Yesterday Oscar and I went to the Commissary to get a paper that says I live here so I can then go to Immigration and update my paperwork. As I have said on Twitter, I am currently illegal. The paperwork wasn’t completed, so we couldn’t get to Immigration to make me legal. Today I went to jail. Fortunately for me, these two events are completely unrelated.

There’s a man who attends the Lambaré church, where I go, who has quite the interesting past. I don’t know his whole story, but from what I gather, he was basically hired muscle in his day. He’s been to prison and is now free and has completely turned his life around. Rather, and he would definitely correct me if he knew what I said, God has turned his life around. He would say prison didn’t change his life, the Word of God did. He quite frequently visits with several inmates in this prison called Esperanza (Hope) who have also been changed by the power of God. He asked me a few days ago if I wanted to come with him this time, and I said sure. I met a man called Ruiz.

Ruiz left home when he was 12 because his mother beat him constantly. He has three scars on his head alone that she gave him. He just took some clothes and a bag one day and left on his bike. He worked for a while, but after a few months (I think) he was hit by a car on his bike. If I understood his story correctly, the man who hit him was a Japanese man who essentially adopted him into his family and took care of everything he needed. After a while, for a reason I didn’t catch when he told it, he left and got into drug trafficking and selling, arms dealing, and eventually murder. He once killed an entire family – including the pets – because (I think) he owed them a large sum of money (maybe they owed him money…). He said after that, he felt free. At one point he killed 13 people one week.

When I met this man, all I knew is that he was a Christian. I met him in the pastor’s office, so naturally I thought he was the pastor. I found out eventually that he’s an inmate, changed by the Holy Spirit of God, well respected among his fellow inmates and guards alike, and is given a lot of liberty that probably no one else in the whole prison gets. I literally could not believe the stuff he was telling me because of the character of the man I was talking to. In his face I saw nothing but love, peace, and a man of purpose. These days, whatever he puts his mind to, he does. He’s made – to sell – shoes, jeans, backpacks, sandals, and has just finished a book. He’s earned the trust of everyone in the jail, enough that he can have his computer, scanner, printer, speakers, sewing machine, and other things (he’s saving up for an air conditioner) in the office, that the two actual pastors invited him into, at his disposal. Incredible, unbelievable hardly describe the change in him.

I used to ask, when I would hear of something terrible – like someone killing a whole family – what were they thinking? Which person in their right mind would ever do something like that? I would always come to the conclusion that a “normal” person would never do something like that. I spoke briefly with another man who says Ruiz’s story is nothing compared to his. Yet both of these men spoke of the Truth and had the peace and joy of God in their faces. I think they’re the first people I’ve met (that I know of) that were quite literally the worst possible kind of person you can be, and yet they spoke with authority and with so much *reason*. They are not unreasonable men. They’re in their right mind. That’s what God can do.

That’s the God I serve.

To quote a song by Shawn McDonald, “what a beautiful God.”

-j

Something Jesus says in Matthew 20 in the parable of the workers in the vineyard turned on a light bulb over my head. To recap, an owner found some guys to work in his vineyard early in the morning and everyone agreed they’d get a buck for their work at the end of the day. In the afternoon, he went out again and got some more workers, also agreeing to pay them a buck. When there was only an hour or two of day left, he found some more, and once more everyone agreed they’d get a greenback for their work. When it came time to pay, he paid the most recent workers first, and by the time he got to the ones who had been there the longest, they were certain they’d get more than their dollar, but that’s what they agreed on so that’s what they got. They weren’t happy. The lord said to his workers “Didn’t we agree on a wage before you started working, or are you envious because I am good?”

It makes me wonder how often I use the scale of someone else’s life to judge God’s fairness in my own. It’s not fair that so many kids I know way younger than me can be married already. It’s not fair that God lets some people stay in their birthplaces their whole lives and I have to move. It’s not fair that others don’t have as much responsibility as I do in, and out of, the church. I ask me this: “Says who?”

God’s made a “deal” with each one of us based on 1) what He wants to do with our lives, and 2) how He’s created us to be able to do it. I’m sure the people who worked half a day were upset too, until they realized that they made more for the work they did than the ones who worked all day. There is always more than one way to look at things. I choose to look at the trust God placed in me instead of the stuff I wish I had/could do instead.

-j

ps> This is a new concept to me. Please to have patience.

As if there weren’t already enough ways to keep everyone up to date on what I’m doing, now it could possibly be even more up-to-the-minute than ever before. I have Twitter.

Twitter, to me, is basically a way for people with nothing better to do to tell everyone the minutiae of their lives. I know people that use twitter as if it were an IM service. I’m not judging you, I’m just saying.

There are times when I say to myself “man, it would be really cool to share this experience with my friends,” but by the time I would get to a computer it would be too late. With twitter, I can text a message to my account from my cell phone for cheap and *bam* – you’re updated. You don’t even need to have Twitter to see it. My updates will show up on my sidebar here, and you can also visit www.twitter.com/hisc1ay if you *really* can’t get enough. But if you already use it, go ahead and follow me.

Let’s see how long this lasts. I guess it depends on how expensive it ends up being.

-j

Being the new year and all, I decided to make a better effort at reading the Holy scriptures. My task is being made a bit more easy as I have two resources to help. There’s a devotional that I suspect many of the church members or teachers at school use, seeing as how I bought it from the pastor who runs the office at the school. The second resource is a guide to reading the Bible through in a year that Ben made copies of for folks at church. What I like about it is that as long as we’re all using it, we’re all reading the same stuff every day and maybe we’ll even have more conversations centered around the portion of God’s word we read that day. It’s divided into two sections with two chapters per section. One section is to read as a family, and the second is to read personally. If you’d like to know where to get it, I can try to find out.

Hopefully this will also spark lively discussion on this here blog. I just read the first two chapters of Genesis and picked out a couple new things that catch my attention in this day of evolution and intelligent design and maybe God used evolution and all that stuff. Here’s what I found. I don’t claim to know everything, and I will even pose some questions to which I look most forward to reading responses to.

My first question is “How was there evening and morning without sun, moon, or stars?” In chapter one, you can read that God created a light and separated it from the darkness (Day 1), and then THREE DAYS LATER created the sun, moon, and stars. Don’t evening and morning imply sun and moon? This challenges my belief that the days were 24 hour days. It doesn’t mean they weren’t, but it looks at our common knowledge of days depending on the sun and laughs in its face. Not to mention the plants were created the day BEFORE the sun. Interesting, eh?

The evolutionary topic I discovered in chapter one is regarding how they were made. I’ve heard, as I’m sure you have, questions about whether or not God used evolution or some type of it to create the animals. Intraspecies evolution aside (it’s clear that animals have adaptations, I don’t argue that), the order in which animals were created intrigued me for a few seconds. First it was fish (and birds), and THEN it was animals. That order lends itself to an evolutionary progression. But then I read further and discovered that the Bible clearly says every animal was created “after his own kind”. It seems to me that even though the order might afford evolution, God actually did create fish separately from amoebas separately from alligators separately from cows, apes, humans, etc. The end of chapter one also suggests that everything was created vegetarian! Man…I love my steak (and eat a lot of it here).

Chapter 2 has some fun answers to questions. Were Adam and Eve the *only* people God created? I don’t know. I did notice something that I had never noticed though. Chapter 1 says that land animals and people were created on day 6. Chapter 2 tells us when. It looks like God created Adam first among all animals period. So it was plants, fish, birds, and Adam. Then God wanted a companion for Adam, so he created all kinds of land animals and had Adam give them names. Finally, he created Eve to be a real companion. I had never noticed before that animals came *after* man! One more thing that piqued my interest was that the land might have been plantless for some time. Just the way its written, to me, suggests some significant length of time before God caused the mist to water the ground that he had separated in order to sustain flora.

I really look forward to see what you have to say. I also anticipate many posts like this as I dive into God’s word daily. My prayer is to find stuff I hadn’t noticed before as well as gain a better knowledge of the history and purposes of God’s people, and later His desire for our lives. I hope I can even bless you with His word as I discover it myself anew.

-j

Happy New Year! I pray that everyone has entered 2009 well and content. One thing I’ve heard more than once here is a reflection upon the year 2000 when the world was supposed to end. Here we are nearly a decade later alive and well! Take that, computers!

It’s been difficult to adjust to the sights, sounds, and feelings of the holiday season here. Not difficult in the sense that I’m unhappy, but rather my brain never really connected the season that was with the season I felt. Last night was more “normal” than Christmas, but I’ll get to that later.

Our Christmas was spent with some visitors and friends from the States. Three of the Koch kids from Syracuse had come down to spend some time painting the school (it looks pretty nice now), so there was at least a small bit of familiarity for me as I have basically known them since they were born. Apart from the giving of gifts, the rest was foreign. On Christmas Eve, we went to La Quinta (a large house recently placed under the auspices of the school) for some swimming and eating. Our friends Ben and Vivi were there with us as well. I made fudge again (but not as much as last year), and at around 10 we ate our asado, which was more than delicious. We shall never forget the pork.

The other thing that happens on Christmas Eve is the setting off of fireworks at midnight. Really, though, kids will have been setting fireworks off for a few weeks already, but there is a sort of culmination on Christmas Eve; A Silent Night it is not. We gentlemen slept at the house in the air conditioning. Merry Christmas to me! The next morning we all gathered at the Caballero house for an exchange of gifts and some tasty lunch. I was given a jar of raspberry jam – my favorite – and a cookbook of Paraguayan food. I am particularly excited about trying that out. I’m on my way to Paragauyanhood, I think. We rounded the day off with more swimming.

Last night the only thing missing was coldness. In recent years I’ve cared less about the ball, but Paraguay has their own version. Once again, we handled small, cheap explosives, from the old to the young. We had a delicious dinner of ham (hard to find here), sopa, potato salad, veggies, cheese, salami, Doritos, and sparkling ciders. The Doritos were imported by the Americans I think. Then we went around the table and each person had to speak a blessing on everyone else.

After dinner we drank tereré for a bit, getting some visitors with food from their own tables, which we traded for food from ours. Eventually we walked down to Pastor Pedro’s house, and I brought my fudge (they have no such thing here – there’s not even a word for it, so I simply called it “sweet”). We set off some fireworks with the kids, tossing them at one another and such. It was all completely safe, I promise… Anyway, it wasn’t hard to tell when it was 12, because the sky became ablaze with multicolored sulfuric light, and it sounded like a war zone. Amidst all the “Feliz Año Nuevo!” text messages we were all getting, we embraced one another, wishing God’s blessing on each other and celebrating our entry into yet another year.

And here we are. Below isn’t a video blog, but it’s a bit of the sights and sounds of Paraguay on New Years Night.