Wilderness Wonderings...

http://alaivani.com/Default.aspx?tabid=56&EntryID=456 jon

So, I was born in south Alabama...moved to Guyana for four years, then to Grenada for eight years...and 1982 rolled around and we moved to the US. The plan was for me to do a year or two of high school to prepare me for American university, and then for Mom and Dad to go back to the mission field where they would open a new work on the island of St. Lucia. Life does always go as we plan. We had arrived in Atlanta, Ga, where the Briarlake Baptist Church had allowed us to live in their mission house. The location was great--across the street from the church, a few blocks from Lakeside High School . Dad was to take a position at the Georgia Baptist Convention center in their annuity department...and Mom was going to just go on being Mom. Shortly after we arrived, I even landed my first job...at the church...working on the grounds crew. Since the church was big--taking an entire block--there were grounds enough to care for! One of the things that the then- Foriegn Mission Board requ...

As I thought about life in G’da ( Grenada ) today after writing this morning, many more memories came to mind that I want to put on ‘paper’: Walking the beach below the Cooke-Yarborough house, along Mosquito Bay; the swing from the tree behind the house that went out so high over the hill-side; the shack-shack tree in front of our house where I would sit in the breeze for hours; throwing darts and playing ping-pong for hours in the garage…with Andrew Minors, Peter Reeves, Gregor Phillips, Jackie Evans and more; making black-coral jewelry; ‘hunting’ with our modified air-rifles—shooting the few hapless doves…and then actually cleaning, cooking and eating them; catching fish for weeks on end…and finally three of us (Andrew M, Jeph and me) frying 67 fish and eating them all (well, some scraps we threw to our cat, Charlie); making kites; hearing “Oh What a Night” day after day on the Minor’s ‘new’ reel-to-reel player…at full-volume; finding the old single-car barge that washed up after a s...

So, we finished up four years in Guyana, South America—my “first” second culture.  Now, just so you understand the TCK, we’re call “third culture” kids because our first culture (birth or home culture) mixes with our second culture to produce some weird concoction that is now a “third” culture.  Follow that?  Just wait—it gets even more complicated for me! Guyana—the only English-speaking country in South America, a country with large Muslim, Hindu and Christian populations, a large land area with a small population (less than a million!), a country both modern and stone-age.  It was a great place to spend my childhood—I was largely oblivious to whatever dangers, but old enough to enjoy a rather care-free life. Then, at the end of 1973, since the Guyanese gov’t refused to renew visas for missionaries, my parents had to turn elsewhere…and it wasn’t too far away.  After a year-and-a-half furlough in North Carolina for Dad to do masters degree no.2, we moved to...

While I am entering that category of folks that occupy middle- to old-age, what I discuss here is for all ages.  Eating well:  This refers to two aspects of eating.  First, as is obvious to most people with a little education, WHAT we eat is important.  For a healthy life, we need a balance of fruit, vegetables, grains…and a good source of protein.  Some time back, I published a list of the best fruits and veggies one can eat.  The best grains are whole grains, high in fibre—whole-grain rice, whole wheat, oats, quinoa, etc.  But, it’s as important HOW we eat.  If we rush through a meal, it affects our digestion—a fancy word for how we ‘process, absorb and make useful’ our food.  Most people think that digestion begins when the food hits the stomach, but this is not so.  Digestion begins when we put the food in our mouths.  The saliva in the mouth begins to infuse the food with enzymes that begin the digestion process—what we do w...

Just another Saturday morning…nothing of note, nothing special.  The sun shines brightly over Monterrey…but then, it shines brightly almost every day.  And, according to the weather forecast, we’re in for a warm one—mid-90’s. This morning, I make pancakes for my son and me—some sort of multi-grain concoction that I’ve put together.  And, I made some syrup as well…home-made, with maple flavoring.  The butter is getting soft.  In just a bit, I’ll go start putting it all together so Andrew and I can enjoy a hearty breakfast. As I look out over the mountains south of our city—the sparse, rugged mountains, I long to escape the people, the sounds, the press of the city.  Sharing this small bit of earth with some 5,000,000 others gets a sort of tedious at times…and I hear the vast emptiness of desert, forest, wasteland calling to me, asking me to step away for a while. I believe it’s not by chance that Jesus, Moses, Abraham, John the Baptizer…even Paul…had s...

One of my favorite authors is the Catholic priest, Henry J. M. Nouwen…and one of my favorite books by him is The Genesee Diary .  While there are many really good lines and impacting passages in this book, one paragraph in particular managed to force me to see myself—it was a mirror for me to see my own life: “Now I see that I was all mixed up, that I had fragmented my life into many sections that did not really form a unity.  The question is not, ‘Do I have time to prepare?’ but, ‘Do I live in a state of preparedness?’  When God is my only concern, when God is the center of my interests, when all my prayers, my reading, my studying, my speaking, and writing serve only to know God better and to make him known better, then there is no basis for anxiety or stage fright.  Then I can live in such a state of preparedness and trust that speaking from the heart is also speaking to the heart.  My fears and my resulting fatigue over the last three years might well be d...