Month: March 2009

Like… five minutes?!

There was a girl on one of my teams last summer (who shall remain anonymous in this post) who gave one of the most memorable quotes of all of Quito Quest 2008. We’ll call her “C” for this post (because everyone who can decipher that already knows who you are).

We were getting on our bus to head to the jungle, and she was already in the back seat, lying down, with a bandanna over her eyes. To be honest, it was about 7 am, and despite Jerry’s snide remarks about how early I got up all summer, I would have been enjoying myself that morning if I’d taken a leaf out of her book and tried to pass out too. But I was responsible and quietly counted everyone as they got on the bus and got ready to leave.

As some of the other students got on, they started talking about various things that had happened their first couple of days in Ecuador, and someone must have said something about prayer. Out of nowhere, “C” (still with a bandanna over her eyes and laying down) says “Guys, have you noticed how people in Ecuador pray for like five minutes?” For those of you who need a little context (that is, if you aren’t Methodist) she meant “five minutes” as an infinitely long time for a prayer to continue.

I’m not even sure what I said. But since “long prayers” and “Sarah Miller” went together in my head right that minute, it probably sounded at least a little more defensive than I meant for it to come out. “C” shot up out of her seat, letting her bandanna fall to her lap the second I opened my mouth. Apparently she didn’t realize that I’d been sitting right in front of her, I guess because I hadn’t actually spoken for the few minutes up to that point that I had been on the bus. Once she had realized I was present, she immediately began apologizing profusely. Everybody around us giggled slightly nervously, but I was laughing my head off at the mere idea that she thought I (extrovert that I am) would be offended.

That would probably still be hilarious if it happened to me now, eight and a half months later. I just find it hard to be real sometimes when I have to pray out loud, so I tend to condense and get it over with. Don’t get me wrong, in certain places and groups, it’s getting me to stop that’s the trick. But apparently I had gotten comfortable enough and made enough of an impact in our two debriefs up to that point that my spoken prayers were atypically long, at least in her mind.

So why in the world is this on my blog now, in March 2009? Because of Jason.

I went to Benjamin House tonight and after chapel, singing, and prayer requests, Jason prayed for us. First off all, I don’t know how the guy remembers every single prayer request that everyone says in there. Toni and I both do decently (she better than I) if either of us is the one to offer the closing prayer, but Jason never misses anything, and still doesn’t slow down, just throwing in praises, thanksgiving, and never worrying about how long he’s been going or anything else happening in the room (which could be quite a number of things at any given time).

We marvel consistently at how he remembers everything anyone says during prayer requests, and usually knows what anyone left out. But I also marvel at how heartfelt his prayers are, from his eagerness to be the one to pray each Monday night to the fact that he both goes to God for anything and gives God the glory for everything.

I can’t say I’ve never in my life been somewhere and didn’t think “will this guy ever stop?” when someone was praying (for Billy- the “Dear Lord” guy in Tyner). But I can say that if Jason prays for “five minutes,” I don’t mind.

The merits of small-town life

When I first moved to from Lawrenceville, GA (suburb of Atlanta and home of the Gwinett Braves) to Clarksdale, MS (suburb of nowhere, home of the Delta Blues Museum: what a level of excitement for a 12-year-old who’d never even heard of Lucille) I basically thought I’d descended to the first circle of pre-teen hell, mourning my separation from movie theaters and shopping malls.1

Although it was in my first small-town experience that I learned valuable lessons like what it feels like to be a minority, how to properly cross the street,2 and Native American pronunciation, it was not those things that I began to appreciate while I was there. Those were ones like Freedom, Self-confidence, and how to properly toilet-paper someone’s house.

On days when I had marching band practice, I would walk the two blocks from Oakhurst Junior High to the downtown storefront of the J.C. Penny Co, Inc. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I was a pre-teen and I was entrusted with transporting myself from one place to another. Plus, I got to leave school in a slightly cooler fashion than hopping in my mom’s minivan. It also necessitated the learning of the second of the aforementioned then-unappreciated lessons.

I’d walk past Marty’s barber shop and wave to the grandfatherly man, sometimes armed with scissors, sometimes fast asleep in his own chair. Once in a while this guy that worked for my dad and went to the high school that shared my junior high’s campus would pick me up on the bridge over the Sunflower River. I’d feel even cooler for the 45-second ride, listening to Eminem and wondering was ‘cid was.

Now granted, I was never a fan of Clarksdale (although I’m sure this had as much to do with when in my life I moved there as anything else), but that has made me appreciate Elizabeth City even more. I’m surprised to realize even as I write this that in 2000 (the year I moved from the Delta to the Albemarle) that Elizabeth City had 3,000 less people than my former town of residence. But it had a movie theater with two screens and a shopping mall, and that was quite enough for me.

But it retained the small-town feel. I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class, and a good chunk of my entire high school. And although I sometimes wish I’d learned to drive in a bigger place so that I’d be a more aggressive driver, I like the fact that rolling down Southern Avenue, Ehringhaus Street, Halstead Boulevard, or even Highway 17, I can’t help but pass someone I know. In one single day last week, I saw, waved to, or phoned after passing Jerry, Billy, Linda, Ginny, Madeline, two different Mrs. Julies, and my mom, and all I did was go from home to the bank.

Multiply that effect at least by two if I so much as take a walk down Water or Main Street. Dozens of people tell me the next day that they saw me from their car or office or Rachel’s Place (where Johnny still knows what to bring me for breakfast without so much as a word).

And forget the fact that people know me. I (try not to, but) can drop my dad’s name anywhere in Pasquotank County and people who don’t know me instantly love me because they love him and because they know who he is.4 Some people wouldn’t appreciate that, but in my experience, it’s not bad for a cop, FedEx driver, or random elderly lady at somebody else’s church to say “Hey, I know someone named ‘Peck’…”

Growing up in a small town tends to serve you well other places in the world, too. Add in being southern, and stopping on the sidewalk to chat with someone about their family, despite being 20 minutes late and still 4 blocks away doesn’t seem all that foreign, even on another continent. Living in a big city with easily defined neighborhoods isn’t a big adjustment either when you treat the couple square miles around you like a small town that’s just really close to all the other small towns around you.

I tend to think that personal relationships of all kinds benefit from their being born in a small town. Seeing the same people everywhere has pros and cons, but makes for closer relationships with those people. And that doesn’t necessarily impede branching out into new friendships either. I’m used to always being able to strike up a conversation with anyone. This is because I can invariably ask “who’s that” and get anyone’s life story around a place like this. Though I don’t always do that (probably because I know I always can later), it makes for a habit of just being friendly.

Something I learned in another big town was that no matter where you are, you’re going to say “there’s nothing to do in this place,”5 but the fact that I have said that in a city with 10 times the population and 14 times the area of this one sort of takes the sting away from the statement, and negates really the only disadvantage I see to being outside what we sometimes so wistfully think of here as “civilization.”

If the above paragraph sentence is any indication, then maybe going to school here had its effects on me. And I certainly know more country music than I’d care to know and more obscure history than I’d care to admit because of my two small-town stints. But I like the fact that the whole town can be like Cheers sometimes, that six days a week anyone who knows me knows where to find me, and that a movie ticket is cheaper here than it is in a developing nation (despite the need for a baseball cap).6

1Lydia is scoffing at this notion as she reads this post, but shopping malls do include book stores.
2Though I’d learned this already at a much earlier age, this was first of three times I would re-learn this important skill thanks to both witnessing someone being hit by a car and being (somewhat) hit by a car myself in the vicinity of Oakhurst Junior High.
3With, at the time, some semblance of a bookstore.
4Though I tend to have to say “I know… I look like my mom,” before they believe me.
5That’s never true if there are people around.
6Oh yeah, and discovering freedom, tight friendships, and the subtleties of race, street-crossing, and politics in a small place aren’t so bad either.

Afternoon at CFC

Colin has been interested in going to the Cooking For Christ ministry at our church for several weeks now. It’s something Julie has organized to take dinner to the homeless each week. Based out of our church, the volunteers meet up at First UMC each Monday to put together sandwiches and pack up fruit and crackers and bakery bread and take it over to the old, unused Elizabeth City Middle School building to distribute to people who need it and fellowship with them.

I guess Colin had talked to Julie about it and decided to go yesterday to help out, and asked if I wanted to go. Now, it’s not that I didn’t want to go, and certainly not that I didn’t want to help. But I was really tired, and already have one of my favorite ministries on Monday nights, and cooking has always been Colin’s thing, not mine (though I’m good at it when I want to be). I just didn’t think I’d be useful.

One skill I’d forgotten about, though, is putting together sandwiches. Holy cow. If you ever need mass amounts of sandwiches put together, I’m your guy. Sarah and I made so many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, just jelly sandwiches, ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, Nutella sandwiches, and cheese sandwiches over the summer that we eventually even had a system to make and distribute them to 40+ people on a bumpy bus in just a few short minutes.

Turns out I got to put it to use. I really only decided to go so that Colin would have a buddy. But I realized that I fit in really well at new (for me) ministry sites (thanks, Cameron) and I know how to make myself useful and jump right in and both get a job done. but to serve the real purpose and just love people along the way. Some of my favorite people were at the church, or got there soon after we arrived, and a lot more who I think will be some of my favorite people soon were waiting for us at ECMS.

It’s such an easy thing to distribute food to people just one day a week. But what I love is that the group who has already been going really knows most of the people that are there. There’s another really similar ministry to CFC in town, but the more I hear about it, even from the people who started it, the more I feel like they are helping people at arm’s length. But Julie pulled up and had hugged and kissed  the first three people she saw. Most times it’s not that sandwich that’s the tool for ministry.

Ad follow-up

In case you’re reading somewhere other than dp.n, this post references this.

Total endoresment here. FedEx. Best commercial ever. They played it in fast-forward and said (and I’m paraphrasing just slighty) “Instead of our commercial, get back to your show, your time is valuable.” Waaaay better than the repetative vacuum thing. Thanks, FedEx.

Ad variety… add variety

My return to daily writing is going to be celebrated by a rant. And by two observations. Because one forces me to write in too much detail for me to do it at odd hours of the night, and because I just like hanging a Louie halfway through.

Because I like putting off other things, and because I’m totally addicted, I’ve been watching episodes of House online. I haven’t decided if I’m going endorse my (legal) viewing site yet, but I’ll de-endorse its advertising. Every time there would be a commercial break on TV, one commercial comes on. The same commercial.

After the third time I watched the Hoover Platinum Collection commercial, I was pretty tired of it. By the sixth or seventh, I was wondering what exactly it is about House that makes advertising execs think the people watching it want to buy a vacuum. Granted, I began watching House because my mom was always watching it, and she’s a lot more likely to buy a vacuum than I am, evidenced both by the fact that she owns multiple vacuums and that her presence or my then-girlfriend’s was the only thing that got me or Anthony to vacuum our room in Greensboro.

In fact, not only do I spend two hours watching House most weeknights (an amount of time I haven’t spent in front of the TV in a looong time), I’m watching it on the internet. When the heck am I going to vacuum? I just don’t think I’m their target audience.

Point number two: I was annoyed enough by and inattentive enough to the commercial that I will obviously remember it. But even aside from the fact that I act on that by writing a silly blog post about it, if my related actions were (like most people’s would be) confined to my buying habits, annoyance isn’t the emotion I’d be going for when selling a product. So why advertising execs think that much repetition is a good idea.

I truly believe that free (and even cheap) web hosting would have died out a long time ago if it hadn’t been for super-heavy initial investment by people who thought the related advertising would take off. Even half the free web hosting sites don’t have banners anymore, because nobody wants to bother with worthless website advertising. Except for that same whole investment phenomenon, I’d worry that internet TV would go the same way, as it’s funded by commercials the same way real TV is.

My analysis, of course, hinges on the fact that I’m mostly immune to advertising anyway. I don’t shop, I don’t pay attention to commercials unless they are for a product I had not previously known existed (the one and only case in which I believe advertising effects me and accomplishes its goal) or for a product which I already know, love, and regularly support in a monetary or temporal fashion, and in which case the advertising is wasted. Either way, I’m both annoyed at repetition and very glad that the advertising world just hasn’t figured out how to really work their magic online (maybe those ads are better than I give them credit for, but placement is still all wrong, whether this blogger is giving them more coverage or not). It means I’ll be watching House from my computer for a long time.

Unbelievably Competative

I am unbelievably competative. I wrote a grand total of four posts on my blog for the entire month of February. I’ve put up four posts in one day before, and it took me an entire (albiet generally gloomy) month to match that in the most recent division of time for which statistics are available.

But now Mike has his blog working.

Together, we have run two web sites at varying levels of success, readership, and profit, but at equal levels of snobbery, mockery, sarcasm, humor, web savvy, wit, charm, and humility (high, higher, higher than you think, higher than we thought, lower than you tink, immeasurable, undeniable, and none, respectively). Seperately, we’ve run such a number of others that it would not increase even my self-admitted humility rating to take credit for it (I have a dozen at first mental count).

Certainly being in a foreign country and cataloging your experiences is innately more interesting than the musings that have been gracing the servers of dp.n of late. I would know, on both counts. But what I’ve learned from the same situation is that while everyday experiences are superficially much more exciting from the perspective of here, and easy to notice from the perspective of there, thery’re still “everyday experiences.” Everyday common, but every day common as well.

That said, expect to see more of me in March. Game on.

Affirmative or Otherwise

I had a series of seemingly unrelated revelations today.

The first came as I stopped by First Baptist to pick up my computer. There were some people in the office, so I poked my head in to say hello. Before any other conversation could emerge, one of them asked “Are you leaving the country any time soon?”

I’ve gotten used to that question. But I realized this afternoon how odd it is. None of the three people I was talking to really had any clue that I’m heading back to Ecuador. I haven’t been around First Baptist enough for anyone outside of Discussion Group to really ask me about it, so it wasn’t a loaded question. If it wasn’t a loaded question, why was there a question at all? Which brings me to another question, how is it that I’ve become used to that question? Obviously other people have been asking me that same thing, and while people at church and La Casa ask when I’m leaving, it’s not as if there is a shortage of other interested parties in general.

Tons of people I know have gone on “mission trips”, plenty of them to foreign countries, and all pretty much overflowing with excitement and stories and faith when they returned. But even out of the specific people that I think of, I just don’t seem to have any knowledge of them being bombarded with questions about returning to the mission field (H & D, I’m simply ignoring you in that statistic because either of you could make the same point I’m going for here).

Another such thought came tonight as I gave my Ecuador presentation to the United Methodist Women of Newland UMC. It’s always interesting to see what people comment on at the end or ask questions about during the presentation. I like to see who absorbed what I was saying, or at least what I was trying to say. Or even who got something else totally meaningful and totally related out of it even if it wasn’t what I was intending.

The group was awesome, and I think really understood the value of relational ministry. And I always expect someone to say “I couldn’t drink river water in the jungle,” or “I couldn’t eat guinea pig,” (you would if you were unspokenly competeing with four 14-year-old girls who had no problem with cuy). It’s just that I tend to expect people to eventually laugh and say “Well, I would if I had to,” or “God would pull me through.” I’m surprised at how adamantly people are opposed to doing anything out of the ordinary, even at the risk of missing out on serving the Lord, or having the time of your life mud wrestling in the jungle, or discovering you actually enjoy guinea pig. Or serving the Lord. Did I mention that one?

Now I certainly don’t mean to say I’ve got the corner on the market on how to serve God. If everyone was called to serve God in Ecuador, it would be a really crowded 98,985 square miles of earth. It just makes me appreciate my ability to live without Fudge Rounds and an Xbox. It also reminds me for those times I do spend living in a third world country how lucky I am to have toilet paper.

But ultimately it just reinforces in me both the notion that ministry involves a Call, and the idea that a Call implies a response, whether it be affirmative or otherwise.