He rode a blazing saddle...

I talked to my dear mother on the phone this afternoon and confessed to her that I wasn't really all that excited about camp. This week is really stressful so I would rather sleep than make a major move, I am not excited about being cut off from all English speakers for 7 weeks, even if it will be good for me, and I'm not sure how I will do being around kids all the time.
So we prayed together that God would get me excited about camp. Tonight as I was looking up contact info, I found a video that got me a lot more excited than I have been! It looks like fun, and they have a solid spiritual focus. Furthermore, they spend all of their time trying to act like they come from the rolling plains of the United States. How often do you find French people who want to be like me? It's going to be a great summer!

Check Check

Two checks off the prayer list! I got back my oral comprehension grade today and it was 18/20. That's about 5/20 better than I expected. Praise God for that! For the exercise we had to take the part of either a defendant or the prosecuting attorney in a mock trial. I chose to be the prosecution and I think I had a marvelous case- but that wasn't the point of the assignment. The point was using lots of judiciary vocabulary correctly. I couldn't remember hardly any of it so I skirted around the normal words. Apparently my professor didn't mind.

Prayer request number 2 was answered finally this afternoon. After about 2 weeks of shuffling and copying papers, and getting lots of conflicting information, I have finally sent off my application for the renewal of my French residency permit. Now I just ask for prayer that it gets processed correctly!

Happy Birthday

Today was my birthday, a fact which I didn't share with anybody here at school until Friday. Even then I only told one person. Why, you ask? I don't know. I haven't really made a big deal out of my birthday for several years now. I don't like having people fuss over me, which is probably a pride issue. Anyway, the one person I told it to, bless her heart, managed to tell pretty much the whole school and in two days she pulled together a surprise party. I was sufficiently surprised! Here are some pictures from the festivities:


Me with Judy, the one who made it all happen.


She had asked me what I liked to eat and I said lasagna, so we had at least two types of lasagna and several other pasta dishes to feed everyone who came, as well as salads and garlic bread. It was AMAZING! Then we had a chocolate cake and some cupcakes:


And I got some cards and presents as well! My friends the Bs got their hands on my Facebook photo and made a card for me : )


And here is a majority of the crowd who came, minus some who had already left and all of the kids (I think they were outside playing).


THANK YOU EVERYONE!!!

Le Christ Vivant

For a while I had stopped using my daily French devotional but I picked it up again Thursday and the first two days caught my attention. Here is my translation:

"We have preached a Christ bland and insipid. We have announced a watered-down gospel and we have caused the youth to doubt the Holy Scriptures. We have removed that authority, and that is the reason that many of them ask "what is the point in subscribing to Christianity?"
God is no longer the God of the Bible, He is the God born of our imagination. We have stripped Christ of his divinity and the supernatural has been eliminated from our faith. Even the enemies of the faith have no objection to such a Christianity. They are satisfied if we have nothing but a social Christ. They are not opposed either to a Christ nailed to the cross: it is there to stay that they would like to leave Him - dead, bleeding, and attached. What they are opposed to is a Christ alive and resurrected.

It is a resurrected Christ who sent out the disciples with an entirely new message. They preached a living Christ. It is that which we must announce, not just on Easter, but each day of the year: the resurrected Christ wants to come into our hearts today! But be warned! He wants to radically change our lives. We reject that Christ because he jostles us, disturbs us, and we hesitate to follow Him in this materialistic, profane age that is avid about pleasure and loaded with prejudices...

We, the Christians, should be ashamed! We have limited Christ to sanctuaries, to temples, and to the religious domain of our lives. We have not lived an applied Christianity. We have made nothing but a Sunday engagement. We adore God from within the thick walls of a church, then we put Him in a quiet corner of our lives. From one Sunday to the next, we rarely talk about Him. We spend precious little time reading His Word or praying. We, the Christians, sometimes act and live as if Jesus was dead.

That Christ would never have any influence on the hearts in the agitated world in which we live. It is not the Christ of the Bible, and it is not the one we need.

The insipid, bland, and impotent Christ of the Church today bares little resemblance to the Christ who was announced by the prophet Isaiah. He has very few traits in common with the Christ of the early church, against whom the the world mobilized itself.

When Christ was on earth he went to the temple, but he didn't stay there. He went to the streets and met the sick, the dead, and everyone who had needs, in all classes of society, presenting grace and truth at the same time."

"Quelqu'un qui dérange" 12-13 Mai 2009 La Bonne Semence - 30, rue Châteauvert BP 335 VALENCE

What the author never really discusses is the obvious question, "So how do we fix this?" I think it's a French thing. They expect people to figure it out for themselves. But I pose the question to you, "If we truly believe that Christ is resurrected and living in us, how will that reality manifest itself in our daily lives?"

Things I have made

This past week was a good one for me in the kitchen. Thursday night I made some chocolate cookies with the help of my friend, J. Those were good, but Friday night was better when I made those delicious lemon bars that I have always wanted to make. In the middle of the week I made homemade pizza that was fantastic, and then today I made Flaming Spinach Pizza Pie. It happened like this:

I was going to make cornbread, but when I walked into the kitchen a friend offered me a pre-bought crust that she had been storing in her freezer for a while. I accepted, thinking it was a pizza or keish crust, since that's kind of what it looked like on the cover. Maybe it was a vegetable pie crust. I don't know, but it ended up being sweet. At any rate, I quickly scrapped the cornbread plans and started heating up some tomato sauce and olive oil. To that I added carrots (for vitamins!) and a ton of spices in completely haphazard amounts. The list, as I remember, was cumin, tabasco sauce, chili powder, salt, pepper, pimente forte (HOT powder), dark brown sugar, basil, herbes de provence (a French specialty), and of course a lot of oregano. I forgot the garlic but it ended up not mattering. I then fried up a bunch of spinach in oil. I looked in the fridge and, realizing that I didn't have much shredded cheese, I tossed two triangles of off-brand fondu cheese (yay for France!) into the sauce. I spread the sauce over the pie crust, slopped on the spinach, and then sprinkled my shredded cheese over the top. That cooked for about 15 minutes, and when I tried it, it was FANTASTIC!! It was just a perfect amount of spicy and the brown sugar and pie crust gave it a really nice sweet undertone. I have never in my life tasted it's equal and, thanks to my unmeasured spicing, I'm sure I never will again.

Tape me up, Scotchy!

Richard Gurley Drew was not a likely candidate for success. When, in 1921, the 22 year-old replied to the newspaper add for a lab technician, two skills on his resumé were playing the banjo and knowing how to drive a tractor. For education, Drew could only say that he had taken one year of Engineering at the University of Minnesota and was taking a random correspondence course for machine design. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing must have been desperate, because they hired him.

Drew was put in charge of perfecting sandpaper, the "manufacturing" that 3M had begun when the "mining" failed. One day, as he visited a body shop to test the sandpaper, he heard some workers swearing. He investigated and learned that the tape used by the painters to make the 1920s two-tone look was too strong and tended to take off paint when it was removed.

Drew, ever creative, reasoned that tape is like sandpaper without the sand. Surely he could make a better tape than what the painters were using. He went to work on his idea. His boss supported this quest for a while, but as the stacks of rejected sandless paper grew he told Drew to return to improving the sandpaper, like he had been hired to do. Drew agreed, but one day later he suddenly thought of a new way to persecute the paper and scurried back to his pet project. In the middle of his experimenting his boss walked into the room. Drew didn't stop working and His boss left without a word. Shortly later Drew perfected his masking tape.

Next, Drew needed a paper-making machine to mass produce the tape. His boss considered funding it but ultimately refused. However, as part of his job Drew had been given permission to make purchases of up to $100. He quickly wrote up a massive number of $99 purchase orders. He confessed this to his boss- several weeks later as he was showing him the new machine sitting in his lab. That demonstration must have been rather tense, but Drew kept his job. They named the tape "Scotch," and it was a huge success.

Five years later another Minnesota company needed a waterproof tape. Drew ordered 100 yards of cellophane, a new product from DuPont, and started experimenting. He slowly built massive piles of rejected tape. He finally created a sample product, which the company rejected. Drew kept working anyway, and about a year later he sent a sample to a prospective client. The new transparent tape, made primarily for food packing companies, soon found thousands of commercial and household uses. During the great depression people found that it could repair everything from books to toys to dollar bills.

Drew was placed in charge of a group of creative individuals at 3M and continued to work there for another 40 years. By the time he retired he had his name on more than 30 patents. His leadership led to the 400 different types of tape now produced by 3M. He continued as a consultant for product development even after his retirement and died in 1980, the same year that 3M introduced Post-It notes to the world.

Today we buy enough Scotch tape each year to go around the planet 165 times. Drew has been named to the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and 2007 his creation of cellophane tape was named a "National Historic Chemical Landmark" by the American Chemical Society. In 2004 the tape was also named a "Humble Masterpiece" by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Probably his greatest achievement was the legacy that he left at 3M. His coworker Art Fry said that, "He always encouraged his people to pursue ideas... He said, 'if it's a dumb idea, you'll find out. You'll smack into that brick wall, then you'll stagger back and see another opportunity that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.'" (quote from the Minnesota Science and Technology Hall of Fame website)

Sources:
http://www.msthalloffame.com/richard_drew.htm
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/Scotch_Tape.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Drew_(inventor)
http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/070921_llm_scotch_tape.html
http://ww2.startribune.com/news/variety/influential2k/10.html
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/drew.html
http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/329.html

Citizenship

One of our homework assignments for tomorrow was investigating the US citizenship process and comparing it to the French system. I didn't spend a ton of time on it, but here are some things I learned.

US

- If you were born in the US, you are a citizen.
-If you were born to a US citizen, either mother or father, you are citizen even if you were born overseas.
- For naturalization, you need to be a legal foreign resident for 5 years (or 3 if you have married a US citizen), be a person of good moral character (including not having serious domestic issues or affairs), not be a member of the communist party unless your membership was involuntary, read/speak/understand basic English, and you have to take a test about American history and civics.

FRANCE

- If you are born in France but not to French parents, you have to live in France for 5 years after the age of 11 and apply for your citizenship after the age of 18. It can be refused.
- I am not sure about people born to French citizens overseas.
- If you marry a French person you can apply for citizenship after 2 years of marriage if you can prove that you have a sufficient knowledge of French.
- For other naturalization, you have to be "assimilated to French society" and not have a criminal record. It may be more complicated than that but our book was kind of vague. 80% of French citizenship requests get confirmed. I'm not sure about the US.
- Under the law shortly after the French Revolution, a person became a French citizen after living there for only one year. As my professor pointed out, at that point in history you might not have lasted the year anyway and it was probably safer to stay somewhere else! At any rate, I will be celebrating my unofficial dual citizenship in September.

Language

Today I had a minor crisis. It was an identity crisis more than anything but it was also linguistic. In light of the realization that I will most likely never write "well" in French (precious few French people can), I suffered a temporary fervor for my waning English skills and nearly determined to never abuse the English language again. Fortunately I restrained this pharisaic tendency and didn't make any rash vows.

Most notably, I didn't vow to never again start a sentence with a conjunction. This habit started innocently enough in college as my journalistic zeal for concise communication merged with the liberty of "creative writing." I have always disliked having to start a sentence with "However," "Furthermore," or their ilk. It feels far too early in a sentence to introduce a comma. The reader has only begun when *lurch* they have to shift up and coast through the yield sign. I like to at least have a prepositional phrase to justify the appearance of a comma. Therefore, I started commencing my phrases with "but" and "and".

It was stylistic. I only did it once in a while. Now it has gotten out of hand. I started with the occasional one; now I sometimes smoke a whole pack in one blog post. That is why, as I stood in the shower and pondered the decline of my English vocabulary and usage, I nearly vowed to remove conjunctive beginnings from my stylistic arsenal. Fortunately reason intervened somewhere between the shampooing and the towel. I decided to guard that quirk, along with many others that I have developed, because in some cases they have value. However, from now on I will be using them with more thought and care.

Marche Pour Jesus

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the Marche Pour Jesus (March for Jesus) in Paris. The parade had 6 or 7 different trucks with bands playing live music, and each truck had a crowd behind it. The lead truck was playing a very diverse collection of music that had been organized ahead of time. They also handed out the words to everybody before the march so even if we hadn't practiced up ahead of time (like me) we could follow along.



All of the trucks after that played whatever came to their minds at the moment. So after about an hour behind the main truck I started drifting backwards through the parade. I danced along for a little while behind the second truck, which was vibrating African rhythms, and then joined the "Juifs pour Jesus" (Jews for Jesus) who were waving banners and blowing shofars behind a much smaller truck. I skipped the Brazilian truck because I don't speak a word of Portuguese and joined up with another couple hundred vigorous dancers near the end of the parade. I think there were about 5 of us white folks in that crowd. It was fun.


I think my favorite people where a dozen or so Indians (You can see their flag in the photo above). They were behind the main truck but they were far enough back that you couldn't hear the truck very well. That was convenient because you COULD hear the Indians VERY well. All they had was a tambourine and their voices but they kept up the music coming at full energy for the entire 3 hours. It was a fun mix of French, some Indian language I don't know, and English. They usually started a song in English or Indian, then switched it into French. Sometimes I'm pretty sure they were doing the translation on the fly.



The theme song for the event is HERE

La Suisse

Well, you may have noticed that I haven't gotten around to posting anything about the rest of my Switzerland trip. Maybe someday. In the mean time, here is a montage of my video footage from the trip. Don't worry, it's only 3 minutes long :-)

Another story

Here is a quicko translation of the story I just wrote for class.

"For starters, we forgot the motor. Not the motor for our car, mind you, but the motor for the boat. If we had forgotten the motor for the car I think we would have noticed. When we got to the lake we made a sail out of our rain jackets, and with that contraption we succeeded in reaching the middle of the lake. We hung out there for three hours trying to catch some fish. Unfortunately we had also forgotten our bait. We tried using cheese as bait, but after three hours we had no more cheese and still no fish. All we had left was some bread.
Before we had time to try using bread as bait, it started to rain. We frantically demolished our sail and put on our raincoats. We heard rolls of thunder. This made us nervous because without our sail we were stuck in the middle of lake. Suddenly a flash of lightening struck the metal pole that we had jimmied to hang our "sail." The lightening dismantled it for us. It also succeeded in pitching us overboard.
We swam to shore, pushing the boat ahead of us. When we got there we discovered that the metal pole had been a more important part of the boat trailer than we had thought. In the end we dragged back home without fish, without food, and without a boat. In addition we were scorched and soaked at the same time, a truly bizarre situation!