Category: Writing

I’m New Here

It’s been a long time since I’ve made an effort to give out my blog address. So since I might have a new audience for the first time in a long time, I’m going to start my 2019 Quito Quest blogging journey by answering all the questions I usually get from people who are trying to figure out what exactly I do in Ecuador.

What exactly do you do in Ecuador?

I will be hosting a short-term team. In general, teams come for between 1-2 weeks to work with ministry sites in (and sometimes out of) Quito. The team hosts are around basically to take care of the team. Food, housing, transportation, translation, cultural acquisition… all the things they need to be running smoothly so they can do their projects, interact with people in a healthy way, and stay safe… that’s my job.

How long have you been doing this?

I started going to Ecuador in 2007. I’ve been hosting teams since 2008. I’ve lived there for several springs and summers and a big stint between 2009-2010. These days I just go back for two weeks or so every March to host a team. Since the first time I went, the longest I’ve ever gone without being in Ecuador was 15 months (between March 2012 when I hosted a Canadian team in the jungle and July 2013 when I took my own high school students from Elizabeth City on a team).

Where do you stay?

My wonderful friends the Vivanco family let me crash with them. Cameron, Roberto, Graham (7), Liam (5), and Francis (3) will be part of the cast of characters in my daily recaps. So, probably, will Luciano (the cat), and Caroline (my partner, who is also flying in from the U.S. just to be a host).

Do you get paid to do this?

That’s cute.

An old Ash Wednesday homily

This is one of my favorite Ash Wednesday messages, written in 2013, and I thought it deserved to be bumped to the top again.

Matthew 6:1-6 (NRSV)
Concerning Almsgiving
6 “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Concerning Prayer
5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Homily: A Projected Image

Ash Wednesday is a pretty weird holiday. In preparation for the most joyous day in the Christian year, we’ve got a day of mourning and repentance and a season of fasting. We do this ritual tonight with ashes on our foreheads that alludes to our Baptism and to our death all at once. And then we come to this weird piece of Scripture tonight talking about all the wrong ways to do all the right things. So, what’s the deal?

A few years ago, I played in the praise band for the contemporary worship service at First Baptist. And a group of us in the band began a young adult discussion group. We would meet after the service and go out to eat and talk about something different every week, sometimes the topic of the service we’d just left, or something controversial in the news about the political or religious world around us.

And this one Sunday night, sometime during the summer, about as far away from Ash Wednesday as you can get in the calendar, Mason Smith, the pastor at the time, did a really meaningful service of Imposition of Ashes. It wasn’t Ash Wednesday, but it went with what he was teaching that night. And after the service, our group met and decided we were going to go to Applebee’s that night for our discussion. My friend Adam said he was going to stop at home for a minute and he would meet us there, so the rest of us went ahead to the restaurant.

It was past dinnertime on a Sunday night and football season hadn’t started yet, so the place wasn’t very busy when we walked in. And our hostess had some time to talk to us and to notice the crosses, so after she’d gone through asking how many were in our party and seating us, she stayed at the table for a moment to ask about the funny marks on our faces. We were all actually a little embarrassed and self-conscious, which is ironic considering how many future missionaries and church staff were in that group. But we were self-conscious. We had put on those crosses as part of a deeply personal worship experience and had left them on out of nothing more than forgetting we were headed out in public. We weren’t asking for any attention with them, we just hadn’t realized we were inviting it.

But once the surprise wore off, it became a chance to talk with her, and then our waiter, and then even the cook who came out to see what was going on. It became this missional opportunity in which that they were eager to participate because they realized we weren’t trying to be obnoxious about our faith, we were just trying to live it out.

The most memorable part of the evening was when Adam, who had told us he’d meet us there, finally showed up. We’d expected a call to ask where in the building we were. But he just appeared at our table. Another of our group said to him, “Oh, you found us!” to which he replied “Are you kidding? I walked in with this cross on my forehead and the hostess just said to me ‘Your friends are in the back.’” Our discussion topic that night became “Wouldn’t it be great if our faith was that visible all the time?”

And yes, yes it would. If that’s what is really visible. Our faith, our love for God, what’s in our hearts. Because that’s what Jesus is getting into in our passage from Matthew. Not the rules for what we’re doing. But the “why?”. We’re not told “Don’t practice your righteousness in front of others.” We’re told “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.”

Ash Wednesday is all about the why. The symbols matter. The service matters. Our participation matters. But our hearts matter more. This past weekend I had the opportunity to go on a ski trip with 7 other adults and 30 youth from our congregation and from Christ Episcopal Church. Now our youth for the most part have spent at least a year and a half with me. They know me, they get my sense of humor; they understand my expectations for them. Some of the kids from the other group spent the weekend still trying to figure me out.

After snowboarding all day Saturday and leading vespers Saturday night, I was in my bed pretty early reading and watching movies on my iPad just waiting for “lights out” to roll around at 11:00. At about 10:55 I got up to walk out to the living room to give the boys in my house a head’s-up that they needed to be in their rooms in just a few minutes. They were watching ESPN and listening to music at a pretty low volume, which was fine.

As I came down the short hallway, one of the boys from the other group (who shall remain nameless) heard me coming and he scurried across the couch and hit the “pause” button on his iPod. And so the room was now really quiet and the boys were staring up at me expectantly. I knew he hadn’t been afraid the volume of the speakers or the TV would wake me up, so I correctly guessed that he was worried about the content of the music he’d just turned off. So I gave him a couple of heartbeats to freak out, and then I asked him, “Are you worried you’re going to offend me?” And he looked up me with these wide eyes and said, “…yes.”

I appreciated his awareness that his choice of music was not necessarily appropriate. I would have been prouder of him if he’d just not been listening to it in the first place. But I also wasn’t going to pour out wrath and judgment on this student who was both repentant, and otherwise functioning completely within my will for him.

Sometimes we just need to get busted like that. We need to realize that the image we’re projecting isn’t the one we want, or what God wants of us. We should be reminded that our hearts and our actions should match.
The other scripture for Ash Wednesday is from Joel chapter 2. It says 12“Even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.” 13Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.

Rend your heart and not your garments. Because as we return to God with fasting and weeping and mourning, it is the sincerity of our actions that He sees and values.

We are a sinful and broken people. And in repentance tonight we are here tonight to recognize it; to put on ashes, a symbol of death and mourning. But we put them on in the form of the cross, a symbol of Christ’s defeat of death.

You probably won’t get this entire blessing as you come forward this evening, because it’s a mouthful when there’s a whole line of people. But in the traditional words of the Ash Wednesday service, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent, and believe the Gospel.”

Amen.

Springtime Web Maintenance

I so rarely check look at my own website when I’m not in Ecuador, that the most common occurrence for the last several years is for me to find it totally broken when I do bother to check on it. So if you notice the face-lift, that’s why things are different. I logged on last night, and lo and behold, the front page simply wouldn’t load.

I chalk it up to laziness on my part in updating. Somebody found a flaw in WordPress and exploited it so that the theme I was running got messed up. I switched themes, and most of the content is back. But it doesn’t look like “me” around here at the moment.

I tell you that to tell you this. Once the school year starts and I return to a normal schedule, my plan is to begin a youth ministry blog, and split my website into two sections. One for my Ecuador writings, and one for my musings on the oddities of working with students and getting a paycheck from Jesus. So that face-lift will continue, but hopefully that’s a reason for me to actually create content here more often. And keep my website updated. And not get hacked. Again.

Keep checking back.

That Time of Year Again

It’s March (or it would be if this wasn’t a Leap Year), so I’m on my blog again. It seems that lately I get my renewal notice for my hosting and domain name registration and I log in for the first time in months to do maintenance and maybe put a post on here about my 2 weeks in Ecuador. And that’s definitely the case right now. I’ll be in Ecuador from March 7-23 hosting the team from Sewanee with some of my favorite people, and hopefully not getting sick this year (which should leave me much more time than in 2015 to actually record and processing my experience here on the blog).

Look forward to it.

August Resolutions

It’s almost Labor Day, public schools are back in, UMYF is meeting, there’s a different schedule at work, new and old friends have been appearing around town. It must be fall.

Even though it’s been a couple of years since autumn directly meant the start of a new school year for me, it’s easy to see this time of year as the start if things. And it is the start of my fist full school year working at First UMC. We had our first youth meeting of the school year Sunday night, and even though I didn’t get to spend half the time talking about events that I thought I would get, I did get to tell everyone about some of the new adventures I’ve got panned for this year. Going to some new Junior and Senior High retreats. Bible Study. Different Sunday School plans. Bigger scale summer missions through two of my favorite organizations in the world. And doing some annual events better than I did them last year.

It will be interesting next June when I start going through records from this year. Plans and schedules and my written notes in each of the event folders in my office. I’ll see what we actually pulled off and what we didn’t. I’ll see what resolutions I stuck with. Because I feel lIke that’s something I’m doing right now: making new year resolutions.

One of them is to write.

I’ve had several conversations lately with friends who are educators. They have to figure out from Facebook to cell phones to face-to-face relationships with the same people in different locations, how much of their life is public and how much is absolutely not. Some of those decisions are a lot easier for me in youth ministry, because I simply couldn’t do my job if I wasn’t Facebook friends with all of my students, or able to call or text them. Granted, my phone has 64 gigs of memory so I never have to delete any of those conversations. I do have to think about keeping records and being intentionally transparent.

And one of those other safety things I have done since last October is that I haven’t been blogging. Sure, there were a few posts from Pilgrimage and Beach Retreat and my short stint in Ecuador this spring. But I haven’t been recording my daily life like I once did. And it’s been hard. And in some ways it’s been way too easy. You’d think I’d have filled my personal journal three times by now, but the entries in there are just as sparse as they are here on my blog.

It makes me sad that there’s really not a record of my thoughts and emotions since I finished Quito Quest 2011. Whoever eventually succeeds me in my job at FUMC is really going to think I went overboard with my event notes. But other than that, my fears, failures, triumphs, quotes, funny moments, ideas, opinions, revelations, and stray thoughts for 10+ months are only in my head. And I’m sure some of those random and fleeting spurts of brain activity are just gone.

So that’s why my new school year resolution is to write. More specifically, to blog. Having a somewhat-public medium for expression means I have some sort of accountability. When I had days in Ecuador where all I did was watch Lost and go to McDonalds on a Saturday, I felt I had to justify that to my audience. Even when Dana and John were probably the only ones reading it anymore. And if I could say I was just dead after six straight days of learning and growing and struggling through what God was teaching me, then I at least had a more positive outlook on my state of being once I hit the “Publish” button. And if I couldn’t, I made judicious use of my unlimited Skype plan until I’d connected with someone and either tried to offer my own advice or learned something more than what happened to the Dharma Initiatve for the day.

I have about the same sense of what is okay (about my job and life in the U.S.) and not okay to write about now. I can put those rules I have for myself into words much better than I could last October, though I’m not going to do that for y’all at the moment. I am going to say, though, that you’ll be hearing about my adventures.

Because my life is an adventure. Whether I live in the rain forest of Ecuador or the swamps of northeastern North Carolina. A friend of mine tells me frequently that every day he looks at his cat and asks her “What the hell’s gonna happen today?” And I understand what he means. I would want an Oraculum for my life lately if it would be someone else’s responsibility to name each day. I had to look up how to spell Frabjous and Horovendoush just to finish this post with such an awesome reference.

New Writing Project

Yesterday I began the process of writing an article about Guardians, a program within the Inglés Student Ministries (ISM) branch of Youth World. Throughout my afternoon hanging out with the chaplains at Alliance Academy and the high school juniors and seniors who really run the program, there were tons of entertaining moments I just had to write about, but knew should never make it into something published with our organization’s name officially attached.

My first and favorite was when my friend Ashley had all of the kids circle around Dani, the girl who was speaking during the whole-group program. Her directions were “Everyone circle around and touch Dani… appropriately.” I’ve actually been in several adult groups where that particular disclaimer might have been helpful and effective. It’s going to be fun hanging out with this group as I work on the article.

On Writing

I do a lot of writing. You may have noticed.

Aside from my blog, though I’ve also been keeping a journal. I’ve discovered that between the two, the writing itself is something that helps me to process. I think of myself as an internal processor because it takes me longer to put things into words, and I carefully craft my thoughts in my head before they come out. Even when I write, I use the backspace key judiciously, so what you see is many times edited over from my brain to my fingers to the screen. And maybe that does make me an internal processor. But I don’t necessarily like fitting in a well-defined box, and more and more I’m finding the value of putting stuff out there, if for no reason than it sometimes surprises even me when it goes from vague unshaped notions in my mind to solid black-and-white words on a page or screen.

At dinner tonight, Preston and I got on the subject of writing. He does a lot of research, and has written several books, but it was his journaling that started the conversation. We talked about why we journal and the thought process and the actual product. It’s interesting to me that my journal is the one and only thing I write and have no idea who my audience is. Do I really want to re-read it? Do I really want anyone else to read it? Even after I’m dead?

At some point after Mike and I disbanded our first co-written website, I do remember thinking to myself about all the thoughts I had which themselves had nowhere to go. I’m sure this was a self-aggrandizing thought, but I decided my ideas had to much value not to be recorded.

I also spent a lot of time last summer talking about the “Operation Auca” missionaries, the five men who were martyred here in Ecuador in the 50’s. One of the most famous quotes from Jim Elliot’s writings is something he wrote only days before he died, which said “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” It sounds so profound now, looking at what he is known for now, but when he wrote it, it was just how he looked at life. I’m not so arrogant as to think I’ll ever write anything that will be published by anyone else and that will seem even half that intelligent or ring that true. But once in a while I discover something I put down in ink or pixels that I would never have otherwise remembered I’d thought. Sometimes I still don’t remember thinking of it myself.

I recently corrected all the spelling errors in a blog post I wrote last summer. I pulled it up exactly 365 days later as I was preparing for a devotion at Benjamin House. I really didn’t remember that one, but it was pretty profound. My brain must have been going pretty fast for me not to bother to even glance over it before I hit the “publish” button. But I’m sure there was some value at the time in writing it, and I can definitely see the value in re-reading it. At only twelve sentences, I think it may be my favorite thing I’ve ever written, and I didn’t even remember it, and never would have thought about it again if it hadn’t been recorded.

T-Minus 3

It’s officially Monday, now, which means the day after tomorrow I’ll be on a plane.

I’m excited to go back to Ecuador, to see friends, to join ministries that I’m passionate about, to see what God has in store for me for an entire year and to begin to discover how He is going to use me. But most of the time it hasn’t really hit yet what a big deal it is. I just feel like I’m going to a familiar place for a short little while, and wondering why all these people keep hugging me and trying to cry.

One of the side effects of not doing lots of writing this summer has been a lack on information on my blog about the ministry that I’ll be doing. I think another may be that I haven’t fully processed it like I’m used to doing, so I’ll try to rectify that right now with a brief summary of what (I think) the next year has in store for me.

I will be headed back to work with Youth World, where I will be serving in a couple of ways that are right up my alley. I will be teaching music/guitar at at least two of Youth World’s partner ministry sites, Iglesia Carmen Bajo and Mision Emaus. I’ll also be doing some PR for Youth World, which will be in the form of writing for the organization’s web site (linked above) about the ongoing ministries at various partner sites.

When people talk about serving as a missionary, what comes to your mind? I have to say, until very recently, writing web pages and playing guitar would not have been my first answers. It’s fascinating to me that God uses my abilities for His work, no matter how strange a combination of skills I may seem to have, and how unimportant they seemed even to me before I thought about them in the context of ministry. But that’s the thing. Ministry is about people. It’s about relationships, and connecting people, and connecting with people, and God connecting with people.

Music is inherently social. I don’t believe I know anyone who builds, plays, and writes music for guitars. Maybe a couple people who do at least two of those things, but not everything that’s necessary for a beautiful piece of music to eventually get played for the first time. And I certainly can’t think of anyone who would bother to do any of those things if there wasn’t anyone else to enjoy it. I’ve found a love of playing for God, and I’ve even found (despite nerves and lack of talent) the joy of playing for other people in being part of worship. Something I picked up for my own enjoyment turns out something God uses for the benefit of other people, and a way for me to give back to him in a form that’s more personal to me than many others possible ways.

Writing is similar. We wouldn’t need the written word if we didn’t communicate with other people. And God has given me the opportunity to connect with people in some completely different places through things that I enjoy to begin with. How might He use the gifts He’s given you?

Terrible With Words

I’ve been trying to write this post since July 29 (and I just spent like 10 minutes figuring out that exact date). That mere fact ought to just emphasize my entire point.

People tell me all the time how good I am at writing. Every English professor I’ve had since being in college (when I actually started putting half an ounce of effort into any work) has been what Mike dubs a “Danny fan.” Everybody in Ecuador loved my blog once they discovered it, and I have been amazed by the extent of my readership Stateside.

Now I’m not tooting my own horn by any means. I’ll just go ahead and tell you that I feel like almost everything I write on my blog is half-finished, not well thought-out, and uses too many “I”‘s  and parenthetical phrases (I think you’ll notice them now that I say that, and I’m only partially joking). Consistently, my sermons are written on Saturday night, and Lord knows if I have a paper due, especially online, it gets turned in at 11:59PM, barely finished, with no planning and only enough references and four syllable words to fake someone into thinking it says anything of any value.

Edit 3/10/2018: This has been in my Drafts folder for nine years. It’s unfinished, and I don’t know where it was going. But it was interesting, so I published it.