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.