i'm brazil bound. finally. after months of preparation and excitement and work and not nearly enough prayer or study, i am at the airport...waiting on the first of 3 legs of airline flights.

i'm flying from LR to Hotlanta, Hotlanta to Sao Paulo, and Sao Paulo to salvador.

hopefully all the luggage will make it... along with everything else that is supposed to arrive (me).

i'll post pictures, hopefully, very soon.

{thanks to j.b. for posting this on his blog.}

An Excerpt from "Through Painted Deserts"

The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way.  All my life I have been changing.  I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers.  I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money.  I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change.  Everbody has to change, or they expire.  Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons. 

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die.  I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.  Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning.  And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.  Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours.  Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was.  This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy.  I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means.  Did You really do all of this to dazzle us?  Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom?  God forbid Your glory would be our distraction.  And God forbid we would ignore Your glory...

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page.  It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you.  It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence.  And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were....and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. 

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right.  You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up.  You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something  beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play.  My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God.  We get one story, you and I, and one story alone.  God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution.  It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

It might be time for you to go.  It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit.  It is a beautiful word, isn't it?  So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be.  And you will not be alone.  You have never been alone.  Don't worry.  Everything will still be here when you get back.  It is you who will have changed.

i've also come to discover that some people who are "in" church ministry are not there for the right reasons, unfortunately.

romans 16.

 17-18One final word of counsel, friends. Keep a sharp eye out for those who take bits and pieces of the teaching that you learned and then use them to make trouble. Give these people a wide berth. They have no intention of living for our Master Christ. They're only in this for what they can get out of it, and aren't above using pious sweet talk to dupe unsuspecting innocents.

 19-20And so while there has never been any question about your honesty in these matters—I couldn't be more proud of you!—I want you also to be smart, making sure every "good" thing is the real thing. Don't be gullible in regard to smooth-talking evil. Stay alert like this, and before you know it the God of peace will come down on Satan with both feet, stomping him into the dirt. Enjoy the best of Jesus!