Please Pray for Our Trip

One of the challenges in raising children abroad is passing on one’s own cultural heritage. Drex isn’t going to get American History at school. What better way, therefore, to spend what is probably my last summer reading stories to my own children—after a rich twenty-four year career —than reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer with Drex. Even as Drex has gained from Tom a broader sense of his own cultural identity he has found comfort in their sympathies: an abhorrence for the “restraint” of “whole clothes and cleanliness,” their distaste for Sunday School, “a place Tom hated with his whole heart,” and their affinity for fishing: “While Joe was slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him to hold on a minute; they stepped to a promising nook in the river bank and threw in their lines; almost immediately they had reward. Joe had not had time to get impatient before they were back again with some handsome bass, a couple of sun-perch, and a small catfish—provision enough for quite a family.”

I would have said such exploits were for another time and place had I not seen a similar performance by Drex and his Uncle Butch last week in the Algarve. This was Butch’s first visit to Portugal and he wasted no time dispelling our myth of the elusive Portuguese fish. A storied fisherman, he reads water like ordinary people read maps. Where I see sun sparkling he sees structure: sand bars, shelves, pools. And he sees fish, powerless to resist his bait. He and Drex caught them “at will.” Almost as soon as they cast they’d begin backing up, reeling them onto the beach. “Thirty seconds without a fish! What’s going on?” Drex complained at one point. Thirty-one fish in all; all very tasty. Butch was pleased; Drex was beside himself.

Back here at home, one of the benefits of living in the center of a major European city is the summer street festivals, like Lisboamágica, Street Magic World Festival, today in its fifth and final day. At Drex’s insistence we’ve seen all fifteen magicians, some several times. Drex has been practicing tricks at home and has assumed a more theatrical bearing, generally. I have found the magician’s twenty-minute acts inspiring, too: what I need to do is develop a little repertoire of children’s stories I can relate and illustrate in Portuguese and English on the streets of Lisbon. I could make balloon animals—as many of the magicians did—until I’ve attracted enough children for stories. I could top them all off with a winsome version of the Greatest Story Ever Told.

The Habitat for Humanity Global Village trip I’m leading to Mozambique is just over two weeks away. You can meet the team and get a taste of what we’re in for at Bringing Together Worlds Apart. Please pray that God would fill the believers on our team with His Holy Spirit, that we might minister His love to everyone with whom we come in contact. Pray He would give us words and means to communicate the Gospel in ways people understand. Pray for safety and health. Pray Debbie and Drex are well while I’m away.

We appreciate your prayers more than we can express and more than you’d conclude based on how infrequently I’ve solicited them here lately. That is an omission for which I beg your pardon. The Lord bless you this week.

A Philosophical Question

If a pipe bursts in the wall and there’s no one there to hear it, does it still turn the basement into a swimming pool? Yes. That’s why we’re thankful that when a pipe burst Tuesday at Casa Pátria, twenty minutes before honeymooners were due to arrive, Debbie was standing only a few feet away, heard it pop, and watched water begin to gush onto the floor. She turned off the water, diverted the honeymooners across the street to Casa Joaquina which was mercifully unoccupied and we spent the following forty-eight hours fixing plumbing, finishing just in time for the following guests. God doesn’t eliminate all the difficulties from the lives of His kids--what good would we be if He did?--but He’s a very present help in trouble and often handles us with kid gloves. Praise Him.

It’s a long way to Lisbon from Southern California so it’s no wonder Jerry was out of sorts when he arrived Thursday with his wife Susan for ten days at Casa Joaquina. But in his weakened state he didn’t know what to make of the Portuguese man gesticulating and remonstrating from the doorway until he recognized his computer in the man’s hand and the man himself as the taxi-driver who had dropped them off twenty minutes earlier. Jerry had left the computer in the back seat. The driver hadn’t noticed either until he picked up two young men who very quickly—inexplicably—asked him to stop and hopped out carrying a laptop they hadn’t had when they’d entered. “Wait a minute, that’s not yours!” he’d said, and wrested it away. Then he’d made his way back to Casa Joaquina—an heroic effort in its own right, given the labyrinth of one-way streets and unavailability of parking—in order to bestow upon Jerry the computer he had yet to miss. “Nem toda a gente é má,” (Not everyone is bad) the driver said in explanation of his benevolence. Not every Portuguese taxi driver is so gallant either, to be sure, as a number of our overcharged guests will attest, so it pays to make sure the meter is running, but kindnesses like these should not go unheralded.

Blessed week.

The Shaping of Things to Come

Please don’t conclude from my long absence here that we no longer need your prayers. We need them at least as much as ever. Debbie and I continue to pray hard about the form our ministry here in Lisbon ought to take. Our passion for bringing the Good News of God’s love to this culture where it has been largely forgotten is being fueled by Australians Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch through their book The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church which is encouraging us to think creatively about introducing Jesus to people who don’t know Him. Praise God for His promise to direct us. Please ask Him to raise up people to partner with us in ministry.

Drex and I found out yesterday it takes just under two minutes to ride a mountain bike like a maniac from the Castle of St. George at the top of Lisbon through the Alfama, the precipitous, cobbled and crumbling old fisherman’s quarter, down to the Tagus River. UK biking icon Steve Peat won Lisboa Downtown (lisboadowntown.com—cute video! See if you can find Drex in the tree behind the throne.) for the fifth consecutive year, then, when given the last word by the master of ceremonies, said, in summing up the sentiments of his disaffected contemporaries, “Let’s get drunk!”

On a more wholesome note, Drex and I are reading Rascal, the eponymous tale of a pet racoon and his boy, set in early 20th century northern Illinois and Wisconsin. Author Sterling North so charmingly evokes the ethos of the place and time I keep expecting my grandfather to pedal around the bend with a string of catfish dangling from his handlebars.

Good books, warm spring days festooned with flowers, the companionship of the Holy Spirit; God communicates with us in lots of different ways. May He give us ears to hear and eyes to see this week.

Thank you for praying for us.

Open to Renegotiation

Lisbon is not Braga. One way you can tell them apart is the different kinds of people here. One different kind of person is Seoirse Ó Deaghaidh (Pronounced “shorsh oh JA.”) That’s Ó Deaghaigh with an accent, “never, ever with an apostrophe.” Seoirse is Irish, though he’s not lived in Ireland for twenty years. He's one of our neighbors, but he might easily be mistaken for a leprechaun. His mischievous smile appears at doors and windows as if by magic when one is not expecting it, though one looks for it more and more. Sometimes he can be lured out of hiding with simple cell phone text messages: “Tea?”


Guess which door is Seoirse's









Having appeared, Seoirse keeps one company while one performs one’s menial tasks. He’s fascinated by practical matters. Occasionally, he provides an extra set of hands. Or he tells stories, or reads Sheamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winning poet who used to date his sister:

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Seoirse has lived all over Europe, so he has lots of stories to tell. But leprechauns must hide themselves because they cannot hide their feelings. They’re completely vulnerable when caught in the open. Seoirse alternates between weeping and laughter, chiding himself, when describing the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. He cried, too, when I laughed while talking with Drex on the phone. Laughter was forbidden in his father’s household. Owing in part to that prohibition, there’s tension between Seoirse and his Heavenly Father. As far as Seoirse is concerned, the two have not spoken for years, but he has alluded to being open to renegotiating that silence. Please pray he will.

Please pray for Drex: He's had a fever for six days. He hasn't been in school since last Tuesday and he won't be going today. He's got a knarly cough. His class has a field trip coming up this week that they've all been looking forward to for a long time. Please ask God to make him well.

No Crystal Stair*

Drex’s life is an interesting blend of abundance and deprivation: as an only child (for all practical purposes) with two parents working from home, he sees a lot of his folks. Often—probably more often than if he shared them with siblings—he gets their attention. He lives in a stimulating urban environment. His is a genuine international education. He has travelled extensively for a person his age. Yet he has been repeatedly deprived of close family relationships and friendships. There exists neither culture nor country where he is not a stranger, a foreigner. The largest open space that is part of his daily life is a narrow cobbled street. Sometimes I envy him, sometimes I’m afraid of being arrested for child abuse. We are completely dependent upon God to make it all OK, and to make us sensitive and responsive to Drex’s needs. Thanks for your ongoing prayers for our parenting.

With respect to that international urban education, results thus far are mostly encouraging. Fifth grade at Fernão Lopes in ’06 seems considerably more violent than I remember fifth grade at Wing Lake Elementary School in ‘72, but Drex, hardly the most aggressive kid crammed into the school’s tiny temporary quarters, seems to bear up with remarkable equanimity. While we walk home together he enthusiastically acts out from whom and under what circumstances he’s received the new marks on his face, sometimes handing me his back pack and insisting I stand still on the sidewalk to get the full effect. Thing is, students are more readily held back here, so it is common to meet children one, two and three years older than most of their classmates. The oldest student in Drex’s class is fourteen. So you’ve got a lot of young adolescents, for whom school has not been a crystal stair, with a lot of negative energy, looking out over the heads of their smaller colleagues like so many heads of wheat ready for harvest. I’ve trained Drex to end altercations by tackling low and driving with his legs but that’s a little nuclear for the school’s confined spaces and often not practical. So Drex ignores my advice and makes friends of his enemies instead. Where does he get that? Please pray for his protection and for his enemies.

He’s doing well enough in class. First semester grades are out and Drex’s GPA was 4.6 on a scale of 5, including the only 5 in his Portuguese Language class. Much of the credit goes to the head teacher, Professor Cláudio, who has transformed Drex’s attitude towards school. Debbie and I met and fell in love with Professor Cláudio last September. He is manly, gentle, radiant, encouraging and engaged with his students. He’s been teaching twenty-two years. Though Portuguese by birth, he grew up in Brazil, where he seems to have caught that country’s contagion for life. He believes the way out of Portugal’s present difficulties is paved with little acts of benevolence on the part of its citizens, especially its younger ones. Drex likes him as much as we do. May God bless him in his ministry.

Thanks for praying for us. May the Lord bless you this week as well.

* from

Mother to Son by Langston Hughes

Feeling God's Pleasure

I drove from one end of Portugal to the other this week. On Monday I went south in the old Habitat for Humanity truck, Manuel, with a load of furniture for Casa Armona, the little beach cottage soon to join the VisitingPortugal.com line-up. We first became acquainted with southern Portugal, known as the Algarve, last summer when the country was in the throes of its worst drought in decades. As far as I knew, the Algarve was brown. Charming in a sun-baked Mediterranean way, but definitely umber. Imagine my surprise when just south of Lisbon verdant hills dappled with sheep, cows and horses and festooned with great lakes—some white, some gold—of tiny flowers (miniature daisies is what they look like up close) began rolling by the highway. Rather than looking like homeless people, destitute, bedraggled and misplaced, as they did last summer, the little whitewashed houses were the very picture of rural simplicity, sufficiency and grace. One wondered how there can be so much talk of economic crisis in the midst of such idyllic prosperity. I played fado—traditional mournful Portuguese music—on my harmonica as I drove along.

Having delivered my load of furniture I was free to take Manuel north to Braga at the end of the week, where I left him for good with Luis Ribeiro, the current Habitat construction supervisor and mastermind of our self-financing Habitat houses. Luis has worked out a system whereby we build a house using the labor and donations of ten Global Village work teams, each of which works for two weeks. It’s brilliant, and because lots of volunteers want to come to Portugal, we can fill our calendar with as many teams as we can handle. So you’d think we’d be putting up houses from the Minho to the Mediterranean, wouldn’t you? Well, not quite. We’re like a really cool kite that hasn’t quite caught the wind. In fact, at the moment we’re in danger of crashing. We’re looking at some creative ways to get turned around. Would you please ask God to keep us in the air?

It had been a long time since I had been in Braga and it was very nice to check in with old friends. I joined my little men’s group for their morning prayer hike, breakfasted at our old house with ex-Habitat construction assistant Alvaro Azevedo and his wife, who are caring for nine foster children there, and chatted with our diminutive eighty-two year old former neighbour Dona Rosa, who had heart surgery in the fall and cried when she spoke of how much she misses us (just as she used to cry when she spoke of how much she misses the Leaf family that lived next door to her before we did). I stopped by As Andorinhas, one of the neighborhoods where Vivarte used to operate, and had a beer with Senhor António, whose deformative joint disease you may have read about here before. His fingers, none of which approaches straight or anything less than twice normal size, were wrapped in plastic—something I’d not seen before—against the weeping of incisions made for their drainage. “You’re a hero,” I told him, awed by his suffering. “You just keep doing what you have to do,” he said, in his patient way, his eyelids and facial muscles drooping in response to pain medication. Please continue to pray for António, that God would heal him completely.

Looking back now upon my autumn trip to America I can see two or three themes that emerged. One was “feeling God’s pleasure.” It came up in conversations with several men. You may remember the expression from the 1981 Academy Award winning film, Chariots of Fire. The hero, Eric Liddell, uses it in response to his sister when she reminds him that God made him a missionary: “Yes,” he replies, “but He also made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure.” Feeling God’s pleasure keeps coming up because it is 1) so nice, and 2) a natural indicator of our gifts and what God would like us to do with them. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart,” King David of Israel, who ought to know, wrote. Just as there is mutuality, a bonding and a shared pleasure, between parent and child when the child manifests his giftedness—in the arena, on the stage, in the classroom, in conversation—so our relationship with God should be characterized by mutual pleasure and delight. One might even say there is a fulfilment, a bringing about of fullness in relationship, when we exercise our gifts, fulfilling the purpose for which He made us. Think about making God feel fulfilled. Where do you feel His pleasure? In thinking about the question myself, I notice that one of the places I feel God’s pleasure is in trying to create a little window upon the world through writing. I’ve been busy about a lot of things lately and haven’t been writing much, so being at the computer this long, feeling God’s pleasure, has come as a pleasant little shock. Would you mind asking God to get me to listen to my own advice? Is there a way to organize your time so you might feel God’s pleasure more? I pray it would be so.

Thank you for praying for us. Blessed week.