Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for the ‘Life Lessons’ Category

I had been wanting to see him since nearly 6 months had passed since we were face-to-face.  Since my mother’s remarriage and our subsequent move to Charleston, SC, I now had about a 4 hour drive between me and my dad.  If I can just hold out for a couple of weeks, I’ll see him during my Christmas break. Why am I missing him so much right now?

I was sleeping well going into my final two days before Christmas break, but definitely not looking forward to the mid-term exams standing between me and my temporary freedom.  Thursday morning… aahhhhh. Two more to go. If you would’ve asked me, I would have said my junior year in high school was carrying along as planned.  Learning more French.  Polishing up my high school transcript with CP, Honors and AP courses.  I think I even had a girlfriend.  Or had had one… I can’t remember.  The phone woke me up that morning shortly before 6am.  I heard my mom answer it across the hall in her bedroom.  Her door opened.  Then, mine opened.  “Your brother’s on the phone for you, Jonathan,” my mom told me.  Hmmm.  That’s odd. He, my 10-years-older brother, doesn’t usually call me and especially doesn’t do so at six in the morning.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Jon boy.”

“Hey, Charles.  What’s up?”

“I’ve got some news to tell you….. Dad passed away this morning.”

WHAT?!

“….”

“You there, Jonathan?”

“Yeah.”

“His heart must’ve failed him. [Our stepmother] found him really early this morning still sitting in the living room chair after staying up reading last night.”

“Oh.”

“Well.  I’ll call you later on with details about what’s going on and we’ll go from there, okay?”

“Sure.”

“I love you, Jonathan.”

“I love you, too, Charles.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

There it was.  32 months after the brother between Charles and me was killed in a car wreck, my dad had taken his step into eternity, too.  What a blow.  I don’t think I even remember that Christmas or New Year.  I went down hill from there.  Three months of home bound schooling because I just didn’t want to go any where.  Life stunk.  Gosh, who was going to be next???

Seventeen years ago, Thursday, December 17, 1992, I was sixteen years old, aging way too quickly.  I still deal with the wounds from that combination death punch from the early 90′s.  The Enemy still tries to use this date to knock me down but to that I recall one of my favorite verses in the Bible.  Romans 8:18. For I do not consider the sufferings of this present time worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us. That promise backed by the Creator who sent His Son and traded my condemnation for His righteousness is the reason I can, and do, celebrate this time of the year.  God became a man.  A Father sent a Son.  I love and extremely miss my dad but the anticipation of God’s glory that will be revealed in me when I step into eternity… well…

Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory. Romans 5:1-2

That’s why I rejoice this Christmas season… and in every other season of life.  Glory.  His.

Bad hearts.

Tuesday, 3:00 pm – Mama Ima’s kids show up for a visit as Mama told them both Dana and I would be at the house that afternoon.

Tuesday, 4:30 pm – The kids finish pizza, ice cream and a studio tour before heading home.

Tuesday, 6:00 pm – I notice out of the kitchen window that the studio door is still open and the light is on. I credit this to my ever-increasing forgetfulness. I go to the studio, turn everything off, close the door and lock it with the deadbolt and padlock.

Tuesday, 11:00 pm – Asher and I go to bed… finally, because he took such a late nap. Dana stays up to sip on a cup of apple cider. Our guard arrives for work.

Tuesday, 11:30 pm – Dana finishes her cider, looks out the front window to check on Teddy, then heads on to bed.

Wednesday, 3:00 am – “Baba Asheri.” …pause “Baba Asheri.” …pause “Baba Asheri.” The guard arrives to our bedroom window to wake us. “Ndiyo?”, I reply. “Je, ulichukua kufuri ndani?”, he asked. (Did you take the padlock inside?) I’m fighting sleep haze so it’s better for me to just get dressed and go see what he’s talking about.
I go to the kitchen door, unlock it and talk to him through the bars. He shows me the deadbolt, missing the padlock, of course. I open the steel door and walk out to the studio. As soon as I walk in, I know definitely it’s burglary. I know my stuff. I know where I keep my stuff. Within seconds, I know exactly what I’m missing.
I go back into the house to put on shoes, a hat and to grab my trusty maglite. The guard and I search the inside perimeter. All clear. Let’s look outside. We arrive to the back wall of the compound and discover my Honda generator sitting on the ground just outside the wall. The guard must have startled them since they left this behind. They were also in the process of unplugging all the cables from the mixer in order to take it but something made them leave in a hurry.
At this point, my blood is boiling and I ask the guard for his machete. He keeps the stick. I get the machete. I want to come upon these hoodlums carrying my stuff off. I quickly head off in the direction of the footprints in the dirt hoping I get to hack someone because they stole my stuff. Later, I’d realize that to be a not-so-good of an idea to ‘pursue’ these thieves. What if I would have caught them? Would I really chop someone up over things??? Knowing more-than-likely that the people weren’t believers and I would thus be sending them to eternal punishment if death resulted?? All for an LCD monitor? A tape duplicator? And what if they killed me? What would that do for my wife and 1-year-old child? And my work here? All for material things? Dana was right… it is best just to stay inside until light and then completely scope the situation. I head back in and stay in.
We didn’t find anything other than the generator but here is what they did take:
Sony cassette tape duplicator – kinda funny because they took the slave unit and left the master unit. The slave unit cannot work without a SONY master unit. Seeing that there is no availability of getting one of those here, this stolen item is actually useless in anyone else’s possession but mine. Obviously technology ignorant, opportunistic thieves. How’s that workin’ out for ya?
17″ LCD monitor – nice monitor and unfortunately they only need VGA or DVI output and a electric plug adapter to be able to use it. They got lucky.
Wireless bluetooth keyboard – kinda funny here too. Bluetooth is still an unknown word here. My hunch is that potential stolen-item customers won’t even know how to use this. “Bluetooth? Will that work with my 56k modem?” Sorry, Jack. Try again in 5 years when you realize bluetooth isn’t a dental disease.
Cassette Recorder/Player – This is something that has external speakers that I have mounted on the wall to each side of the soundbooth window. The thieves unplugged everything from the back of it and only took the main unit, leaving behind the more-expensive and smaller USB external soundcard sitting right on top of it. They pushed it off of the radio like it was trash. Shows what they know because they also left all 4 microphones behind. Only one of which could buy two of the cassette players.
Sony Handycam mini-DV recorder – Ouch. It has Asher’s first steps on it. They only took the camera. Sony makes a proprietary charger for their electronics like this. They left that behind. It can’t be recharged without this one or one just like it which will be extremely hard to find. The camera was sitting on the charger. These guys are a few fries short of a happy meal if you catch my drift.
Bookbag – this was a birthday present from my brother many-a-year ago. It has traveled to eight different countries with me, always faithfully protecting my laptop inside it’s padded pouch. It was in the studio. My laptop was in the house. Whew.

So, if the door was dead bolted, how did they get in? Take a look at the picture above again. See the thin piece of metal with a hole in it through which the padlock passes after the slide bolt has been closed over it? They use bolt cutters to cut it then bend it in order to just pull the lock out of that hole. The lock was never found. May it rest in peace.

Where do we go from here? Well, I praise God and am quite amazed with Him that the thieves took things that only made my job quicker and easier. They took absolutely nothing that will halt my work here. I can still record. Obvious by my post yesterday. I can still edit. I can still make tons and tons of cassettes. So, I brought unnecessary equipment to Tanzania with me? No. The slave unit enabled me to duplicate seven copies of a cassette at once. I can only do three now. The monitor I will need for dubbing video like the Jesus film but that probably won’t be for a couple of years. Luke is a big book and translation on it hasn’t even begun. I was using the monitor to view my script while I had the recording program open on my laptop monitor. The radio is what I used to listen to recording playback in the control room of my studio and to make the cassette master copies. I have to use headphones all the time now and have my friend, who owns a studio in a nearby town, make my master copies for me. The keyboard helped me keep my laptop at an ergonomical distance and height. Oh well. The video camera… luxury item. It was nice to be able to capture things from our life here. The bookbag. Man, that’s disappointing. Lots of sentimental and practical value there. One of that quality will have to be sent from back home.

But, like I said… the work goes on.

Bwana Mungu hatashindwa!
(The Lord God will not be defeated!)

… now, you gotta get yourself out of it.

I hate that saying. Don’t know if I’m not supposed to say ‘hate’, but there you have it.  The phrase has a certain philosophy in it that is isolating, prideful and all-around self-reliant.  When you belong to God, how’s that working out for y’all’s relationship?  Nuts, I say.
What brought this up is a usb modem we bought Friday for cutting down our internet cost. The modem was crazy expensive (in relative terms) and is made in a certain billion-people republic. It has proven disastrous in getting it to work with Windows Vista. I spent many-a-hour Saturday troubleshooting that stupid thing, all to no avail. Both companies’ (ISP and modem manufacturer) support stink so I figured, “I got myself into this, now I gotta get myself out of it. I’ll search high and low for the solution and FIND IT!!!”
It hit me at the end of the day that I have an underlying belief that if I get myself into some sort of mess, I am not permitted to ask for help, especially not from God. Pretty whacked out, huh? Having the Creator of the Universe love and care for you above and beyond your shortcomings and yet still puffing your chest out with your bull-headedness thinking it’s totally up to you to solve whatever problem there is?

Sense can slip my grip quite often.

As I sat in our daily devotion the other day, I noticed something peculiar: a handful of single missionary women and not one (ZERO, NADA) single missionary man, much less a handful of them. So, I looked at our branch poster. Across Tanzania and Uganda, we have twenty single missionary women serving. How many single missionary men? two. I wrote that in small letters because it is shameful to us as guys. Why do women in general have more of a heart for missions or… the Lost? This doesn’t just ring true in Ug and Tz. My last short term mission trip with Hickory Grove Baptist was of this makeup: 8 women, 2 men (both of us married but 6 of the women were single.)
So, what are single men lacking? Desire? Dedication? Faith? What is it? Just trying to understand so if you can help me out on this, please do.

This post was intended for this past Tuesday.  Technical difficulties prevented it from happening…

Day 3 – Your world becomes a whole different place without electricity.  It has been over 72 hours since ours went out.  Stuff in the freezer is almost thawed.  Teenagers next to the office ask to charge their cell phones on our generator.  Our gas stove becomes worth its weight in gold.  Whole different place.

On a serious note, please pray it is restored soon. No fridge.  No hot water.  Lanterns stinking up the house at night.  Plus, we don’t feel as safe when it is pitch black all around us.  Too much opportunity for mischief.

Bright side – we have my little generator (110V) that is powering our modem and wireless router.  Hence my ability to post this!  Not all bad after all.

Weird combination, huh?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I say that because that was me.  I got Theo when I was 26 and just beginning to again acknowledge God in my life.  Theo has been there through some of the biggest parts of my life: my return to God, my marriage to Dana, our call to the mission field, the birth of Asher, our move to Mbeya, and the beginning of vernacular media in the language project here.

Yesterday, after 11 hours on the road with 4 more to go, I called the office to ask about a small problem I was having with my cell phone.  Our project team leader and neighbor took the opportunity to talk to me on the phone.  “Jonathan, I wanted to catch you before you arrived back home.  I have a bit of sad news,” he said in his British accent.  He went on to describe how Theo and Teddy had escaped through a gap in the fence of our backyard while we were gone.  Theo, being inquisitive and friendly found the pack of compound guard dogs and went to greet them.  There was a fight and Theo was hurt badly.  The Belgian paramedic in House 1 here on the compound tended to his wounds and was hopeful he would survive.  Kay, our landlord, took Theo and Teddy into her house to stay for the night and was awakened to Teddy’s bark around 5am.  She went to check on them and discovered that my little 7-pound furry white friend had died in his sleep.

They buried him that day down below our house in a nice little grave covered with small gravel.  We visited it this morning accompanied by heavy hearts and tear-streaked cheeks.

It has amazed me how a small animal has brought me to my knees.  I have cried extremely hard because Theo will be missed very, very much.  He was a once in a lifetime dog to me and his shadow is around every corner in the house.  It will take a while to adjust to not having him around but we look and hope to see how God is going to give us strength and how He will use this to bring us closer to Him.

In the eternal perspective of things, Theo was just a dog.  An animal.  A pet.  He had no eternal destination unlike the people I’m here to love and serve.  Losing Theo made me realize that I value my pet dog, my luxury, at points in my life my idol (bad thing), more than I value the people here who are so different from me.  This is a struggle. A big one.

Well… Friday I drove into town only to notice that the A/C had quit working.  The fan worked but out came only muggy air.  That’s not a good thing for a six-days-total journey to Nairobi.  Especially with an 8-month-old.  So, I took it to the garage first thing this morning.  They pulled it up on a ramp:

We were waiting on the A/C guy to come diagnose the problem when one of the mechanics discovered a bigger problem.  The left front 4WD axle was broken.  They worked up a quote… Tsh. 2,700,000.  That’s the equivalent of USD$2,150.00.  Ouch.  Gladly, we don’t have to have it fixed yet.  We just don’t have 4WD until we do.

The A/C problem was due to a hairline fracture in one of the little pipes… allowed all the gas to leak out.  They sealed it with super glue and some kind of metal cement, refilled me with A/C gas and I was ready to go… or so I thought.  As they were finishing me up under the car, the mechanic saw a nail sticking out of my left rear tire.  That’s never a good thing unless you collect those.  Even then, not a wise way to go about it.  I had to go home to eat a late lunch first (yes, I’d been there that long already) only to return in the afternoon to have it patched and pay the bill of Tsh. 224,400 or USD$179.00.

Not my best day but hey, I finished editing chapter one of JONAH in Kinga while I was waiting.  That’s a good thing!

I’m uploading a new photo gallery Dana put together from our 5-day Kinga recording journey.  By the time you read this, it should be ready for viewing.

P.S. Most of the pictures have been geo-tagged, meaning you can see on a map where they were taken.

You mean more to me today than ever before.  On this day four years ago, I thought the same thing.

I love you.

Happy Anniversary.

We have now been back in Tanzania for five months and oh, how that time has flown by! But it hasn’t been without progress. Literally, we have spoken to you about vernacular media and Jonathan’s role for years now. The milestone of the start of actual media production is finally about to pass and you have the opportunity to contribute directly so millions can hear God’s Word in their heart language.
The Old Testament books of Ruth and Jonah have been translated and published. Since the literacy rate is extremely low for one’s heart language, the need is urgent to record these books into audio form. Between now and next June, our goal is to accomplish this in all nine languages in which the books are complete. This is a large initiative that needs a considerable amount of planning, prayer, coordination and funding.
We estimate that each language will be able to have 250 cassettes produced at a cost of $350.00 per group. So, to completely fund the project of recording Ruth and Jonah we will need $3,150.00.
Please pray God will provide for this project to be successful to completion. Also, please continue to pray for the people to whom we are ministering and that these translation audio recordings will impact their lives.

(To contribute to this recording, write a note stating MICP Vernacular Media (UTB 44410356253) with a check payable to Wycliffe, and place both in an envelope addressed to: Wycliffe Bible Translators, PO Box 628200, Orlando, FL 32862. Just like other regular and one-time gifts, this is tax-deductible.)