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Archive for the ‘Traveling Thoughts’ Category

Days 7 and 8 – What Do They Serve For Lunch In Corinth?

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 8, 2011| 6 Comments »

Mark and Sherrylee with Alex and Eleni Merrilytos overlooking Corinth.

We did not see the Parthenon! We did not see the Acropolis or the Agora! We did better than that!

We met the church in Athens, in fact, churches: a Greek-speaking church, a Bulgarian-speaking church, and an English-speaking church. In addition, we broke bread with Russian Christians, American Christians, a wonderful group of women from the Philippines who work in Greece, one brother from Nigeria, and one from Ghana.

The Omonia church of Christ in Athens is a church with open front doors! And the world is coming in! Alex and Eleni Melirrytos are the Greek couple who minister to all these groups.. There are other leaders who work very hard in all of the larger ethnic groups, but they are the responsible servants of God!

The congregation has existed for many years and has gone through lots of different phases. The current phase is challenging! The neighborhood has deteriorated badly. Other evangelists have led this church in years past, but have gone. The current economic situation in Greece has resulted in many of the foreign members of this church returning to their own countries or to other countries to find work.  And, of course, the inevitable personal situations have accumulated here as they do almost everywhere, always being heavy baggage to carry for those who live with the consequences.

Sherrylee and I fell in love with this church! It’s authentic! The people are devoted to God and to one another–and they are talking about forgetting what is behind and pressing forward. Paul would be proud of them.

The Greeks are dramatic! They can talk loudly—almost shouting—and their body language is BIG, and they can be all talking at the same time!  And ney means “Yes,” but sounds like “No”! We laughed so hard because we could never tell if they were mad or just loving on each other!  Alex and Eleni were the worst—and the BEST!

They took us to see Ancient Corinth on Monday—a little over an hour away from Athens by car, but probably three to four days walk for Paul and his entourage. That hour driving gave us time to talk about all the possibilities for LST in Athens, especially what the challenges might be.

What a beautiful setting on the sea. No wonder Paul stayed in Corinth so long!  Of course, there are only small areas excavated, still you can believe you are walking on the same street Paul did when he went to buy groceries. The Bema, or Place of Judgment, mentioned in Acts 18 has been identified and is being restored, so we could see where Paul stood before Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia.

Alex sneaked me down a back path to the ruins of the theater which are really closed off to the public, but we wanted to see the place discovered in 1929  where Erastus’ name and title are inscribed. This is almost certainly the Erastus mentioned in Romans 16 who was the director of public works.

What do you think they serve in ancient Corinth for lunch? Gyros, of course! What were you expecting???

After a pretty late lunch, we went to Cenchreae, where there is precious little left of Phoebe’s hometown, mostly just ruins of a church being swallowed by the sea.  But almost next door is a beautiful camp hotel where Christians in Greece gather once or twice a year for Bible study, retreats, and warm (probably dramatic!) fellowship. We are definitely going to try to get an invitation to be on their program!

Almost 2000 years ago, right here in Athens, Paul said,

From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. (Acts 17:26-27)

I’m thankful for every Christian in Greece and am praying for every person from every land that God has brought to Greece so they could seek Him and perhaps find Him!

Maybe you will be one of those people someday, coming with LST to Greece to talk to people about the unknown God and His Son Jesus!

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Day 6 – It’s Complicated!

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on November 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Jerusalem is like no other city that I have ever visited! Not the beauty, not the variety, not the landscape, not even the history—all of the usual things that people talk about when evaluating Vienna or Prague or St. Petersburg or Bangkok, or Beijing—no, perhaps it is the spiritual confrontation and the emotional upheaval on every corner that sets Jerusalem apart.

At the Wailing Wall, people wail! I was prepared for the praying and the rocking and the reading of Torah, but I was not prepared for the wailing! These are not the first Jews who have wept over Jerusalem.

The Tomb of David is one of the most artificial of sacred sites, a site that really no one believes to be anything but a fabricated holy site, and yet there were not just tourists, but worshippers there! No one is fooled, but still some fill a need to believe and worship!

At first we were all a bit disappointed with the Via Dolorosa—the Way of the Cross—supposedly tracing Jesus’ steps from the Place of Judgment in front of Pilate to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. First we were told that any real steps that Jesus might have taken would be about 65 feet below the level of the street upon which we were walking. That’s not so bad.  Then as we walked, we realized that virtually every step was lined with shops of all kinds—not just tourist shops, but all kinds of shops.

Instead of carrying a cross like a few pilgrims were doing or stopping soberly to read the crucifixion story step by step, most people on the Via Dolorosa everyday were trying to make a buck—that is, a shekel! Perhaps it was time to drive the money changers out of the temple!!  BUT . . .

. . . then it occurred to us that even on the very day of crucifixion, this street probably was not so different. The way was lined with shopkeepers who possibly noticed the soldiers marching down the street, followed by some poor guy going to be crucified.  And then they went back to their customers. After all, it was the third person today they were going to crucify!

That the monotony of the mercantile just went right on at the very hour that Jesus walked to the cross just messes with your emotions a little, doesn’t it!

The church of the Holy Sepulcher completely covers the traditional Mount Calvary, Golgotha, and the tomb of Jesus! Nice to visit, but it didn’t move me really because if there is anything true about the place, it is totally covered up by the attempt of Christians to protect it, to give it significance, to magnify—maybe even to proclaim.

I wonder what we are slowly hiding because of our needs to protect, to make significant, to magnify?

Our last stop—at three o’clock on Friday afternoon–in Jerusalem was the Garden Tomb, first suggested as the real site of Jesus’ burial just a little over one hundred years ago. A British organization has created a quiet, beautiful garden to surround this first century tomb. Whether or not this particular site has any greater claim to veracity than the more traditional site, the garden and the garden tomb are much more emotionally satisfying. A wonderfully Christian British lady who had taken her three-week holiday to work at the site gave us not only a wonderful tour but her testimony of faith. To find heartfelt faith, full of joy that “He is not here; he is risen” was a special gift.

And so it is with so many “holy” sites in Israel. Most of them have some rationale for their designation; few of them are anything but slightly educated guesses; but all of them are someone’s attempt to remember the work of God! You don’t have to believe in them or worship in them to be thankful that someone wants to remember and glorify God.

“It’s complicated!” Every Israeli, every Palestinian, every Arab, every Christian we talked with in Israel and Jordan, every one of them at some time in the conversation said the same thing, “It’s complicated!” Whether we were talking about the politics of the region, about faith, or about life in general, their answer was the same, “It’s complicated.”

For the political conflicts, for the social struggles, for the religious division, they are all right! We have been able to find nothing but complication.

Thank God for the simple, uncomplicated truth: He is risen!  Those who believe this truth do not need to wail.

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Days 4 & 5 – Truth and Contrasts

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 3, 2011| 2 Comments »

Today I learned that the Bible was even truer than I thought it was!

We spent two nights in Amman, Jordan among the children of Ben-Ammi, the son of Lot and “the father of the Ammonites of today” (Genesis 19:38). Our friend and sister from Germany Veronika (who often comments on this blog!) but who has lived in Jordan for 17 years had arranged for us to meet with three leaders of a local church in Amman to talk about LST.  Jordan is a country with religious freedom, but just by virtue of being such a small minority, Christians in Amman have to be bold and creative. These men are involved mostly in training Jordanians to plant and lead churches. Perhaps they will invite LST and someday you can come here and join them in their boldness!

Open your Bible to Deuteronomy 34 and read the first eight verses about the death of Moses.  It’s not an unfamiliar passage to me, but visiting Mount Nebo opened my eyes to how true it is. I had read the words “There the Lord showed him the whole land—from Gilead to Dan . . . “ and I had always understood it to be either just metaphorically looking over the Jordan and seeing that part of the promised land you can see which would represent the whole land—or sometimes I even considered the possibility that Moses saw everything miraculously with the eyes of God!

Never did I think you could see the whole land from Nebo—but you can!  With the wind whipping around the mountain top, we hung on to the railing that Moses did not have and looked across the Jordan valley. On our left we saw the Dead Sea. On our right we saw the Sea of Galilee. The maps in my Bible never prepared me for that sight!

Everything is downhill toward the Dead Sea! We spent a couple of hours at Petra, the city of the Nabateans built into the red rocky gorges left by ancient winds and waters. After several days of awesome moments with sites of Jesus and Moses, it was a little disconcerting to go into such a pagan past, but our very last stop in Petra was a pagan temple that had been converted into a rock church in later centuries.

We sang Amazing Grace and listened to the words and music reverberate against the stones that had heard and seen so much for centuries. If those stones survive for thousands more years, I pray they will release the words of amazing grace over and over again to those who will hear!

Sherrylee talked us into riding camels back to the entrance of Petra. I know Rebekah rode a camel from her home to meet Isaac for the first time. I hope she was a better rider than we or she probably was in no shape to be very impressive when she dismounted. I’m quite sure that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for all of us!

To cross between Jordan and Israel is no easy feat in today’s world. Joshua needed a small miracle and so do many people today! We paid extra for what they call VIP service at the border—slightly embarrassing, but it certainly eased the waiting in line and the hassle.

Being VIPs gave us a little extra time to add Qumran to our trip, where we looked into the very caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered. Sherrylee was the one who pointed out the incongruity of having lunch in the very place where Jesus fasted for forty days.

Before we even caught our breath, our van drove past Jericho and went up to Jerusalem, passing the Inn of the Good Samaritan. I hope we didn’t miss anyone on the side of the road.

We finished this marvelous day in Bethlehem–not a city of peace any more, I’m afraid. We dutifully went to the Church of the Nativity, where hundreds were standing in line to see the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. It’s just a silver star on the floor far below ground level today. Joseph and Mary would not have recognized it. But they wouldn’t have wanted to wait in the long lines to check it out anyway!

Next year—no, tomorrow in Jerusalem! Our last day in Israel and another opportunity to meet with Christians here to see if LST can be of any help.

P.S. I plan to post a few pictures soon! The ones of Sherrylee and me on camels may or may not be included!

 

 

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Day 2 – Proximity to God!

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on November 1, 2011| 3 Comments »

Today we stood on Mount Carmel in Israel, the home of King David’s wife Abigail and the place where Elijah did battle with the prophets of Baal (1Kings 18). It’s a great story of face-to-face altar combat, with Elijah talking smack to the false prophets and then destroying them—literally.

What did surprise me though was what could be seen from the top of Carmel. Looking southwest you can see Caesarea, which is located on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. Turning just a bit to your left you can see the mountains of ancient Samaria. Continuing in the same direction, Mount Gilboa rises above the valley, yes, the place where King Saul fought his last battle, then fell on his sword (1 Samuel 28-31). Without even moving your feet, but just by shifting your eyes to the left you see “the hill of Moreh” where Gideon did battle with the Midianites (Judges 7) and then Mount Tabor, where the judge Deborah sent Barak into battle (Judges 4).

One more slight turn in the same direction and you see the modern city of Nazareth nestled in the mountains above the plain of Jezreel.  The trees block your view further north or the list of geographical sites associated with biblical history would just keep going on, I’m sure.

It’s not that one can see these sites at all, rather that you can stand in one place and see all of these places at one time! 

I wonder if Elijah, while waiting on Mount Carmel for the prophets of Baal to get through with their empty incantations and gyrations, looked around and thought about all that God had already done to show Himself to people.

Imagine Jesus, Joseph, and Mary on their way to Jerusalem, walking down from their mountain home in Nazareth into the valley of Jezreel and Joseph pointing to this mountain and that mountain and this river and that rock and this pillar and over there—teaching Jesus the history of Israel every time they turned a new corner on their journey.

Perhaps God picked such a small and insignificant piece of His Creation for this very reason—for proximity, so that the very mountains He created could tell the stories of His marvelous ways!

 

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Day 1: Arrival

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , on October 31, 2011| 3 Comments »

What is the first image you see when you get off the plane in Israel?

The whole transatlantic trip yesterday was quite uneventful—which is exactly the way you want it to be.  Sherrylee and I had arrived at the airport in DFW two hours early, and it paid off. When we got to the ticket counter, we checked on the possibility of upgrading to business class in exchange for mileage. The airline agent was very helpful, but it took over an hour to make it happen, but it did!

The ride across the Atlantic was a little bumpy, and the movie selection was not exciting (Captain America  and Green Lantern). I did finish the book I was reading Moneyball, which I found fascinating. The book is so detailed that unless you are a hardcore baseball fan like I am—and, yes, I’m still wearing black for the Texas Rangers—you probably want to stick to the recent movie release Moneyball with Brad Pitt. I haven’t seen it yet, but it has been highly recommended to me.

We arrived early in the morning in Frankfurt, rested for about four hours, stored our winter suitcase in the hotel luggage room as planned, and then headed back to the airport to check in on El Al, the Israeli national airlines.

I’ve been fascinated with El Al, since all the trouble of the 70s and 80s, with hijackings. During the 80s, there was actually a small bomb in the Frankfurt airport which was left near the El Al ticket counter, so for thirty years now I have had a mental note not to spend any time near their counters in foreign airports.

El Al has the reputation for the highest level of security, but I have always been thankful for security, so other than waiting in a couple of more lines, the extra security was just as it should be—effective!

The loading/unloading ramps in many airports now have lots of advertising. I love the Chinese bank that puts pictures comparing cultures: a squid in one culture is YUK and another YUM!  A cricket in one culture is GOOD LUCK and another culture A PEST! But that was not what was on the ramp when we walked off the plane in Tel Aviv!

I expected perhaps a picture of Old City Jerusalem, or a menorah, an ancient church, or the Dead Sea—something representing the deep, deep religious and cultural heritage of this country.

No, the first image on the wall across from you as you exit the plane is a big golden BUDDHA! In Thailand, yes, but not Israel!  Because it was all written in Hebrew, I don’t even know how the picture was being used, but the incongruity was unnerving!

Fortunately, I found equilibrium again after meeting our tour guide Nabil and our driver Omar. Before we were even outside of the airport, Nabil turned and said, “Are you a Christian?”  I said, “Yes.” I returned his question, and he said, “Yes, I am a Roman Catholic, born in Jerusalem.” Apparently his family has been Christian as far back as he knows. Today I want to find out what it is like to grow up Christian in Israel.  Nabil went on to describe himself as a Palestinian Arab Roman Catholic Christian with Israeli citizenship.

Do you know the word syncretism?  If I had internet connection now—which I don’t—I’d link you to the definition, but its basic idea involves the blending of diverse cultural or religious elements in a particular culture.  This may be the word that explains Buddha and Nabil—I don’t know yet, but that is one of the things we will watch for on this trip.

It’s 4am, and I’m sitting in the bathroom because I’m jetlagged and don’t want to wake Sherrylee up by turning on the light.  I think I’ll go back to bed and see if I can catch a couple of more hours of sleep before we start our tour of Galilee today!

Shalom!

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Eight Hours Until Departure!

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , on October 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

Eight hours until departure—that is, six hours until we leave for the airport! Sherrylee and I are pretty well packed for our twenty-seven-day trip—just our toiletries to add after showers this morning!

We have two carry-on suitcases, one school-size backpack, and one purse to carry on the planes. In addition, we have packed one “winter” suitcase because we are going to be in relatively warm countries for the first two weeks, but the last thirteen days will be in northern Europe where it will definitely be winter. That winter suitcase has Sherrylee’s boots and our winter coats.

The winter suitcase is possible because we have a seven-hour layover in Frankfurt on our way to Tel Aviv. We like it that way because when you land in Frankfurt at 7am, it is really only midnight “body time”. So we have taken a dayroom at a nearby hotel where we can sleep for five hours before flying on. The added benefit is that I will put our winter suitcase into their luggage storage for free and then pick it up when we come back through two weeks later.  You can store luggage at the airport as well, but it costs something like 5 Euro per day per bag. I’d rather apply that 60 Euros to a few hours sleep and a hot shower!

Last Minute Decisions

Do I take my computer or just my smartphone?  I do have a phone that will work wherever we go, and we use T-Mobile because it is a very common carrier in and around Europe, so taking my phone is a given.  You do have to watch how you use it though because it is expensive to do two things with it: make phone calls and use the internet!  We use it primarily for unavoidables or emergencies. I don’t answer it if I don’t recognize the person calling. I’m not going to pay 2-3 dollars to hear some pre-recorded telemarketer!

But I do use it to scan my email each day and see which ones need to be addressed quickly! I used to carry my laptop computer for this, but if email were all I needed a computer for, I would leave the computer at home.  I don’t like the extra hassle at the airports, the problems with logging in at hotels, nor the weight in my backpack.

BUT, just for you I am taking it this year, so that I can blog more easily! I tried last year using hotel computers, but did you know that many countries have different keyboards—a real pain! And often, at least in the hotels where we stay, there are only one or two computers and they won’t let you tie them up for an hour at a time.

To help avoid lots of computer time though, I have been downloading several apps to my smartphone (Android) especially for this trip.  Kayak is a great search engine for travel, so that is now mine! I also downloaded Priceline’s app because I still have to make hotel reservations for the last part of our trip in Europe.  I love to get 4-star hotels for 50-75% off!! I’m using Pageonce to track our flight information. With these apps, I don’t have to pull out the computer and try to get online in airports or at poorly wired hotels. I can do most of our travel arrangements with my phone, if need be.

I also bought a Garmin for this trip because we will be driving all over western Europe for the last 15 days. If you rent one from the car rental place, they cost you about 10 Euro or $15/day, so I figured I could buy one and get the European maps for it and pretty much break even.  Navigation systems are time and nerve-savers when you are driving in foreign countries—and they all speak English!

Last-minute To Do’s!

Here’s my list for the next few hours:

  • Get about $500 cash from the local bank—all in newer $100 bills.
  • Pick up the cleaning!
  • Leave the car with at least ½ tank of gas.
  • Call my Mom again and make sure she has our itinerary
  • Update itinerary and distribute it to our families
  • Check-in online before we go to the airport
  • Email contacts at our first stops and just verify that they will meet us.
  • Update our personal finances so that there are no bad surprises about our checking account while we are on the road and they are hard to fix!

That’s it!  It’s 7:45 am, time to wake Sherrylee up! Ben will pick us up and take us to the airport in exactly five hours.  If there is any time, I may try to go to Kellan’s flag football game!

Let’s have fun on this trip! Pray that we have great conversations about spreading the Word everywhere we go! I’m really excited because we have three firm appointments in Israel and Jordan to talk about LST—and maybe another one!

This is the day the Lord has made! To Him be the glory!

 

 

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Why Sunday Is Not On Your Travel Itinerary!

Posted in Christian Culture, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on October 26, 2011| 5 Comments »

I have a feeling that many, if not most Christians do not plan to go to church on Sundays when they are traveling. Sometimes we haven’t, but most of the time we try to and I’d like to tell you why.

First, why don’t Christians go to church when they travel? Here are my top ten reasons:

  1. Don’t want to take the time away from travel, sightseeing, or relaxing.
  2. Don’t want to take the time to find a church.
  3. May not like the church you find, so then you will have wasted two hours.
  4. Don’t want to take Sunday clothes.
  5. Don’t like going to church with people you don’t know.
  6. You might bump into teaching, worship, or something that makes you uncomfortable!
  7. You might get invited to lunch or something else that would just take up more time.
  8. They might expect you to come to Sunday night or Wednesday night services and that would just be more time out of your schedule.
  9. They might not have anything for the children and we’d just have the kids on our laps for the whole time!
  10. It is not a salvation issue, so why should we?

As I said, we have used some of these excuses ourselves over the years, but we have also been blessed many, many times by finding a church and breaking bread with Christians on Sundays. Maybe I can give you some hints that will encourage you to look for these blessings as well!

  1. If it is part of your travel plan, then you are more likely to follow through. If you don’t plan to find an assembly of saints on Sunday, then you will not. Write it in to your travel itinerary from the beginning—just like tithing from the first fruits.
  2. Do a little research about the available churches. On a recent trip, I spent no more than thirty minutes on the internet, looking for churches of Christ in an unfamiliar city. I looked for things like location and time of services.  If churches are too far away or they start too early or late, then I look for alternatives. These are not deciding factors, but not unimportant.
  3. Try to learn the intangibles from the website.  Is this an open church or pretty closed? Is this a church involved outside of itself? Does this church have only traditional worship?  Almost all of these questions can be answered by looking at a church’s website.  If the church doesn’t have a website—well, that says a lot right there.
  4. Arrive at least 5-10 minutes before services begin, so you can meet a few people. Not only will you meet some nice people, but you will likely find a connection with some church or some person that you both know.  We recently went to church in Savannah, GA that was completely new to us. We didn’t find any relatives, but we did find out that the preacher was a cousin of a missionary that we had worked with in Kiev, Ukraine!
  5. Expect to give, not just to receive.  I find more and more truth in Jesus’ saying that it is more blessed to give than to receive. When we give concern, friendship, our fellowship in communion, our common worship, prayer, then we are blessed! If we attend only to receive, we can still be blessed, but maybe not as much!
  6. Communion is too important to miss! If Jesus thought that breaking bread was important, then….it doesn’t really make any difference what I think.  I must need that fellowship and koinonia often!  We always look for an opportunity to break bread with Christians!
  7. Worshipping with other Christians teaches us the breadth of God’s kingdom. Not every church building, not every worship style, not every sermon has to be the all-time best or even as good as the ones at home.  Being gracious is being Godly!

And your children will only complain about it if you do!  Spending that time with Christians on Sunday is a great discipline for teaching children to put God first—before vacations, before sleeping late, really FIRST!  And that is worth a lot!

Sometimes it just doesn’t work out—we used to call this being “providentially hindered!”  Sometimes we have to miss meals, and  sometimes we have to miss sleep, but we are healthier and feel better if we don’t.

Don’t miss the spiritual feast awaiting you when you travel!

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Twenty-four Hours Until Departure!

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged on October 24, 2011| 2 Comments »

It is not the last minute before our trip, but because Sherrylee and I will be doing these things in that last twenty-four hours, I’m going to write about them now!

  1. Check in online before you go to the airport, if possible. It’s not always possible because of the information the airlines and the government must collect for overseas trips and sometimes for security reasons, but if it is, do it! It will save you standing in lines that are unpredictably long and watching your two-hours lead time at the airport dwindle to a panicky thirty minutes before you board your plane!
  2. If you haven’t started packing yet, get the suitcases out—the smaller ones—and start putting the clothes you are taking near, if not in, the suitcases. Allow yourself at least a couple of hours between packing and closing the suitcase to walk out the door. If you wait until the very last hour to pack, you will forget something!!
  3. Get your quart-sized plastic bag and put all of your liquids in it to make sure it all fits.  If you need to purchase travel size deo or shaving cream or toothpaste, then put it on the final shopping list.
  4. Go to the store only once today and do it at least 2-3 hours before you leave for the airport.
  5. Decide which lights to leave on, which timers to set, and where you are leaving a spare house key for emergency purposes. You may want to unplug most other electrical items, just in case of a power surge. I usually turn our home computer completely off.
  6. Think ahead about the weather at home and prepare your house for it. Do you need to maintain a certain temperature to keep things from melting? Freezing?  We’ve had wax decorations melt in the Texas summer as well as unexpected freezes that would certainly threaten your pipes if you don’t have a minimum amount of heat still on in your home.  Make sure you set everything appropriately as you walk out the door.
  7. Go over your checklist one more time, but realize that everything is no longer of equal importance! At this point the highest priorities are
    1. Tickets, Passports and documents
    2. Money—however you decided to carry it
    3. Medicines

The nice thing about international travel these days is that if you suddenly need a jacket and you didn’t bring one, or if your battery-operated toothbrush gets turned on accidentally in your suitcase and runs completely out, you can find what you need in the airports or wherever you are going.

I have a friend who always said that any problem that can be solved with money is not a real problem! I’m not quite sure that works for every situation in life, but it is very true about traveling overseas. Having said that, those items in #6 are much more difficult to remedy, so double-check those before you leave.

Then walk out the door! We always feel this great sense of relief when we leave for the airport because whatever is not done will not be done, and whatever is forgotten is either unnecessary or replaceable when we arrive at our destination.

If you have done a little planning, started a little early, not left anything too big until the end, then you should be able to board the plane ready for a great trip.

There’s a sermon in that last sentence somewhere!

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Five More Tips for Planning Your Overseas Trip!

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on October 22, 2011| 3 Comments »

A week from today we leave on our overseas trip. What should I be thinking about after having finished most of the items on the big checklist I gave you in the last post.  Just one big thing left to do before we get to the things that can only be done at the last minute:  Go back over your big check list to make sure you really did everything you checked off—or that you forgot something that should have been on that list.

Some of you Readers, especially Randy,  made some excellent suggestions of actions that should have been on the first check list that I gave you.  It’s hard to think of everything at once.  Here is what you have added to my list:

  1. Check for visa requirements. This should be done at the same time you are checking on your passport for the first time. If you need a visa where you are going,  it can take up to a month to get; for other countries perhaps only a week; and for many countries you can just buy it at the border. Most visas are pretty easy to get, but some are not. Be very exact in filling out their forms and following their instructions. If you have any doubts about how to fill out the forms, you may want to use a visa service. Their prices are not unreasonable.  And, lastly on visas, sometimes you have to send your passport in to have the visa inserted into the passport, so you can only start the visa process after you have a passport. You must plan ahead for this! Also, always use a mailing procedure that allows you to track where your passport and/or visa is in the mail.
  2. If you are taking anything electrical (phone chargers, computers, etc), you will need a plug adapter at least and you may need a voltage transformer.  Fortunately, most of our gadgets and computers are built to transform their own current, so you just need a plug adapter. I recommend that you take nothing that has to heat: curling irons, travel irons, hair dryers.  Our experience is that they are likely to burn up no matter how careful you are—and they may burn your clothes or your hair!!  Buy one in the country where you are going to be!
  3. Speaking of phones, if you are taking your phone, especially if you have a smartphone, check for both call rates and international roaming charges where you are going.  There are many ways to make cheap calls—which will have to be another whole posting—but the one that you might miss is that all that internet usage that you enjoy in the States for a package price could cost you per MB in other countries. I have heard stories of hundreds of dollars of charges just for checking your email on your phone. Check this out before you go!
  4. Double check your itinerary.  For me that means printing out the confirmation pages from every flight and hotel I booked and every car I rented. I can’t tell you how often some little discrepancy has popped up—maybe because I changed our plans in the middle of booking things or maybe just human error—but it is so much better to catch those mistakes and fix them before you have to stand in front of a counter in a foreign country and try to work it out with someone there!

Have I ever told you about the time we had a flight booked from Antalya, Turkey to Frankfurt, Germany, via Istanbul.  It was scheduled to leave about 10pm—in foreign countries many flights leave and arrive in the middle of the night! We got to the airport in plenty of time—which I always recommend because things go wrong—and this time, we got there and could not find the counter where we should check in. We searched in the international terminal and then went to the domestic terminal. All kinds of people told us where to look, but we never found the counter where we should check in. The clock was ticking too. Our scheduled departure was less than an hour away!!

After trying to communicate with a number of people whose English was sketchy, we finally were informed that the airline that we had booked with no longer even flew out of this city! We had a worthless ticket to Istanbul! Our only alternative was to buy another ticket to Istanbul and connect with our flight the next day to Frankfurt.

This whole fiasco probably took two hours to work through and on a scale of problems was a fairly minor one—which is the only kind I wish for you in your travels!  But if you travel much internationally, you will eventually have these kinds of experiences.

–which brings me to my last piece of advice as you get to the final countdown for your trip!

5.  Get yourself into the frame of mind that things will not go as you planned them! Count on it! So you can either be flexible and take it as part of the experience, or you can wind yourself up, yell at the people who do you wrong, complain about how you were jerked around and cheated for the rest of your trip, and make yourself and others quite miserable.  And if you are a Christian and doing this, you should have stayed at home! You are not representing well that Name you are wearing.

If you tend toward the wind-up side of things though, you might want to consider fairly comprehensive travel insurance.  It might provide you with a little peace of mind. A good website that allows you to compare many plans is www.insuremytrip.com .

Soon—before you leave—I’ll give you a list of things to do during the last twenty-four hours before you go!  No, you are not procrastinating, but there are some things that just can’t happen any earlier.

Don’t begrudge preparation!

I love the quote from Abraham Lincoln on preparation: “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”

 

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High Noon in the Garden of Good and Evil in Savannah!

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , , on October 13, 2011| 1 Comment »

In Savannah, they call it “the Book!”  They are referring to the novel  Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, which was first published in 1994. It was a bestseller for 216 weeks on the NY Times list. Many probably remember the story from the Clint Eastwood-directed movie, released in 1997, starring Kevin Spacey as Jim Williams.

Unfortunately, the book version is true!  Williams, a local antique dealer, is tried four times and finally acquitted for the murder of a male prostitute. A voodoo priestess, a local drag queen, and a mad scientist threatening to poison the water system of Savannah are some of the quirkier characters who populated Savannah and are part of the backdrop for the non-fictional novel’s storyline. It’s a quirky, tawdry story, and I’m not trying to send you to see the film or buy the book.

Sherrylee and I are in Savannah for a few days, so we keep bumping into two dark elements that are a disturbing, and I am beginning to think that one may have led to the other.  The term southern gothic is the literary genre to which Midnight belongs .  Macabre , supernatural, and grotesque are words often used to describe the genre. Other well-known authors that have used this genre include William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ann Rice, and Flannery O’Connor, who was born and raised in Savannah.

Southern gothic keeps coming to mind as you tour old homes in Savannah because you keep hearing stories of murder, spirits, and voodoo! The cemetery/ghost tours are among the most popular.  We rode past one mansion that has been abandoned by its owner because he is convinced it is haunted.

This strong tradition of dark magic/religion came to America—especially to the southern slave states–with the early slaves from Africa, then blended with other religions and superstitions into a recognizable and now celebrated southern tradition. Have you been to New Orleans?? Much of Mardi Gras tradition comes from this dark and superstitious tradition.

It’s frightening! It’s the garden of evil side of Savannah!

First African Baptist Church of Savannah, GA

On the opposite side of Savannah from the Bonaventure Cemetery is the First African Baptist Church, probably the first Black congregation in North America, dating back to 1773.  The congregation was entirely slaves, including the first pastors. The current building was built by freed African Americans and slaves, brick by brick made and layed after their day’s work for their masters in Savannah.

If you look closely at the floors of the sanctuary, you find small holes—ventilation holes to the built-out crawl space under the floor.  This church building was Stop Two on the Underground Railroad, used by thousands of slaves, attempting to escape to the north to gain their freedom.  They would spend two or three days sometimes under the floor of the church in a four-foot high space, fed and watered through the holes in the floor by other slaves.  At a safe moment in the middle of the night, someone would lead them through a tunnel from the church to the Savannah River, where they would be ferried in a small boat across to South Carolina for the next leg of their dangerous journey.

As I was thinking about the haunted houses, the voodoo, and the southern gothic on one side of this city, I started comparing it to the hallowed house, the Holy Spirit, and the Christian tradition on the other side.  No one lives in the haunted house! The First African Baptist Church is still a living, thriving congregation of Christians—still serving, still loving, still sacrificing for the welfare of others.

When the clouds roll back and the Light comes on and all the deeds of darkness are exposed for what they are, I know which garden of this city I would want to be in!

 

 

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