Do you hear the bells?

I listed to the gongs on a church bell tower as I tried to fall asleep in the hotel. We had a staff retreat in a tiny town near Madrid and their church clock struck the quarter hour, half hour, three-quarters, and of course on the hour. It's a sound foreign to my Missouri and Kansas upbringing.

I have enjoyed church bells since first living in Europe with IMM in Belgium many years ago. It charms me and reminds me I'm not home, but someplace different. Someplace with a different story to tell.

At this retreat, I realized I'd never noticed that some church towers are sounding the time out for the entire village. I'm sure in general people don't notice much as it is just a sound of daily life, but I imagined a time when people didn't have watches, and clocks in every room.

This particular church tower dated back to the 12th century and I could picture people pausing in their activities to "hear" the time. Did they rush from a vegetable market when they realized it was already two o'clock and lunch was ready at home? Did people set appointments by the number of strikes from the powerful bell? I don't know, but it's an aspect of life that charms me and reminds me that we are not in Kansas anymore Toto!

Not Home for Christmas

started decorating for Christmas today. Took my time and enjoyed the part I did instead of making it into a marathon that I'm eventually tired of and just want to be over. I was digging in my giant red and green Rubbermaid bin and asked myself the question, "Why?"

I thought of some people I'd like to have come over in a couple weeks. So one answer is I want it to be all Christmas-y and cozy. I probably deep down in my heart want someone to say, "Oh this is nice." But is this why?

I'm looking harder at Christmas as a way of easing my angst over not being home for Christmas. When we do go, it's action and stress packed, so one good thing is a more leisurely Christmas this year.

Madrid has lots of light displays in shopping districts and some kind of nativity scene tour, so there are some delightful things I'm looking forward to in Spain. So none of my reflection is really negative but it is a different year this time. I want to find ways to embrace what it will be and not give too much attention to what I'm missing to the point of not enjoying what I've got.

In my unpacking of Christmas memories in the form of cards, ornaments, and garland, I realized too there's the God side of the season. It's easy to get caught up in the commercial side, decorating, shopping and forget the reason we do it all is that we are precious to God and he sent Christ as a way of showing us.

Learning to communicate

In September we did a one month intensive Spanish language school. It was meant to be a refresher course and hopefully an advancement. The refresher aspect of it ended after about a week when it went into full speed ahead new information -- for us. On the other hand, we were in class with 20 year olds from China, South Korea, Japan and the USA who had been having whole semesters of this same information in universities around the world. Review for them - brand new cram in your head over night and be ready to move on tomorrow for us!

Part of the class too was an introduction to Spanish culture which for us was more often review but for some of the foreign students was very strange and new indeed. Our Asian friends had generally not heard of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the whole Christian thing confused to them. The Spanish seem to take a certain level of Catholic Christianity for granted and don't even see it as religious. For instance, they say, "Jesus" when you sneeze here instead of bless you. We answered some interesting and basic questions for our new young friends.

It's interesting what is normal and what isn't and what it costs to get it in your head. As we added new Spanish information into our brains, we felt our old ways of communicating actually breaking down rather than advancing. It seems that in the scope of language you have to damage it and rebuild it to progress. We are still putting the pieces back together and plan to take some additional conversational classes to do that.

It makes me wonder when we introduce new ideas of the Gospel into cultures via our videos if there is first a disconnect to the old ways of thinking before the process of acceptance of the new ideas. Are we stretching them as hard as we've been stretched lately? It challenges me to make sure the message we send is presenting Christ and his love clearly.

You can Never Go Home

When we became missionaries in 2003, we made the decision to rent out our home. It was the first home we'd owned as a married couple and it was tiny. But we'd made it our own. When we were advised to keep it as rental property, I made my peace with the fact that 1. I may never live there again and 2. if I do, it won't be the same. Renters won't care for it the way we did and even if they were careful it will have years more of daily wear and tear on it.

When we came back to Spain this time, we were thinking we'd go into the same house we lived in last term but at the last minute the landlord backed out. So now we are adjusting to a new place to call home. We still have one light fixture to install but other than that it's done. It's feeling like home little by little with all that we've done.

When you grow up and move away from your parent's home, you can go back and visit or even stay for an extended time, but it doesn't feel the same. The thing is you have changed in your absence at college, or with roommates, or getting married. Mom and Dad have moved on in their habits too. It's just not the blissfully ignorant home of childhood when you aren't even aware of the sensation.

On arriving at our Spanish "home" church, we discovered many things had moved on and changed in our absence. Different people on the worship team, a new team of lead pastors -2 we hadn't met previously, and of course a bunch of new people. Nothing bad, but not exactly the same. It's up to us to adapt to our new home again and some days that's just pure work.

We heard recently that our home church in the USA is also going through change. They got a new pastor a few months before we left -- after 29 years of the same one. New people want to do new stuff and often we need to be pried out of old ruts we're in but that doesn't make change any easier. I remember when I was in the 4th grade this same church presented a master plan of expansion. The proposal at that moment in time was just to add a gym, kitchen, and fellowship space, but the master plan included turning the sanctuary to a kids area and tearing down the parsonage to build a bigger sanctuary. I remember being disturbed by that idea in 4th grade and thinking I didn't want them to tear things up. I was a big benefactor of that gym they built through my high school years and even as recently as a Christmas party last year. Now, the sanctuary my parents were married in, my grandpa helped build, I was married in, is giving way, being torn up for a new children's wing. It won't be the same when I go back -- they are moving on and I will have to adapt. My quiet place in a pew on a quiet Sunday night will be no more. You can't go home, but that's part of learning as believers that our permanent home is with Christ in heaven. I've had to learn that as an adult, as a missionary, and now as fellow believer. My comfort and security isn't dependent on a place, it's dependent on Christ.

Late Night Party at the Neighbors - Spain Normal!

Community

Over the last year, I've heard a lot about community. The church has to exist in community - we support one another in crisis, at least we mean to, and we sharpen one another in conflict, the old iron sharpens iron thing. I heard of a group that are trying to take that further and live in the same neighborhood with their small group and share living in a more daily way. Even in the secular world you hear a lot about community service or doing work for charitable and rescue operations.

Well, we have been in our town home in a three street development on the edge of a village near our office for almost four weeks now. The "backyards" all are postage stamp terraces that touch one another and the windows of our homes look out over all the yards and directly to the other houses across the yard. When you sit on the patio, you can hear conversation going on all around. Yesterday when I was upstairs I could hear a child playing a flute or recorder somewhere. All the sounds and noises seem to carry through the homes and the, currently, open windows.

So far the neighbors have been very stand offish which is very different from our last experience here in Spain. They seem to have some strong reservations about us, the new neighbors, but when I see how overlapped they are in their living I can understand that it will take some proving ourselves to be accepted into the "community." It will be interesting to see if we can earn our place on the block.

Day 2 Term 2 House Hunters International

Didn't sleep well from jetlag last night which made the morning's news harder to take in. The house we had arranged to live in, the same one from our last 4 years in Spain, is gone. Well, not gone. Unavailable to us.

Our former landlord had emailed IMM a few weeks ago offering us the house again for a much reduced price. Silvia our legal representative for all things in Spain and an extrordinarily hard worker, negotiated the price even lower. It was all so easy. We wouldn't have to imagine where things went or if they would fit. Just slip everything back in place and ba-da-boom we are back in business. We were to give him the deposit money this afternoon.

This morning Senor Landlord called Silvia and said he and his wife have been fighting with his mother in law who lives with them and is aged and needs nursing care. So they are going to move into the rental house and let mama have the apartment.

So we spent a few hours looking at housing options online and made a couple appointments to view houses/duplexes/townhomes. I'm not really worried. With the economic crisis in Spain, the area near the offices of IMM has decreased in price and it will work out fine. It's the oddity of going from a done deal that did not require thought to suddenly having to figure out what you want, need, can afford, what's practical and how far away should we go before it's impractical.

House one, strike one.

No pressure but we are having that training event in about 15 days and the bed we are sleeping in now is needed for others coming in for the event! It will all work out. It's a good example of the need for flexibility when living in a foreign environment.