved to become nicer over the years. He used to carry both a bag and a stick, and the word on the street was that if you had been “bad” the year before he’d club you with the stick and put you in the bag and take you to Spain. Why anyone would protest getting out of the endless cold drizzle here for sunny Spain is beyond me, but eventually a cadre of childrearing experts convinced the local population that it wasn’t healthy for children to have the threat of kidnapping hanging over their heads.

Piet does all the heavy lifting for Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas rides a white horse (but did I hear he rides a donkey in Belgium?) and I’m not 100% sure if both Sint and Piet hop up on the rooftops or just Piet, but it is Piet who goes down chimneys and puts presents in shoes. After Sint and Piet show up in mid-November, children put out their shoes every night or three times a week or weekly depending on the inclination of the parents, and Piet puts a present in the shoe overnight. Mandarin oranges, pepernotje cookies, and chocolate letters are all staple gifts in the days leading up to the big day, which is tomorrow. Most Dutch families do a gift exchange tomorrow night.

As a kid I was baffled by the logistics of Santa Claus – how he could get from the North Pole and around the world to all the places he needed to get to in one 24-hour period. It’s more manageable for Sinterklaas, he only needs to handle one relatively small country. In traditional Dutch families, gifts are given in the period leading up to and including tomorrow. Traditional Dutch families don’t exchange presents on Christmas Day. That is a holiday here, but the orgy of stockings and presents that are normal in America doesn’t happen here on that day. And the gift giving tomorrow pales in comparison to what happens on Christmas Day in the US. Dutch parents don’t feel the compulsion to give as much stuff as we do.

For a traditional adult Sinterklaas party, such as we are having tomorrow, it is customary to write a poem for the person you are giving a gift to. Usually, the poem makes fun of a bad habit of the gift’s recipient. The definition of poetry in this case is that it has to rhyme, which is something I have never been good at. But I have written a horrible poem, and have my gifts all set. And the menu is simple – hot chocolate with whipped cream and kruidnotje cookies. Wish you were here to see it all for yourself.

Being Cosmopolitan

2009-12-01T01:46:00.000-08:00

Last time I wrote sort of a tongue-in-cheek account of frustration and woe about life here. But this time I am writing to make you envious. We traveled to Germany this weekend to visit our daughter Amanda and also spend some time with friends there. It was wonderful. For almost a decade I served on the Young Life – German Partnership committee. Sometime in the mid-1970’s Young Life established a partnership with the state church in Wurttemberg in and around Stuttgart in Southern Germany. The relationships formed from doing this work have enriched my life deeply.

So we stayed this weekend in Ludwigsburg, Germany, with Kerstin, who heads the partnership committee on the German side, and her husband Sven. They are really smart and really nice, and I like people like that. On Friday night we went to a restaurant that specializes in serving game and I had wild boar. It was spectacular – served with fresh cranberries in a special sauce with spetzel. Man, that was good. On the way to the restaurant they asked how Gretchen and I were adjusting to our new lives and I mentioned that I had been struggling between the two cultures and have been asking myself, “who or what am I when I know I am not Dutch but then have questions when I go back into American culture?” Sven said, “Then you are cosmopolitan, but more than that you are human, which is the best any of us can hope to be.” There is real wisdom in that statement.

Sven is a collector, and I appreciate that personality. I used to collect stamps as a boy and baseball cards as a boy and an adult, and now I guess I collect friends in different countries. Sven collects things related to fantasy literature, and Kerstin and Sven together collect Scotch whiskey. I asked them what turned out to be one of the smartest questions I’ve ever asked anyone on Friday night. I said, “I don’t really know anything about Scotch. Will you teach me?” And they did. We had a tasting, and also an education. They have traveled in Scotland many times and visited several distilleries and they brought out lots of different types and we learned about the taste differences from the types of barrels Scotch is aged in. I found out I was an oak man, although it seems like the most distinguished palates go for the “peaty” whiskeys. We learned about using your hand to warm the Scotch to bring out its full flavor, and although we sampled many different types it was just in small sips and we kept our wits about us. (If we had gotten hammered, I just wouldn’t write about it.) I will say, though, that I didn’t have any trouble falling asleep Friday night.

On Saturday they took us to the baroque Christmas market in Ludwigsburg. The market is baroque because Ludwigsburg is baroque – the castle in Ludwigsburg was inspired by Versailles and is a European treasure. The market was huge and featured a brass band, people dressed in period costumes, and most anything you could imagine a Christmas market might have for sale. We bought some vanilla honey, which must have been made by angelic bees because it is heavenly, and a cherry-balsam mustard that you simply would need to taste to understand how good it is. We were also introduced to the wonders of Gluhwein (I am missing an umlaut on the “u”), which is a warm, spiced fruity wine, and I learned the secret of being able to stay outside for hours on end in the cold. We brought some of that home to fortify me the next time I walk Maury in a cold Dutch drizzle. I posted a picture above of me with Sven and Kerstin having a cup of Gluhwein at the Barock Weihnnachtsmarkt in Ludwigsburg. Guten Tag! Amanda joined us Saturday afternoon and we had a very nice time together. One interesting thing was Sven noted how Amanda’s German got worse as she spent time speaking English with us. But Gretchen and I are amazed at our tri-lingual daughter and are very proud of her.

We said goodbye to Kerstin and Sven Sunday and headed over to Esslingen, where Amanda lives, on the other side of Stuttgart. We had dinner Sunday with Dieter, a pastor who is also on the partnership committee, and his American wife Nancy, who is also a pastor, and their two children Anna and Hannes. They are a great family. After dinner we went for a long walk and I asked Dieter about two dozen theological questions I have been thinking about. Dieter told me a great quote from Vaclav Havel, the playwright who was once president of the Czech Republic. He said that hope isn’t the belief that everything is going to work out okay someday, it is the belief that what you are doing now is making a difference. That is quite profound and worth thinking about. He also gave me an unexpected answer to one of my questions. I asked him what sin is and he said, “Sin is failing to trust in life.” I said I didn’t know what that meant and he went on to talk about how in his resurrection Jesus has shown that life is stronger than death. Sin is to live as if you don’t believe that, that you don’t believe life has meaning, to live in a way that doesn’t respect or value others, our planet, our lives, our world, to take this gift of life and not do with it what we could or can do with it. There is much to think about there, also.

German pastors are so much better educated than their American counterparts. I know there must be exceptions, but every German pastor I know has depths of knowledge, not just about theology and people, but also about things like literature, history, language, music, wine, Scotch, and art. I am always enriched after spending time with any of them.

Gretchen and I went home via Luxembourg, just because. Well, not exactly just because. It is almost a seven hour drive home from where we were, and I didn’t want to feel pressured to cut our time short on Sunday. So I looked for a place to stop and break up the drive, and I picked Luxembourg because Amanda and I are having a contest of who has been in the most countries and she was ahead by one…was ahead because I tied her on Sunday night. I was thinking of her when I registered at the hotel. The desk clerk was speaking German when I got there, then spoke French to the person in line in front of me, and then spoke English with me. It is funny because Gretchen and I consider Amanda’s speaking of French, German and English to be such an accomplishment for an American, but I realize this accomplishment qualifies her to work the desk of a hotel in Luxembourg.

All of which made me think of seeing Penelope Cruz on David Letterman on TV a little while ago and she told him she makes films in English, Spanish, Italian and French. And he just looked at her for a second and then said something like, “We are so stupid.” I don’t think we are stupid, but we sure don’t have to know the same things people in other parts of the world need to know.

Ah, the Romance of Europe!

2009-11-23T04:25:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I think I have figured out how to function day to day here. And then a day like today happens, and Dutch reality slaps me in the face and says, “Snap out of it.”

Here’s what happened. A while ago some of the folks who support us decided to give us a wonderful gift. They decided to pay for an adult tricycle for Gretchen. She needs the stability of a tricycle, but they are fairly expensive so we’d put off buying one when we first arrived. After their generous offer we went ahead and bought one. These folks are experienced in international business, and sent us a check in Euros to pay for it. Today I tried to do the simple task of depositing the check.

I knew that checks are unusual in the Dutch banking system because everything is done electronically. So I decided not to head to the closest bank branch, which is located in a convenience store (and is the only bank I have ever been to where you can also buy porn). Instead I headed to the “centrum,” where the main branch of my bank is. I made a near fatal mistake (the first of many) when I decided to head downtown without thinking of how I was going to pay for parking. They don’t give parking spots away in any city on this continent. It was raining, of course, and I navigated my way to the closest parking garage to the bank. I grabbed the umbrella we keep in the car and because the wind was blowing the rain sideways had to really bring the umbrella down in front of me. I soldiered on in the general direction of the bank, not really being able to see beyond my feet, and after a while found that I had managed to walk myself into a dead end. When I looked up I had no recognition whatsoever of where I was. Oops. So I retraced by steps, went down another street, found myself in another parking garage, walked on and before too long had oriented myself and found my way to the bank.

When you enter the bank you have to take a number, but before you take a number you have to decide if you want to speak to a representative or go to a teller. I have never had to go to a teller before, but today I thought that was what I needed to do and chose “kas” instead of “vragen” at the number machine. Wrong choice. I approached the teller with confidence and explained I wanted to deposit a check. “No,” she said, “We do not accept checks. You will have to wait and speak to my colleague and he can instruct you.” So I waited and after no more than fifteen minutes her colleague told me I have to mail the check to their offices in Amsterdam and made a copy of the instructions of all the things I have to write on the back of the check (the usual things – “I want to deposit this in the bank” in Dutch, my name, my address, my bank account number and “I will not bring another check to the bank again” in Dutch 100 times.) He even gave me an envelope to mail the check in and thought he should make a copy of the check for me, so I left with a bunch of papers in my hands.

Then I thought about paying for parking and decided to use the ATM machine inside the bank to get some money. Bad idea. I have no idea what the ATM machine in the bank is for, but as near as I could tell, it was not for withdrawing cash. I think I possibly could have made arrangements to finance a new boat, but I couldn’t get money from the thing.

So I headed out, clutching my little collection of papers, holding the umbrella close, and navigating my way to the parking garage. Unfortunately, the wind was now behind me and soon the umbrella was inside out. I managed to wrestle successfully with that while holding on to my papers and entered the parking garage, thinking I could use a bank card to pay. No deal. Of the many ways to pay, bank card wasn’t one of them. I set out again and went to another bank downtown, where I used their ATM and got a ten Euro note, which I was able to put into the payment machine to pay the one Euro I owed. The machine spit out my change, all in coins, with such a violent force that I spent the next few minutes finding my coins on the ground.

Successfully having paid, I drove home, a wiser man. This only took an hour and the check is still in my possession. I was enjoying listening to Phoebe Snow sing “Poetry Man” on the way home when the car CD player malfunctioned (as it likes to from time to time) and suddenly I was listening to a guy trying to sell me something in Dutch. But just as I thought this stinks, I turned into our driveway and it switched back to Phoebe and she sang, “You’re the Poetry Man, you make things all right, yeah, yeah,” and I thought “You got it, Phoebe, I am the Poetry Man and I am going to make everything all right.” Yeah, Yeah.

Belgium - There is More Going on Here Than Good Waffles

2009-11-20T15:20:00.000-08:00

I’m in Charleroi, Belgium tonight staying with the Murru family. I love this family. Sergio was raised in Belgium but his family is from Sardenia, his wife Roselie has Belgian and American citizenship and is a third generation missionary, and they have three great kids who are all interesting to talk to. This has become one of my favorite places to visit.

Earlier tonight Gretchen and I attended a couple of events on the north side of Brussels. We went to a Belgian Young Life club (called Jeunesse et Vie in French) and I was thinking about how in the US it would be cool if at a Young Life club every person who entered the room kissed every other person in the room. No one is a stranger for long in this culture. Before the club we went to a guitar class that is fairly unique. We met a Belgian guy named Nat who is a minister and we had a chance to talk tonight. When he first started working in this area (and like a classic person from Brussels Nat speaks French, English and Dutch beautifully) he was very invested in a fairly well-known outreach program and tried it nine times without much response. He finally simply asked the question, “What can we offer instead of a pre-packaged program that meets the needs of this neighborhood?” So now they offer language classes and guitar classes and things like that. And he does a sort of revolutionary thing on Sunday mornings. He doesn’t have a traditional church. Instead, they serve some croissants and then someone does what is more or less a sermon and that is followed by what he called a “debate” although discussion might be a better English word. They have several people who come to the Sunday morning times that do not consider themselves Christians but enjoy talking about what they hear on Sundays. I found the whole concept refreshing and was sort of envious of it. I’d love to go to a “church” that non-Christian people wanted to come to and then felt comfortable enough to dig into the message and talk about what they really thought about what is being said.

Nat told me that when he teaches people about relating to folks that don’t share the same faith views, he teaches people to avoid three topics – politics, morals and apologetics. By apologetics I think he meant especially science and ideas about how science and the Bible fit together. Do you know that board game Taboo where you are have to give clues to figure out a word but get a list of words you cannot say? This sort of reminded me of that – how do you talk about Christianity if you don’t talk about these three topics – which more or less seem to consume much of the talk about Christianity in the US if not in the Western world as a whole. Nat said if you venture into these three topics here, people’s defenses go up and you are having an intellectual discussion about ideas but not a heart talk about real things. So I naturally asked what they do talk about with people. He gave a profound answer.

“We tell people we will pray for them when they are hurting or struggling. No one is ever offended by that. And we talk about the love of God.”

That’s it. Pretty simple. And pretty revolutionary.

Speaking of profound answers to questions I’ve asked recently, I also want to post this next exchange because I thought it was very rich and I don’t want to forget it.

One of our staff people in Portugal is a young woman named Ashley from North Carolina. She is a great dancer. I know to look at me you would assume that I am also a great dancer. Sadly that assumption would be false. So I asked Ashley last weekend what the secret to being a great dancer is. She said, “Well, outside of rhythm, the secret is freedom.” I think that answer has wisdom in it way beyond Ashley’s years.

Portuguese Blessings

2009-11-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

Lisbon – Okay, I admit I think it is cool to post something from Lisbon. Actually, I am in Cascais, which is so wonderfully beautiful I don’t understand why it isn’t world famous. Lisbon is on a river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean and Cascais is the spot where that river meets the sea. There are hills and cliffs and beaches and I’ve tried to spend as much time as possible out of doors because the weather is warm, the sun has been shining and it feels so refreshing. Of course it is raining today, but that’s going to happen in November. Overall it’s been wonderfully good to be here.

I have become aware that sometimes I communicate in a sort of “out of body” type way, that I can’t quite believe little old Jeff Munroe from little old Grand Rapids, Michigan gets to be where I am having the experiences I have. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here I go again. Last night I was having dinner with three British people who play in the “Lisbon Gulbenkian Orquestra.” One of them plays the French Horn, the other the viola and the third the violin. The French Horn player also is a gourmet cook and he just threw together something on the spot for dinner (which was terrific – turkey and pasta and salad and mango and pineapple) and then we went to downtown Lisbon where we met the French Horn player’s wife, who plays the flute in the orchestra, because she had a ticket for me for their concert last night. Oh, and I also know another French Horn player in the same orchestra, bringing the number of people I know in this orchestra to five, and making Lisbon, Portugal the place in the world where I know the most members of an orchestra.

I am here under the guise of working, and at times the past few days I have worked quite a bit, but the concert last night and the conversation at dinner were pure gifts to me. My spirit was fed. There is something about having a serious talk with folks who have English accents that makes me feel special. I don’t quite know how to explain that.

I also spoke this weekend at a camp to a group of high school kids. A few of the kids are Portuguese and have lived here all their lives. Others are part of the International community and attend one of the International Schools here. I met an American kid who has never lived in the United States, and I asked the other kids to tell me where else they have lived. This is the list of additional countries I collected: Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, France, Brazil, South Korea, Italy, Argentina, Australia and England. There were two kids who were born in Angola who had been sent out of their country because it was engulfed in a civil war. (Did you know, that like in Brazil, Portuguese is the language of Angola?) One of the kids from Angola had also lived in Miami, Florida for a while. He made me laugh because when I told him I was from Michigan he said that he was aware there was an Angola near Michigan and he wondered if he should live there. I assured him I didn’t think they would quite know what to make of him if he showed up saying "I'm home," in Angola, Indiana. He was a really nice kid whose name I can pronounce but can’t spell – if I had to take a guess I’d say it was something like Yvandro. Yesterday we were standing outside of a Starbucks and he asked me if I was going inside to get a coffee. I told him I wasn’t because I don’t like coffee, and he looked surprised and said, “But you are an American, every American I know likes coffee.” I said, “Well, maybe I’m not like every other American you know,” and he quickly became serious and said, “I already know that from listening to you speak to us.” Again, I don’t know if I should pinch myself or not, but to have a refugee kid from Angola say that to me made me very, very happy. It has been good for me to be here.

It's a Girl! No, it's a Washing Machine!

2009-11-09T05:07:00.000-08:00

We learned over the weekend that our Dutch friend Donna is pregnant. She told us Friday night, and then when I saw her on Sunday morning I asked if she and her husband Rian had talked about names yet. Basically, she said, Rian is in huge denial, and that he won’t even talk about any of the preparations they need to make until he sees her stomach start growing. I totally understand that – it takes a while for first-time fathers-to-be to get used to the idea that one plus one equals three, and one of the gifts of pregnancy is that as that belly protrudes there is no denying that the baby is coming.

So I told Donna that I thought Jeff was a beautiful name for a baby, male or female, and she laughed, very similarly to the way Christie and Staffan in Sweden laughed at me when I suggested the same thing to them a few months ago. No one takes the idea of naming a baby after me seriously. I’m learning to live with that disappointment.

But having the conversation with Donna brought back memories of how our kids got their names. It was pretty dopey. I had done my family history and learned that we were a pioneer family in the state of Michigan. My ancestor Jesse Munroe was the first resident of Eagle, Michigan, in something like 1836. So I wanted the name Jesse for a boy and Gretchen agreed. I love the name Jesse – it’s both Biblical and has the whole "Jesse James outlaw" thing going for it. The question we struggled with was what to call a girl. Gretchen wanted the name Elisabeth spelled with an “s” instead of a “z.” My thought was that would mean the kid would go through life with both names misspelled, because our last name is misspelled constantly. (Damn you, President James Monroe!) Her next suggestion was Carolyn, after her college roommate (and a reader of this blog). I said no, that my parents were named Carol and Lynn and since they were divorced I didn’t want to be the one to reunite them. (Sorry Carolyn.) Then she suggested Marilyn, since that was our friend Duey’s wife’s name and it rhymed with Carolyn. There was something familiar about that. I don’t know, what do you folks think about naming your daughter Marilyn Munroe? So I finally came up with a list of names I could live with that were all variations on the same theme – I liked Allison (because of an Elvis Costello song, truth be told) and Emily and Amelia and Amanda. Gretchen agreed to Amanda.

The next issue was middle names. Since I had argued so hard on the first names, I backed off on the middle names. Jesse’s middle name is Scott, which is a significant family name for Gretchen. She had a brother who died several years ago named Scott, and it was also her mother’s maiden name. I liked the name because Munro is the name of a Scottish clan. We had no problem with Scott. But we totally caved in and let ourselves be bribed on our girl’s middle name. Gretchen’s mother said, “If you name her after me, I will buy you a new washing machine.” Well, Gretchen’s mother’s name is Susan and Amanda’s middle name is Susan. The washing machine lasted until Amanda was in high school, thank you very much.

My grandfather always used to plead with us never to name any of our children after him or my grandmother. I don’t know, I always wanted a couple of kids named Clarence and Cleva. I don’t think there was ever any danger of us naming humans after them, but they do sound like good pet names, don’t they? What I'd give for a gerbil named Clarence.

All of which makes me think of Eric and Katie Kuiper, who are expecting baby number three before too long. The first two are Simeon and Judah, which means they’ve got a 12 tribes of Israel thing going, and I wonder if Asher or Naphtali or Gad is on the way.

I am thinking there must be some other great stories out there about all the fun communication between couples that goes on when coming up with names for your children. I want to hear from you about it. I love those families that have four kids: John and Jeremiah and Josiah and Bob. How the heck did Bob happen? Let me know. It can’t be worse than taking a bribe or considering naming your kid after a sex symbol, can it?

Some Book and People Notes

2009-11-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

I just took Maury out around the neighborhood in the gloaming – it was totally wet and dark-- and counted twenty seven people on bicycles that passed us on our walk. I was wearing a raincoat, an ear warmer, and gloves; they were all in jackets or sweatshirts and moving along at a normal pace. I don’t know how they do it. I am not Dutch.

There were two encounters I had yesterday that I want to write about. First, I met a fifteen-year old and a seventeen-year old from, of all places, Middleville, Michigan. Their dad was a missionary in Poland for three years and then decided he needed more education, and for the past year and a half they’ve lived in the Netherlands while their dad goes to school. As I was talking to them I said, “You know, you can’t go back to Middleville,” and they said, “Why not?” and I said, “Because your world is so much bigger now than the kids you left behind there. You know Polish and German and French and Dutch and your friends are worried about who they will see at the latest high school football game and going to the mall.” And their eyes lit up and they said, “We want to go to the mall,” and I told them I was at the Woodland Mall last Friday night and about the new gargantuan Barnes & Noble they’ve built there, and I could see their hearts melting with envy. What a funny world. The seventeen-year old is going to college next year, and when I asked her where she said, “Someplace on the East Beltline,” which means Kuyper, Cornerstone, Calvin or Davenport, and it just struck me as surreal to be talking about colleges in my hometown of Grand Rapids with a kid in the Netherlands.

Then I met a young woman from Alaska who has a French mother and American father who described herself as a third-culture kid and we talked about not fitting in the US and not being really European. She actually brought up how frustrating it is to go to Chili’s, which made me smile because of my recent blog post about that. And then I said, “Why can’t Americans learn how to bake bread?” and she waxed rhapsodic about the higher value Europeans put on food and social situations involving food. At one point she said to me, “How often do you go back to the US” and I said, “About every three or four months, I just got back on Sunday night,” and she said, “Oh, are you jet lagged?” and I said “Of course,” and then she said, “And food doesn’t taste that good to you,” and I admitted that was true and she said, “Well, I call that the price of living an interesting life,” and I loved that comment. She made me feel good about feeling lousy.

Meeting her made me think of what I am going to do next week. I get to go to Cascais, Portugal (where I am confident the sun will be shining), and I am speaking at a Young Life camp for “third-culture kids,” kids who go to International Schools whose parents are either in International business or the military and who are American but who have often lived everywhere in the world except the United States. These kids fascinate me and it is a challenge to speak to them. You just can’t toss anything by them, they are way too smart. So, as I am preparing to speak to this extremely sophisticated group of kids, I’ve been re-reading NT Wright’s masterpiece “Simply Christian.” If you are wondering if the Christian story makes any sense and what in the world it all might mean, you should read this book. NT Wright is the Anglican Bishop of Durham, and we made a pilgrimage to the great cathedral at Durham about four years ago. Durham is where the river Wear is, where Godric (another great book, this one by Frederick Buechner, you really need to read that one, too) lived, and we were amused by the advertisement outside the Cathedral cafeteria that included a review from the “Sunday Times” which said, “Everything you would expect in a Cathedral cafeteria.” Anyway, NT Wright’s book is without parallel.

And finally, another book plug on this dark and rainy night. I’ve been quoting Barbara Brown Taylor’s “An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith” in these pages lately because it is so good. She writes about discovering God in the everyday; that spirituality isn’t some quest to find something out there but waking up to what’s already here. Do yourself a favor and read that one, too. You won’t regret it.

Dutch Dullness Yields to Dale

2009-11-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

Someone asked me when I was in Michigan what in the world loving your enemies means and how we are supposed to do that. I felt like I was at a loss because those words of Jesus come from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, and the greatest commentary on Matthew is by Dale Bruner, but my copy of that commentary was in the Netherlands, not in the US. So, I’ve been reading Bruner today. It’s either read Bruner or contemplate the endless shades of grey in the Dutch sky, so I settled on Bruner. What he says is so good I want to share it with the world, or at least the small fraction of the world that reads this blog.

Before I start with what he said, let me say a few words about Dale Bruner. He is about the sweetest, gentlest person I’ve ever met, a little elf of a man who in his retirement spends countless hours studying and reading. He once said to me with great enthusiasm, “Jeff, I get to sit in a carrel in the Fuller Seminary library and spend my days with the greatest literature the world has ever known. What could be better than that?” And I, introverted Jeff Munroe, said, “Um, maybe talking to people?” and he said, “Well, of course, but I talk to a lot of people through my books” and I am envious of that. He’s the kind of guy who once wrote to me, “Your letter was a Balm in Gilead” and I believed him. He can get away with sounding like the King James Version of the Bible because he is so sincere.

So, here are some highlights on loving your enemies.

This statement of Jesus’ is unlike anything anyone else has ever said. It is without parallel in ancient wisdom texts. Statements like this make Jesus utterly unique.

The command is communal, not just individual. To capture the essence of it, Bruner translates the text: You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you folks, You people love your enemies and you people pray on the behalf of the people who are persecuting you so that you may really be the children of your Father in the heavens, because he is shining his sun right down on evil people and on good people, and he is sending his rain down on righteous people and on unrighteous people. For you see, if you folks just love the people who are loving you, what kind of reward do you think you should get for that? Aren’t even the extortionist-tax collectors doing the same? And if you folks just give warm greetings to your spiritual brothers and sisters, what is so special about that? Aren’t even the pagans doing the same thing? So then, you folks are going to be a perfectly mature people, just as your heavenly Father is perfectly mature.

Because it is communal, Jesus is telling the church to be inclusive, not exclusive. We cannot want the destruction of whatever group we perceive as being the enemies of God. I can think of lots of groups the American church at least has perceived that way, and I will leave it to you to fill in your own thoughts. Jesus is re-interpreting all those destruction references in the Old Testament and telling us to read them differently. Bruner says, “Jesus is Lord even over Scripture…Christians can no longer read vengeance texts as binding…the disciple will never again be able to enter crusades of any kind…the problem with hatred is that it almost always sees others as the chief problem: a warped self-righteousness infects all crusades.”

What does it mean to love our enemies? How can we do this that sounds so extraordinarily difficult? Jesus starts with the little step of simply praying for them. We should do for them what they cannot and will not do for themselves. “Often, in hard fact, the only viable or even honest way we can love our enemies is to pray for them.”

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Bruner tells us, Jesus’ commands take us back to the splendor of the Beatitudes. What Beatitude does loving your enemy take us back to? Surely the seventh: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” If we didn’t get it, Jesus makes it clear when he gives us this motive for loving our enemies: “so that we may become children of our Father in the heavens.” Bruner writes, “This is the divine carrot, the great come-on of Jesus’ Command: intimacy with God.”

All that stuff about the rain and the sun being equally distributed to the good and bad alike? Jesus is telling us God loves his enemies, so we should too.

Bruner uses the phrase “perfectly mature” to capture the goal for us, instead of the word “perfect,” which almost all of our Bible translations use. I think that is an inspired choice. Perfect is too cold, too unattainable, too distant, too, well, too perfect a word to attain to. “Mature” is what it is all about. Grow up. Be who you were created to be. Be fully human.

He closes the section with this:

Love. Christian maturity is a whole-souled commitment, for Jesus’ sake, to protecting other people. Christian maturity is looking at everyone we meet and saying, at least to oneself, “I will never, God helping me, do anything to hurt you: either by angrily lashing out at you, lustfully sidling up to you, faithlessly slipping away from you, verbally oiling you up, protectively hitting you back, or even justifiably disliking you.

Thanks Dale, for shining a bright light into a very dull Dutch day.

The High Cost of Being Cheap

2009-11-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

Rome - There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote I love that says, “Strange travel directions are dancing lessons from God.” I have some strange travel directions to get from my home in Grand Rapids to my home in Dordrecht. I saved over $1000 on travel expenses by flying through Chicago on this trip. The way over was simple, the way back complicated (via Rome on Alitalia) but through the magic of Cheapoair.com, yours truly is suffering to save money, which I call the high cost of being cheap. I figure it easier to have a strange itinerary than to find a new $1000 donor. My trip started at 9am in Grand Rapids on Saturday and right now it is 10am in Rome on Sunday, and if everything goes well from here I will walk in the door in Dordrecht around 6 tonight. With all the time changes factored in, that’s still about 26 hours to get home, and the worst part is that I missed the extra “fall back” hour of sleep you got last night – I was losing 6 hours while you gained one.

I decided on the drive to Chicago that I would choose joy instead of orneriness and grumpiness on this trip. I decided to have as much fun as possible and see how many people I could bless along the way. My first chance came on the South Side of Chicago when I stopped to fill up my rental car before turning it in. I had to go inside to get my receipt from a rotund African-Amercan woman with the face of an angel, who was sitting in a sort of cage behind large amounts of bullet proof glass. She said, “Here you go, baby,” as she handed me the receipt, and I took a step away and then stopped and said, “Thanks for calling me baby. That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me today.” She roared and roared and was beaming as I walked out.

I found it was cheaper to rent a car at Midway Airport than O’Hare Airport, and cheaper still to ride a shuttle between the two places than to rent a car at one and return it to the other. So, on the shuttle I tried and failed to initiate a conversation with the man sitting behind me in the turban with the enormous moustache. I was so hoping I could get to the point with him where I could say, “What’s the deal with the turban and soup strainer?” but it didn’t happen. A few years ago I hosted a group of Amish people who wanted to see TimberWolf Lake and about half way through the tour I felt free enough to ask them, “What’s the deal with the neck beards?” but this wasn’t the same. (By the way, despite repeated requests, the Amish would not give me a hat.) Anyway, the man in the turban spent most of the ride on his cell phone speaking what I assumed was Hindi. It seemed ironic to me that we dropped him off at the American Airlines terminal while I was taken to the International Terminal.

Standing in a non-moving security line at O’Hare (after checking in on Alitalia, which is conveniently located between Pakistani Air and Air India), I started to study the buttons on the backpack of the Japanese young woman in line in front of me. One of the buttons said “(Heart) my body,” and that made me interested in talking to her. That last line sounds lecherous, so let me explain. I know from a lifetime of experience that body-image is often the overwhelming issue for young women. Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia” lays out powerfully how so many seemingly self-confident pre-pubescent girls wilt under the pressures of adolescence. So, I liked the button and the sentiment it proclaimed. I broke the ice and found out she was from Tokyo, attending grad school in Public Health specializing in genetics at the University of Michigan, and was heading to Mexico City for fall break to visit some friends. She seemed like a great young person, and I thought of three things I could say that might bless her.

First, I boldly told her what I do for a living. I wanted her to experience an inquisitive, friendly Christian. My hunch was verified by her response when I told her I was a minister – it seemed like the farthest possibility from her mind.

Second, I made sure I told her how impressive she was. Her English was fantastic(I couldn’t hear an accent) and I can't imagine how smart she must be to get into a great school like U of M (tough for a Spartan to admit but true) and to be doing graduate work in English.

Third, I made sure I told her that she had great eyes. She wasn’t one of the magnificent beauties of the world, but her eyes were pretty. My theory is that the reason I knew she was Japanese before we started talking was her eyes, so I decided to compliment what made her distinctive. I tried the same approach with the Muslim woman’s head covering last week and it worked both times.

We talked about a lot of things while we stood in line, like Ann Arbor, where I lived a long time ago, and my own daughter’s grad school ambitions, and all the security rules that defy logic (for example, in the US it’s take your shoes off and leave your belt on, in Europe it’s take your belt off and leave your shoes on). By the time we got to the other side of the scanners and said goodbye she had a big smile on her face and I felt she headed toward Mexico City feeling just a bit more confident and sure of herself.

On the plane I read these lines from Barbara Brown Taylor: “What we have in common is not religion but humanity…encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get…The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery.”

That’s what I am trying to do, especially while I travel. I got a few laughs out of Alitalia, we were an hour and a half late leaving and no one seemed to care or be in a hurry, as a matter of fact the pilot saw a couple he knew in the waiting area and he spent 45 minutes talking to them while all the other crew members were entering the plane. Once we were in the air after about 20 minutes they showed the safety video. I wonder what all the people who don’t know how to fasten a seat belt did? Alitalia definitely had their own way of doing things. My seat mate was from Bulgaria, and he was suffering from a bit of Eastern European-itis, which is another way of saying he was very quiet and not interested in talking and an arm chair psychologist might even say projecting a bit of shame out there for the world to encounter. There was an American couple across the aisle and I talked to them for a bit, she fell into my lap early on the flight and sadly, that wasn’t a very pleasant experience for me. She also broke her arm rest and I fixed it, being the handyman I am. They were on their way to a cruise – the 30th cruise they had taken in their lifetime and they were one trip through the Suez Canal short of having circumnavigated the globe on cruise ships. She said, “We’ve seen the whole world, well, actually, we’ve seen the coasts of the whole world, we really don’t spend much time in the interior.” She seemed to enjoy telling her husband what to do and speaking rather brutally to him, and he seemed to enjoy taking it. I told them I enjoyed the interiors of countries and actually meeting the people who live in these countries, and I could tell that seemed like a wild and crazy idea.

Now I am in Rome and exhausted, but I always wanted to post something from Rome, so here goes.

Addendum – Now it is about 8pm and I have been home for 90 minutes – nothing much eventful happened the rest of the way. I slept a lot, first in the waiting area, then on the plane to Amsterdam (where I was sitting in the same row as a Dutch woman who was also traveling home via Rome for a cheap ticket) and finally on the train to Dordrecht. It was pouring rain in Dordrecht and I let it soak me through trying to find the bus home. The whole central station is under construction and in the dark I couldn’t see where the busses are now. Finally, I did see a taxi cab and asked God to forgive me for doing something nice for myself on this trip that seemed to have a monastic self-flagellation quality to it. I spent 10 euro more on the cab than the bus would have been, and got out of the rain and home quickly. As we were approaching home the cab driver said, “You have had a long journey but relief is in sight.” Amen. That man is a true prophet.

Three Blessings

2009-10-27T15:54:00.000-07:00

Three things have moved me and blessed me in the past 24 hours.

First, I heard a testimony last night at the Urban Young Life Celebration in Grand Rapids that was as clear and as wonderfully presented as any I have ever heard. A nice-looking young African-American kid got up on the stage and held up two pieces of paper with three numbers printed on each piece. He said that this number was his identity for three years while he was in prison. When he got out of prison he started attending Young Life and went to summer camp, where he met Jesus Christ and turned his life around. Then, as he got more involved he went to another camp and wondered, “What could be better than what already happened at the first camp?” Well, at the second camp he found out he could do something, and he pulled out a beautifully painted self-portrait. “I learned I could paint.” One of the adults at camp saw his painting and has helped him get enrolled at Kendall College, a local art and design school. He set the self-portrait up on stage where we all could see it, took his prison number in his hands and tore it up, saying something like, “This is not my identity. My name is Bryan, I am a child of God, and I am a painter.”

My nephew Michael Jeffrey Munroe was sentenced to seven years in prison last week for his part in a botched robbery in California. He also loves to draw, and my eyes filled with tears as I prayed that my nephew would come out of prison like Bryan has.

Second, as the night was coming to a close, I took in the whole scene. There were maybe 300 people there and I was one of the twenty or so white people present. In the past I would feel awkward about that, last night I was feeling pretty cool to be one of the few white people with the sense to be a part of something so beautiful. As the night was ending there were 150 or so kids on the stage, and I again started to cry, as I considered how pure and good this ministry is. One of the African-American businessmen on the Young Life committee saw my tear-filled eyes and said something like, “I hope those are tears of joy, because you started this thing.” That about did me in. I didn’t start it, I was part of starting it. I hired the staff and helped find the funding for it. I did my best to support it when this ministry was part of my Young Life region. I cannot take all the credit, but I can take some.

I hope I have reached the point in life when I no longer go looking for compliments because I need them for self-validation. I hope I have reached the point where a compliment can just be a compliment, and I can let it come over me and come into me with all its weight and stick to me so I can feel some of its glory.

The third blessing came as I read these words from Barbara Brown Taylor in her wonderful book “An Altar in the World.” She was writing about herself, but like all great writing, I met myself in her words. (Sorry, Barbara, if this quote is too long for copyright purposes. Remember we met last January and I got to say nice things in public about you and you liked me. Please don’t sue me.)

In my life, I have lost my way more times than I can count. I have set out to be married and ended up divorced. I have set out to be healthy and ended up sick. I have set out to live in New England and ended up in Georgia. When I was thirty, I set out to be a parish priest, planning to spend the rest of my life caring for souls in any congregation that would have me. Almost thirty years later, I teach school. The last time I tried to iron one of my old black cloth clergy shirts, the rotted fabric gave way beneath my fingers.

While none of these displacements was pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back. I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path. I have lived through parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned. These are just a few of the reasons that I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead. The Bible is a great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

Lost isn’t a very nice way to describe yourself, but when I say I live in Europe and know I don’t fit there and then come back to the US and know I don’t fit here either, that is exactly what I am trying to say about myself. A dear friend listened to me describe all the ways I feel God doing his work in me while we were having lunch today and said, “Would any of this have happened if you hadn’t gone to Europe?” and I know the answer to that is no. My standard answer to people who ask me how I am doing is “this is the hardest thing I have ever done and the best thing I have ever done.” I am aspiring to embrace my “lostness” as a spiritual practice.

In America

2009-10-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

I was standing at the baggage carousel at Midway Airport in Chicago yesterday, waiting for my bag to come down from my flight from Denver, and as it approached I saw my suitcase as if I were seeing it for the first time. It’s an American Tourister, and so am I. I noticed that it is tattered and worn. So am I. The back is broken, the edges are rounded, and there are threads loose on every corner. I thought, “Dear Lord, save me. I have put every mile on that suitcase.” And as I thought about it, I realized I actually have three other suitcases I use as often as this one, which is another way to say I have put a lot of miles on. I think the difference, though, between me and my suitcase, is that while the worn corners and loose threads of my suitcase make me think it may be time to get another one, hopefully, the worn corners and loose threads of my life are making me a better person. I am praying it isn’t time to trade me in just yet.

I have been in America for almost a week and have been contemplating the question, “What is different here?”

I noticed a few differences almost immediately the first day after I arrived. My friend Brett picked me up at O’Hare last Sunday and we went out to Chili’s. That’s a difference, not only do we not have Chili’s in Dordrecht, we don’t have anything remotely like Chili’s. I got a big hamburger (and tried not to notice that what I ordered was called “The Old Timer” or some similarly insulting name) and also thought, “We sure don’t have anything that tastes like this in Dordrecht.” (People that saw me last week kept saying, “You’ve lost weight” and I kept answering, “You go to the grocery store without a clue what to buy and you’ll lose weight, too.”) But then the moment Brett and I had finished the last bite of our burgers, the waitress grabbed our plates and set a bill down. You wouldn’t think anything of this, but after a few European months I felt like saying, “What is your hurry? I am with my friend whom I haven’t seen for six months and we are having a wonderfully deep conversation. Just let us be, let us sit here and enjoy being human with each other for a while. There isn’t a line of people waiting to take our table. What is with you Chili’s people?” I have come to appreciate that when you get a table in a restaurant, that table is yours for as long as you want.

When I am in the Netherlands I am very aware that I am American and not European. But then I come back here and wonder how American I am. I wrote that I was experiencing culture shock and a mid-life crisis. I am not joking. Another way to say this is that I have been wondering a lot lately who I am and where I fit in this wide world of ours.

Nobody put any wine on any of the tables last week at the Young Life senior leadership team meetings I attended, and I noted that as a difference as well. In Europe, a group wouldn't eat without wine, and Americans are the poorer for that. We're so uptight that if you put wine out the group would suddenly turn into a bunch of drunks. But that doesn't happen. What happens instead is the group relaxes, slows down, and enjoys being with each other. I had a fellow staff member from Spain with me this week in Colorado, and after our first day of non-stop meetings he said, "You could learn something from us...the nap." He is exactly right. We meet way past the point of productivity.

I notice how fat people are here. And how opinionated about stupid things some of them are. There was a large old man on my plane sitting a couple of seats away from me talking loudly to someone else about topics like football, Las Vegas, Chicago, and the Swine Flu and peppering every third sentence with an F-bomb and I wanted to say, “We would all like you more if you kept your mouth shut and left us wondering what you thought instead of painfully revealing it” but instead I of course kept my mouth shut and thought, “I like Europeans.” When we got off the plane he had to have a wheelchair brought to him, and this is probably very unkind, but as near as I could see his disability was his weight. And once again I was thinking that life would be better if he had more oral self-control.

So I drove last night from Chicago to Grand Rapids and am writing this in my Michigan home. It feels really good to be here and to see that, as near as I can tell, Jesse is enjoying the fact that his parents abandoned him. As I was driving into Grand Rapids I passed a business that had a little neon sign next to the highway that simply said, “God Bless America” with a neon flag on it. And I thought, “Here is another difference.” You simply would never see a “God Bless Sweden” or “God Bless Belgium” sign. And it is NOT because those countries are filled with godless heathens. Let me try to explain, I probably won’t do a very good job, but let me try.

A European would never put up a God Bless Belgium sign because their self-image is much more humble than that. They know their country is small, and the main reason they created the European Union is so that together they might be able to have some influence in the world. (Which isn’t exactly working, because “European Union” is an oxymoron, kind of like “United Methodists.”) Every European country is small compared to the two largest powers in the world today, which are the US and China.

There is a bad theology afoot in the US that sees the US as the new Israel. In the Old Testament, God chose Israel as the nation he was going to work through. Somewhere under the surface on this side of the Atlantic, there is a notion that our nation is now God’s chosen vessel. I call this bad theology because the New Testament clearly shows that after the Israel experiment, God chose to work through a person named Jesus instead of a nation. But “God Bless America” feels a bit like this sort of “new Israel” thinking. Of course you are saying, “No, you are reading way too much into a simple sign, we simply want God to bless America” and I think a European would say, “Don’t you have enough already? You are the richest country in the world, you have these amazingly huge sprawling cities, you have unreal national parks, oceans, mountains, deserts, farmland, waterfalls, oil, gold, geo-thermal features…and that’s just Alaska and Hawaii.”

Does that make sense? To a European, God Bless America carries with it a certain arrogance that hints at feeling like God’s favorites. A European mentality would challenge us instead to put up a sign that asks God to bless our enemy – maybe a God Bless Afghanistan sign by the highway. Imagine the scandal that would cause.

Homeland Security and I are Good Friends

2009-10-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

Chicago - There is a certain gamble you take when you get on a plane for a transatlantic trip – as you wonder who the airline is going to seat next to you, some total stranger who you are going to sit closer to for the next eight hours than you even sit to your own spouse or loved ones when you are at home. I know some guys who pray for someone they can evangelize on a plane, I always find myself feeling sorry for the people who sit next to them, which is probably a bad thing for someone in my position to say but I don’t feel bad enough about saying it not to say it. Let the blog comments from those saved on planes come rolling in, I can take it. The least I can say is that this is not an approach I am comfortable doing myself. I used to pray that 1) the person next to me would not be monstrously obese or have any huge hygiene issues, and 2) that it would be someone inclined to leave me alone. But I am turning over a new leaf in middle age, I am committed to abandoning my misanthropic tendencies and bringing my honest self to every encounter I have while I trust God with what happens. I have decided I have wasted too much of my life worrying and wondering what others think of me. I want to be free of that and just be open to what happens (as long as the person isn’t monstrously obese or has hygiene problems).

So, today as I was waiting for the plane in Amsterdam I looked at the sea of people also waiting and wondered who I would sit next to and I prayed, “God, send the right person to sit next to me.” He did!

The God I believe in surprises me all the time. He really did today. So, when the young Muslim woman sat down on the plane next to me, I said hello and then thought, “This could be really interesting.” I asked her if she spoke English and she said yes, and then after we got in the air we started talking.

I asked, “How long have you worn a hajib?” And she said, “It’s pronounced hijab” and I apologized for not speaking Arabic correctly and she said, “I am totally amazed that an American knows what to call it,” and then told me that she’s worn it since she was fifteen, and mainly wears it not to cause problems in her family.

I said, “I don’t know, I think it makes Muslim women look mysterious” and a huge smile came across her face and I could tell that made her really happy. Turns out she was from Bahrain and was going to Chicago to attend a convention for architects. (Okay, who saw that coming? The Muslim woman is an architect? I could have guessed all year and not gotten that one.) She had lived in the US for two years in college at, of all places, Mississippi State University. She said her impression of the US had been informed by “Friends” and “LA Law” and she was really surprised when she went to rural Mississippi. She confessed that the first time she flew into the US when she landed in Atlanta she thought she’d be able to see the Statue of Liberty from the plane. I chuckled at that.

Then she turned toward me and said, “Don’t tell me, I want to guess what you do for a living.” “Okay,” I said, “but be prepared to be wrong.”

She said, “You are either a professor or a journalist.”

“Wow,” I said, “those are really good guesses. I studied Journalism in college and I taught as an adjunct professor for about 10 years, so you aren’t far off.”

“Then you must just be a writer.” I told her I like to think of myself as a writer, but sadly the world doesn’t pay me for that. Then I went ahead and told her I was a Christian minister and told her a bit about what I do and where I live. I was fully prepared for “Christian minister” to end our conversation.

“Is that sort of like a missionary?” she asked.

“Yes, it is exactly like a missionary,” I said.

And now it was my turn to be surprised because she said, “I really like missionaries. The first ten years of my education I attended a Catholic school in Bahrain. They were great people, and I often think how blessed I am in life to have had contact with those missionaries.”

Our conversation went from there. Like every non-US person I encounter she asked a number of questions and made a number of comments about US foreign policy. Among the most poignant:

• Saddam was a truly bad man and I am glad the US took him out. I just wish you could have taken him out in a way that didn’t cause my cousin in Iraq to lose his eye and my family in Iraq to lose their homes.
• I have traveled in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan and it is a wild place. I think the United States and other nations of the world need to be there.
• I don’t understand the health care debate in the United States. As a non-US citizen, it makes no sense to me that your country will spend trillions of dollars for aid to Africa and not figure out a way to insure your own poorest and most vulnerable people.
• What was that Sarah Palin thing all about?
• I wish your country would send more missionaries and fewer soldiers around the world.

I asked her if she felt judged by Americans she has encountered and she said that she has had some very ugly experiences in the United States with people saying very mean things to her, but that the Americans who have taken the time to get to know her find she is very different from the prejudices people have. I also asked her about how it is for her to get into the US, wondering if she has a hard time at customs. She said, “Homeland Security and I have become good friends, they add an element of adventure to every trip to the US I take.”

I said I was sorry for the Americans who judged her and that was their loss for not meeting an exceptional person. I told her how sad I was that some of those people were Christians and that as far as I can tell Jesus is about love and not hate, and I thought she appreciated hearing that.

As we approached Chicago the plane banked over Lake Michigan and she said, “Is that a lake? It’s bigger than the Persian Gulf!” The pilot come on the intercom and said the temperature was 8 degrees (about 46 fahrenheit) and she shivered and said she’d never seen snow. I told her about how much snow we got in Michigan and about snow days and she said, “The one day it rained last year it lasted for two hours and I stayed home to watch it” and I thought how very, very different our worlds and life experiences were. She stuck out her hand and said, “By the way, my name is Shaima” and when she was doing her customs form I saw that she had five names on her passport and one of them was Jasmin and one of them was Mohamed and again I thought about what different worlds we came from. And then in a moment of inspiration I said, “I don’t think you have to worry about being cold here, Shaima,” and she asked me why not and I said, “you’ve already got your head covered” and she laughed and laughed and I thought “I’ve still got it” and “I never, ever imagined a day would come in my life when I could make a Muslim woman laugh about her head cover." What a world we live in.

Here's to Making the Time Good

2009-10-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

One quick story before I get on a plane and head for the United States. A little while ago I was standing outside at a shopping center with Maury while Gretchen was inside getting some groceries. An older man came up to me and said something in Dutch. This is not good, I thought, because older folks usually don’t speak English as well as younger ones. I tried to understand what he was saying and then asked him if he spoke English. He looked troubled.

“Ik spreek beetje Nederlands,” I said, and he answered “I speak a little English” and then again in Dutch he asked me something I didn’t understand. This time he followed it by pointing at his wrist.

“Oh, the time?” I said. “You want to know what time it is? Hoe laat is het?”

“Nee,” he said, shaking his head. And then he said something again in Dutch and I could clearly hear he was using the word winkel. Well, we were in a winkel center, a shopping center, and there were winkels everywhere. And suddenly what he wanted to say came to him in English.

“I want to make the time good,” he said, and I looked deeply into his eyes and said, “I think we all do, sir, it’s sort of the most important question in life, isn’t it? How do we make our time good? It is one of the philosophical questions of the ages.” Except I didn’t say that, but I did think it while I looked at him. What I said instead was, “I don’t understand.”

But really, how do we make our time good? What entirely does that mean for us? It is a really deep, profound and mysterious question.

And just as he was getting ready to leave me in frustration I suddenly grasped what he was asking me in Dutch. “Sir,” I said, “Are you asking me where you can get your watch fixed in this area?” and he brightened up noticeably and said, “Ja, Ja.”

Sadly, I had to tell him that I have no idea where he can get his watch fixed. I think I might have some ideas how to make our time good, but he wasn’t really interested in hearing them.

The World is Shrinking

2009-10-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

One definition, I suppose, of having an “open mind” is having the ability to keep opposing ideas in your head at the same time without feeling conflicted because you can see the truth of both sides.

For example, I have been feeling the separation of miles across oceans and feel how really, really big our planet is. But at the same time, I am absolutely convinced the world is shrinking. Here are a few ways I’ve noticed the world getting smaller lately.

My uncle, a truly gentle and good man, died yesterday after a short bout with cancer. Through the magic of Facebook, we knew of his death less than an hour after it happened. Just imagine how long it would have taken 100 years or so ago for a nephew in the Netherlands to learn of his uncle’s death in the United States.

We were at the store this morning and I noticed the radio was playing a Paul McCartney song that came out when I was in high school. I was listening to a song by a British singer that was recorded in New Orleans that I used to listen to in Michigan but now was hearing in the Netherlands.

Last night I saw a commercial that said, “When you need a bank in Africa, choose Zenith Bank.” After that a tourism ad for Qatar came on.

I have also seen tourism ads for Moscow, Cuba and Iceland lately. There are great prices for Iceland these days, but you are going to want to bring some flashlights with you because it’s starting to be dark most of the time there. Hence the good deals. I still really want to go to Iceland sometime. I like geo-thermal features. (Which makes me think of my friend David Bast's great line on a family vacation to Yellowstone: Eventually we developed GTFFS. Me: What is GTFFS? Dave: Geo-thermal Feature Fatigue Syndrome.) I have wanted to go to Iceland ever since I first heard the story that Iceland and Greenland got their names to confuse invaders. Iceland is beautiful and green, Greenland is a massive glacier. I have no idea if that story is true, but I like it. I also want to go to Iceland because Bjork is from there, and as I am sure you all remember, she once wore a swan to the Oscars.

Every Sunday afternoon Eurosport 2 shows Big 10 Football and a couple of weeks ago I saw Michigan-Michigan State on my TV in the Netherlands. How strange is that? They take a three hour long game and someone who has never seen a football game before edits it into a one hour package. How do I know the editor is a novice? The first thing they showed was Michigan kicking a field goal. Then a “fast forward” button appears on the screen and Michigan is kicking another field goal, but I can see the score before that was Michigan State 7 – Michigan 3. Then another fast forward button and it’s the third period and MSU has a big lead and the announcer says “Total domination by the Spartans so far this afternoon.” You couldn’t have proved that by me.

I was in Schipol airport in Amsterdam a while back and noticed the plane parked at the gate next to mine was heading for Tehran. I don’t have any idea if someone holding an American passport can even get on a plane to Tehran these days, but if I need to go there I know where I can catch a plane.

I was out with Maury the other day and we walked for a while behind a skinny Dutch kid whose pants were sagging and he had a pair of huge earphones on, which were blasting a song I am not familiar with, but whose lyrics were “so you want to be a thug.” I am absolutely convinced the kid had no concrete idea what being a thug really means, and if he did encounter an actual thug, that thug might find this Dutch kid extremely amusing.

And this most of all … on Sunday I get on a plane in Amsterdam at 10:30am and will get off that same plane at noon in Chicago. How I wish the trip was only 90 minutes – we gain 7 hours on the way. But that flight is the start of two weeks in Colorado and Michigan and the chance to re-connect with many dear, dear folks. I’m looking forward to it.

Why Did I Weep?

2009-10-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

I counted 12 Kleenex in the trash next to the desk when I had finished writing this. Hope it connects with a tender place inside of you, too….

We do a language exchange with a young Dutch woman named Hilde on Monday mornings. She wants to get better in English and we need all the help we can get in Dutch. Hilde especially needs help with reading and writing English and we decided to read a book together. So, I scanned my shelves. One of the hardest things about moving was choosing which books to bring. Books weigh a lot, and I had way too many of them. So I limited myself. 26 books by Frederick Buechner made it, of course, and Patrick O’Brian’s 20 volume Aubrey/Maturin series. Dale Bruner’s glorious two volume Matthew commentary also came, some books are worth so much more than their weight. I also decided to bring the five books Max DePree has published, and my eyes lit on his gem, “Dear Zoe.” The book is a collection of letters Max wrote to his granddaughter who was born at 24 weeks. Hilde is a new mother, and I thought Max’s book would do the job perfectly. It has. Hilde can’t wait to find out more about Zoe every week.

So this week while we were reading, I started crying. It is a beautiful, heart touching story, but I’ve read it a number of times without crying before. I’ve been asking myself, “Why did I weep this time?”

I posted a little hint of this in September in what I wrote the day after my birthday. I’ve been feeling the gulf of separation (maybe that should be the new name of the Atlantic Ocean) between most of the people who have filled my life and where I am today. I am sure I am now feeling culture shock, which might be best defined as the realization you aren’t on vacation anymore. I also mentioned that I reconnected with long-lost friends, and that’s caused me to be doing a lot of reflection on my life of late. I think the weight of all those things is why the combination of Max’s tender words and tough questions he was asking God about his granddaughter made me cry. He asked God, “Why do I have to start all over at 64?” and I feel the same question minus 13 years. And then there is Max himself. He’s been a special friend and mentor to me for over 20 years. I was dumbfounded when the CEO of one of West Michigan’s largest companies invited me to have lunch with him because he wanted to get to know me better. Wasn’t that supposed to happen the other way around? I miss being able to call him up and drive to Holland to spend time with him. He lives in the wrong Holland! Max personifies wisdom, grace, eloquence and elegance. In his book “Leadership is An Art” he has a chapter called “Why Should I Weep?” My question is a variation on that theme.

I think I should cry more. One of my favorite stories about Frederick Buechner comes from Dale Brown, who hosted FB in his home many years ago for a speech at Calvin College. Dale said he got up early in the morning and heard the television. He went downstairs and there was Frederick Buechner, sitting in front of Dale’s TV set, crying. The night before, while Buechner had given his speech at Calvin, the Rodney King-inspired riots in Los Angeles had broken out. Buechner was watching the news and crying. I want to be like that – I want to be soft enough so that the things that break God’s heart also break mine.

What makes you weep?

I’ve thought of few more things that always move me:

• When Amanda and Jesse were little sometimes I would stand in the hall outside their rooms and look at them asleep and my throat would catch and a tear come to my eye. They were so beautiful and innocent.
• When I read the book “Charlotte’s Web” to Amanda I couldn’t read anymore after Charlotte died and Wilbur the pig remembered her by saying, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” That’s all I ever wanted to be, too.
• Three movies – “The Wizard of Oz,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “Forrest Gump.” With Oz it’s when Dorothy keeps saying, “There’s no place like home.” And she was an orphan, folks! The longing for home is one of strongest pulls inside of us, and we are all on some sort of Oz-like quest, just trying to get back where we belong. With “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it is when Jimmy Stewart sees what life would have been like if he had not been there, and through his eyes we see the absolute goodness of one man’s life. Plus Jimmy Stewart was such a great actor and the angst and terror in his voice and face are extremely powerful. Most of the time when that movie’s on I can’t even bear to watch it, because I know it will tear me up. With “Forrest Gump” it is the last scene where Forrest puts little Forrest on the bus. Again it is innocence and beauty and the goodness of life that gets me.
• When I preached at my grandmother’s funeral and I told of my hope that in heaven my grandmother would be united with her own mother, who had died when my grandmother was four or five years old. Her father abandoned her then, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents, way up at the top of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was fine when I wrote the lines, but found I couldn’t say them out loud very well.

How about you? What makes you weep?

A Man and His Dog

2009-10-08T03:44:00.000-07:00

After a few days of rain, today broke crisp and clear and seemed like the perfect day to grab a 20 minute noon walk with Maury, the dog. I’m not surprised by the rain; after all it is the rainy season, which as near as I can tell runs from about August 15 to June 30 annually. But the sun is shining today so it was a good day to get out and enjoy it. Maury and I took one of our favorite treks, straight up our street and over a canal until we get to a river, and then we walked along a dike above the river until crossing another bridge and heading for home. Along our way today we encountered:

A couple arguing loudly in Dutch who slammed their front door shut when they became aware that we were passing. Some things translate into any culture.

31 sheep. Counting 31 sheep makes me yawn.

Two cows.

One noisy, lonesome duck. I felt a great empathy for him, because I’ve been feeling like a noisy, lonesome duck lately. More on that in my next post.

Two evil, malicious, vile, sneaky, snarling cats.

Ten other dogs. Maury greeted each one with an anxious blend of sniffing, posturing and curiosity, wondering if this is friend or foe. It occurred to me today that he and I are not too much different, except thankfully I don’t do the sniffing (although the pheromone research people say that I do). I’m just much better than Maury at hiding my anxiety.

A woman dressed as a Japanese Geisha on a bicycle. Someone recently told me a great past time here is to play, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen on a bike?” This is definitely an entry.

Maury is my steady companion, the only friend I have who greets me every day with fresh enthusiasm. Isn’t there a prayer to the effect of “God, help me be the person my dog thinks I am”? I wrote this poem in Maury’s honor and I hope you enjoy it.

Blessed are the Meek

Sometimes
at five or six am
when I am asleep on my side
you hop on the bed
and lie down spine to spine with me
sticking your head into my pillow
snorting and squirming
into the bouquet of dead skin cells, sweat and hair follicles
you find there.

An unhappy voice comes
from the other side of the bed saying,
he’s rutting on you, you are both disgusting,
STOP IT.

But I like it.
It sort of feels like a massage
and besides
it’s a reminder that,
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
old boy,
there is still a wild beast somewhere deep inside both of us.

Odds and Ends

I need to report that I have a Dutch driver’s license in my wallet! In addition to that, I have a new train identity card. These join my already existing Dutch residency card to make a tri-fecta of cards adorned with the “Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken.”

My dad asked me the other day, “When do you sleep?” I told him that like any normal person I sleep at night and occasionally in the afternoon at my desk. Then I said, “Why do you ask?” He said, “Because you seem to post your blog entries at weird hours.” A little explanation might clear this up. The Google folks that run this blog site are based someplace on the US West Coast and all blog entries are actually posted 9 hours before what the site says. If the math is too hard to figure out, just rest assured that I sleep at night.

Ik Weet Het Niet

2009-10-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

I got my haircut this morning. (In Journalism school at Michigan State I learned the importance of strong leads – first sentences that grab your attention and make you want to keep reading. This is not a strong lead. My favorite lead for a sports story was “Babe Herman has never doubled into a triple play, but he did triple into a double play today, which ought to count for something.” )

I’ve needed a haircut for a month or so. My hair was starting to curl over my ears, and before long I would have had sidelocks like an Orthodox Jew. All I needed was the hat. But I kept putting off getting my hair cut because it was something new that I would have to figure out. (By the way, I am getting my hair cut very short these days, and as I was sitting in the chair this morning I contemplated that over my lifetime my haircut has followed the Three Stooges: I started off as Moe, evolved into Larry, and now am Curly. Nyuk, yuk, yuk.)

“Ik weet het niet” means “I don’t know” and those words come out of my mouth more since we’ve moved than ever before. I didn’t know how to get my hair cut here before this morning. I still don’t know how much I weigh, how tall I am, what my shoe size is, what any of my other sizes are, how to get the cable company to understand what doesn’t work on my TV, and on and on. I just don’t know. I can’t tell you how many calls Gretchen and I have had to make to our Dutch friends that started, “We don’t know how to ….”

I was raised and educated to be the smartest guy in the room. I went to seminary where I studied Greek and Hebrew so that I could read things that no one else could. I have prided myself on being reasonably intelligent for a long time. And my grasp of useless trivia is especially good. I know that Babe Pinelli was the home plate umpire when Don Larsen threw his perfect game in the 1956 World Series, that Hannibal Hamlin from Maine was Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, and that John Ritter’s father sang the theme song to the movie “High Noon.”

But I live now in a place where none of that matters. What I don’t know is astounding. For beginners, I don't know the native tongue of 99% of the people I regularly encounter. And while I am grieving the loss of my intelligence, I am beginning to see that maybe this new posture of not knowing can be an advantage.

This weekend one of our new staff people asked me a question and I said, “I don’t know” and she said, “that’s what I like about you as our leader,” and I said, “you like the fact that your regional director is clueless?” and she laughed and said, “no, I like that you don’t pretend to know it all and try to control everyone and every situation. You give us the space to figure things out.” I took that as a compliment.

I read a book recently that was about the shift from modern to postmodern thought, and one of the points the author made is that while the modern world was all about intelligence, the postmodern world is all about creativity. Intelligence, he said, is mastery over a body of knowledge. Creativity is the ability to recognize the patterns emerging from an environment and respond appropriately.

Here’s an example. Imagine you are on a train in Europe and the train stops at a station and an announcement comes on in a language you don’t understand. Everyone gets off the train. What would you do? Get off the train, of course. Then what would you do? Follow the crowd, of course. The crowd all walks to a tram stop, gets on a tram, and takes that tram to the next station down the line, where they then get on another train bound for your original destination. This isn’t hypothetical, it happened to Gretchen and me a couple of weeks ago. We actually can understand some Dutch at this point, so when the announcement came on I said, “I think there is a problem with this train” and Gretchen said, “I thought they said something about strawberries.” Is the train broken or are they about to serve strawberries to every passenger? When in doubt, we step back and watch what others do. I have always been taught the opposite – to make things happen on my own, but now I am learning to recognize the patterns and trust the wisdom of others.

Which leaves me pondering many questions today.

The great cathedrals of Europe sit mostly empty on Sunday mornings. They have more visitors during the week from tourists wanting to see the art and architecture than pilgrims searching for God at worship these days. What might we conclude from that? People vote with their feet, the old saying goes, and the people have voted.

Is this a different way to think of creativity for you? I guess I always thought creativity was creation out of nothing, but I see this definition as creation based on what others are doing around you. As I reflect on that, it seems more probable than creation out of nothing.

Is it okay for you to say, “I don’t know”? Is it okay for a leader to say that?

What might it mean to trust the wisdom of others? Throw that into the European context for a moment – are you Americans aware of how this side of the world views you? One way to put it would be to say that Europeans generally don’t think Americans have the ability to trust in any wisdom other than their own.

What patterns do you see emerging around us in the postmodern world?

Here’s to creativity. The words of the now forgotten Five Man Electrical Band seem appropriate:

Signs, signs everywhere a sign
Can’t you read the signs?

Helsinki and Henri

2009-10-04T09:55:00.001-07:00

It’s been a whirlwind week. Gretchen and I had the full Ryanair experience last Friday, flying from Eindhoven to Nykoping, Sweden. Ryanair is like nothing else in the world. You use it because it is ridiculously cheap, but cheapness costs something. In Ryanair’s case it costs a bit of your dignity. Everyone lines up because there are no assigned seats and I inevitably moo and baa in line. I can’t help it. Treat me like a farm animal and I feel compelled to respond in kind. And it costs time. Ryanair defines Nykoping as Stockholm, but grab a map and look - it is an hour and a half away from Stockholm. Skavsta airport in Nykoping is a classic Ryanair facility – some World War II relic that they have more or less resuscitated because they can fly in and out without paying big fees. As near as I could tell, the only other planes flying out from there were on an airline called “Wizz,” which was flying to Gdansk, and left me imagining conversations. “Sorry, Bob, I can’t join you for the meeting this afternoon, I’ve got the 4:15 Wizz to Gdansk.”

So we took a train to Eindhoven, a bus from Eindhoven Central Station to the airport, a plane to Sweden, and a car to Vallentuna, where we were staying. All of this so we could ride on a boat. Of course to get on the boat we took another bus, a train, and a subway. If only we’d managed to ride our bikes or found a rickshaw we would have covered about every form of transportation.

After a full day of meetings last Saturday (you can see my Swedish friend Daniel showed up for the first meeting wearing a tee shirt with my picture on it!), we got on a boat in Stockholm Sunday afternoon to sail across the Baltic Sea to Helsinki. The boat is sort of a cruise ship and sort of a ferry. The cabins are small, but at least you have beds, a shower and a toilet. The ship is filled with restaurants, bars, a huge store, video poker and there was even a “fun center” that featured five Swedes in long dresses and white leisure suits singing and dancing. ABBA lives on, my friends! No, it wasn’t the real ABBA, just a cheap Swedish imitation, but I did see that in a few weeks Gerry and the Pacemakers are playing on this boat. You have to be a real trivia freak like me to know Gerry and the Pacemakers. They didn’t quite make it as big as another band from Liverpool. These days Gerry and the rest of the band probably have pacemakers.

We took two young couples who serve on our staff in Sweden with us, along with their new babies. Gretchen got a bit of a “baby fix” and we all enjoyed our time together. We had seven hours in Helsinki, enough time to see some wonderful architecture and be able to say, “We’ve been to Finland!” Look again at the map you got out and you’ll see that if the captain made a wrong turn we easily could have wound up in Russia. I’ve put a couple of Helsinki photos above – I’m always interested in churches and a unique thing in Finland is they have both strong Lutheran and Russian Orthodox influences. What you see is the oldest wooden church in Helsinki, which is Lutheran, and also an impressive Russian Orthodox church, close to where our boat docked. And you can see we were very, very fortunate to be there on a beautiful fall day. We also visited a church literally blasted out of stone called Temppeliaukio, but I would have needed a helicopter to really capture that well on film.

We went on the trip to scout this out as a potential regional staff retreat location – my vision is to do a floating retreat someday. There are similar ships that sail from Stockholm to Riga and Tallinn, and who doesn’t want to go to Latvia or Estonia? I do.

We headed back home on Wednesday, with our Ryanair experience this time highlighted by two drunks in the row in front of us. Drunkenness is obnoxious and pitiful in any culture. At least these guys didn’t appear to be on the verge of vomiting, like the drunk sitting next to Ken Knipp and me on the Ryanair flight we took together last April. Well, technically the drunk guy wasn’t sitting next to me. I made sure Ken was next to him and I sat coiled, prepared to leap out into the aisle regardless of the seat belt sign. Ken was ready to take one for the team if necessary. I was ready to save myself. Ken and I have had some great adventures together over the years, like the now legendary day he invited me to go check out a resort in Southwest Michigan with him for a possible family retreat. The place turned out to be “men only” and we were mistaken for a couple looking to go on vacation. That was a bit awkward.

Anyway, Gretchen and I arrived home Wednesday evening and within a couple of hours welcomed two Norwegians who were coming to town for our training group meeting this weekend. In addition to the Norwegians, we had three folks from Spain, one from France and one from Portugal join us. These folks are our first and second year staff, the hope of our future, and I loved our time together. I thought it was time well spent, but I don’t exactly have the most objective point of view about the whole thing. There is a certain ego boost involved in having people fly in from all over the continent to listen to you drone on for a few days.

We spent time with a great Henri Nouwen book called, “In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership,” and I think I’ve probably read this short gem ten or fifteen times. Let me try to sum up the three things that I tried to teach our new staff from the Nouwen book this weekend.

1. That even though we feel the temptation and expectation from the world around us to be relevant and successful, to accomplish or do something; the simple question Jesus asks us is not “what are you doing for me?” but “do you love me?” Nouwen says it like this: The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus? Perhaps another way of asking the question would be: Do you know the incarnate God? In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, that reaches out and wants to heal.

2. That even though our world and Western culture especially values individualism and the self-made hero, ministry is a communal and mutual experience. There are great dangers when we allow ourselves to be isolated and alone. Another way to say this is “you are as sick as your secrets,” and only by finding safe places for confession in community can the dark forces that would undo us be brought to light and seen for what they really are.

3. That the greatest mystery of Christian leadership is found in following the example of Jesus Christ, who did not cling to his divine power but, as the book of Philippians says, “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.” The model we follow for Christian leadership is Servant Leadership. The temptation we face is the temptation to power. Nouwen says: What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life…I am not speaking about a psychologically weak leadership in which the Christian leader is simply the passive victim of the manipulations of his milieu. No, I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership.

Our Norwegians and Spaniards and all the rest have headed home now, and Gretchen and I are enjoying a relaxed Sunday afternoon. It’s been a good week.

Vive la France

2009-09-23T03:32:00.000-07:00

Praz de Lys was beautiful this weekend – we were often in clouds or sometimes above clouds and it added a sense of mystery to the whole place. Imagine being on the side of an alp in the mist and the only other sign of life besides your own breathing is the sound of cowbells coming across the valley. Here are some memories from this weekend.

I was the only American in a group of about ten other folks and our meetings were in French. At one point one of them asked me in English, “Would it help you if we spoke slower?” I laughed and said, “The only thing that could help me would be a brain transplant from someone who can speak French.”

At another point I decided to show off my French skills by saying, “Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble.” (As in “Michelle, my belle”) I thought I had them fooled for a second until my friend Vincent said, “It’s funny you learned French from the Beatles because I learned English from the Beatles.” He then went on to say, “I can’t believe the same guys could go from writing I Want to Hold Your Hand to A Day in the Life in four years.” That’s an insightful comment. Then he said, “A Day in the Life is ….” and he used a French phrase that we don’t have an English equivalent for (Amanda Munroe – do you have any idea what he would have said?) He explained it to me as “having nothing that led up to it and nothing that could follow it.” Sort of like “one of a kind” or “singular” maybe, but more powerful than that. I’m not sure. Anyway, it was a nice intercultural moment. Vincent went on to tell me about the day he shook hands with Ringo Starr in the Geneva airport, and I told them my theory of the Beatles – that Paul was a musical genius, John a creative and philosophical genius, George the spiritual heart and Ringo the mascot. The French folks stopped for a moment to contemplate the depth of what I was saying and take in this new truth. There were a lot of “hmmms” in French accents around the table. I like France.

At another point in our meetings, when a new idea was presented, one of them said, “I am very disturbalized by this.” That’s my new word of the week.

I learned there are no French words for leadership, fellowship, or discipleship. “We don’t have a lot of ‘ship’ words,” my translator (and our staff person in Lyon) Marie-Aline said to me. They don’t have a word for leader the way we use that term in Young Life, either. I asked what a volunteer leader is called in France and she said simply a volunteer. That loses something in the translation. But then I asked what the team leader is called and she said “animator” and I thought that was a tremendous word.

In the morning they all poured their coffee into cereal bowls and sat dipping bread into their bowls of coffee, before picking up the bowls and drinking. If I could have remembered the term Vincent used in reference to A Day in the Life, I would have used it to describe their morning coffee ritual.

I got confused by the kissing etiquette. In the Netherlands, it is right cheek, left cheek, right cheek. In Belgium it is one time on the right cheek. But in France, where the bise is synonymous with their culture, I noticed some people were starting on the left while others started on the right. I called time out and demanded an explanation from the rules committee. Turns out the bise differs according to geographic region. “Do you ever get mixed up and wind up kissing on the lips?” I asked. “Oui.” Ooh lah lah.

ALL THINGS COME TOGETHER

As I left for the airport, I had the nagging thought that I was forgetting something. I even got out of the car before leaving for the train station and said, “I need to get my phone,” but it was in my pocket, so I got back in the car and left with an uneasy feeling. I fell asleep on the train and it wasn’t until I was in the airport that I realized I had forgotten my passport. After a few moments of panic and self- flagellation, I called Gretchen and asked her to get my passport and come to Amsterdam with it. Maybe, just maybe, if she could get on a train quickly enough, she could get there in time to save me.

Then I approached the KLM counter and told the woman there I had a big problem. She cheerfully said, “Let me see if I can help you.” I love KLM! “Do you have a driver’s license?” I pulled out the Xerox copy of my driver’s license they gave me at city hall in Dordrecht last week. I never finished the driver’s license story, so here goes. I got a letter last week from the medical director of the CBR saying that she had determined I need to wear glasses to drive. My family has known that since the summer when I was in 6th grade and I came into a room and looked at a pair of shoes in the corner and asked, “whose dog is that?” They took me to the eye doctor the next day and I’ve had glasses on since. I got the letter from the CBR on Tuesday last week, in time to take it to city hall to formally apply for a driver’s license before my Michigan license expired. I only had to go their twice on Wednesday morning last week because the first person I talked to made me get a letter from Young Life in the Netherlands about my work status that the second person didn’t ask for, but that only makes a long story longer, so let’s keep moving. They took my 53.20 euro, my documentation, and my Michigan driver’s license and told me in four weeks I will receive a call or possibly a letter telling me I can go pick up my Dutch driver’s license. They then photocopied my Michigan license and gave that back to me and said, “This is your driver’s license now, it’s okay to drive with this.”

So, the woman at the KLM counter said, “Do you have a driver’s license?” and I pulled the photocopy of my license out of my wallet. “This isn’t a license,” she said. “It’s a photocopy of a license.”

“I realize that,” I said, “but this is what your government has told me to use for a license.”

“Do you have any other identification?” she asked. I pulled out my Dutch Residency Card (see blog entry “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken.”) She looked and winced, but then recovered and said, “I need to show this to my colleague.” Off she went to a back room where I imagined a group of people doubling over in laughter. I think I could see them pulling back a window shade and peeking out at me. Before long she came out and said, “It’s okay, you can use this.”

I called Gretchen and asked where she was. She was sitting on a train about to leave Central Station in Dordrecht, so she was able to get off the train before it left town. Whew!

Off I went, praying that the folks in Switzerland would agree with the folks in Amsterdam. They did. The woman at the counter in Geneva even said, “Are you just going back to the Netherlands – you aren’t going on to any other countries?” “Yes,” I said. She looked empathetically at me and said, “All you want to do is go home, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I said, “that’s all I want to do.” I was like Dorothy in Oz.

So, what have I learned this week? That you can drive in Europe with a photocopy of an expired American license. That Americans don’t need passports to cross European borders by air. That French people can be fun and interesting and they don’t necessarily dislike Americans. And that, no matter how stupid, hopeless and disturbalizing the situation I create, Gretchen is willing to bail me out if necessary.

I Hung One More Year On The Line

2009-09-19T00:22:00.000-07:00

Do you remember that Paul Simon song that begins, "Yesterday it was my birthday, I hung one more year on the line”? Doesn’t matter if you do. Yesterday it was my birthday and I hung one more year on the line. I’m aching a bit.

Not from my advancing age, though. I’m aching with some mixture of nostalgia, regret, culture shock, loneliness, and mid-life crisis. Let me try to explain.

“People are wishing you Happy Birthday on your Facebook page,” Gretchen said. “You need to check it.” Well, truth be told, Jesse set up a Facebook page for me about a year ago and I’ve looked at it maybe a total of three times. I would have looked at it more, but I forgot the password. Anyway, I got the password from him and looked for the first time in seven months or more. I should have been looking at it earlier. There were all sorts of people there – people from high school, people from Michigan State, people from Young Life in Holland, Michigan, and from Central Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. There was the little girl who played Mayor Shinn’s daughter in the Flint Southwestern High School production of The Music Man in December, 1975. I was Charlie Cowell, the anvil salesman. (But he doesn’t know the territory!) Her Facebook page said she is a prison guard in the south and her greatest joys in life are her grandchildren! How did that happen? There was a kid I took to Young Life camp 22 years ago that we nicknamed “Tiger” because the first night we were there he danced around the cabin in tiger-striped shorts to a song called “Girls, Girls, Girls.” He’s pictured in a business suit on Facebook. There was the guy I performed “Who’s on First” with in high school. There were people in Hawaii and Germany. There was a guy I remember not being all that nice to when I was younger, and there he was, 35 years later, wishing me Happy Birthday. Facebook is like a giant “come home, all is forgiven” poster. As I read these people’s Facebook pages, looked at their pictures, and contemplated their lives, I felt all sorts of feelings flooding in and through me. Most of what I felt was regret for letting them go.

You are in a sort of “review your life” frame of mind on your birthday, anyway. I started reviewing mine. I don’t have any regrets about the places we’ve lived or the decisions I’ve made or the overall direction my life has gone in. But I have real regret about walking away from relationships. And now here I am, on another continent, 4000 miles away from most of the people who have defined my life.

Place is important and God knows I’ve been seeing a lot of them. In a couple of hours, I will get on a plane and fly to Geneva and then drive down to the Praz de Lys in the French Alps. That’s what the picture is of. Can you believe I get to go to spend the weekend at a place like that? Next weekend Gretchen and I are getting on a boat in Stockholm and sailing to Helsinki. I have to pinch myself to know I’m not dreaming. But as fun and exciting as seeing all these places is, it is people that make life worth living.

Patrick Swayze died this week, and to honor the occasion Dutch TV preempted their regular programming to show a bunch of his movies. Not to speak ill of the recently deceased, but as an actor Patrick Swayze falls somewhere on my list of favorites right between Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone. Which is another way of saying not very high, but at least he’s above Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves. Just imagine if Patrick Swayze made a movie with Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves. Oh, that’s right, they did make a really dumb movie together about surfing bank robbers, and the Dutch showed it last week. Bhodi and Johnny Utah? Real people have names like that? Come on. They also showed Ghost and Gretchen and I wound up watching it. Whoopi Goldberg was great in that movie. Anyway, we’re watching Ghost and the thought that occurred to me was “if Patrick Swayze is dead and so in love with Demi Moore, why is he trying so hard to keep her alive? Wouldn’t he be more fulfilled if she died also? Then they’d be together.” I know I am thinking way too much about the meaning of Ghost, but it started me thinking about heaven. I hope the promise of heaven is real. I believe in it, mostly I think because I want to believe in it. I don’t have any evidence for it beyond the Bible, but I’d rather live believing in it than not. Will we know each other in heaven? ls heaven where my Facebook page goes from being virtual to real, and I will be connected to all these people from different stages and places in my life? Or will being in the presence of God so fill us that nothing else matters? Will I care one whit about the life I’ve left behind?

Which started me thinking about Bill Segrist. Bill died about ten days after we moved here, and I had promised him I would preach at his funeral, so I hopped on a plane and went back to Michigan within two weeks of starting my new life. That was a bit surreal – outside of the funeral I really didn’t want people to know I was back, because it seemed way too anti-climactic. You shouldn’t show up again two weeks after people make a big fuss over you going away. Anyway, one of the great things about Bill was that he never let people go. He stayed connected, and he sure didn’t need Facebook to make that happen. What I tried to say at his funeral was that I never knew anyone who was so unwilling to let go of people and who was so willing to be there when things were rough. When someone is in trouble, a lot of us give that person space – but Bill would move in instead of out. On the night of Gretchen’s stroke in 1985, it was Bill who was still there after everyone else had gone home. He was given six months to live three years before he died. I think he fought cancer so hard and effectively because he just wasn’t willing to let go of the people in his life. I want to be more like Bill.

We finished my birthday with a Dutch party. About eight people came over and congratulated me on having a birthday. The women all kissed me three times. That’s not a bad custom! We talked and laughed and spent several hours together. I confirmed that Dutch people don’t move around as much as Americans do. Most people here live in the town where they were born and live close to their parents and extended family. If they do move, they only live an hour or so away from each other, because the country is so small. Maybe they are on to something. Maybe they are smarter than us. But I also thought, these Dutch friends are here now and are enriching my life. I’m going to be with French friends later today and with Swedish friends next week. All of these people are enriching my life and I wouldn’t know any of them if I’d stayed on Windsor Lane in Flint, Michigan.

So I started with the poet Paul Simon and I’ll end with the philosopher John Lennon:
All these place have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all.

What I Want For My Birthday

2009-09-10T12:20:00.000-07:00

Last April my immigration lawyer explained that with my “Highly Skilled Migrant Status” I would be eligible for the “30% ruling,” which allows me to exclude 30% of my income from Dutch taxes AND allows me to exchange my Michigan driver’s license for a Dutch one. I was ecstatic, because I have heard horror stories from Americans trying to get European licenses. It is usually very hard and very expensive – most Americans cannot pass a European driving test. How do I know this? Because I watch Reality TV! Once I was watching a show in England about people trying to get their licenses (I know it sounds boring but it was gripping) and it showed a woman going for her driver’s test. The first thing the examiner asked her to do was check the brake fluid. Then he made her change a tire. Then she had to get in the wrong side of the car and drive on the wrong side of the road. Okay, that last part was just because the show was set in England, but check the brake fluid? “Blimey,” I exclaimed to the telly in an attempt to sound British, “I’m not exactly Mr. Goodwrench here.”

A friend in Spain has told me his license cost him over 1000 Euro in driving lessons, exams, and government forms. Not me. I’ve been imagining walking into the Dutch version of the Secretary of State’s office (we don’t have a DMV in Michigan), tossing them my Michigan license and them handing me a Dutch license along with a complimentary pair of tiny wooden shoes to hang from my rear view mirror. Oh foolish man. What previous experience have I had with anything here that would make me think this would be easy? First, I had to clear the immigration hurdles and get accepted as a Highly Skilled Migrant. That took six weeks, cost a few hundred Euro, and involved about twenty pages of documents - including things from the US affixed with apostilles, which had me visiting county courthouses in Ottawa and Ingham counties and going to the Secretary of State’s office every day the week before we left. Then we had to file for the 30% ruling. Another bunch of paperwork, more money, and another month, but yes, this was also granted at the beginning of September.

So I naively emailed my lawyer (and it is naïve to email your lawyer, because he bills you for 12 minutes for each email at 180 Euro an hour, or 36 Euro an email, or about $50 an email…Lawyer: Here is the information you need. Me: Thanks. Lawyer: You are welcome. Bill - $100…when oh when am I going to learn NOT to say thanks because it costs me $50 every time he says “you’re welcome.”) Where was I? Oh yeah, so I naively emailed my lawyer and asked “How do I exchange my driver’s license now that I have the 30% ruling?” I am still thinking I can go someplace and trade.

He gleefully writes back saying thanks for the chance to send you another $50 email and here are the steps you need to take. Basically, I have to go to the Stadswinkel ( which more or less is City Hall but translates literally as “city store”) and pay 20 Euro to get a form to mail to the Central Bureau Rijvaardigheidbewijzen (any Central Reformed people who read this – you can start thanking God I am not doing the spelling bee this year because I have a whole lot of new words that would make you cringe). The CBR people are in charge of driver’s licenses. After completing their form I have to mail it back to them, then they send it to the RDW (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer, good but not quite as exciting as Rijvaardigheidbewijzen) who are the people in charge of the roads. After approval by the CBR and RDW then I take the forms they send me along with a passport photo (see blog entry called “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken”), 53 Euro, a copy of my 30% ruling AND my valid Michigan driver’s license and in a few weeks they will send me a new Dutch license in the mail.

Are you still with me? (The Dutch people who read this blog are thinking “What’s the big deal?” while the Americans are thinking “This is why I should never leave home.”) I get the first form from the CBR. For some reason they went ahead and made it in Dutch, but I can read enough of it to know I have a serious problem. It was a medical history questionnaire and it’s one of those forms where you are supposed to answer “no” to every question. You know the questions. Are you criminally insane? Do you have narcolepsy? Do you have an attention span so short that sitting through a traffic light is going to be a problem? But right there on number 8 I can see in Dutch it’s asking if I’ve ever had an operation of one of my eyes. Time for a moral dilemma. I don’t like to brag about it, but I am legally blind in my left eye. 26 years ago I had a detached retina and had eye surgery and the result is I can see out of my eye with glasses but without them I can’t see squat. I could lie and make my life easier (which is pretty much why people lie anyway) or I can tell the truth. I guess you know what I did. (Would I be writing about this if I’d gone ahead and lied?)

Did I mention it’s my birthday next Friday? I’m not saying this to entice you to send presents (not that’s there’s anything wrong with that), I’m saying this because – by some fluke of timing – my Michigan driver’s license expires this year on my birthday. I have to have a valid driver’s license to make this whole thing work. I didn’t think this was going to be a problem in June when I started working on it, but now it is September. I am starting to think God was looking the other way on this one and wondering if I might need to jump on a plane and go back to Michigan for a day to renew my license before next Friday.

So I fill out the form honestly and late Tuesday I receive a letter from the CBR telling me I need to see an eye doctor. What are the chances that that’s going to happen quickly? But miracle of miracles on Wednesday I call the Albert Schweitzer Ziekenhuis in Dordrecht to make an appointment with an eye doctor and they say I can come in at 8am on Thursday. So I go get my eyes examined by a Dutch eye doctor this morning and 45 Euro later he finds that I am blind in my left eye but with my glasses I can see fine and approves me to have a license for the next ten years. Hoping to speed this along, I get the idea of taking the form personally to the CBR in Rijswijk. We have to go to Rijswijk anyway, because Gretchen’s residency card has come in (mine took six weeks, hers took three months; mine is good for five years, hers is good for one year. “I love socialism,” he said sarcastically.) and that’s also the city where the immigration office is. We hop on the train after the exam and head to Rijswijk. I have dark glasses on, because my eyes are still dilated. We get Gretchen’s residency card (see blog entry “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken” for further explanation. I promised Gretchen I would not post this picture on the internet. I did not promise I would not comment on it. Simply stated she looks like Bela Lugosi after a night out on the town. I try calling her “Stella Lugosi” but she fails to see the humor.) Then we head around the corner to the CBR offices. I stumble a few times on some curbs because the sun is shining very brightly and my pupils are still dilated. Gretchen takes my hand and begins to lead me on, and I am led by the hand wearing dark glasses into the office where I want to get a driver’s license.

But it goes well there. The receptionist promises to call another woman “just after her lunch break” on my behalf…but then she changes her mind and actually picks up the phone and makes the call! And the other woman says “send his form up” so she puts it into a vacuum tube and off it goes. The first woman says “she’ll try to put it into the system today or tomorrow” and gives me a phone number to call next week to see if they’ve acted on it. I might actually hear something before next Friday!

We go home and I have another idea. I decide to see if I can contact the Secretary of State’s office in Michigan and ask for help. I see on the web site where I can send Terry Lynn Land an email, and I do so. But I notice that really these emails are for telling Terry Lynn Land your concerns about the Secretary of State’s office. And then on the side of the page I see “Out-of-State Services” and find a place where I can call to request an extension on my driver’s license for six months! I call. I explain my situation to a woman in Lansing. She says, “Well, I can’t help you if you don’t live in Michigan.” Apparently I misunderstood the nature of “Out-of-State Services.” I try to sound desperate. I make sure she understands it’s not like I’m on vacation in Toledo. She begins to soften. She asks if I have any utility bills in my name in Michigan. Sure I do. I have bills on two continents. She starts to tell me how I am going to have to send these to her when she suddenly cracks and says, “Oh, what the heck, I’m just going to do it for you. I am going to give you six months but after that we are not going to do anything more for you. Make sure those people give you a license in the next six months.” Don’t you love Midwesterners? So, I have a six month extension of my license on the way, and I might not even need it, because maybe, just maybe, the CBR is going to come through and I can get to City Hall by next Friday with all the documents I need.

Take that, Peter Stuyvesant!

Amanda and Anne

2009-09-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

Our daughter Amanda came from Germany last week to visit and to celebrate her 22nd birthday with us. We had a real Dutch birthday celebration, which included our Dutch friends congratulating Gretchen and me on our daughter’s birthday. We don’t do that in the US, and we are poorer for it. It makes you think about your role in your child’s life. I started thinking about what we’d contributed beyond biology to her. What had we done as parents that helped make Amanda such a remarkable young woman? She’s twenty-two and living on her third continent, working for the German church, searching for grad schools, and is very much intent on making a difference with her life.

We are blessed to have two great children who are contributing in positive ways to the world around them. I use the word “blessed” very intentionally, because it seems to me that Amanda and Jesse are people who have temperaments, skills and abilities far beyond anything positive Gretchen and I ever gave to them. We are blessed. But having said that, I have been thinking about one positive thing we did with our kids that we can take some credit for.

We read to them. Both of us loved to read to them and both kids loved to be read to. We read long after most parents probably quit reading to their children – I think we read to them until they were leaving elementary school and maybe even into junior high. I have very vivid memories of Jesse as a boy laughing his head off to “The Wind and the Willows;” of crying with Amanda when we reached the end of “Charlotte’s Web;” and both of them really enjoying “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lord of the Rings.” We loved “The Trumpet of the Swan” and “A Little Princess” and “The Secret Garden.” We tended to go for the classics, and Amanda and I remember reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” together when Amanda was about nine or ten years old.

She’s asked me since why I chose to read a book with such a dark theme to her when she was so young. I don’t have a great answer for that. I just felt she was old enough to learn some of the horrible truth about what it means to be human. Beyond that I am not sure.

Last Wednesday, I had a meeting in Amsterdam and Amanda and Gretchen rode along. We all headed to the Anne Frank house afterwards. It seemed an appropriate thing to do with my daughter, since I’d introduced her to Anne Frank so many years ago. This was my second time through the house, and both times when I’ve visited the overwhelming thought I’ve had is “this really happened – it isn’t just some story from a book or movie – and it really happened right here, not so long ago.” The house is dark, somber, and sad, with the blackout paper still covering the windows and the rooms all bare because Otto Frank wanted the world to see what the Nazis left behind.

Anne Frank has become one of the most well-known faces of the Holocaust. At one point in the tour there are some words on a wall from a Holocaust survivor who says, “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

So when my daughter was a young girl, I chose to expose her to another girl, to introduce the whole subject of the Holocaust to her.

There is a film clip playing in one of the rooms of Otto Frank talking many years later about returning from Auschwitz(he was the only one of the eight people hiding in the secret annex to survive) and the shock he had when first reading his daughter’s diary. He knew she kept her diary, but didn’t know the depth of feeling she had about so many different things. He had felt close to her, but after reading the diary he said that he reached the conclusion that most parents really don’t know their children.

Fathers and daughters. Great and complicated stuff. A Jewish father tries to hide his family during the war. His bookish daughter keeps a diary. I am sure Otto Frank never imagined that he would spend the rest of his life as the steward of his lost family’s memory, and particularly as the steward of his youngest daughter’s memory, simply because she wrote down what was happening. I’m sure he never imagined the house they hid in would become a museum visited by millions. Almost 65 years after they were captured, and 29 years after Otto Frank’s death, one Christian father from the United States and his daughter joined the millions to walk through these bare rooms and feel the weight of the Frank family’s suffering.

Quintessentially Dutch

2009-08-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Today I was walking in downtown Dordrecht. It started to rain. Hard. I had a hooded sweatshirt on, it being August and all, and I pulled the hood up over my head. There were a lot of people downtown. Not one other person had on a raincoat, or a hat, or was carrying an umbrella. They walked by like nothing was happening, while I tried to shrink inside my sweatshirt. I thought they were looking at me like I was some sort of limp piece of stroopwaffle. Obviously, these people are way more used to being wet than I am. Being wet is a quintessentially Dutch experience. Gretchen and I talked about this tonight and came up with a few other things to put on the list.

• The common Dutch expression, “de volgende keer betaal ik,” which means “next time I’ll pay.”

• Letting the pooh fall where it may. We picked up Maury’s pooh on our walks the first couple of weeks we were here. Eventually we realized we were the only people doing it. The thing is, there aren’t any lawns, so when he goes it’s always in a public area. They have little red signs in places they don’t want you to let your dog go and green signs where the dog can go. Just like traffic lights. My theory is that whole dikes – canals – polders – windmills thing they tell you about how they keep their below-sea-level country from flooding is a cover for the real reason. The country is built on a foundation of petrified pooh.

• The question, “do you want curry sauce or mayonnaise with your French fries?”

• Having your wife lovingly and tenderly scream, “YOU ARE NOW DRIVING ON A BIKE PATH!” as she burrows down in her seat and hides her head under the map you are trying to read to find the store where they have television sets on sale. Never found it. I learned later that not only wasn’t I on the right street, I wasn’t even in the right city. Oops. I now own a GPS. I confessed my mistake to a Dutch friend who said, “Relax, we’ve all done it.”

• Hearing a loud “blaaaaaap” sound behind me while walking the dog, thinking some drunk guy just let out an enormous belch, and turning around to see a sheep staring at us.

• Buying a dining room table and having it come – without warning – unassembled. It required 75 screws to put it together and had four pre-drilled screw holes to get you started in the right direction. Where is Norm from “This Old House” when you need him? I thought, “If I wanted to build my own dining room table I would have rustled up a couple of chipmunks, gone out in the woods and gnawed down a tree, not bought it from a store.”

• Telling Gretchen “If you feel like you’ve got one of those stripes running up your behind just turn around and come home” as she was setting off on her bike for church one drizzly Sunday morning. I was staying home because I had to pick up a friend at the train station. She told some other friends at church what I’d said to her and a Dutch guy later congratulated me on starting to sound like a true Dutch man. I thought I was giving good advice, but apparently my comment wasn’t very sensitive.

• Getting excited because our cable TV package includes ESPN Classic only to learn it is European ESPN Classic. Tonight they are showing the 1959 football (no, not that kind of football) match between Liverpool and Leeds.

• TV shows that start at random times. We love “All Creatures Great and Small” and it’s on most every night from 5:35 to 6:20. Except last night when they showed “Sesame Street” followed by a bike race instead. Today the TV Guide said “All Creatures” would be on but "Sesame Street" came on again. We were about to turn it off when we realized “Sesame Street” was at our language level. So we watched it. And then at 6:10 “All Creatures” started. Weird.

That’s about it for late on a Friday night. Did I mention I love being here?

In Brugge

2009-08-26T05:10:00.000-07:00

Or is it in Bruges? Both, actually, which I will explain later. Gretchen and I just came back from spending three days in Brugge celebrating our 24th anniversary, which was August 23rd.

I’m posting some pictures below that don’t come close to capturing how beautiful this city is. I am not going to do a Rick Steves travelogue here, I’m just going to say it is a two hour drive from our house and I would place a visit to Brugge at the top of my “must-do” list of things within two hours of here.

In these pictures you will see a tower – known as the Belfort – that was immortalized in the movie “In Bruges.” There is a picture of the view from the top of the tower. There are 366 winding steps to the top, and Gretchen and I had the aural pleasure of being at the top at 11am Monday, when the carillon played a song and followed that with eleven “bongs” of the bell that we could feel as much as hear. Wow!

There was a symmetry to being at the top of that tower on August 24th celebrating our 24th wedding anniversary even if we were married on August 23rd. Let me explain.

Most of you know we were married under unusual circumstances. Our lives forever changed 24 years ago, on a Thursday night late in July, one month before the date we were supposed to get married, when Gretchen suffered a massive stroke. She was 24 years old and had the stroke a few minutes after coming home from work. I will always remember things like driving 70mph down a residential street on the way to the hospital with her in the seat next to me, paralyzed on her left side and having seizures on her right. It was terrifying. After a week in critical care and another week in Holland Hospital, she was moved to the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Center in Grand Rapids, which specializes in helping people who have had brain injuries. A team of people worked on her case – I remember a neurologist, a social worker, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, plus several nurses. One of the many things we had to decide was what to do about our upcoming wedding. The folks at the hospital were concerned that going ahead with the wedding as planned would be too much for Gretchen.

What we all agreed on was that we would change our plans dramatically. We changed the date of our wedding from August 24th to August 23rd (which is why the inside of my wedding ring has “8-24-85” inscribed on it). We eliminated almost our entire guest list and never sent our invitations out. We decided instead to make our rehearsal our wedding, and our rehearsal dinner our reception. We sat down (because Gretchen couldn’t walk) in the front of the church and the 25 or 30 people we were married in front of were then seated. I recommend sitting down to get married. Royalty does it, and it helps control the knocking in your knees.

The folks at the hospital gave us a weekend pass – we were married on Friday evening, spent Saturday at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in GR, and on Sunday afternoon Gretchen had to go back to the hospital. I went to a friend’s house and slept on his couch, looking at the new ring on my finger and thinking how weird it was that I was newly married and sleeping on a couch. Gretchen stayed in the hospital for another month. A month or so after that she was able to stop using the wheelchair. About a year later she returned to work. Five years after that she was finally cleared to start driving again. What a way to start life together. But what a rich life it has been. Who could have imagined all that we’ve experienced over the years? Who could have imagined we would start in Holland, Michigan and wind up in the real Holland?

So I stood atop the tower in Brugge and felt elated. I was elated by the view and was so happy just to be in that beautiful place. I was laughing every time that bell rang and shook my bones. More than that I was elated because I was feeling so blessed as I thought about our life together. And I was marveling that Gretchen had just walked up 366 winding stone steps. But the 366 winding stone steps were nothing compared to surviving a stroke, or learning how to walk again, or giving birth to two children, or putting up with me for 24 years!

It was very good to be in Brugge.*

*Every Belgian city has two names, one Flemish, the other French. Most of the time you can figure the two names out – Brugge/Bruges is not difficult. But some are more of a challenge. I don’t know how anyone unfamiliar with this would know to follow the signs for Luik if they were heading to Liege or Bergen if they needed to go to Mons. Oh those Belgians.

Brugge Pictures

2009-08-26T05:06:00.001-07:00

Calvin and Us

2009-08-18T07:48:00.001-07:00

If you hear the words “Calvinist” or “Calvinism,” do they bring positive or negative images to your mind? Do you think of a theological system of belief, particularly about salvation, or do you think more of a way of life? Do you think, “Those are the sort of people I want to spend time with?” or “those are the words that best describe me”? My guess is that in West Michigan the reaction to these words is more positive, while in the majority of other places it’s negative. Here are some words used to describe what it means to be a Calvinist from the “Calvin and Us” exhibit going on this summer at the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht: “A wagging finger, doing your duty, saving your pennies, having just one biscuit with your coffee, and a simply furnished home on display to all the world through a large front window.” None of those words has anything to do with the doctrine of salvation.

In the Netherlands, at least, the word Calvinism has come to denote a certain religious severity and austerity. There isn’t much fun or joy associated with it. As we walked through the exhibit in Dordrecht we heard some “man on the street” interviews with Dutch people who condescendingly described Calvinism as the way of their grandparents. The people being interviewed wanted to be sure they made clear these sorts of things were from a time in the past – the sort of stereotypical “Dutch-ness” that is long gone.

John Calvin was born 500 years ago. What do you know about him? He wasn’t Dutch. He never even set foot in the Netherlands. He was French, but most of his adult life was spent in Geneva. Calvin was, without doubt, a person of amazing intellect and ability. He was a prolific preacher, teacher, and writer. And like anyone important enough to get an “ism” associated with his or her name, there is a bit of a gap between John Calvin and Calvinism. I find it helpful to think of Calvin in his context – coming out of the abuses that caused the Reformation in the first place. Calvin wanted us to know that salvation came from God alone, that there was nothing human beings could do or pay to gain their salvation, that it was 100% a gift of God. Affirming that God alone is sovereign (and man is not) led him to predestination. But Calvin wasn’t pulling these ideas out of thin air; he was finding them in the Bible. Of course, not everyone reads the Bible the same way.

We went to the Calvin exhibit on Thursday afternoon last week. Then on Saturday Gretchen and I visited Amsterdam. I was wondering, as we walked by a “coffee shop” and smelled the strong odor of marijuana coming from inside, how the country that perhaps more than any other in the world embraced a rigid, conservative form of Calvinism, gave rise to legalized pot and the red light district? How did that happen?

The history of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands is a history of several splits and divisions, with each group attempting to express the true Reformed faith. Today the Netherlands is home to a vast array of religious and secular belief systems. One survey I saw recently said that 50% of the Dutch population openly says they do not believe in God, the highest percentage of any country on earth. How can the this country be the home of many religious schisms and at the same time be noted for tolerance?

Maybe I’m hung up on schisms because I live in Dordrecht. This is where the Synod of Dort took place in 1618-1619. The Canons of Dort were first read in the Grote Kerk, where the Calvin exhibit is taking place. I saw a drawing of the Synod of Dort – there was a huge circle of men wearing black with those funny white clown collars on surrounding “the remonstrants,” whose orthodoxy was on trial at the Synod. (The remostrants lost, by the way.) The Canons are where the acronym “TULIP” to describe Calvinism comes from, and fun and easy to defend doctrines like double predestination are fully articulated. One of the ironic things, of course, is that while the Canons of Dort are still a doctrinal standard of Reformed Churches, the theology of the great majority of people in Reformed Churches today is much more in line with the remonstrants, who believed in free will – that humans have a role to play in making decisions about their salvation.

Here are some pictures from the Grote Kerk and the exhibit. I never know exactly how these will be laid out on the blog page, but here is what I’ve included: The Grote Kerk from the outside and inside, two views of Dordrecht from the top of the church tower, and some of the exhibit. The picture with a lot of Dutch on it asks, “Who would we be without Calvin?” I included the picture with all the lines showing various divisions within the Reformed churches here because this subject in particular fascinates me. I look at all those splits and wonder if this is just human nature or something special in the Dutch psyche. I don’t think the non-churched world is impressed when you have several variations on the same theme (who are a bit at odds with each other) in buildings a few blocks apart.

How does all of this strike you? I aired a bit of the schism theme a couple weeks ago, so let me ask a different question. Is it just me or is there something a bit schizophrenic about one nation going from hyper-conservatism to hyper-liberalism? More than once people (in West Michigan) have suggested to me that all the religious people left the Netherlands a century and a half ago and migrated to the US and you see what was left behind. Those comments are said a bit “tongue in cheek,” but much truth is said in jest. Here are a few lines from the other side, from a book here commenting on the migration of Dutch people to the US: Holland’s most identifiable contribution to the emerging continent can be felt this day in the State of Michigan where large concentrations of Dutch-Americans (the Michi-Dutch) have inhabited the picturesque landscape…the Michi-Dutch haven’t changed much over the past 150+ years…As staunch churchgoers and moralistic merchants, they believe they are THE true Dutch…Many of the second- and later-generation Dutch in western Michigan have no idea what the real Holland is like.

In other words, I think today’s Dutch reconcile the “schizophrenic” nature I referred to earlier by thinking that they have progressed from a repressed past.

What do you think?

The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken

2009-08-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

This is my Dutch residency card, which will be in my wallet for the next five years. The picture would be more appropriate on a wanted poster. I look like the sort of guy who runs amok in a post office or comes unhinged and visits the neighbors with a garden implement. Let me tell you how this picture happened.

The day we moved here we flew from Chicago to Amsterdam. Our dear friends Chuck and Tim Ferguson volunteered to drive us to Chicago so we could have a direct flight to reduce the time Maury the dog would have to be in a crate. So, on that June day, after a solid four hours of sleep, we got up (we’d been up late the night before, trying to make sure we weren’t forgetting anything), finished the last few details, and the Fergusons picked us and all of our luggage up for the almost four hour drive to O’Hare. I wasn’t worried about the short night – that would just make it easier to sleep on the plane. Everything went fine, but since it was a warm day, the airline folks told us to wait a while before we gave them Maury, and because of that we were the last people on the plane.

The anxiety I was feeling about picking up my life at age 50 and moving to another continent was balanced by the excitement I felt about a great surprise waiting for Gretchen on the plane. Through some fluke, when I went to check-in online the day before on the Northwest web site, I was asked if I wanted to choose seats. We were traveling on a KLM flight on a Northwest ticket, and usually when doing that you don’t know where you are going to sit until you get to the airport. But this one time the web site asked me if I wanted to choose seats. I said yes, and then it showed me all the seats on the airplane. All the seats – starting at row one. Being no fool, I clicked on the first row of World Business Class and it gave me those two seats. Now I have enough experience flying overseas to know it is impossible to get seats in World Business Class without spending both money and frequent flyer miles. This was truly a fluke, and I jumped on it. It would be my first time sitting up front.

I decided not to tell Gretchen, because deep in my heart I couldn’t actually believe it would happen. I carry around way too much mid-western guilt and shame to let myself think we were worthy of World Business Class. I didn’t want her to be disappointed when the airline agent looked us over and said, “No, I don’t think so.” After all, my travel guru Don Hux had found these tickets from an airline wholesaler. The advertised price on the web was $2300 for a one-way ticket to Amsterdam. We bought ours for $400. (You know that thing about the airline guaranteeing their lowest fares are found on their web site? Well…we beat their best fare by $3800 for two tickets.)

Thanks to this web site fluke, we were going to sit in World Business Class on two one-way tickets bought wholesale. When we checked in the ticket agent said, “That’s odd … you are sitting up front on economy tickets.” This was the moment of truth! But he simply shrugged his shoulders, and that was that. We were in!!! I was feeling so great. As we entered the plane, Gretchen turned right to head toward the poor, tired huddled masses yearning to be free, but I gently and lovingly said, “No, no, my pet, this way” and proceeded to march proudly into the promised land of champagne wishes and caviar dreams. This was going to be the best ocean crossing we’d ever done. We had so much legroom Shaquille O’Neal could have laid down in front of us. We were soon airborne, and then we were served a lovely dinner. “A little more wine, sir?” “Don’t mind if I do.” Now it was time to relax with a book or a movie and then we’d lay our wonder seats down and close our eyes and wait for the Sandman to visit World Business Class. Next thing we’d know we’d be waking up refreshed as we circled Amsterdam.

But my somnolent dreams were rudely interrupted when Gretchen said, “There’s something wrong with my seat. It won’t recline.”

“Well,” I said, “you probably don’t know how to do it, this being your first time in World Business Class and all. Let me show you.” Like I knew. I tried, and couldn’t get my seat to recline either. We weren’t the only ones. Turns out the power for the seats wasn’t working in the entire World Business Class section. What was this, some sort of cruel joke courtesy of the peasants in steerage? Eventually the flight crew came through and manually reclined our seats – about 30 degrees. The foot rests wouldn’t come out. That whole thing about the special seat that reclines to horizontal so you’re more in a bed than a seat? That didn’t happen. We were more or less vertical. I started to think of how I could complain to the airline. They should give me World Business Class for life. But then I remembered this was the seat they had mistakenly given me for a ticket I paid 20% of the published rate for. I didn’t see my complaint going far.

Well, we could make up for a non-reclining seat just by shutting our eyes and sleeping. When life gives you lemons, just make a little lemonade, you know? But when it was nice and dark and slumber time, the toddler in the seat across the aisle from us started screaming. Babies cry. Toddlers scream. She just started wailing and wouldn’t stop. She screamed like someone standing on the runway trying to be heard above the roar of the jet engines. I put earplugs in and noise-cancelling headphones on, but her screaming was the sound equivalent of an armor-piercing bullet. And it never stopped. One hour, two hours, three hours. Every once in a while she’d sort of wind down, and then all you had to do was count to five and she was off again. She was wailing like someone having her teeth drilled without Novocain as beavers gnawed at her flesh. At one point I opened an eye and saw the child was asleep and still screaming. How did she do that? Why couldn’t I sleep and listen to her in my sleep? Finally, magically, she stopped. Thank you, God. I looked at my watch, which I had set to Amsterdam time. It was 4:21. At 4:45, exactly 24 minutes later, the flight crew turned on the cabin lights and started serving breakfast. Neither Gretchen nor I had slept.

Our plane landed about 6am. We got our luggage, got our dog (who was very, very happy to see us) and walked through customs unimpeded – I thought four giant suitcases, two carry-ons, a squirming dog and large dog crate might draw someone’s interest, but it didn’t. Our friend Miquel was waiting to pick us up. We needed to stop at our immigration attorney’s office in Amsterdam to get some important papers – but we had to wait a while for the office to open. So, we had our second breakfast of the morning and then went to the lawyer’s.

Because we wanted to get things rolling as soon as possible, the lawyer had made an appointment for us to be at the immigration offices in The Hague the next morning. So we had to pick up the forms from his office and then we needed one more thing: passport photos taken to Dutch specifications. The lawyer told us not to get them done in the US, because they would be rejected. The Dutch have very specific rules that are not the same as the US rules. Different size pictures, no smiling, no glasses, etc.

So, after going to the law office and getting our papers, we headed out for the hour drive to Dordrecht. By then it was mid-morning, and we had an appointment to meet our house rental agent and landlord at one o’clock. We made it to Dordrecht in time, unloaded all the luggage from the van Miquel had borrowed for the occasion, returned it to its owner, retrieved Miquel’s car, and then headed to our new house to get our keys and sign our lease. At this point it was two in the afternoon. Miquel turned to us and said, “We need to go get your pictures taken.”

And so this is how I look when you add the stress of starting a new life to not having slept (or showered or shaved) for a few days. I know the raw material isn’t much to work with, but this picture is brutal. And now I have it on my residency card in my wallet for the next five years. I look like Charles Manson with Bozo the Clown’s hair. My eyes are forced wide open because all I wanted to do was shut them and go to sleep.

Gretchen’s picture is similarly awful, and out of love and respect for her I will not post it on the internet. But I will tell you this – and I am not making this up – after we submitted Gretchen’s photo to immigration we got a letter saying she needed to show them proof that she had insurance for psychological hospitalization.

Dutch For Beginners

2009-08-11T22:50:00.001-07:00

Here’s a picture of us pretending to be hard at work at “taal school” with our Dutch tutor Pieter Hoogvliet. We’re enjoying our time with Pieter and have learned, among other things…

Dutch vowels are called “klinkers” and sounds are called “klankers,” so klinkers make klankers.

Some Dutch words make more sense than English words. A verb is called a “werkwoord” and honestly that sheds more light on what verbs do than the word “verb.”

The Dutch word for spring is “lente,” which explains the name of that season of the church year.

We simply cannot pronounce the vowels “u” or “uu” or “eu” as they are supposed to be said. I take comfort in the fact that Dutch people can’t say “th” or “z.” They have words that use the letter Z but they pronounce it like an “S.” They can’t get their tongue up on their teeth to do th or z.

“Van” is the Dutch word for “of” or “from” and “de” is “the,” so:
Van de Molen means from the windmill
Van Putten means from the wells
Van Donker means from the dark
Van Buren means from the neighbors
While
De Vos means the fox, which explains Fox Motors in Grand Rapids
De Hoog means tall and
De Jong means exactly what you think it means.

The Dutch word for baseball is “honkbal.” I don’t know why.

Sometimes it’s really easy to speak Dutch – to say “the name is” you say “de naam is.”

But we get confused by these Dutch words because they mean something else in English:
Wil = want
Of = or
Rug = back
Hoe (pronounced “who”) = how
Burger = citizen (I was really excited about an “Amerkaan burger” until I learned this was a reference to me.)

The most fun is doing the guttural “g” which sounds like clearing your throat. I love to ask people if they’ve had enough to eat – genoug gegeten. Then there’s goedemorgen - you can spit all over people just saying hello.

Some people have wondered why we’re even bothering to learn Dutch, since you really can ask almost anyone here if they speak English and they’ll say yes. The answer is easy – all you have to do is go to the grocery store. We noticed some things had stickers on them that said “reclame.” We both thought it meant something like reclaimed and figured it was stuff past its expiration date and steered clear of it. Then we learned reclame means advertised. So, we were staying away from the things on sale. But that’s not the worst - one day soon after we’d arrived Gretchen picked up a package of lunch meat to put into our cart. It looked like roast beef, but I read the label and said, “I don’t think so.” The mystery meat was labeled “paardenrookvlees.” I knew that paard means horse, rook means smoke and vlees means meat. I later asked a Dutch friend if I was reading that correctly and she said sure, that she loves horse meat, it’s very light and very good if you are trying to lose weight. I first made a face and then said, “you’ve got a point, I would lose weight if you served me horse meat.” She said, “so what, you people eat deer and turkeys.” I didn’t grow up in a deer hunting family, so I’ve never had much venison, but I plead guilty on turkey. Gobble, gobble. I miss turkey. And hamburger buns. And yellow mustard. And Reeses. And ice. And Wendy’s. And Thousand Island dressing. Oh well, I comfort myself knowing I can get all the fresh eel and herring I want.

This week we were working on a bunch of sentences that were negations of a previous sentence that included possessive pronouns. So, if the first sentence was “Heir is je kantoor” (Here is your office) he would have us negate it and say “no, that is our office,” which is “nee hoor, dat is ons kantoor.” We did similar sentences with autos, calendars, cups of coffee, etc. Every sentence began with “nee hoor.” Nee is pronounced “nay” and hoor is pronounced … well, it’s pronounced “whore.” So with every sentence we were saying “nay whore, that is her car” or “nay whore, that is my coffee.” I felt like I was in junior high. It’s almost as bad as seeing speed bump signs in Sweden that say “farthinder.”

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

2009-08-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

One last reflection from being in Sweden last week...

There are worse places in the world to be on an August night than on the shores of the Baltic Sea. After two days of meetings with folks in Vallentuna and Uppsala, I headed to Vaxholm for dinner my last night in Sweden with an American couple and another couple with a “mixed” marriage – he’s Swedish and she’s American. Walking around Vaxholm feels a bit like walking around Grand Haven, Michigan – it’s a very popular resort destination in the Stockholm archipelago. If you aren’t familiar with it, Stockholm is part of an archipelago of thousands of islands on the Baltic Sea. The sea doesn’t look like a sea, it looks like a lake or river. Vaxholm’s many colored wooden buildings are charming, as is the boardwalk in front of all the boats in the marina. You probably wouldn’t want to be there in December, but on a summer night it was unbeatable.

In the midst of this idyllic place, lying on a little island right smack dab in the middle of the Baltic, is an impressive fort, first built in something like 1500, because Vaxholm was the place to repel invaders to Stockholm who would come by the sea – from Russia, maybe, or Finland, or worst of all, Denmark. As we walked through town we found other fortifications, including a battery of cannons that was operational from 1700 until the early 1900’s – seems like the Swedes gave up on the idea of defending themselves at about the same time that World War I broke out. They were neutral in both great wars of the last century and today they don’t have much of military because, as the Swede I ate dinner with put it, “we haven’t had a war for 200 years, so we’ve decided to spend our money on schools.” They do have a small military, and according to my Swedish friend, they are the best in the world with submarines (which ought to count for something), but really, if they were forced to, they probably couldn’t (and wouldn’t) defend their country.

Sweden’s neutrality in World War II was controversial. The Nazis were able to travel through Sweden to invade Norway, adding yet another reason to the long list of why these two countries don’t like each other. Many Swedes left home and enlisted in the armies of other allied countries. In some ways, this was the perfect solution for the government – those that want to can go fight, but officially our stance is neutrality.

It was interesting to be seeing these relics of Sweden’s military past in the context of what I was doing. I spent an afternoon in the Young Life office, going through relics of our past --dozens and dozens of files. Our staff members have been asking what to keep from the “previous administration.” Most of it needs to be recycled, but I agreed to look through it first. I pulled out a file that was labeled “churches” and on top there was a letter dated about ten years ago from a church in the US. The letter began, “Dear Missionary Family, Our church has been going through a difficult period lately and recently experienced a split in our membership. We are very sorry to inform you that we will not be able to fulfill our pledge to support your ministry this year….” What a sad letter, I thought. And I also thought, I wonder what the people who sent the letter would think if they knew all that I know about our own struggles and conflicts in Sweden. But it isn’t just Sweden - we had our struggles and conflicts in Michigan, too. I’ve been part of some really bad situations and know I’ve left some people hurt behind me, and I’ve seen other people I care about hurt deeply. I’ve seen my share of really lousy things happen to people, but I think they pale compared to the larger history of the church. I have seen people forced out of jobs they didn’t want to leave, but I’ve never seen anyone burned as a heretic.

So, I have been trying to get my mind around the church landscape in Sweden. Like every country, there have been a lot of church splits. There is of course the old State church, which is Lutheran, but there are divisions within it, and then all sorts of Mission and Free churches. And that’s just on the Protestant side. The Swedish government may have given up on the idea of fighting, but that hasn’t stopped Christians from doing it. And if you dig into the history and find why these different groups split, the answers often seem ridiculous these days. Sort of like knowing in West Michigan the Reformed and Christian Reformed split over things like whether or not to sing from the Psalter, have worship services in Dutch (what’s wrong with that, I do it every Sunday?), and allow membership in the Masonic Lodge. Those don’t seem like issues to split a denomination over in 2009. Is it just me or does it seem like so many disputes that were about a point of theology seem in retrospect just to be about the exercise of power?

Here are some other questions I am left with.

What do you think of a country that has more or less given up on the idea of being a part of a war?

What do you think the church would look like if we took that stance?

What is really worth dividing over?

What sort of witness to the world do we have when a country can live at peace for 200 years and we can’t seem to make it through a day in peace?

And finally, to quote Rodney King, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

These aren't just rhetorical questions - if anyone outside my immediate family is reading this, I would love to know what you think. (And it's okay for members of my immediate family to respond, too.)

Life imitates a not so good novel

2009-08-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

I spent the past few days in Sweden and flew back to the Netherlands today. Before I left I grabbed a book someone had given me to read almost a year ago. If I were doing a book review I'd call it almost a good book, but not quite. It was about a Presidential election where one of the candidates was a caricature of Jerry Falwell. He had millions of fundamentalist followers. I don't like it when Christians are presented as unthinking, racist, rich, hate-filled idiots. Much of the book was about the back and forth between the various candidates on their faith views, and the sort of things the characters said were so unbelievable it was laughable. I won't bore you with more about the book, but one of the things I have been thinking about is how difficult it would be to answer belief and social issue questions on the spot. I'm no politician, that's for sure.

So, I landed at Schiphol airport, got my bag, and headed out to take the train back home when I was met by a film crew. All of a sudden I felt like the book was coming to life. A woman with a microphone asked me where I lived and I said "Dordrecht," and she looked disappointed until I added, "But I am from the United States" and she brightened up.

"Do you mind if we ask you some questions?" she asked.

"Well, what is this for?" I asked.

"A talk show from Schiphol airport," she said. I have never heard of a talk show from Schiphol airport, so I thought, "why not, this is probably some obscure thing shown in the airport lounges" and I figured she was going to ask me what an American was doing in the Netherlands or where I was flying from or something like that.

"Okay," I said.

The camera started rolling. This nice, sweet young woman looked at me and said, "Researchers today have concluded that homosexuality cannot be reversed by therapy. Would you please tell us your opinion about that?"

I felt like doing a Ralph Kramden and saying "ah-bah-dah-bah-dah-bah...." I have all sorts of mixed feelings about this issue. I looked down at my clothing and was relieved I wasn't wearing any logos - so I would be answering anonymously.

I don't remember exactly what I said, but more or less I tried to say that these findings didn't really surprise me, that I think some people are just born that way, but at the same time I have heard of other people that are homosexual who have had traumatic experiences that happened to them that may have caused them to become homosexual and I thought these people probably could be helped by therapy. I know I also said "I don't know" and "this is complicated" a lot. I think I sounded really stupid.

After a few minutes they let me go on my way. I turned a corner and there was another film crew standing there. I took a wide turn away from them. I'd had enough "Meet the Press" for the day.

Here's my question for those of you reading this -it was obvious to me they weren't going to interview me if I was Dutch, but when I turned out to be an American, they were interested. Why do you think that is so?

Cliche Corner

2009-08-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much.

Poetry and Palestinians

2009-07-31T01:10:00.000-07:00

I woke up with this poem in my head:

Far From Home
As the old Muslim woman scooters down the bike path
I glide by glancing at the proud face shrouded by her hijab
My breath catches.

I've been writing poems for about a year and a half, based on something I see or a memory I have. I wrote this one in the style of Haiku, but I have no training and probably am violating rules about meter, and I probably am cheating by adding a title. (Which, by the way, is a reference to both of us.) All I know about Haiku is that it is three lines. I am attracted by the discipline of using as few words as possible to put a frame around a moment.

Beside seeing this regal woman driving an Amigo with her head held high the other day, I have had a few other Muslim encounters of late. Outside of 9/11, my reality in the US was that I rarely was aware of Muslims. There was one Muslim family in my kids' school. But here I see Muslim women every day - I'm sure I see Muslim men, also, but they don't self identify with head coverings like the women.

The other day when we were in Stuttgart, as we visited our friend Ele's church, there was a summer fair for children going on, and there were a lot of kids there. Some of them ran up to greet Ele when they saw her. They were all Turkish kids and they knew Ele as the "God Lady." An interesting thing about the German church is that it is organized in a parish system, so anyone living in a certain geography is in the parish. Ele has a lot of "immigrant" families, almost all Turkish, in her parish. When we drove through Helmut wanted to make me aware of the traffic situation and said, "This is Little Istanbul. German driving rules don't apply anymore, just imagine you are in Turkey." Ele considers everyone in the parish part of her congregation, and loving all the families is part of her job. I've been thinking about that. Maybe Catholic churches in the US have boundaries, but Protestants don't, and one result is we don't have much to do with anyone who doesn't come to our church. You really need to show up for us to love you.

Later that day we went on the Neckar with the Palestinian and Israeli group. Dieter, a German youth pastor, had organized this. How one even starts to gather groups of young people from Palestine and Israel and get them to come to Germany is beyond me. Amanda is helping with this conference, and both Amanda and Dieter mentioned that the day had been very intense before the relaxing trip on the river. What I observed in our gondola was that there was a marked difference between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis were a bit older and more mature, and they exuded a sort of relaxed confidence. The Palestinians were all raw energy. We had one guy who seemed like a perpetual motion machine, constantly moving from one end of the boat to the other. I wanted to sing, "Sit down you're rocking the boat!" from Guys and Dolls to him. I thought about what Dieter had told me: that the Palestinians had never been out of the West Bank before, and that to come to Germany they had to travel several hours to an aiport in Jordan, because they aren't allowed to fly from Tel Aviv. You could feel the anger below the surface with these kids, and it wasn't hard to imagine any of them picking up a rock or a grenade and throwing it. The question that ran through my head - which must not be original to me - was "are terrorists born or made?"

I don't have any answers today, just experiences of contact with people from very different places with different lives from mine. Dieter is convicted enough to try something - and a boat full of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a little microcosm of our world. I imagine we all need to sit down and stop rocking the boat.

2009-07-27T08:15:00.001-07:00

Here are some pictures of our German weekend. You can see market day in Esslingen, where Amanda lives, the bridge in Heidelberg, and Amanda and I on the same bridge with the castle at Heidelberg behind us. Then there's me after climbing up to the magnificent elevated pulpit at our friend Ele's church in Stuttgart. You'd better have something to say if you are going to preach from a spot like that. It would be like hovering over the congregation in the Goodyear blimp. Unfortunately, I can't see how the pictures are going to be laid out on the page as I type this, so it might jump around a bit - but I am sure you are smart enough to figure out what's what.

A weekend in Germany

2009-07-27T01:32:00.000-07:00

Gretchen and I drove to Germany for the weekend to visit our daughter Amanda in Esslingen, outside of Stuttgart, and also to visit some of our Young Life staff taking a theology class in Heidelberg. Here are some highlights:

Driving between 140 - 150 km per hour on the Autobahn (150 is 90 miles per hour) and having cars - mostly Audis, BMWs and Mercedes - blow by me traveling at least 40 or 50 kph's faster than me. It doesn't seem possible to nod off driving when that sort of thing is happening. A car driving 200 kph is going 120 mph.
Staying in Stuttgart in a beautiful 4th floor apartment with our friend Helmut and enjoying everything about city life.
Punting on the Neckar river in a gondola around Tubingen with a group of German, Israeli, and Palestinian young people participating in a peace conference. Gretchen and I got to crash the party. The peace conference was the brainchild of our friend Dieter, and he had his hands full with this group. They had been meeting all day and as you could imagine, it had been extremely intense. I thought it was a great strategy - take two groups that don't like each other and put them on a gondola floating serenely down a river. We punted in peace.
Worshiping in an ancient German church in Heidelberg on a special Bach - Mendelsohn Sunday with a group that included people who live in Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Czech Republic and California. Among the people in the group were Rob Johnston and Cathy Barsotti, who are teaching the theology class. Rob made me laugh yesterday when we got into a discussion of street names in neighborhoods -- in our neighborhood here we can go to the intersection of Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak, which is just around the corner from Herman Hesse. In the neighborhood his father lived in in California you could go to the corner of Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra, just up the road from Ginger Rogers.
Walking across a fabulous bridge in Heidelberg and having Amanda read a little sign in German for us that noted the bridge had been blown up in March, 1945 for no reason and reassembled after the war by the citizens of Heidelberg.
Visiting the spectacular church of our friend Ele Arnold in Stuttgart and seeing the cellar door of the church manse that is preserved there. The door has light pencil writing all over it, and as you exam it you see the writing is a list of dates and times throughout 1944 and 1945 - and it goes up and down the length of the door - there are hundreds of dates and times. Ele explained that the people who lived in the house at that time recorded every date they went into the cellar for an air raid and how long they stayed in the cellar. When you see things like that (and the bridge in Heidelberg) it is difficult to know how to react. I feel torn between "I'm sorry" and "you started it." Germany always challenges me this way.
Hearing from Amanda about a German caller on a radio show saying that Germany should accept all immigrants from Turkey, Italy, and other countries because people are people and you should be open and loving toward any person, except, of course, if the person is a Hollander. Another German commented - half in jest - that the Dutch were funny people with a funny language. There are some real feelings between these two countries, many of which also have to do with World War II.

So, that's about it from a long weekend away. We're going to work on some more posts later and add some pictures of Germany to this and also post some pictures of life around here for you.

Meeting A Local

2009-07-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

Friends - Gretchen and I have been in the Netherlands for just over a month and have settled enough that we now will be publishing random thoughts, pictures, musings, etc. of our life here. Here's our first entry - next time we'll put up some pictures of life here:

It is more of less possible for English speakers to live here without knowing how to "spreek Nederlands." But you live on a surface level, not really able to go deep with people or really understand Dutch culture. Our goal is to get to the deeper level by knowing Dutch. We have a long, long ways to go. In the meantime, we have to be content with the occasional Hollander who is curious enough about our presence to take the initiative with us.

Take the other night, for example. Gretchen and I had a late dinner at Verhage, a sort of fast food restaurant in our local shopping center. There was an outgoing man at the table next to us with a few empty Heineken cans in front of him.

Most Europeans are reserved, quiet, and politically and culturally aware. This conversation sticks with us because our new friend was none of these.

"Do you mind if we talk?" he said across the tables as we were finishing our meals. "I think it's good for people from different nations to understand each other.

We certainly agree with that sentiment, and he asked what we felt was the difference between the United States and the Netherlands. Before I could say anything, he answered, and after he'd made a few statements I felt compelled to ask him if he'd ever been to the US. Turns out he hadn't, but that didn't stop him from being an expert on the US economy, the auto industry (and General Motors in particular), and then, of course, the kicker - presidential politics.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I have to ask, are you for Bush or Obama?" I felt a bit at sea, because I wasn't aware they were running against each other, but then he said, "I really had to laugh about that Canadian woman." He'd lost me, but then clarified by saying she ran with that guy against Obama. "Oh," we both said, "you mean Sarah Palin. She's from Alaska." Alaska, Canada, same difference I suppose from this side of the Atlantic.

It only got better when his curiosity got the better of him and he asked how long we were staying in the Netherlands. "We aren't sure," we said, which puzzled him. Finally Gretchen said, "maybe five years," and he was stunned, because I'm sure that he thought we were tourists. "You better own a house, then," he said, mentally calculating how much staying in a hotel for five years might cost.

"We have a house...but we rent it, it's just around the corner from here."

"Well, then," he said, still thinking. "You better have a job here to stay for five years."

He has a job here," Gretchen said.

"Is it Young Life?" he said, and now it was my turn to be stunned, until I looked down and realized I was wearing a Young Life tee shirt.

"As a matter of fact it is."

"I'm sorry, but I've never heard of it. What is it?" I looked around and realized we had the attention of the entire restaurant, who, I am quite sure, had also never heard of Young Life. This is Holland, after all, not Holland, Michigan.

"It's a Christian youth ministry," we both said at the same time.

"I'm sorry," he said once again, "I understand Christian and youth but I don't know what that other word means."

More people were leaning toward us, interested in what the answer to this might be. I wasn't quite sure what to say, so I said, "It's a religious organization that works with young people all over the world.

"I'm sorry," he said once again, "I can't stand Scientology."