Strange things still happening with Blogger. Not to be understood, just accepted.

Andrea left this morning. One down, four to go. Not really. But the past few days have been difficult. Our struggles with Andrea's doubts and uncertainties raised a lot of questions in my mind about reasons to go, about reasons not to go. About the whole idea of this. And my only real answer to any of those questions is that, quite simply, I was told to go. No matter how much I fought this and that and the whole denomination and organization, He told me to go. Don't question, just go. Strange. In some ways, it's much like my problems with Blogger-- not to be understood, just accepted.

Spoke too soon.

It's working again! Wonderful, wonderful. Must start blogging again soon. Tired of writing in telegraphic style STOP Must go to bed soon.

Still nothing. Looks like I'll have to haul my computer up to the library and email everyone from that. Such a drag. Spoiled by technology.

I've been trying to post for days now but it seems there's a strange error to do with the templates. Bloggers everywhere are pulling their hair out. If you're reading this, it means that at some point something worked, and I apologize for the delay. Not that it was my fault.

By the way, I do take suggestions of new quotes for the sidebar.

It's been... how many days now? As at conference, time here stretches and shrinks and wrinkles and sometimes seems to wink and disappear altogether.

I just finished spending some time trying to work out my written goals for my time here. I've never been one for writing out goals or strategies, so it's slow going-- fortunately none of it's due until next Friday. I hope. Anyhow, I left my room to come here for a few minutes and found half my building sitting in the great room playing cards and eating pizza. Irresistable. But I, alas, must go to bed early tonight. Breakfast is at 7:00 every morning (including tomorrow-- I have a seminar that starts at 8:00) and this business of going to bed at midnight, getting up at 6:30, and then spending the day in classes and meetings and studying and then exercise is simply not working for me.

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, happy, and wise.

Perhaps.

It's strange to be here and continue to have my expectations confounded again and again. (God's laughing at me right now.) I can feel a bit of my cynicism slipping away every day. I've plenty to spare, however; nothing to worry about there. And we haven't yet started any of the stuff the Dead Heretics so love to shred and examine and dissect every week-- though I hear that next week we have some classes on spiritual warfare.

It will be a good six weeks. I have no doubt of that now. Challenging and occasionally frustrating, but a worth-while experience. And certainly one that will help prepare me for what I will encounter later on.

Blessings.

I'm here in Virginia now and things are great. Right now I'm running on the high of loopy exhaustion and seeing these friends for the first time since the beginning of May. We'll see how the world looks at breakfast at 7:00 tomorrow morning. Given that I'm going to bed in the next half-hour, it shouldn't be too bad. I'm hopeful.

Strange thing-- the closer my departure for Virginia, the more calm I am. My worries and fears and doubts have mostly faded away, as if what was really bothering me was merely impatience at having to wait... and wonder... and wait. Sure, if I think about it, I can summon up the same troubled thoughts and waiting what-if's-- they're still there and still real. But somehow displaced by a new and pleasant readiness to go.

Perhaps too my week here in Houston has helped, has served as a buffer between what is behind me and what may be ahead. A week here has smudged the edges of the life I had-- not so much that I begin to forget, but only so that who I am has become just vague and indistinct enough to ease me into and through all the changes that I know must happen. Is this another reason I have chosen to do this? To remake myself? To start over? If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

It will be good to go. It will be good to see friends from conference and good to make new ones. Good to rise to the challenge of sorting through the morass of teachings and expectations and good to confront a bit more of whatever it is I believe. I wish, just a tiny bit, that it all lined up a little more.

What to do, what to do? I've lost all sense of what needs to be done. But why fret? In the end, I'll simply get on an airplane and go.

The cat disappeared today. I wondered if perhaps she had decided to fade away into her own oblivion rather than be left here with my family and the dog. But she was finally discovered in my mother's closet, where she'd been trapped for what we think was nearly eight hours. To describe her as "pissed off" would be an understatement.

I took the dog out for a walk/run tonight and found myself in the midst of a rather impressive fireworks display. Why fight the traffic downtown when you can sponge off the hundreds of dollars the neighbors spent on their own explosives? Except that the Doobie Brothers were playing downtown....

A year ago tonight I was sitting in an apartment in Vienna, where my Independence Day celebration consisted of a lone leftover Christmas sparkler and the first couple lines of the Star Spangled Banner, sung with an Austrian accent. The year before that I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan, watching the wild gyrations of my teammates as they scrambled around a rocky soccer field, waving tiny American flags and trying to light each on fire with sparklers. This year, a quiet evening in Houston. Next year... who knows? I doubt I'll be overtly celebrating American independence and freedom from my flat in north Africa. Not that I'm celebrating it from my parents' house in yuppy Suburbia right now.

Only a few more days until I fly to Virginia. The start of my "great adventure", as one of my friends called it. I'm calmer about this than I was a week or so ago. I'm moving to Africa! How could this fail to be at least somewhat a good thing? And I never thought this would be particularly easy. Especially the way I'm going. But it's what I want to do more than anything else right now. And, as has been suggested, I can always go lose myself in the desert.

After I created this blog I decided to wait until I left before I posted anymore. But recent events (or lack of events) and thoughts have caused me to reconsider. The limbo I exist in now is an important part of the whole experience of whatever-it-is-I'm-about-to-do. And this will be good practice of the necessary communication restraints which are about to be imposed on me. And not just the obvious ones. Theoretically, anyone can read this-- and that includes everyone I'll be working with. Must remember that.

limbo-- from the Latin limbus, border or edge; Roman Catholic theologians chose this word to refer to the border region of hell which holds the souls of those who got caught on a technicality, e.g., unbaptized infants. Interestingly (at least to me; probably not to most of you), the original form in English was limbus, but the extant form is limbo, actually the word in the ablative case (denotes, in this case, location), which makes sense-- how often is the word used other than in the phrase 'in limbo'? (I do miss the ablative case; Greek doesn't have it.) Today its common meaning is 'an indeterminate place or state'; it can also shade into 'a place of neglect', though I'd like to think that the latter doesn't apply here.

in limbo ----------------- With less than two weeks left in Norman, I'm trying to be here as much as possible. Obviously I'm already accomplishing the physical sense of this. In a mental, emotional, and spiritual sense, however, I'd have to say that I'm flickering in and out. Of course. I'm about to go do the most exciting and outrageous thing I've ever attempted. Anyone would be distracted by that. But there's more to my in-between-ness and uncertainty than only that. After everything I've struggled with and hopefully through during the past few years, have I chosen the right path? (At this point, one of the ever persistent voices beeps in: what is right? - a question that is a faint echo of the constant and occasionally distressing conundrum 'what is real?') By doing this, am I putting myself and others at risk? I'm not seeking an argument or a fight. But I seem to get them sometimes, whether I will or nay. I'm not looking for everyone to agree with me-- how boring that would be!-- but some people are. Agreement with their ideas, their interpretation, their customs, their rules. I know. I've talked with them, observed them, written about them.

So I'm scared. The fear waxes and wanes-- it wanes the most as I read and study in preparation to move. And then I can't wait to go, can't wait to meet people and talk with them and share and listen and, for a time, to whatever degree possible, live the dream of immersing myself in that culture. One so vastly different from my own. I want to strive to lose prejudices and assumptions and preconceptions, all so that I can catch a glimpse, however brief, of another way.

So where's the fear? I'm excited, right? I'm eager to go, I'm looking forward to the whole experience of working through culture shock and stress. Where's the 'but'?

There's always a 'but'. Deny it though we may try, there's always a 'but'. Thankfully, wonderously, we occasionally struggle long enough and hard enough to overcome the 'but'.
I believe I'm headed that way. The worst has already passed.

My 'but', my fear, is that in the end I won't be allowed to do the above. That those I am with, those who were overjoyed to hear that our city has both a Chili's and an Applebee's, will prove such a hindrance that my mindset will always be shoved back into an American box, no matter how I hope and fight to get out.

On the one hand (men), it's easy to look at this and say that I shouldn't allow others to effect me so strongly. Easy to say. But (de) I've been on teams before, and I know how loners are preached against, how independence is discouraged, and how extreme the consequences for not conforming to the team ethos can be.

Gentlemen, place your bets. How long before the powers that be send her back?

A catchprase I found the other day-- we as a nation, as a culture, as an economy, are engaged in the 'Coca Colanization' of the world. And we shall not rest until McDonald's and Britney have penetrated even the deepest, darkest jungles and hoisted banners on the highest, coldest mountain peaks. I DON'T WANT THAT. And I pray with all my heart, soul, and strength that I do not further such a cause.

My hope is that there's another 'but', another de. I chose this route, seized this opportunity, in order to effect a change, slight though it may be, from the inside. And so these fears are also an indication that I'm headed to a place where that should be possible. insha-allah-- God willing. And when all is said and done, I will be following my dream of living in another culture, even if I have to forge my own way out to it.

An adventure. This is an adventure. Opposition only makes it more so.

Read now or forever hold your peace. I may have to remove some of this in the future.

There is still much to be done. But this is a start.

Last week, as I was collecting still more email addresses, it occurred to me that perhaps a slightly better way to communicate with people during the next two years would be through blogging. I dislike mass emails, but the impersonal aspect inherent in blogging somehow doesn't bother me. My efforts here are, of course, all in the hope that someone will deign to check back every so often to see what's been posted. A big hope, I realize. We shall see, shan't we?

So if you've wandered by and decided to stop for a moment, salutations. I apologize for any ads desecrating this page. I'll see about getting rid of them once I know that someone besides myself is reading this. So to myself, happy blogging, and to the rest of you, happy reading.