Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Traveling Thoughts’ Category

November 11: Meanderings in Budapest

Posted in Traveling Thoughts on November 13, 2010| 2 Comments »

I have been waiting to get to a computer in the business center of our Budapest hotel for 20-30 minutes now because they all were being used by gray-haired women–every single one of them.  You expect teenagers to be doing games, but maybe that has all gone to their mobile phones now. Two of these women were checking their email and the other was downloading a recipe for one of the women on her tour.  It just struck me as a mark of a changing world.

Today we had no travel and no appointments–the first day like that since we left home.  We slept a little later although it is so unseasonably warm in Europe that the rooms are all too hot for us. The hotels have switched to winter climate control, however, and there is no turning back for them.

We did a little sightseeing at the Buda castle. No, the castle has nothing to do with Buddha. It is the west side of the Danube with Pest on the east side.  The river is so large that two very distinct groups settled both sides of the river. Until the 15th century, they really only co-existed, sometimes peacefully and sometimes belligerently.  We know the city as Budapest–and it is a lovely city.  It reminded both of us of Vienna–many beautiful buildings, clean, history everywhere you turn.  I wish we had more time here.

We did a turn of shopping too–which I still will never believe is recreational unless they make it an Olympic sport, but I have not convinced Sherry of that yet–near the castle, but also in a beautiful pedestrian zone just off of the Danube on the Pest side.  I tend to stand outside the stores and people watch while Sherry looks through the shops.  Tonight I thought to myself, what a wonderful time we live in. Listen to all the languages. I heard Dutch, French, German, Russian, English, Japanese, Korean, and several Arabic languages that I couldn’t distinguish.

But even as I thought that, I thought, the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem was just like this–maybe even more so.  During St. Paul’s times, people are traveling from Greece to Italy to Egypt to Israel and to all of the countries in between.  We do live in a wonderful time, but people are having the same experiences that we are having, just not quite as plugged in perhaps.

At the National History Museum we saw beautiful glass drinking cups and pitchers  from the 5th century, beautiful leather  belts and beaded necklaces–one that looked just like some of these silver studded fashion belts being worn today–and we saw gold and silver coins from the first century.  I wonder if any of the women on Paul’s missionary journeys had to have a day for shopping every now and then–it wouldnt’ surprise me.

A dose of walking through museums and shopping in foreign malls is good to correct our perspective sometimes.  When we think the world is as bad as it could be, that the politicians have ruined everything, that the economy is everyone’s motivation for good and evil, that families are falling apart, that children are . . . . . and so forth, we probably ought to just take a look at the skulls in the museums or the simple leather shoes of children found in the cesspools of old houses, or the mosaics of families eating together in pre-Christian Roman houses and just be reminded that people are pretty much the same as they have always been.  Different toys, different haircuts, but pretty much the same.

That is really good news. That means that the ancient Word of God is also the modern Word–and likely is still the post-modern Word. In fact, I believe that the Word is the same yesterday, today, and forever, don’t you?

Read Full Post »

November 10 : Hotel Mistakes

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

 Yesterday, Sherrylee and I had a good meeting with Yuriy Aniper, who is another of the young preachers working in Eastern Europe today.  He inherited the work when Rick Pinchuk, a long-time worker, died.  Yuriy has prepared himself well, having completed a degree at Kiev Theological Seminary and has good support from the States, so we pray that his work will be fruitful and he will be faithful for all of his life.

By the way, have I ever told you how hard it is to choose hotels in foreign countries over the internet.  I’ve always booked our own travel because I’ve done it so much, I think I can do it better than everyone else.  After all, you have to consider several important factors in choosing a hotel over the internet:

  • location – You don’t want to be on the opposite side of a city from the people you are wanting to see if it takes a couple of hours to cross by tram. You also don’t want to be too isolated when your friends are not around.  And, finally, you want to be relatively convenient to getting to the airport, preferably not a 50 dollar cab ride away.
  • cleanliness and comfort – All turkish hotels have hard beds because that is what they think is standard. All London hotel rooms are tiny, crowded, and have marginal bath/showers. You have to allow a wide range of acceptability here, but still you have to look for something that works for you. We have found that the date the hotel was built and/or when the rooms were updated are probably the only way to really tell anything about the hotel on the internet.
  • restaurant, internet access, and airport shuttle are all important to us, but not 100% essential
  • cost – Cost is the hardest.  I always try to balance the above factors with what I think is reasonable.

When I make a hotel mistake, it is always because I thought cost was more important than what I was giving up–and it never was.  That is exactly what happened with the hotel I had booked in Kiev.  It was a two-star hotel, which didn’t look too far from the center of town, but the only reason it won in the finals was because of price.  We took a taxi from the airport–it is always a bad sign when the taxi drivers don’t have a clue where the hotel is.  As he started slowing down, I started peering out the taxi window into the darkness–the eastern European darkness that is just a little scary. The only businesses anywhere near were the little tin sheds selling cigarettes, magazines, and whatever. 

As we got ready to stop, Sherry said, I don’t think we can stay here.  That is all it took for us to just keep on driving.  Hotel mistakes are expensive mistakes. Our only choice in the middle of the night was to ask the taxi driver to take us to a big name hotel, so we ended up at the Radisson–a very nice, but pretty expensive hotel.  So, anyway, my only advice to you about choosing hotels is that you may save money in the long run by not being quite so stingy when you are searching.

And, yes, I did look on Tripadvisor.com and I will be writing my own review as soon as we get back.  So my final words of advice on this subject are

  • Never believe the pictures on the internet. Just remember that they are all glamor shots.
  • Make sure you read reviews on neutral sites–and make sure those reviews are recent. (I almost chose one hotel in Kiev until I got to the fourth review that said something like, “Oh yea, if it makes any difference to you, the hotel is above a pretty loud strip club.” )
  • If your gut says “maybe not,” listen to it.

We are in the best hotel ever in Budapest, so I’m batting 3 for 4 so far.  I’ll keep you posted though.

Read Full Post »

November 10 – Kiev: A Glimpse of the Harvest

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 11, 2010| Leave a Comment »

In 1991, LST sent a large group of students from Lipscomb University to Kiev, Ukraine.  One of those students was Chris Lovinggood, who later returned as a full-time worker. One of his accomplishments was to create what is called the Ukrainian Education Center (UEC), a center for reading, for study, for small groups to gather, in short, a place for Christians to build relationships with the community.  This building is where the Let’s Start Talking teams meet their Readers as well. 

Today, Sherrylee and I had the privilege of meeting Vitaly Samodin,  the director of the UEC.  He is also one of the leaders in the Nevky church, with whom LST has a fairly long history of serving.  We spent the morning talking about our partnership and how we might serve the church here better.

About 11am, we were joined by Kostya K–, the minister for the church of Christ in Bila Tserkva, just outside of Kiev.  Kostya’s story is classic!

Kostya was an LST reader about 1994 in Kiev. David Skidmore was the American Christian who read with him. David says that they sat under a statue of Lenin as they read.  But Kostya was not that interested. So David went home.  Fifteen years later,  David is walking by the missions bulletin board in a Memphis church and sees a picture of Kostya and couldn’t believe his eyes.  He read the caption under the picture and was convinced it was the same Kostya that he had read with under the statue of Lenin, but now Kostya was the preacher for the church in Bila Tserkva!  David had not even known that he was a Christian.  Heaven is going to be full of people discovering each other and never dreaming that one had influenced the other towards eternity. 

We visited with Kostya for a while, then he took us to the UEC since we had never been there.  As a true serendipity, Tim Archer, a man we had worked with in Kiev in the early 90s was also visiting the UEC, so we got to have lunch with Tim and Kostya.  See what I mean about our being so blessed to constantly meet people of great faith.

Churches of Christ in Kiev seem to be doing well. There is sustained work, there are many young leaders, there is vision beyond just conducting church services, and there is a strong sense of serving the community.  It has been an encouraging day.

The weather in eastern Europe is unseasonably warm. Sherrylee and I can’t decide whether it is a blessing or a curse. Very cold weather as we expected would have been bone-chilling, no doubt, but the extra warm weather has made it very, very warm in all the buildings because they had already turned on the heat.  It is apparently unreasonable to cool anything in November.  Oh well. Stretch those rubber bands.

Tomorrow we have a morning meeting with Yuriy Aniper and then we fly to Budapest.  Thanks for going along with us.

Look for pictures of the people we meet on my Facebook page.

Read Full Post »

November 9 – Bucharest: Bullet Holes In the Walls

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , , , on November 10, 2010| 3 Comments »

The first time I was in Bucharest, Romania, was Spring of 1990, just months after the revolution. The streets were empty, the stores were empty, the people were friendly–but empty, and there were bullet holes in the walls of many of the downtown buildings.  One of my strongest memories is of how the main road from the airport to  the city had to be navigated through huge potholes.

Well, the potholes are gone, the streets are full of cars, the stores are full of stuff, the bullet holes are gone except for the museum pieces, the people are still friendly–but as in much of Eastern Europe, the emptiness of 1990 has only been filled with materialism, not God.

One of the earliest LST workers in Romania was Bubba Cook–he goes by Albert in Romania, but I noticed that most of his friends still call him Bubba, so I will too.  He did short-term work for four years in several cities in Romania, and after completing his Masters at Harding Graduate School in Memphis, he was invited back to Bucharest to work full-time.  He married one of the young women in the church Lavinia and now ten years later, they have two beautiful children Bogdan and Lara. (See their picture on my Facebook page–I can’t figure out how to get to these pictures from public computers!)

But their road has not been easy. The main church in Bucharest is typical of many “post-war” churches in Europe.  Feeding on the brokenness and emptiness of the Communist era, the immediate impact of the love of Christians and the gospel story touched many post-revolution lives, so at one point in the first ten years, the congregation numbered over 300 members here in Bucharest. As people recovered economically, however, they began filling their lives with things other than God, so the numbers are down to under 50 in this same church. 

It is an old story in Europe. Frankfurt had at least three congregations that built buildings to hold 1000 people after WWII; all the buildings emptied and now have been sold, and the body of members continues to shrink with each year–and it is one of the better churches!  The same story unfolded in Japan after WWII, so this is not a country-specific spiritual disease, but one that threatens every congregation in its own story.  You can probably think of some great American churches of the past that are struggling to keep their doors open now.

As this kind of slow death begins to occur in a church, the macro-struggles of the church to survive only reflect the micro-struggles of individual Christians in the church–and often on the mission field, the missionaries or the national evangelists receive the brunt of the frustrations the church feels as it declines.

Without getting into the details of their story–because it is their story–Bubba and Lavinia shared with us many of their frustrations and their struggles. We talked and we prayed for them and know that God will continue to lead them, but they are still dodging the potholes in the roads in Romania.  Bubba is actually enrolled in doctoral studies at a seminary here in Bucharest and doing very well. I think God has great plans for him and Lavinia.  Our advice to him was simple:  “Don’t quit!”

We visited with two of the Romanian leaders of the church of Christ in Bucharest–wonderful young men, full of the love of God, and as we talked about LST in Bucharest and how we might help, they began raising the same kinds of survival questions that Bubba and Lavinia had raised. We talked about how churches plateau in Europe at about 50, then they reach a point where it takes all their manpower to sustain the church, so they quit reaching out to new people. First, they just level out, then they start to shrink. When they start to shrink, they get scared of shrinking, so they throw all their energy into trying to rescue each other, which brings them closer to each other–but makes an even more closed group for any new people to try to enter–so eventually they settle into a comfortable number–and they stay comfortable until they die.  To survive, not just to grow,  a church must continue to reach out to new people!  That is true everywhere!

We left Bucharest yesterday hopeful! All of the people we talked with were eager to reach new people, to once again offer the Great News of Jesus to the Romanian people in a way that they can really see Jesus, not just as a flat-faced icon, but as the One who loves them and died for them, the One who can really fill the emptiness in their lives.  Pray for the work in Romania.

Today, we are in Kiev, Ukraine.  I can’t wait to see what God has in mind for us today!  I’ll try to tell you tomorrow.

Read Full Post »

November 8 – Two Different Stories

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 9, 2010| 2 Comments »

On these kinds of trips, Sherrylee and I get to talk to lots of different people. That’s a funny sentence actually. First, there are only different people, and secondly, the differentness of the people is most of the reason why we make the trip, so why should it be unusual. Well, as the French say, vive la difference!

As we are talking to these different people, one of our favorite ways to get to know them first is to ask them to tell us the story of how they became Christians.  On our last night in Turkey, during a visit with A and K, they introduced us to M and T, two Russian Christians that are their co-workers in Antalya.  As they told us their stories, I was reminded again that God’s ways are not our ways, or as the old hymn says, “God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.”  Read the short version of their stories and delight with me in the different and unexpected ways God finds people who want to find Him.

M’s parents were atheists, so he had no religious thread to his life. He was, however, brought up with a sense of morality and a tender-heartedness towards people–not traits highly regarded among his peers. When he entered the Russian army as a very young man, he says he was beat every day. If it was not other soldiers taking advantage of him, it was instructors or officers trying to toughen him up. For the most part, they just humiliated him.

Of course, he left the army as soon as it was possible, but then he decided he needed to be tougher, so he started drinking more, carousing, confronting people and picking fights whenever he could in an effort to be a tough guy.  But M, as much as he tried and as depraved as he could act,  was not a tough guy at heart, so when his conscience would catch up with him, he said he would just lie on his bed, cross his arms over his chest, and wish to die–right then and there. He had lost his soul!

One day after lying all day on the couch and wishing to die, he got up to go outside and get something and a complete stranger came up to him and began talking to him and being friendly–pretty unusual for M who really only had friends who humiliated him. Out of the blue, this stranger invited M to church with him.  That’s all it took.  M went and found God and was found by the love of God, and now he is spending his life serving God!

T, his wife, has a very different story.  Her parents followed the party line under Communism, not believing in God and not teaching her about religion, but her grandmother was different. Everyday, her grandmother would go into the sitting room in their house and shut the door for a while. When T was about seven, she followed her grandmother into the room and discovered that her grandmother was reading the Bible and praying to God during these secret times.

From that moment on, T believed in God–in her own way. God became her secret friend, she says. She would talk to God but not in a religious way, rather in a child-like way, not really knowing anything about him. But He knew her, so the story just gets better.

As was pretty common in Georgia, when T was about 15 or 16 years old, her mother took her to a fortune-teller to have her future told.  As T tells it, the fortune-teller looked at her hand and used her cards, but then did not want to tell them what she saw. Mother insisted that the fortune-teller tell them even if it was bad, but eventually all the fortune-teller would say was that she could only see until T was 21 years old and then everything went black.

T was baptized when she was 21!  The seeds that her faithful grandmother had planted grew into a beautiful Christian young woman who was among the leaders in her church group. The devil had lost claim to her soul–no wonder the fortune teller’s powers could see no further. Tamoona belonged to God now!

T was at the church that M first visited–another providential act. They married and have promised to give their lives in God’s service–and we got to have supper with them in Antalya, Turkey. 

Tomorrow, I will tell you about our visit in Bucharest and about our friends and hosts Albert and Lavinia Cook.  The story just gets better!

PS. I have not figured out how to get pictures from my phone into this blog yet using public computers in Eastern Europe, but if you want to see pictures of the people I’m talking about, you can find them on my Facebook page–eventually.

Read Full Post »

November 6 and 7 – Turkey

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , , on November 8, 2010| 2 Comments »

We arrived in Antalya, Turkey, at 3am, took a taxi to our small pension in the old part of town called Kaleici, then went to sleep.  About 5am–I’m not quite sure–I was slightly awakened by the call to prayer that is heard five times each day in Muslim countries. 

I’m not sure myself how they determine when to pray, but I do know there is a slight contest between the different minarets to be the first to call each morning.  I suppose in some parts of town you might only hear one call, but where we are staying, there are at least five different people competing over their very loud speakers to be the first, or the best, or something. Anyway, it is always an interesting cavalcade of sounds–especially at 5am after an all-night flight–as each chanter begins his liturgy.

About noon, A… and K… and their nine-month old son I… met us for lunch. We first met A and K before they were married in 2002. They were part of the first Let’s Start Talking team in Turkey. A couple of years later, they participated in the first LST internship in Turkey, and now they are full-time M….. in Antalya and great young heroes of faith.

A and K met each other first in Moscow, Russia, where both of their parents were missionaries–not working together, but putting their children in the same school. This background, of course, gives them great experience and perspective for tackling this very challenging work in Turkey.  A’s dad Tim was actually one of the last full-time workers in Turkey from churches of Christ before all were expelled in the 1970s.  Sherrylee and I are grateful to Tim for opening the door to LST in Turkey, but even more for instilling in A a desire to reach out to the wonderful Turkish people.

A and K have been in Antalya for two years now. They are already involved in leading a small Russian-speaking church–you never know how God will use you–as well as working in a college outreach effort near Akdenz University (which uses English classes, but is not LST). In addition, they have several young Christians they are mentoring.

Sherrylee and I took them to their favorite restaurant for lunch where we had a kind of mincemeat-stuffed hushpuppy with some yoghurt dip/soup and a delicious quesadilla-style entrée made with their wonderful pita bread that is native to Turkey. A and K did all the ordering, so I’m afraid I didn’t learn the names of their favorite foods to share with you. I’ll try to do better in the future.

The pita bread though and a small bottle of red wine that we ordered gave us the opportunity to break bread and remember the Lord until he comes again–something Sherrylee has started reminding me to do often at our many “fellowship meals” with people. We Christians have ritualized the Lord’s Supper so much that at first it was a bit awkward to just casually pray, eat and drink–but I suspect it is much more first-century than what we typically do on Sundays.

We talked a lot with A and K about their work, especially brainstorming how to more effectively use the LST workers that come every year. Turkey, though legally a secular country, is enough in reality a country of muslim culture and just enough of the religion to force Christians to be careful.  Turkey has the same problem with Muslim fundamentalists that the U.S. has with Christian fundamentalists. If you can imagine the challenges for Muslim missionaries in the U.S., then you will understand the challenges of Christian M…..in Turkey.

(The M……s in Turkey never even say that word because in the vernacular it conjures up the Crusades and extreme Christian oppression among the Muslims.  We will have to explore together soon the use of words like that in foreign countries.)

Saturday evening we had dinner with the A & K and their Russian co-workers M and T with whom we had such an interesting conversation that I want to write separately about that tomorrow–if that’s OK with you!

Read Full Post »

November 5 or 6 — I’m Not Quıte Sure!

Posted in Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 6, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Jetlag  —  The disorientation your body feels when the plane you are flying crosses multiple time zones, leaving your appetite and your sleeping pattern at home!  Generally speaking, jetlag just feels like you stayed up all night and have to work the next day–so it is survivable!  I’ve read that it takes one day to recover from jetlag for every hour adjustment that you need to make. 

So, for instance, Sherrylee and I left Thursday afternoon and flew about nine hours to Frankfurt, Germany.  Our bodies thought it was midnight when we landed, but the clocks all said 6am–so what should we do?

In the years we were taking groups to Europe every summer, we only had one answer:  you wake, eat, and sleep by the local clock from the minute you arrive.  We would land in Frankfurt at 6am, rent a car,  drive four hours to Hannover, spend the afternoon getting the team settled with their hosts, then we might even have the big information meeting that evening when we would meet the people we would be reading the Gospel of Luke with all summer.  In other words, no time for jetlag!

Now that we are traveling more independently, I have discovered a few alternative remedies for jetlag:

  • Caffeine and coffee will keep you awake at the right times–that’s easy–but what will help you sleep when it is dark? You could read old blogs that you have printed out and taken with you–but I use Melatonin myself. One gram for every hour that you need to recover–up to six.  Melatonin does not put you to sleep; it just helps reset your body clock a little faster.
  • Stay outdoors as much as possible!  Sunlight helps reset your body clock as well.
  • Plan for jetlag and compensate for it.  That’s what we always do now, if our schedule will allow it.  Yesterday in Germany, we went straight to a hotel, got a dayroom, and slept for six hours.  Then we got up and flew on to Turkey.  It made all the difference yesterday because our Turkey flight was delayed two hours and we did not arrive in Antalya until 3am–but because we had slept, it only felt like 9pm body time.  We slept then until 10 this morning and now I feel like we are almost turned around!!

Sometimes you just have to ignore jetlag–especially on short trips where you don’t have time to get turned around.  But that is just part of the adventure!!

This Turkish keyboard is driving me crazy! They use a dıfferent letter i and they put it in the same place as the i on an American keyboard.  If some letters look lıke symbols ınstead of letters, that is the reason.

Our hosts A & K  are here to visit, but I will tell you about them later.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts