360 days and counting...

I celebrated my 29th birthday on Monday in a typical Czech fashion...with two Czech guys on their hands and knees facing away from one another, me being held by my hands a feet being swung between the two of them with my hips crashing into their butts 29 times...I'm too old for that...

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This is my last year to be cool. It's a shame, but this is it...360 days left. Not that I can't be cool once I'm 30 but it will be a different kind of cool. It will be a conditional cool.

(this make-believe conversation has been translated for your reading enjoyment)

czech high school boy: Hey, who is that dude over there?
czech high school girl: Oh, that's the dude who organized this english camp.
boy: He looks cool.
girl: Yeah, he is.
boy (yelling to me): Hey! Come here.
Nate: Yo! What's up?
boy: How long have you had your dreads?
Nate: About a year and a half.
girl: They are really cool.
Nate: Thanks. (to the boy) What's your name?
boy: Honza. What's your name?
Nate: Nate. Nice to meet you.
boy: You too. Your Czech is really good! How long have you lived in Czech?
Nate: A little over three years.
girl: Really? Three years? How old are you?
Nate: How old do you think I am?
boy: Uh, 26.
girl: Maybe 24.
Nate: (laughing) Nope. 30!
boy and girl: Really! You are really cool for 30.

And there we have it. The conditional statement that I will live with forever starting in 360 days.

"You are really cool...for 30"

I will no longer only be cool. I will forever be conditionalized (is that really a word?!) as "for 30...31...32...33..."

So, here's to being just plain cool for the next year!

let's go swing

My roommate, Greg, went for a bike ride this morning and while out took these pictures.

As he showed them to me this evening my heart was filled with...something...I still can't place the emotion. Maybe it was a combination of emotions...

joy
freedom
longing

I wasn't even there, but I can hear them laughing. I can hear their foreign tongue spitting out insults that I haven't learned yet. I can hear them pretending to be somewhere/somebody/sometime that they are not. I can hear youth.

It's been really hot here. Summer is [here] coming. The 3 months that I work 9 months for is on the horizon...literally. When the sun rises tomorrow I'll be off to Prague to get ready for our interns who arrive on Tuesday. The time for work is here.

It's a strange feeling...this growing up.

The coming heat used to signal freedom. It used to be a signal that lakes and waterskiing and bridge-jumping and wiffle ball and bike rides and roller coasters and (your favorite summer memory here) were coming. But now, it signals the busiest time of the year. It is still the most exciting time of the year for me. But its different. There is responsibilty and caring for others and deadlines and problems (oh the problems) and (your growing pain here).

That's the weird thing about growing up. When we're young we are always dreaming about what we want to be when we're older and how much better it'll be when I'm 16, 18, 21, [enter your desired age here]. And now we are older and we are dreaming of how we wish we could go back to those ages when our dreams were still attainable, we had no responsiblitiy, and now we're looking kcab <-- to 16, 18, 21 [enter any year lower than your current age here].

I want to be content with the age I. But not just that. I don't want to stay there...in contentment...I want to be content with the age that I am

AND

LIVE IN THE
joy
anticipation
freedom
dreams
adventure
THAT BOYS LIVE IN

I want to stop and swing.

Boy, why are you crying?

I've always loved the story of Peter Pan and its various derivations (Hook and Finding Neverland being two of my favorites). Something about a boy who doesn't grow up has always appealed to me. I'm not sure why...

Of all the different variations of Peter Pan that I've seen, I'd actually never read the novel by J.M. Barrie. While hanging out with Red this past weekend she said that I needed to read it and that it'd "change my life".

Already a magical tale, it became more alive as I read the original. Peter was cockier, Tink was feistier, Hook was meaner (but still concerned with "good form"), Wendy more motherlier, the entire story darker and more imaginitive than I could've expected.

While the story didn't change my life it nicely supplimented some thoughts I'd already been having about growing up...

_____


The last two weeks I've been hanging out with a group of college students from Moody Bible Institute. I've always identified myself with high school and college aged students. Even though I'm...uh hum...twenty-eight (letters are easier to look at than numbers), I feel closer to the them than to "adults". I'm sure that is part of the reason that I am in youth ministry.

As I hung out with this group of (primarily) 19-22 year olds, for the first time in my life I realized the real gap between

me










them

I didn't like this realization.

I am like Peter Pan.

"I don't want ever to be a man," he said with passion. "I want always to be a little boy and to have fun." (pg. 28)
"Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man." (pg. 174)

I'm pretty sure I've made those exact same statements before. The former to my mom and the latter to a couple girls I've dated.

During a discussion group at an English Camp with the Moody students the question was asked, "Who has the greatest influence on your life?" As we went around and shared I began to wonder: Am I the type of man that is influencing others? Am I a man who is helping to steer young men and women towards Christ? Sometimes I fear that I only care about having fun. I know that I am a fun-maker. I love having fun. But isn't there more to life than just having fun? Too often I choose fun over discipline and find myslef having lots of friend, but maybe little impact...

I don't want to give up having fun, but I also don't want that to be the only characteristic that defines me. I want to be a man who has profound impact on individuals.

_____


There are numerous other things though, that I continue to love about Peter Pan and this story. What inspired me so much about Finding Neverland was Barrie's recalcitrance towards those who are trying to crush the imaginative nature of children. There is something magical about the way children think outside the box. They haven't been indoctrinated by society of the "oughts" and "ought nots" of life. They can make a common stick a sword and a t-shirt a dress. There are no boundries to the imagination of a child.

Yet, there comes a time when we grow out of it. For those who do it sooner than others, we ridicule and mock the younger ones around us who dwell in the land of pirates, dinosaurs, and elegant balls. And as adults we feel like we need to correct the children and help them to see life "as it is".

My favorite passage of the book speaks to this:

"Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is a nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on."

I want to keep writing. I want you to experience the mind of Barrie as he unlocks a childs mind for us again, but I can't write the whole book out because, well, (a) it'd take to long, and (b) there may be copywrite infringements, so I'll just have to urge you to read it yourself.

As for me, I find myself trapped somewhere between Neverland and Adulthood. Longing to hold tight the tension between the innocent freedom of dreaming and playing and the responsibility to be a man who impacts others and lives in maturity.

Uncle Rico

Church services are interesting here in the Czech for me. I know enough Czech so that I can pronounce the words when I'm singing. I know enough vocab, so that I can usually get the main meaning of the song. The sermon, on the other hand, is another level in which I have only begun to ascend. Half the time it is Polish anyways, so what I usually do is find out what passage the pastor is speaking on and just read the surrounding context and related passages for 45 minutes. It is a really great practice, but I began missing the art of preaching. I missed hearing the Scriptures read and expressed from another's mind and experiences. Because of this I started downloading sermons and listening to them on Sunday afternoons or on long car rides. Rob Bell has become one of my favorites and so I listened to him this morning.

The title of this particular sermon was "How to Lose Your Life". He started with telling the story of Mary (the one called Magdalene) seeing Jesus in the garden from John 20. He talked about how, after realizing it was Jesus, she clinged to Him and how Jesus told her to stop and to go tell her brothers that He is going to return to His Father. Rob asked, "Why did Jesus do this? Why did He tell her to stop clinging to Him? Why did He tell her to go tell her brothers that He must return to the Father?" His answer, expounded upon through the Scriptures was because a new time was coming in which Jesus wouldn't be on earth and that she couldn't hold onto Him and the way things used to be, but rather, by the power of the Spirit (2 Tim 1:7), she needed to prepare for this new time. His application was that our tendency is to hold on to the way things used to be. We fear change and the future, so we remember the past and we fight to keep things the same. This is when he moved to Matt 16:24-25. Jesus says, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it." We cling to life. We cling to the way we want life to be, we cling to our hopes and our dreams and we cling to the past. Jesus says that if we are trying to save our life, we will miss life. We will lose out on what He has for us. But if we lose our life, if we lose our life for Him, we will find it!

Man, this spoke to everything that is inside of me. I love the old days. I love the way things used to be. I find myself remembering Arizona. I find myself remembering Oregon. I find myself glorying in the past. It's sad but am I much different than Napoleon's Uncle Rico? Glorying in the days of the past only to be living in a van, watching life pass me by? God has something great for me. He has taken me from humble Redmond, Oregon, population 7,000, child of a raised-Catholic neighborhood babysitter and an Agnostic mill worker/landscaper (who now are both following the Lord) and moved me to the Czech Republic to work to expand His Kingdom! He has given me the responsibility to help run and organize 20+ camps in which 300 American students and youth leaders will be profoundly changed by experiencing dynamic, life-changing, relational evangelism, where 300 Czech students and youth leaders will experience that same evangelism with their peers and 800 unbelievers will hear the Gospel, some for the first time! And yet, I think back to yesteryear. I think back to what was. I sometimes LONG to go back to what was...internship, seminary, the familiarity of friends, the feeling of knowing and being known.

I am losing my life. While watching re-runs of 1996's Senior Year or 2000's Summer of Fun or the ever popular hit from 2001-2004, The Intern Years, I am missing the show that God is filming now. I am starring in a show right now in which I am a missionary in the Czech. God has huge things planned. God has a never-ending budget and I am watching re-runs in poor quality. He has brought me so far and yet I am not grasping onto the future. I am not living for now. I am just content with living in the past. And in doing all of this I am going to "lose my life"...

So what do I do? I don't know. I know that God called me here. I know that God called me to do what I am doing. I know that I have the Holy Spirit inside of me who wants to use me. Even though I often feel no passion for what I'm doing, I know that I need to take hold of what He has called me to. I need to heed Paul's words to Timothy in 2 Timothy 1, "to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control."