Month: May 2009

Lazy Sunday

This morning I got to sleep in. Usually having to be at church at 8:00am (though I almost never actually make that), I couldn’t believe it last night when we were told to meet for church at 10:30. Since I crashed only a very short time after posting my blog last night, I still got out of bed at around 7:15, but it was really nice to sit around and read and have breakfast and not have to run out the door immediately.

So the four single MITs, the Ross family (dad Nate and five kids are present so far), and the Mosey family (Ted, Caroline and 1-year-old son Jude) were taken to church by Rich and Zo Becker, two full-timers here at the EMC. And we went to church at Willow Creek.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Willow Creek Community Church is a megachurch just outside Chicago, and about twenty minutes from here in Elgin. It averages 23,000 attendees in a weekend (three services) and the main auditorium holds 7,200 people- the largest theatre in the United States.

Definitely a new experience for me. We came in through the food court (yes, the food court) and found the “Sunday School” classes for the Ross kids and the nursery for Jude (who wasn’t just signed in, but given a computer-generated barcode sticker on his back) and headed for the auditorium, past the waterfall and the escalators. The auditorium has two 14×24-foot LCD screens (I had to look up the dimensions) and a huge stage, aside from just the daunting amount of seating (which was so full I thought Rich would never find a place for us to all sit together).

Typical of a lot of super-contemporary and non-denominational churches, the service was basically music right at the beginning, announcements, and then a message. Although of experienced the lack of liturgy before, it still caught me off guard that there was absolutely no theological context given to the offering (which I noticed on my own) and a little disconcerting to realize there’s not a cross in the building (a fact which I knew beforehand, but was careful to look and confirm). For a congregation whose goal is to reach the unchurched, I understand the reasons behind these (which for the sake of brevity I won’t discuss here), and though I don’t like tradition for the sake of tradition and at the cost of sincerity, I (coming from a very traditional church background) tend to be observant of and opposed to incidents of the Church taking direction from the world.

Not that the service was in any way not great. In fact, it was a very positive worship experience for me when I switched myself from “analytical” mode to “God” mode. The music was both powerful and good, and the message was really Scripturally rooted. In fact, the message was almost entirely Scripture, with the focus being on internalizing Scripture for strength in everyday life (something that’s not necessarily one of my strong points, and so was really good to hear).

After the service, we reunited the group in the food court and had lunch together. It was really nice getting to hang out some more and getting a chance to talk to some of the people like the Moseys who I had only briefly been introduced to before. As Caroline observed, it’s funny how roundabout everyone’s story is of how the ended up with International Teams. Before she said that, I had felt like I was the only one (I mean, I got here because I interned last year because Deborah planted the idea in my head when I went on a team the year before, to which I was invited because I’d been on a team with Julie, who had gone the year before with team members who she’d grown up with, who were connected through the Episcopal Church through Cameron, who had also met Carrie years before at camp and who has her own totally roundabout way of ending up a missionary)1.

This afternoon was grocery shopping. Two unpicky twenty-something guys with an envelope of money in a grocery store. We came back with a lot of pizza.

Seriously though, I will be making enchiladas at some point this week, so that should be an adventure both in cooking and blogging.

After that was more down-time. Having learned in Quito not to sit around the house and wait for something to happen (because you end up sitting around the house a lot that way),2 we headed downstairs to see if anyone was in the lounge. Although it turned out to be locked at the time, we eventually wound up jumping on the opportunity to play basketball and football with the Ross kids, and within thirty minutes half the people living here this week were outside playing, talking and hanging out with us.

Another funny realization (a continual one, really) is the connections between people. It was amazing to me how many familiar names were dropped this afternoon (for example: Matt, Cameron, Lane, Danielle, Teddy, Nicole, Miguel, Bob, Phil and Howie just out of one conversation on the sidewalk). To think of all the places that all of these people have crossed paths, and how much more of that there is because of the twelve people here this week (two years from now some of these people will be saying in Ecuador “yeah, I was in training with Danny Peck.” It blows my mind).

Tomorrow class actually begins with Devotions, The Word of God, ITeams Vision and Values, orientations to Mobilization and to Facilities, and presenting testimonies. Wow.

1What a parenthetical phrase!
2Even if it does produce really great blogs.

First Day in Elgin

Today has been the official first day of my training with International Teams. I got up early this morning (3:30am Eastern, which was 2:30am here in Illinois) to drive to Richmond, VA and flew from there to Chicago. My flight itself was uneventful, and when I rolled off and walked downstairs, my luggage came around the turn on the baggage claim belt just as I arrived. I didn’t even have to stop moving to pick it up and keep walking. I did get stuck in an elevator, but that slight trauma was over quickly, and a few phone calls later I was on a bus to Elgin, where I was met by Stacy who drove me back to the office, a.k.a. IT’s Elgin Ministry Center.

I got a brief tour and discovered I was the first one of the MITs to arrive (that never happens). It was nice, though, to get settled in here before other people started showing up, especially with my total lack of sleep up to that point. The EMC serves as IT’s office as well as its training facility and residences for missionaries headed to the field. Upstairs are (really nice) apartments, each with a living/dining area, kitchen, laundry room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a porch/balcony. I’ll be living this week with two other guys, one of whom is here already and who will be doing the same training module as me.

Dinner was (roughly) at 5:30 and it was the first time we all got together and got to meet everyone. There is a total of one married couple here without their kids, three married couples with at least one kid, two single girls and two single guys. Most everyone else will be serving long-term, though both of the other single interns are headed to Ecuador as well (John Andrew to Guayaquil and Kelsey to Quito as well). I’m really looking forward to continuing to get to know everyone, and excited to know that there are a couple of people who I will get to see again in August.

The rest of the night was a more in-depth tour of the EMC facilities, some introductory things, and just hanging out getting to know the rest of the staff and MITs. After dinner and our tour, we were officially finished for the night and headed back upstairs. It was about 8 and still light and really nice outside, so John Andrew and I decided to go find the bike/walking path and scope it out. That gave us a chance to hang out and talk some more and get to know each other, and it was really cool sharing our passion for missions and how we ended up here and where we’re going. As an aside, I wish Elizabeth City would hire Elgin’s park planner. Really sweet public bike path that goes down under the road and back around by the creek and the river.

I didn’t realize until I came back and sat down on our couch how exhausted I was, mostly just from travel. Really good thing I flew. Overall, I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone else through classes, hanging out, and cooking, excited about what God will do through our training and worship this week, and ahorita, sleep.

Radio, Wal-Mart, Censorship and other musings

Driving back to Sue’s from “Grandpa’s House” tonight I was marveling at the radio stations here in Atlanta. People my parents’ age complain that there is not a good Classic Rock station in Northeastern NC, and people my age complain that all they play on CHR is the same three songs until they are so overplayed we won’t listen to them again until they are Classic Rock.

What’s strange is that despite the huge amount of restaurants and traffic here and the presence of the world’s busiest airport, it took the multitude of good radio stations in the area for me to realize that I was not in what my uncle would refer to as “Mayberry.” What’s really amazing is that today, with an Internet connection and a Wal-Mart nearby, there’s just not that much difference between a big city and a small one.

And so we’ve reached Wal-Mart, and therefore Billy’s favorite: the rant.

The South Park re-run tonight happened to be the one skewering “Wall-Mart,” and did a pretty good job (as it tends to do, despite the way my mom and mothers in general tend to loathe it) of pointing out the downfalls of the world’s biggest corporation, employer and evil empire. We can discuss the cons of Big Box stores all night long, but they are easy enough to see and scarily hard enough to avert that I’ll avoid hypocrisy and carpal tunnel syndrome by skipping right to my point, demonstrated by my third hypothetical encounter of the night with Sam Walton’s corporate monster: this blog.

In case you’re Jerry too lazy to read it, the gist is that Wal-Mart won’t sell Green Day’s new album because the band refuses to release a censored version. I agree with the blogger that it obviously hasn’t been detrimental to Green Day’s sales (215,000 copies sold the first week). I also agree with Billie Joe Armstrong that a “young kid… making a record for the first time” should not be dictated to by Wal-Mart. And yet I strongly agree with Wal-Mart for sticking to their guns and upholding their long-standing policy of not selling uncensored music.

Again, I could write a diatribe here on the hypocrisy of Wal-Mart, which sells rifles, unrated movies with nudity and swearing, and sweatshop-produced clothing, but for some reason sees violence, swearing, and degrading ideas as inappropriate for the single, specific medium of audio recording. But again, not my point.

As a writer, a musician, and a (self-proclaimed) intelligent person (do I say “a” or “an” before a parenthetical phrase starting with a consonant but followed by the continuing sentence beginning with a vowel?) I disagree with censorship on principle. But as a Christian, an (I hope) moral person1, and a 99% reformed foul-mouth, I enjoy at least an attempt at censorship, however ineffectual (because bleeping out words so that you still hear something like mother****er2, 3 doesn’t really do anything to censor the idea).

I will stop here to somewhat expand on the idea of ineffectual censorship. There are two great Spanish-language radio stations here in Atlanta. Obviously, the censors aren’t as strict on them as they are in English (if there are any Spanish-language censors in this country). I heard a word tonight on one of those stations whose English equivalent would never make it onto the radio (at least I hope not, which is why my opinion slightly favors Wal-Mart on this particular topic).

The solution is for artists to just realize the power of words other than the four-letter ones. Upbeat, happy-sounding (realistic) Caedmon’s Call can be much more biting as a social commentary than any of the dirty-mouthed rockers in my collection. And I’d love to see a move towards cleaner music at the source. Because much as I don’t listen to the entire genre of rap because of the generally foul content, I go out of my way4 to make sure I have the original, uncensored recording of any music I do own, because that is how the artist intended it.

At least I’m consistently inconsistent.

1Went with “an” for that one. Hooray inconsistency!
2Insert Billy’s gasp here, at an almost-instance of Danny swearing on his blog.
3Better censor this guy!
4That task gets easier and easier for me every year as what I listen to is more and more “Jesus music” and less and less English.

Strange sense of Home

My friends all talk about “coming home” to Elizabeth City between semesters or to see their parents and friends. And in conversation I’ll do the same thing. But in reality, I have half a dozen places that I refer to as “home” and several more that, though it would seem strange to say out loud, feel quite the same way.

Moving around as a kid certainly had a lot to do with that. I remember my private form of rebellion at moving to Clarksdale, Mississippi in junior high was making a point (in my head at least, if not out loud) of using the phrase “going to our house“, as I just didn’t want to think of anywhere in Clarksdale as “home.” Going to Atlanta for a visit was always what meant “home.” For those two long, character-building (so my dad says) years, going home was seeing Derek Martin, Kelsey Page, and Allison Dennard at Berkmar UMC. It was having Thanksgiving at Aunt Sue’s house and quiet afternoon at Grandma Kay and Grandpa Bill’s in Dunwoody.

When our family moved to Elizabeth City, home became the tan house on the corner, even though that sentimental part of me missed the homes that Oakhurst Junior High and St. Paul’s UMC had been (a feeling that came from the people there, if not the places themselves). But despite the way my mom made sure I had familiar photographs and wallpaper, it was the fact that she and Dad and Colin were right there with me that made E.C. home.

By that time I’d already figured out that “home” didn’t mean the place where my mail was addressed. It was where I was comfortable and loved and where I loved to be. And more than just the house in Winfield, the NHS band room and James and Mike and Billy and Megan’s houses came to mean those things as well. People-oriented Ecuadorian culture has become home for me more recently. Amongst Ecuadorians at church in Shandia or Babahoyo, or squeezed onto couches with too many other gringos at a missionary’s house in Quito, that feeling that you belong just follows you around.

So it’s been no surprise to me the past few days here in Dunwoody again that I’ve just felt at home. As Monsignor Lopez said this morning at the funeral, the house on Summerford Court has been a home to him (just as it’s been to the rest of us), not because it’s simply a familiar place, but because of the love of my grandparents. Even without Grandpa Bill there this week, it’s full of memories, good times, and (lately at least) more family members than I knew I had.

In fact, with all the Pecks, Thums, Brocks, Joyces and Jeffersons around for the last five days, it took until the reception at St. Jude’s this morning for me to realize that there’s really nobody my age around. My cousin Guy is younger even than my little brother, who’s not around himself, and Amanda has just seemed infinitely older than even the 3.5 years she’s got on me since she started doing things like getting married and having kids. But it took me five days to realize this because I’ve been at home, even surrounded by people who are all more than twice my age (and who are sure to make snide remarks about this paragraph when they get around to reading my blog). Around family, I just fit in.

Everyone has been saying good-byes this afternoon. And as I’ve gotten handshakes and hugs, my aunts and uncles and cousins have asked me “When are you and your dad going home?” And though I smile and say something like, “Well, we’re driving back on Friday,” I can’t imagine being much more home than this.