jamie's wanderings

This is from Henri Nouwen's The Road to Daybreak: When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

How do you condense a whole month into a few words? Especially a month as I've just had with so many details that swim about in your head, it makes it dizzy just to wake up in the morning? The other side of pain, a new body, that's what Penny Leonhard has experienced this month, and I wish I could sit down and have a cup of tea with her, so that she could tell me what its like. What is it like to have no more pain and suffering, no more tears and joyful reunions with loved ones? What is it like to be removed from time and space, and see Him seated with us? What is it like to look into His eyes and understand it was ALL worth it? But, this lifetime is characterized by the wait, and if you ever feel that sense of "are we there yet?" its because that's what part of our lifetime entails. My friends David and Kate Sunday are going through a time of waiting, as they waited first to see what Kate was sick with, then what type of cancer she had, and finally, they wait to ...

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.” Washington Irving 2009, a year of tears. I've been looking for a title for a while, and I think I finally came up with it. Andrew and I have both faced a lot of grief. Grief over situations like a friend's divorce. Grief over betrayal, deceit and sad situations. And finally, grief of watching Andrew's mother slowly fade away. As the New Year rang in last night, I sat at a table with some of my dearest friends and family here in Granada. Together, we all felt the heaviness of the last year, and breathed a few prayers of hope for the New Year. Some of my hope came back when one friend blessed the city of Granada, and asked God to continue to bring His blessing. You could feel again, what I have felt often this year, the spiritual tension, the spiritual battle for Granada. Tomo...

I found this on a friend's Facebook quote section. I feel this way as we rapidly approach 2010. "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others" ~Marianne Williamson

7 “Write this letter to the angel of the church in Philadelphia. This is the message from the one who is holy and true, the one who has the key of David. What he opens, no one can close; and what he closes, no one can open:[c] 8 “I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close. You have little strength, yet you obeyed my word and did not deny me." Revelation 3:7-8 Last night at prayer meeting Miguel read these 2 verses.He said he'd been writing an article for the denom magazine, and felt like these words are for the church in Spain. He talked about He Who opens doors, and how we have to walk through them. Doors in Spain are fascinating objects. Some are ugly beyond all recognition, and others are made of beautiful pine wood, stained to perfection. I love walking through the old streets of Granada, and wondering what goes on behind all the doors I walk past. But this verse struck me even more as Andrew and I have and impor...

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of "no answer." It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent gaze. As though he shook his head, like, "Peace, child, you don't understand." - CS Lewis

Preach the Gospel, use words when necessary. Today was one of those days. Today, Andrew and I and the pastor and his wife, a couple of the deacons and two other men from our church attended a funeral. Today, we preached the gospel, using words when needed. Santa Fe, is the original Santa Fe for which all other cities called thusly are named for. It is a small village about 4 miles outside of Granada. It was the original encampment of the Catholic Kings, Isabel and Fernindad, when they took Granada from the Moslems. There is no evangelical church there. Many have tried and all except for the gypsies (who are considered an ethnic group outside of Spanish culture) have failed. But God still wants Santa Fe. So, once upon a time, oh, let’s say a couple of decades ago, a Christian who lived in Santa Fe began to witness. He witnessed as much as he could, to one man in particular, Antonio. Antonio resisted for years. The Christian died, and Antonio kept living. Until, one day this summer, Ant...

African Angels I've been convinced for a lot of my life that my angel is African. I have a couple of stories that have happened to me this last month that has convinced me even more. Andrew left Spain on May 1st to head back to the US. I stayed back to finish out one more week of work, pay the bills, wrap up the the last minute details. The wednesday before I was supposed to leave, I went to the gym to try and work out some last minute stress. My gym is a rather Rocky Balboa type gym, and we tend to have Africans that come to work out, but they usually keep to themselves, or talk to the guys and not usually me. I felt like doing weights and I walked over to the lat pull down machine. I was making the weights lighter, when this ginormous African, leaned over and said, "Don't do that, you are a strong woman." I blinked, and obeyed, and he was right. I could do it. He talked with me briefly, and then went away. Strangely enough, he had two small boys with him. Most of th...

A continuation from my previous posts..... I've been studying this week and past weekend for the biblical basis for the book I've started work on. I've begun with the intro, and a chapter on suffering, pain and worship. As I was thinking about worship in the midst of suffering, an old song came to mind that states, "put on the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness..." and so I decided to search the Scriptures for the phrase, Garment of Praise. Up popped Isaiah 61, and I read that glorious chapter in its context. biblereference.com gave me an interesting cross reference, Habakkuk 3, end of the chapter. So I read that whole chapter and later the whole book, which is just three chapters. The gist of Hab. goes something like this. Hab. is disturbed at the sinful nation of Israel and asks God to do something about it. God lets him know, I am doing something about it, I'm sending the Babylonians. At first Hab. gets rather disturbs and dialogues a little more...

It looks like my two previous blogs repeat each other. Even though they do, its what I've clung to the last week. Since we made the decison to stay longer, its been a roller coaster. Read on...

This week the world turned upside down, with the news that my mother in law has cancer, again. I won’t go into details, but its grim. And so the questions we all ask roll through our minds. Why? To what end? The accusations and anger boils as we say to ourselves, hasn’t she given enough of her herself for the kingdom? Isn’t 25 years in the bush in Africa enough? Can’t she find some grace, some mercy in it all? WHERE IS THE JUSTICE? Where is the healing? I have taken rest in an unusual passage. A friend pointed me to it this summer. For those of you rusty in your Old Testament history, Elisha has some friends. This childless couple builds him an extra room and he camps out there, perhaps for a long period of time. He wants to bless them, he promises a son, unasked. This woman has the son, and one day he dies. Calmly, she saddles her donkey and goes into town. As Elisha sees her, he send out his servant to discover what’s wrong. And all the woman says to the servants penetrating question...

We had to make one of the most difficult decisions we've had this year, do we stay or do we go? Our tickets back to Spain were orginally scheduled for August 19th, this past Tuesday. Last week realized slowly that we were still 885 dollars undersupported, that we needed more support, and that we couldn't do it in just a weeks time. I was exhausted beyound all recognition. I had been traveling every week for 7 weeks, living out of a suitcase. I have been on 8 plane flights this summer, driven over 39 hours on road trips and been in 8 states. I've slept in too many beds and woken up at least one night wondering where in the heck I was. It was so hard as a result to process through all the facts and make a logical decision. Clouding my judgement was the fact that I just wanted to go home and sleep in my own bed before things got insanely busy back in Spain. I love what I do. I love living in Spain, speaking Spanish, leading worship, teaching English, translating songs, writing...

So, I'm back on the blogging board...back to some demand. The reason the blog has remained fairly empty is that I am writing, just not on my blog. I've reverted back to my college days and gotten an old fashioned 50 cent journal from Walmart and I'm writing my book in it. Its a modest, red, cardboard covered journal that really did cost only 50 cents. It somehow been very inspiring to pick up pen and use paper for the first time in a very long time. I've had a great time laying out the book and now slowly working out it. I'm also finding airplanes to be a great source of inspiration. So, I'll try to put some excerpts up later this week. I"ve got a ton to do...so I'll my best.

Andrew wrote this today, and I thought I'd post it. Dear Friends and Family, Hi from Chicago! After a whirlwind trip through Atlanta, Mississippi, Kentucky and Houston, Texas, we are back in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. We've spoken in churches, met with financial partners, been to a wedding, a family reunion and have seen God provide for us all the way. In Chicago, a wonderful couple from Naperville EV Free Church has given us their basement apartment to use for as long as we need it. Another couple have loaned us their car while we're here too. A business man from Houston pledged to financially partner with us and then introduced us to a few of his friends and business partners! Some of them have also decided to partner with us! What a blessing! When we first returned to the States in July, we had been under-supported by $1300 per month for the previous eight months. We even had to borrow from our mission's emergency fund to meet our needs. Since we've been b...

mercy , charity , clemency , grace , leniency mean a disposition to show kindness or compassion. mercy implies compassion that forbears punishing even when justice demands it mercy of the court>. This is part of the formal definition from Webster's dictionary. I've been thinking about some terms that we throw around easily as human beings, and we hold to them certain connotations that aren't always included in Webster's dictionary. But being the linguist I am, I wanted to go back and look at a few terms. These two definitions struck me as interesting, especially since words like mercy, justice and peace have dominated some conversations I've had lately. Justice 1 a : the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments b : judge c : the administration of law ; especially : the establishment or determination of rights according to the rul...

I've been meaning to sit and write for a long time, but it hasn't worked out with this crazy time schedule I've been keeping. So many things to blog about, but I'm going to take it one subject at a time. Last Saturday, one of our American students was baptized in the Med. If you wanna see pictures, Andrew's got them posted to his Facebook profile. I love the picture he has of Ben coming up out of the ocean. Several months ago, Ben came over to have lunch with Andrew and I and told us this was the first semester he'd had time to properly read his Bible. He'd realized as he read his Gospels that Jesus wanted us to obey Him by being baptized. We talked with him a bit, and he told us that as an infant he had been baptized. However, as he read the gospels, he saw baptism as a decision he needed to make, that He personally needed to proclaim to the world the work that Jesus had done in his life. And so, we rejoiced last Sat. We sang, we heard testimonies of our s...

Worship should happen not only when we are happy, or sad, or rejoicing, or crying, but it should also happen when we don't feel like it. I have a friend preaching tomorrow, Pentecost Sunday. Tomorrow, I'm leading worship in our church. Both of us have had long weeks, with lots of problems. Frankly, I don't know if I'm up for leading worship, and I imagine he feels stressed and worried about preaching. However, we weren't called to minister/worship/preach/witness when we feel good. In fact, Paul discusses this in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, and this has been my mediation today. Its too long to quote as a whole, but these are my words of comfort this afternoon. "BUT we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the d...

As you can tell, its been a busy spring. I've scarcely had a moment to write, even though I've had more than my fair share of moments to ponder different things and see God working in dry land. When I went to Moody, personal evangelism was a favorite class, but not a favorite pastime. I had this really incredibly passionate proff, Dr. McDuffee, and he spoke a lot about sharing the gospel. I don't remember much he said, but I do remember his passion, and I like him for it, even though I could barely understand why he had such passion. He would even go out on the streets of Chicago and preach. I admired him for his guts, but still thought he was pretty nuts. 13 years later and I'm here in Southern Spain, and I think I've gone as nuts as he was and probably still is. How did I get from point A to point B? Frankly, it all started in Africa, when Andrew and I trucked over the Uganda to do a project for ACTION. We ended up in the north, in the worst part of the world I...

I'm a linguist. Most of my work on a daily basis centers around words, now in two languages. I teach English, I translate songs, I sing...its all based on words. I'm the greatest critic of songs....secular and sacred. I demand perfection and highest regard for both types. I'm a critic of the cliche, the over used, the sadly sung, whether about love or God. So, when I heard the simple song...You never fail me...I was the critic, and didn't really like it. It was too simplistic, too...well, not good enough for this linguist. However, today, I've changed my mind. Worrying like I tend to about money, earthly things, a friend told me, "God won't fail you"....and suddenly, I understood the song. It says, You never fail me, You never fail me Lord You never fail me Lord You are good, always. God's not going to fail me. I know that...but sometimes I need to sing this song to remind myself of that...and to show the Lord that I trust him. He's not going t...

Back by popluar demand...my blog has been on hiatus for the last couple of months as I've been swamped learning how to teach English as a second language. I've enjoyed it immensely, its facinating to watch people of all ages as they struggle to obtain the World Language...yes yes, I know, many people argue that its rather Mandarin as more people may speak that then English, but English is still the way business is conducted in most of the world. I have a class of four year olds, hysterical to watch their brains act like sponges as they try to absorb the concept that their teacher really does know how to talk. On more than one occasion, I've watched them turn to each other and say, "She doesn't know how to talk!" I do have to speak Spanish to them on occasion, but they have learned commands like "Sit Down" "Let's Sing" and "Close the Door". My teenagers are teenagers, acting like I've pulled all their teeth out, put them al...