South Asia–ethnomusicology with creativity provided by the Holy Spirit
“It takes an extraordinary amount of discipline and maturity to live in today, walking step by step doing whatever I’m supposed to do today. It takes discipline to say “I don’t know.” It takes faith to trust in one-day-at-a-time. It requires me to lay down my desperate, freakish desire for control and trust He is at work.” Controlled by His Spirit, producing fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. One step at a time, one step closer towards our best selves, the people God wants us to be. Credit to Karen Yates–read more: This is how I’ve started looking at calling.
I grew up on Los Angeles Dodgers baseball. I was young, but I remember seeing my first game in 1961 with my dad when the Dodgers (the team had moved to L.A. from Brooklyn three season earlier), played their final season at the Los Angeles Coliseum. We would see a game the next year in a brand new stadium built in Chavez Revenue just outside downtown L.A.
Future Baseball Hall of Famers were on this team: Duke Snyder, Sandy Kofax, Don Dyrsade, and Walter Alston was managing the team. I remember the thrill of sitting in the stands eating the precursor to the Dodger Dog listening to Vin Skully on the radio calling the play-by-play. Continue reading
Years ago I remember watching the movie Saving Private Ryan and being horrified at the brutality of beach landing. I found it very hard to watch. I knew my dad was involved in a beach landing on Okinawa as part of the 1st Marine Division during WWII so I asked him what he thought. His comment? “It was far worse than that.”
While my dad talked very little about his time in the U.S. Marine Corps, he was very proud of the Marines and of his service. He was not proud of the fighting but saw it as a necessary part of what his generation was required to do. He said many times, “I fought so you wouldn’t have to.”
That sentiment sums up my feelings for all those who have serve and are serving in the armed forces of the United States of America. WWII was supposed to be the war to end all wars (as was WWI) but, as we know, it wasn’t. There are those who would, if they could, bring an end to our freedoms. Thank you ALL who are serving and sacrificing. While there are many things I would love to change about America, this is still a great country rooted in freedom of expression (speech and religion) and grounded in a system of laws that give us recourse when we are wronged.
May we never forget those who have sacrificed so much for so many. Remembering and appreciating. Memorial Day 2013.
Some might see this as ‘irreverent.’
A friend visiting our Wycliffe USA Offices last week saw some of our marketing materials posted outside the Wycliffe Discovery Center and immediately saw a resemblance between the “most interesting man in the world” and our Wycliffe USA photo. Then he went on to do a parody, “I don’t often read the Bible, my friends, but when I do, I read the Wycliffe Bible.”
OK, I couldn’t help myself…yes, I did chuckle.
News flash: things change fast.
I recently recorded a Carson Daily Last Call where he interviewed Gavin Newsom, the Lt. Governor of the State of California. I’d never heard of him but was intrigued by the idea that he’d written a book about how to reinvent government called Citizenville. Now, that’s a news flash for a State headed apparently for bankruptcy unless emergency measures are employed.
I’m not here to promote his book, but a phrase he used in the interview with with Carson Daily really caught my attention. He reported that Thomas Friedman said that when he wrote his book about Globalization, published in 2005, The World is Flat, he never mentioned FaceBook, Twitter was a sound, the Cloud was something in the sky, 4G was a parking place, Linked-in was a prison, an app was what you filled out to attend Stanford, and SKYPE was a typo! Newsom said, “We are on a collision course with the future!” Continue reading
Hmong children learning in their mother tongue at Lao Chai Primary School in Sa Pa, northern Vietnam.
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the power of first language education in the highlands of Peru. Here’s another example from Vietnam. According to UNESCO statistics, programs like this are expensive but are an investment in the future of the country. According to one of the interviews, this program leads to “…improved communication skills [that] would help minorities in everything from finding work and securing bank loans to signing up for health services…Language is important because it influences everything…” Cheering them on!
According to this article in the Economist, the highlands of Peru have “long sheltered one of South America’s larger concentrations of poor people.”
But recent data shows that there are indicators of change: “new markets, lots of traffic (motorbikes, moto-taxis and vans) and modern farming techniques, including drip irrigation and farm machinery.” The author says this is primarily due to: 1) a burst of roadbuilding and road improvements started in the 1990s that expanded markets and; 2) mobile technology (ownership of telephones among people in rural areas has shot up from 2% in 2004 to 54% in 2011). Yet another example of rural people bypassing telephone landlines and going directly to mobile phones.
This Sunday several of us from Wycliffe USA and Wycliffe Canada have the privilege of attending the dedication of the EAST APURÍMAC QUECHUA NEW TESTAMENT in Abancay, Peru.
Check the Wycliffe Blog for updates.
Last night Dallas and I had the privilege to attend an event at RTS, Orlando–the Spurgeon Lecture series where Dr. John Piper delivered the address.
According to the RTS website, “The Spurgeon Lecture is a hallmark of the Nicole Institute of Baptist Studies, which was established on the Orlando campus of RTS in 2012 to honor the legacy of Dr. Roger Nicole (1915-2010). Nicole, a founding editorial board member of Christianity Today, was a distinguished visiting faculty member at RTS from 1989 to 2000. The Spurgeon Lecture, named after the great Reformed Baptist preacher Charles H. Spurgeon, is designed to equip and inform the audience on a broad range of theological, historical and cultural issues.” Promoted at the seminary as Baptist and Presbyterians coming together around reformed theology (rooted in the Protestant Reformation many believers returned to the gospel of salvation by grace alone). Continue reading
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Bob Creson 