Re-organization

As anyone reading here knows, this blog has been long-neglected. I'm writing now to announce a re-organization of my digital life. Here's the news:

• I will no longer be posting to this blog. Instead I'll replace it with a creative blog called "Curious Imaginings." This will be a mixture of personal creative visual exploits, samples from my professional photography, and miscellaneous interesting stuff. URL: http://blog.curiousimagery.com.
  
  
• For personal news, Liz and I will both do our best to post semi-regular updates (and pictures) from our life to "Garden in the Alley." URL: http://danielandliznelson.blogspot.com
  
  
• Lastly, I'm excited to semi-officially launch my photography business, Curious Imagery. My portfolio and informational website is online at http://curiousimagery.com.

Reminder: if you don't already use a service like Bloglines or Google Reader, they make keeping tabs on blog posts a breeze.

Home Stretch (already!)

Hi again!

Here I am again as the weeks speed by. I think we're kept busy enough that it's easy not to notice the time flying past. Personally, I'm exhausted, but doing well. Since I wrote last, we finished our phase of lectures (just the first four weeks) and have been using class to work though specific issues (everything from operations on conjoined twins to land ownership). The basic concept is to explore the complexities of the dilemmas involved, look at what relevant principles we can draw from scripture, and use these to form a position on the issue. It's rarely a simple process, but the difficulty has been rewarding. As homework, we've been tracking 10 key world issues and writing as many questions as we can on each every week--totalling hundreds of pages of questions by now. The investment of time and energy has been draining, but I'd say worth it.

Backing up, our second half of lecture was particularly impacting. Our speaker Matt Rawlins worked with us to get really personal in identifying how our communication is rooted in defensiveness (hiding, protecting ourselves, needing control) as well as working through some principles of learning to be able to disclose our own agendas and develop a common ground of information from which we can explain our conclusions. You could basically summarize the gist of his message as: "we're all defensive jerks--what are we going to do about it?" A short paragraph doesn't really do this content justice, but for me this may have been the most developmental part of the school so far.

Outside of school life, I've really enjoyed connecting a bit more deeply with the other students here. This really is a high-quality bunch of people and the diversity rarely gets boring ...be it philosophizing over lunch dishes, charting new territory in the forest, or watching movies from all over the world. This last weekend was extended so we had Mon and Tuesday off. I took the opportunity to make a website for a friend which I was very pleased to squeeze in despite all plausibility. Last Sunday, I also celebrated surviving the first 21 years of my life! Thanks all for the emails and notes on facebook. It was actually a really cool day. It was quiet, but I felt really honored by Swiss chocolate, random notes, and getting treated to some potent spirits at the local Auberge up the street.

Now it's home stretch (with less than three weeks remaining). This week, I have a 15 page paper on the dilemmas of economics in Russia, next I'll work with three other students to do a group paper examining Russia's development more holistically. For the final week, Liz will be able to visit! She gets in just in time for our group projects and then to spend a few days around Burtigny and getting to know the school!! An exciting (and very distracting) prospect indeed.

I hope to post again before then, but I'll be back in Seattle after March 27th. I'm enrolled for spring classes at UW and am planning to dive back in full force. If all goes well, I'll have a place to live too--I'm planning to sublet a room from another CHID student who's doing a study abroad in Italy.

Enjoy some random pictures below...

Burtigny Countryside

Burtigny Countryside with U.F.O.

Not beautiful, but I think this was my first successfully-landed handspring. Woo hoo!

Be afraid. Our self-imposed 80's day...

A few Saturday's back, some of us went to France, where I made it skiing for the first time in years (maybe since I was 15?).

We accidentally skied into some back country where we had to hike out. We stopped for lunch at the top of the world and I did a handstand. Geneva is below the haze in the background.

After, we decided to cool off a bit and "ski free." It wasn't as cold as you might think--except maybe for some of the looks we got :o).

Weeks 1-2: Indoctrination vs. Revolution?

[warning - this is a long one!]
Welcome to the world of my indecisive postmodern epistemology! I've grown up dutifully learning to tear apart all the "ways of knowing" that philosophers, teachers, theologians, parents, scientists, artists, politicians, programmers, pastors, friends, and acquaintances have used. But now, because I'm aware of the limitations of whichever model I use, I'm stuck with an inability to use my own sense-making capacity. Justified? Probably. Dehabilitating? Definitely.

So here we are in a school trying to connect the dots between the gospel and the world... how are we to do it? Yes, with a model (note tone of amused sarcasm). Using categories and steps, lists and compartments. I hate putting things into a category. If it really is an accurate description as best I know, great. But when I know an issue is more complex and multi-faceted, it feels dishonest, presumptuous, and frequently very destructive.

Ahem. Anyway... we call the model we're using the "360 degree model" because it looks at "all" aspects of society (painful, I know). Basically it breaks society down into eight domains: family, education, government, arts and entertainment, science and tech, church, economics, and communication. The whole point isn't to try to describe the universe in one sentence, but to create a common vocabulary to bridge between scripture and the world (as a matter of practicality, we're operating on the assumption that the cannon of Protestant scripture is divinely inspired and relevant to us now). The idea behind using this model, is how it allows us to look at a Biblical text and say "hey this is talking about governance" and then to read an article in the The International Herald Tribune and say "hey, this is talking about governance too." From here our challenge is to line the two up and see how they connect.

Personally this is painful. If you attempt to find truth by reducing scripture to "principles," it seems that you're left with just that--principles. Maybe they're good, maybe not. But Jesus said "I AM the Truth." Not, "I can lead you to principles that are the truth." So truth isn't a sum of abstract ideas we're meant to discover. Rather it's a living person (organic, alive, dynamic, changing, unchanging) with flesh--complete with love, infatuation, jealousy, wrath, pain, and joy. Whether something is true gets aligned with the person of Jesus. I'm not sure all the implications of what this means, but when we say, "God says... about government" and believe we've found "truth" I sense we risk loosing something great.

More painful than the idea of the 360 degree model, is how it has been rocking me--in a good way. Maybe this is just another situation of good vs. best, where this is something really good, even with it's limitations. Two assignments in particular where's it's been revealing to me are my papers on the Old Testament books of Proverbs and Deuteronomy. For each, we went through and marked which domain(s) were associated with each verse through the entire book. When we were finished, we wrote a paper summarizing the key thrust of the themes related to our topic. I wrote about family and relationships in Proverbs and communication in Deuteronomy. I'm not particularly proud of them as pieces of writing (your sure to still catch some glaring typos), but each case I found the personal revelation and understanding deeply rewarding. If your curious, you can read both my Proverbs paper and my Deuteronomy paper online.

I can't say I'm in love with the model, but it has been really fruitful so far. If I'd thought it up, I think I would have thrown it out because of its limitations. I think I'm learning something...

The second weekend I was here, we had an incredible snowfall. While I was out taking these pictures I listend through the book of Revelation on my iPod. It was pretty surreal. Enjoy!

Council of Elrond

In the APC, there's 15 of us from Nigeria, Norway, USA, Brazil (working in Rawanda), Columbia, New Zealand, Germany, and Switzerland. Our school staff are from Britain, Switzerland, and South Africa. Ages range from 20-50+, and between us we speak around 20 languages.

So what brings us here? At the very beginning of the school I was struck with similarites between where we're at and the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring. True we're not hobbits, elves, or dwarves, but there's something about our coming together in an uncommon place with a common purpose that smells eerily epic.

Without making it too complicated, I think you could say that we're "just" trying to figure out how to follow God in this world. There's something eternal that's been planted in our hearts. Now we're asking what piece do we play in this story? We've each experienced enough disenchantment and falling on our faces to know it's not as easy as all that, but we haven't given up on finding answers either.

If you'd like to meet this strange company, you can in the pictures below
(we're a bit of a motley crew, I'm afraid).

(Left to right) Øyvind (Norway), Ragnhild (Norway), Hannah (New York, US), Christian (staff from England/Norway), Eva (Germany), April (Nebraska/Philippines), Melissa (Arizona, US), and me. Students MIA are Whitney (Tennessee, US), Gabriel (Nigeria), Barbara (Switzerland), Helen (New Zealand), Eli (Nigeria), Paulo (Columbia), Patience (Nigeria), and Umar (Nigeria).

Christian is catching a brilliant idea

Umar is fine tuning his combat skills

Ragnhild, Christian, and Ian (also staff) on a counter-strike

And this is me finding my inner zen on a Friday afternoon

Exploring Nyon (Photo Adventure)

So, a couple weeks ago I had a little fiasco with Bean (my laptop). Basically he just wouldn't start all the way, he'd power up, but OSX wouldn't load. Apple tech guys couldn't figure out any sort of diagnostic, so I biked an hour into a town called Nyon, where there's an Apple store. Perhaps a bit of a stressful motive for the visit, but it was a fun day exploring the town after I dropped bean off. Enjoy the pictures!

Entering Nyon...

Walking through old town

Triple-decker houses like these are conducive to miniature cities on the rooftops (below)

The old castle is a good place to read.

Here's the view looking out

Finally down by the waters of [the infamous] Lac Leman!
(not to be confused with the Oregon-based musician "Loch Lomond")

I'm not sure if all the cats in Nyon look like this or if this one was actually stalking me.

Can I say that the trip down was significantly faster than the one back up?

At least there was a good view of Mont Blanc at sunset

BTW, Bean is back and doing great. It turns out to have been a faulty hard drive, which was covered under warranty. I just had to pay 90CHF to cover data recovery. Hurray!

Burtigny - Update Overload

It's busy here!
They aren't kidding when they say this school is intense. The difficulty of the assignments is moderate, but the quantity is insane. Every week we read an entire book, write a paper, have a test, and do articles (which ends up being about 20 pages typed per week). It might be doable if we weren't booked with lecture and work duties from 8am-4pm each day.

Perhaps this explains the lack or recent blog entries?

Personally I'm doing well. Even in the midst of the intensity and being spread all over, it's been good to have a rhythm and I've been able to decompress from city life in Seattle a bit. Burtigny isn't exactly the most happening place, but that turns out to be a blessing for me. In the next couple posts I'll try to break down the nutshell version of a some of my life over the past few weeks

Here are some pictures of Burtigny, the base, and the surrounding country:

The countryside around Burtigny
This is the YWAM base. It used to be an orphanage.

My room (it's even smaller than it looks).

Meet Øyvind from Norway (left) and my room mate Gabriel from Nigeria (right).
Øyvind is a journalist and Gabriel does a bit of everything.

This is where I go for walks. Thank my 200mm zoom for making the mountains huge.

They're really pretty far away :o).

At night it's incredible to look down at the lights of Nyon and Geneva.
The lake is called Lac Leman and the mountains in the distance are the French alps.
I like to watch the trains run by parallel to the freeway right as twilight turns to night.
You can enlarge this picture to use as a wallpaper if you like.

Why am I in Switzerland?

Though I'm not sure I know all the way why I'm here, I expect there are reasons. I think I know a few and hope to discover more. As far as what I'm doing, it's a 12 credit school with University of the Nations (YWAM) called Advanced Principles of Communication (or APC). The school is primarily designed for people involved in communications in some capacity (journalism, design, music, etc). It's basically based on the premise that we've all experienced what we believe to be Jesus in ways we can't deny, but also that there's much we see in the church and world around us that feels difficult to reconcile with the promises of our faith. Abstractly, we believe God's authority and goodness, but practically things appear messy and chaotic. We could simplistically say something like "we live in a fallen world," but where is our response as people who are taught to pray to God, "your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven?" Martin Luther is quoted as saying, "If the gospel is not relevant to the issues of the day, it is not the gospel at all." The focus of this school then, is basically to examine the content of our gospel next to the state of the world in which we live to see if our "good news" is really so great (and how we can practically walk in line of it).

On a lighter note, I posted some snapshots from my train ride from Salzburg to here (via connections in Zurich & Lasaunne)

New Years in Austria

After arriving in Austria (Bellingham to Salt Lake City to Cincinnati to Frankfurt to Salzburg), I met up with my friend Alex, who traveled through the Caribbean with me on a discipleship school in 2006. She's loads of fun and it was great to get to know her family and friends in person a bit. The day I arrived, they took me to a hockey game and then introduced me to some fine Austrian beer after.

On New Years Eve, Alex's brother in law took me "arschbobbing." If you break this down, it's exactly like it sounds: "Arsch" (as in ass) + "bob" (as in bobsledding). The exercise and adrenaline were more than welcome. In the evening, we brought the new year in with style (see pictures below).

Fondue dinner


(Left to right) Sabine, me, Jason, Martin, & Alex

Martin making a special festive beverage
(ask me the ingredients in person, if you like
it's called "feuerzangenbowle")

Crazy downtown fireworks in the fog