Good stuff

Friday night I talked to a friend for 4 hours. That was kind of rough because we started talking at midnight, but it was super good. He does a lot of thinking, kind of like me, so we get into deep theological talks. I appreciate that he doesn't lose his awe of God as he does it, nor his respect for the importance of sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. He also does a great job of starting with what the Bible says rather than creating a position based on experience and then finding verses that agree with him. So that was part of our talk. The other part was life in general. Single life, missionary life, life learning French... It was good, and we're going to try to make it a weekly event. But not starting at midnight!
I took two pictures of Notre Dame from the Seine and then stitched them together.

Here is another 3D image for those of you who can see it! This one isn't quite as good. It's the ticket booth/main entrance to the Louvre Museum (home of the Mona Lisa and lots of more impressive things as well)

Chili and Cornbread

Here in France, nobody except American students eats chili. As I road the train home Friday night, I was really craving chili and cornbread. However, I had no eggs to make cornbread and no tomatoes or soaked beans to make chili. I resigned myself to maybe getting around to making it in a day or two. When I got to school I headed straight for the kitchen. On the way, I passed some friends who had made a meal together. They invited me to eat with them, and I discovered, to my delight, that they had made TONS of chili and cornbread. Sometimes God answers prayers that I don't even pray! Thank you, God, and thank you to my friends.

Meditation

I gave a message in class this week. Here is a video of it.

And here is a basic translation:
I passed Christmas of 2008 with my family. I had to go back to my apartment in the cities early because a snow storm was coming and I had a job interview on Monday, so I couldn't afford to get stranded. So, sadly, I left early. The next day I called to verify some details about the job interview. I accidentally called the owners of a different branch of the same company. Their branch was actually closer to where I lived but I hadn't known they were hiring. They invited me for a personal interview in an hour. I went and, long story short, I got the job. All of this was on the day that I wasn't supposed to be back in the cities yet.

Then my roommate decided to move to Texas. I couldn't pay for the apartment myself, so I moved. The place I moved to was not good. It was super cold- I slept with my winter jacket on- and it was super loud. The guy next door was largely deaf and apparently he could not sleep without the television blaring. He would come home sometimes at 1AM and turn the television on. So I slept with my winter jacket and earplugs. Sometimes during the day I would catch the smell of marijuana...

A woman I had met through my new job found out about my situation, and one day she told me that I was going to come live with her family, for free. She said she needed somebody to help eat her food. This was on the 30th, one day before I would have had to renew my rent at the other place for a second month. I moved that night.

This woman knows lots of people, and she introduced me to pretty much all of them. She made a lot of connections for me and also acted as my secretary. Thanks to her, my monthly partnership increased by about 30% in a couple of months. I lived with that family until August, and September 1st I had enough support to fly to France and start schooling.

Without the snow, I wouldn't have had a job.
Without the job, I never would have met that woman
Without my roommate moving, I never would have had to move
Without that move, I probably wouldn't be here.
The conclusion: God is good! (and thank you to those owners and to that woman, you know who you are!)

Carte De Long Sejour

Merci a tous pour vos prières! (Thank you, everyone, for your prayers!) Today I completed the final step of the Carte De Long Sejour process. The medical exam went quickly and smoothly. I got a doctor who only spoke French but he didn't ask anything I couldn't understand. Then I went to the waiting room for my final meeting.My appointment was for 9:30 but the man who was supposed to interview me didn't show up until about 10:30. This worked to my advantage because by the time he came he was embarrassed and wanted to get us taken care of as quickly as possible. I showed him the required papers, he put the proper stamps on them, and away I went! So now I am an official temporary resident of France (or something like that) up until the expiration date of my VISA, which is September. I will need to apply for an extension in May or June so I can attend school here next fall, but until then I am good to go! And all of the people there were really friendly, except for one receptionist.

Cathedral of St. Denis

Today a friend and I went to the Saint Denis Basilica Cathedral, the place where most of the kings of France have been buried. It was quite fascinating. There was a lot of history there. My friend was primarily interested in it because it is the final resting place of the remains of Marie-Antoinette, a tumultuous and rather interesting figure in French history. She and her husband, Louis XVI, were the final French royalty and were killed during the French Revolution.

The basilica itself is quite beautiful, especially when I have photo editing software that allows me to lighten images :-). All Cathedrals are rather dark, especially on rainy days like today. And on days like today, they are also COLD!

Before going into the whatever-its-called with all of its little burial statues and such, we went into a side building for bathrooms, a video that we didn't watch, and a super cool model of what the area probably looked like a while ago (13th century?).

Here is the statue of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette praying. I don't think either of them was particularly faithful to God during their time on earth, but one day they will bow their knees like all others. Someone did them the favor after their deaths of making them bow here on earth, too.

And, at my dad's request, here are some 3D images from the Cathedral:


hmm... I've realized that I somehow got the images backwards in that last 3D image, which is a bummer because it is super cool. I may post the corrected version later. For now, you can see it correctly by using the cross-eyed method rather than the normal method. Good practice!

A good run and 3D fun

Today before lunch I got out for a run, the first I have gotten in about a month and a half. Shame on me! It felt soooo good to get out again. Right now it's really muddy because our 2-4 inches of snow has almost all melted (sorry, Minnasotans, life ain't fair). I also found out that a circus has set up camp in the parking lot of the park nearby. The things you learn when you go for a run...

After class I dug out some of the pictures from Germany and revisited the world of 3D. This first picture is an "enhanced" version of what the image looks like during one of the steps to being 3D. I thought it looked cool so I played with it a little and then saved it "as is":

After making two layers create an image that looks more or less like that, I make one of the layers red and the other one cyanish blue. In order to see these next 2 pictures in 3D, you need a pair of red/cyan anaglyph 3D glasses. You can get them free online. Or, if you happen to have colored plastic at home like my mom and dad, just find a piece of red and a piece of lightish blue and it should be close enough to at least get the idea. Make sure you put the red over your left eye and the blue over your right, or your brain will explode. No, not really, but it will get confused.




And these last 3 require nothing more than a flexible mind. The idea is to make your right eye focus on the right image and your left eye on the left image. If you get your face close to the images that often helps at first. Pick a bright colored spot, and when you have 3 images floating around, try to make two of them come together at that spot. Once it "clicks" it sticks, and you will be able to relax your eyes completely as if you were just reading a book or something.
note: You may have seen 3D images where you had to cross your eyes. Those are easier to see in sense and have a lot of other advantages over my method. However, I tend to feel like that method makes the picture look like a miniature, lifelike 3D model. My method drags you into the picture as if you were looking at the real world. So instead of crossing your eyes, you are actually "uncrossing" them, forcing them to focus on two different things and trick your mind into thinking it is the same thing.
hint: If you haven't already figured it out, you can make the pictures larger by clicking on them :-)

Resto du Coeur

Today was my first day with Resto du Coeur, a local food-shelf type program. It commenced at 6:30, when we knocked on the door and the woman asked us if we were there to get food. Fortunately I got the gist of what she was saying and said that no, we were there to help. From that point on, things improved considerably. My friend J and I unpacked several boxes of clothes onto tables and then I started bagging up bread. All this time people trickled in and I got to introduce myself to them, en français, bien sûr! (in French, of course!). I must be adapting well to the culture, because kissing random women the age of my mother doesn't phase me anymore. Well, it isn't exactly kissing, but for an American it's close enough!
Anyway... after the bread I spent some time bagging carrots. A new man came in and asked me what my name was. This is always quite tricky because no matter how I pronounce it the French have to repeat it two or three times before they have made up their minds how they are going to say it. I always introduce myself as "Jean," but they try to call me "John" and never quite get there with the "J" sound.
Anyway, as this new man tried his hand at pronouncing it, he said, "Comme John Travolta, ou Kennedy!" I shrugged. Sure, why not? If he thinks I'm like John Travolta, the more power to me! Later another man came in and I introduced myself as "John, like Johnny Halliday."
Who, you ask, is Johnny Halliday? Despite the fact that nobody outside France knows who he is, within France Johnny Halliday is widely compared to Elvis and has a following nearly as fanatical. I thought that perhaps it would be more useful to associate myself with a well-known French musician rather than an American one. How wrong I was. The man who had just compared me to Travolta emphatically declared, "Non. Tu n'es pas comme Johnny Halliday." (No. You are not like Johnny Halliday.) Haha!! Ah, the French.
After that the people started coming for food. I was person #2 on a 2 person team handing out fruit and desserts. It was fun! I even did it by myself a couple of times when my partner was gone. It involved a ton of counting in French because each person who came had been allotted a certain number of points based on how many people were in their family and they chose which food they wanted to "purchase" with their points. Some things were worth 2, some worth 4, some worth 6. I got to chat a little with the people who came through, and a lot more with the other people who were working. It took them a little while to realize that I don't speak fantastic French. Three guys tried to talk to me at once, asking me about my soccer playing habits, and I don't think any of them got their questions answered correctly. After that they talked to me more slowly, and one at a time :-).
At one point a very pregnant woman came through the line. It must be noted that some, though not all, French people feel more liberated to voice what goes on inside their heads than the average American. So the woman who was working with me commented to this woman about her very large belly. The woman just kind of smiled and nodded. Then, as the woman was leaving, my coworker turned to me and said, in French, "Near the end of my pregnancy I could rest my glass on my belly, and I thought that was good. But she could put two glasses and a plate on her belly!" Well, I'm just glad that, whether she is eating for two or three, that woman got some food today.

Fond Memories

Here is something I wrote for class:

"Quand j'etais jeune, j'aimais jouer à la guitare. Je ne connaissais pas la method, mais ça ne m'arretais jamais. Mon frére jouais toujours "la batterie," normalment quelques seaus de la cuisine et un couvercle d'une boite de crème glacée."

When I was young, I loved playing the guitar. I didn't know how, but that never stopped me. My brother always played "the drums," which normally were a couple of buckets from the kitchen and an ice cream lid.

Carte de Longe Sejour

The good news: I finally got a letter in the mail yesterday from the office of immigration and integration.
The bad news: I'm not sure what it says! :-)

I need to have my professor look it over, but I get the feeling that even though she will know all the French words, she still isn't going to know exactly what all of it means. That has often been my experience with similar documents written in English as I have dealt with the VISA process. What I do know for sure is that I have an appointment on January 20th that will apparently include a brief physical and a one-on-one meeting or interview of sorts. Hopefully after that they will give me my card and call it good! So thank you for all of your prayers up to this point, and please be praying on the 20th that all will go well.

Ed the hippo.

This came to me this morning while I was praying. I don't think God gave it to me. It was more like my mind didn't want to settle down long enough to pray. Nevertheless, I wrote it down quick and did more work on it after I was done praying.

I have a pet hippo
His name is Ed
He shakes the whole house
When he gets out of bed
Brushing his teeth
Is a laborous chore
I go weeks without sleep
Because of his snore
He was small once and cute
I bought him on a whim
Now he won't go away
Will someone please take him?



I have bought too many hippos on a whim. How about you?

More Snow!

Yay! When I woke up today I couldn't see outside because my only window opens onto the roof and it was covered with snow. I managed to get a couple of pictures of myself in the snow during lunch break before my batteries died.


Class is going well. It's fun to not be one of the new students anymore! I also feel like just in the last week or so I have finally overcome some of my fear of speaking French. I'm still not that great at it, but I'm a lot more willing to start talking without knowing what, exactly, I am going to say.

I'm really enjoying the challenge of French at the moment. Pray it lasts. :-)

A video

This is possibly the lowest quality video I have ever made, but you get the idea. Here's Germany!
There is a lot of the trip that got left out of the video because I didn't take pictures of it. See the post from two days ago for more details :-)

Wal-Mart Shoes

The primary factor that made our National Cross Country Invite so challenging that year was mud. We ran on a brand-new course, one that had never been manicured like the golf courses we frequently visited during the season, and the rain fell softly but steadily for several hours before the race. As our ladies charged through the drizzle to claim their second consecutive national championship, they and the others literally TORE UP the course. As the men stepped to the starting line the rain ceased but it had already taken it's toll. Almost the entire race course was a slip-and-slide.

If the course had been good I probably would have run the fastest race of my life. Instead, I felt like I was on a treadmill running in reverse. The harder I tried to run, the more my feet slipped backwards. This was especially true on the hills, where the path was especially muddy and gravity worked against me. It was on the hills that I was most thankful for what I had on my feet- 1/2" spikes. Those slivers of steel dug into the muck and found something to hold on to. Without them I would have barely been able to get up the hills at all.

After the race I found out that one of my team mates had run in tennis shoes from Wal-Mart. I can't imagine how difficult that must have been. It was a such a cold day that he was running a very high risk of pulling a muscle with all of that slipping and sliding. God was definitely looking out for him, but there was no way he could run the race he would have with good shoes.

Why do I tell this story? Last night I was reading 2 Samuel 22:37: "You enlarge my steps under me, and my feet have not slipped." I immediately thought of that race. Living life without God is like running with Wal-Mart sneakers. When you jog around on a flawless, dry gulf course, everything seems fine. Your body isn't getting the support and stability it needs, but the grass is soft so you don't notice.

But when it rains and the grass disappears into the mud, that spikeless life of self-dependence becomes downright dangerous. The hills are an insurmountable struggle. Each turn comes, sharper and steeper than the last, and it takes all your strength and balance just to stay on your feet.

With God, on the other hand, you are equipped with 1" spikes (which I wish I had had that day) that dig deep into the muck and pull you through. God gives us that stability, that foundation, that allows us to move forward with full force. And the Bible also says that He enlarges our steps. We don't have to feel like we are going backwards on a treadmill. Quite the opposite, we will be amazed how much is being accomplished by God's power.

I think it is fitting, therefore, that the following year our motto was "By the power of Christ in me." And God was faithful. Both years, both our men's and women's teams brought home the championship banners.

Deutschland

It was dark when I left Paris for my grand adventure in Germany but the sun rose about the time the train crossed into Belgium.
The countryside through Belgium and Germany appeared idyllic in the morning sunlight.
I caught flashing glimpses of many small villages.

After I met the family and settled in, my friend took me back into Köln to see the Cathedral. It is a very impressive structure, both inside and out, and built in largely memory of the magi who presented gifts to Jesus.

That night, before picking up Elias, we wandered the streets of Köln. It has a lot of streets for pedestrians only, making it a fantastic place to go shopping for any ladies who are reading this and maybe someday going to Germany.

The next day we visited Maria Laach, a monastery in the middle of a dormant volcano crater.

It is located on the edge of a beautiful forest overlooking the volcanic lake.

My cousin and I. Notice the snow at our feet and in the other pictures. We were excited about the snow. Maria Laach was at a high enough elevation that they still had a little snow. It had melted everywhere else.

Afterward we went to a volcano museum. It described the volcanic activity that occured thousands of years ago in the Rhein river valley in Germany. They had a virtual newscast about the Maria Laach lake erupting and destroying Germany that I found marvelously interesting and entertaining, especially since I had just seen it from the monastery. As we traveled in the car I kept marveling at the cute little villages out the window. Also at the castles, which seem to be everywhere.

Then we went to Koblenz, which rests on the "German Corner," the intersection of the Rhein and Mosel rivers.

This castle used to defend the corner. Now it is a hostel.

This castle stands on the Mosel bank, if I remember right.

On the tip there are several country flags. The US flag was conveniently near the end, so I just had to take a picture with Koblenz in the background :-)

In Koblenz we visited my friend's dad and one of his brothers. It was really cool to me because my grandparents, aunt, and uncle have all visited that house long ago, before I was born. I felt like I was visiting long lost relatives.

Tragically, I didn't get any pictures of Bonn. We spent an entire day there but I left my camera in the car (silly me!). We spent at least 3 hours in the birth house of Beethoven. That was super interesting. Yay for English audio guides! Bonn used to be the capital city, so it has many, many official buildings and historical sites of interest. That night we hung out with the younger brother we had met the day before. That was fun; he loves France and goes there often so he and I got to speak some French.

The next day we went back to Köln and did the Cathedral the right way. We were there for several hours, looking at all the different windows and artwork, visiting the treasury (lots of shiny stuff) and climbing the tower.
Apparently the Cathedral was heavily damaged during the war (as was all of Köln) but it looks pretty good now. In most of the towns I visited there were very old buildings clustered next to buildings from the 1950s. The survivors and the rebuilding.

Many of the original windows are gone. This one is quite new.

The peak

I took a mini-pano from the top.

We weren't sure what this thing was, but my cousin challenged it to a fight.

On the last day we visited Aachen. It has a small but very beautiful cathedral which houses the tomb of Charlemagne. If I remember right, it has been frequently used for coronations.

All that glitters...

Here is the view from the outside. See the balcony for addressing the throngs?

Aachen was a very pretty city. Like Köln it had a lot of pedestrians and not many cars in downtown. Here is a panoramic photo that took me way too long to edit :-)

After that we drove to Dusseldorf to drop my cousin off at the airport and went back to the house. I got to goof off with the boys for a while, playing Wii and around the world (ping pong). I am the master of playing ping pong while dizzy. Or maybe not...
Then more relatives came over and we had a lovely afternoon of food and conversation in three languages. Hurray for one of my new friends knowing French! She and I got to use it a little bit while I was there and hopefully we can keep emailing back and forth in French also. So we had German, English, and French going on at the table, sometimes all at the same time. Such fun! Then I had to say goodbye, which was sad, so I'll spend minimal time on that point.
The train ride wasn't uneventful. We were stuck in Belgium for about 40 minutes. I didn't mind, actually. When I first got on the train I found that I was in a seat facing two other people rather than the normal seating arrangement. So I had to be polite and avoid eye contact with three people instead of just the girl with whom I was almost touching elbows. Such work! But when our train broke down (or whatever it did) it broke the ice and we all started chatting. The couple across from me spoke French, so I spoke French to them. The girl next to me was German, but she spoke really good English. The couple got off in Belgium but my seatmate and I kept chatting. She works for 3M, which is a remarkable coincidence. Anybody who knows much about me knows why. I won't say because, um, this is the internet. Anyway, we chatted about literature and politics and education. It was good, but I never did ask her name. I hope she had fun in Paris. Then I had more adventures on the RER that were totally my fault, with the result that I got home about an hour and a half later than I had expected when all was said and done.
All in all it was a great trip. My friends were fantastic hosts, and I saw a lot of history. I also got a lot of insights into the church in Germany and Europe as a whole. It fascinates me how different the body of Christ can be from one continent to the next, and yet in many ways we are all the same.