Lost in Translation

Just a quick note from an Internet café here in Bogotá to say that our computer died on Sunday at church. For that reason we´ll be slightly out of the loop for a few weeks while we wait for our new one to come.

It´s actually nice to work without a computer at times. Less distractions and for some reason my ideas flow better on paper.

I haven't had many chances to write about great adventures here in Colombia, which may or may not be a good thing (sometimes "adventure" can have a bad connotation here, if we're talking about guerrillas in the jungle).

This morning I decided to jog to La Calera, a town of 25,000 people. On the map it said the distance between Bogota and La Calera was 9 km. Of course it's straight up the mountain on the east side of Bogota, but that's what attracted me in the first place. I took a bus to the road closest to the edge of the mountain and started out at 9:15 a.m. In the photo you can see the first undulating stretch up the mountain-- the first 3 km were brutal. Switch-backs straight up the mountain. I confess that I had to walk about every 300 meters. After running/walking for an hour, I finally reached the toll at the top of the mountain and figured I was almost there. Unfortunately the sign said that La Calera was another 8 kms! But I couldn't give up because I didn't go all that way to say I didn't make it.

Thankfully the 8 km were almost all downhill, so I made it to the pueblo in another hour.

Photo of the plaza en La Calera by "Diego en Bogota" from Flickr.com

I praise God for the ministry partner that I have in Chia. Jose and his family have been a great blessing, especially in language learning, cultural understanding, and friendship. This month's prayer letter from the Alonso's shows aspects of the ministry that I didn't have space to mention in our prayer letter. You can read it online at:

Alonso prayer letter (Note: there are three pages to the letter)

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to blog anything. I taught a course in our seminary here on Matthew, which was a stressful experience because I agreed to take the course with three weeks notice and without notes from another professor. That meant that I was working all day to prepare the class for that night, something that is not fun, especially when I had to continue with responsabilities in Chia. Well, I survived the Matthew class and now I'm teaching a course on biblical counseling at the Bible institute in Tenjo. It's been a lot less stressful because there are fewer students, it's more informal, and the topic is clearer in my mind (Matthew is difficult!).

Last week I started a new series with the men's Sunday school class on historical theology. They have wanted to understand better how our theology fits into the scheme of church history and why we believe what we do from a historical perspective. I have learned to really enjoy this subject, especially since I'm no expert and am learning a lot. The first week we looked at the sufficiency of the Scriptures and the contrast between the view of Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian on this topic. This week we're going to study the topic of the NT canon.

I don't know how many of you speak Spanish, but here are a few resources that I've found helpful.

Recursos para el estudio del canon, de la historia de la iglesia, etc.

El Texto Bíblico -- Nuevo Testamento
Recursos Teológicos
Apologetica.org Este sitio es católico, pero me sirvió para aprender más acerca de los padres de la iglesia.

In the online class that I'm taking on "Hermeneutics in a Postmodern World" from Pro-Meta in Costa Rica we had to read an article in Portuguese last week. I took one look at it and thought, "Nooooo.... you're kidding, right? I can't read that." But I thought I'd give it the old college try. Do you what? I think that I understand about 90% of the article with some minor help from my friends at wordreference.com! That was pretty amazing to me. I was reading it in Spanish, but the languages are close enough that it's actually not that hard. I just look up a few of the code words I couldn't get (like "no" which means "in").

Have I ever mentioned in my blog that interviews in Portuguese and Italian aren't translated here? The people can understand them well enough to make the translation unneccesary.

We were in the States for about a week (June 27th to July 3rd), and not surprisely I felt out of place. Why? That's hard to say. The overnight flight without sleep didn't help. Nor did four straight days of rain in KC with a case of bronchitis.

But perhaps the funniest experience on the trip was when I picked up our rental car. It was a brand-new Dodge Caliber with about 1,800 miles on it. As I looked at it I thought, "Wow, that's a cool car." I thought that until I sat in the driver's seat. It was pouring, and I couldn't see much because the car was so sporty that its columns blocked my visibility. I started it up and tried to pull from the parking lot I was in to building where Holly and the kids were but I couldn't figure out how to get there. I pulled back in and asked the parking attendent. "No clue," he said. I pulled out again and finally found the entrance to the other parking lot. When I pulled the car up the rain was pouring down even harder, and I couldn't open the trunk. "Is there a button? What do I do? Aarghh..." After about 10 minutes I found the latch to open the trunk.

I missed by 1993 Renault 9 back in Bogota. Sure, it doesn't look like much but at least I can open the trunk and see the roads!

Being a first-term missionary can be an interesting role. Perhaps I overanalyze things at times and for that reason often feel a bit discouraged with the ministry. Thankfully I have friends like Jose and Scott who have lifted my spirits and helped me see things in perspective.

As a first-termer, you have so many preconceived ideas about the ministry in the country to which you are going. I don't have our ministry presentation set up on my computer now, but if I could watch it again I'm sure I would laugh at a lot of the things I said in it. This problem has to do with appearances/superficial understanding and the reality. Having only visited the country before on short-term trips, I didn't understand many things. It's the difference between an answer from a book and an answer from personal experience.

As Scott helped me see, the knowledge and understanding we have gained will be invaluable in our future ministry. We haven't seen the fruit in the ministry that we want to see, but that is because we are still building the foundation. A couple of the insights I've gained in a year and a half:

• Colombians are equal partners in the ministry, but in order to truly understand them I must give myself to them in friendship, spending time with them. If they are not my friends, they will not share difficult things with me. On the other hand, if they know that I love them, they will be willing to tell me almost anything that they are thinking. This has implications because missionaries often make mistakes in the ministry and need to hear about it.
• We must be honest. I've seen the temptation in missions to make the figures look good or exaggerate slightly, or place things slightly out of context so they look better. I am trying to reject this temptation on every level in our ministry.
  

I just realized that my blog could serve as a repository for sermon illustrations, saving them under the appropiate tag. Of course the beauty of a good story is that it can be morphed to illustrate various truths.

Yesterday afternoon I went to pick up a missionary family from the airport who had come in from Leticia. There were six in total and as I went to shut the back of the mission van one of the kid's head was in the way. I waited for him to move but because he was still close I didn't slam it shut.

As we were tooling along at around 70 km/h on the Avenida El Dorado (one of the nicest in Bogota to give visitors a good first impresion I'm sure) all was well. The family was happy. I was happy. My friend Wilder was sleeping because he had been up almost all night at a retreat out at camp.

I went to pull off the inner lanes into the outer lanes and heard a whoosh, looked back, and to my horror saw that the van door had conveniently opened and it looked as if several suitcases had flown out. I slammed on the brakes, ran at full speed to grab the suitcases. Thankfully the beautiful silver Mercedes right behind us had slammed on its brakes and the driver and his wife were laughing. I apologized profusely and ran back with the escapee in hand.

It turns out that only one suitcase flew out, and the family said that it was the most beat-up one they own. I learned that even if all looks good, it's always good to double check!

A friend from college, Barry Farlow, just let me know about a site that he helped develop called Pictorb. The site provides missionary pictures from across the globe, and he wanted to know if we would contribute some photos from Colombia.

The Colombian peso has gained more against the dollar in the last year than any other currency in the world. The graph below gives you an idea of how it's value has plummeted. Yesterday it ended in 1,877 pesos per dollar. This tendency reflects the greater confidence foreign investors have in Colombia. The security situation has dramatically improved and dollars are pouring into the country, driving its value down. Importers are happy and the exporters are upset.