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Living in-between

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Living in the in-between can be a challenging experience, as we find ourselves neither in one place nor the other. This creates uncertainty and confusion, making it difficult to know how to move forward. As followers of Jesus, it is crucial that we cling to our faith and hope in Him during these times. I can’t help but think of this every Easter, when I think of Jesus’ first followers. The Saturday in-between Friday and Sunday must have been full of so much. What were they feeling?

They had “pushed all the chips in” so to speak to follow Jesus. They didn’t have an alternative. Their hope and faith had been put in him, he had told them he would defeat death and rise from the dead, but did they believe it? I think often times in life we feel the same whether it’s with following Jesus, following his call, or with almost every big decision in our lives.

How do we move forward in the in-between? Faith. Hope. Ultimately Jesus himself.

Our faith is what gives us a foundation for our beliefs and actions. In Hebrews 11:1, we read that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Our faith in Jesus is what gives us confidence in the future, even when we don’t have all the answers or know what the future holds.

Our hope in Jesus is what keeps us going, even when we are living in the in-between. In 1 Peter 1:3, we are reminded that our hope is living, and it comes from Jesus’ resurrection. This means that our hope is not just a wish or a dream, but something solid and real that we can count on. It is a hope that transcends our current circumstances and reminds us that there is more to life than what we can see.

Living in-between can also be an opportunity for growth and transformation. As we hold on to our faith and hope in Jesus, we learn to trust Him more deeply and to lean on Him more completely. In James 1:2-4, we read that the testing of our faith produces perseverance, and that perseverance can lead to maturity and completeness in our faith.

Take heart, and remember that even when we are living in-between, Sunday is coming. The resurrection, the new life and hope that we have in Jesus Christ are just around the corner. Let us trust in Him, hold on to our faith and hope, and allow this time of testing to produce perseverance and growth. He is with us every step of the way, guiding us, comforting us, and leading us through the in-between.

ARE YOU PROUD OF ME?

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That was the question Ollie asked me with the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen from him yesterday as he rode his big boy bike for the first time by himself.

I so badly wish we had that first ride on video and more over his reaction. The sheer joy, celebrating and his deep-heart question moved me, it even still moves me to tears.

My answer was of course, “YES BUDDY. I’M SO PROUD OF YOU! I’m the most proud that you kept trying even when it was hard!”

In that moment, I learned a lot about my son, myself and even God.

See what Ollie was seeking, we all seek – approval, acceptance, love and surety.

I was taken back to when I was a little boy and sought the same thing. I was reminded of many people around me, that are asking me, as a coach and pastor, the same question, but not nearly as direct as Ollie did.

Sadly some of us, didn’t have the loving home that provided, what we were looking for. Sadly many of us, had parents that spoke to us and because of the way they spoke to us our heads are full of negative, hurtful self-talk.

I was reminded of God’s words when Jesus was baptized, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matt 3:17)

For those of us who have chosen to follow Jesus, these words are true of us true. The father is well pleased, more pleased than I ever could be of Oliver. I’m imperfect and surely, even in my deep love for Ollie, will let him down.

God won’t.

It was a teachable moment for my little big man, but also for me, the proud daddy to learn something too.

I went on to tell Ollie, “I love you and I’m proud to say I get to be your daddy. You are so special son, even if you didn’t ride your big boy bike this well. I love you to the moon and back no matter what!”

Ollie’s response, “I know that dad. I love you too!”

I don’t know where you are today. What you are battling. What you are going through. But I think someone one there needs to read this today. I know I needed to write it.

He loves you and He is proud of you!

Faithfulness. Got it?

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This past Monday, I met with my director, and great friend, Billy, and in our two hours together a ministry leader, whom we both know, was brought up in conversation. I was surprised to hear that he is pastoring a church of over 4,000 and has written a book! I jokingly said, “Oh Billy we could write a book too!” He responded, “About what?” Then we went on to lay out a quick, rough table of contents for a book about faithfulness in ministry, when you don’t see results! We aren’t sure that people would be into a book on this topic, but it got us thinking, moreover, it really got me thinking about faithfulness.

First off, it got me thinking about how the world we live in, no matter what country we are in, doesn’t value faithfulness. How often do we hear the statistics about marital affairs and divorce? I can’t count the number of times I’ve read about this or heard it come from peoples’ mouths. Or how often do you see family quarrels break families up? How often do you see life-time friends end their friendship over something so trite? This isn’t even bringing up politicians or the business world! Simply put, we as a human race, aren’t a faithful people. Some of us might “get it” more than others, but I’ll be honest with you, on my “best day” of faithfulness, I’m surely still lacking!

Over the last year, I’ve wrestled with the lack of faithfulness of many. I’ve been shocked to see people turn their backs on longtime friends, simply for what was best for them. It’s wrecked me. As I’ve walked, or I should say crawled, through this time, I’ve grown to prize faithfulness more than ever before. I value it more in relationship, in ministry, and more. I long for my own heart to get, what it means to be faithful and that, Lord-willing, as God enables faithfulness in me, it would spread to those, He has placed around me.

I’ve been in Prague, long-term, for going on 4 years. I’m often praised for my faithfulness, as people hear how hard the language, how many Czechs say their atheists, how long it takes for them to respond to the Gospel and so on. As I hear this, a feeling of self-righteousness creeps up on me and I need to realize, that I am the most miserable of faithless people apart from my Savior. As I’ve contemplated, this conversation with Billy this week, a verse from 2 Timothy has been hanging around my head.

“If we are faithless, he remains faithful.” (2 Timothy 2:13)

I’m that faithless individual, but He is faithful! He remains faithful. Then the new Shawn McDonald album (Closer) came out on Tuesday and I’ve listened to this song on repeat.

Listen to the words… Let them kick around in your head a bit. Be thankful, that even though we are a faithless people, He is faithful!

getting smacked around…

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Our AIA team here is reading, You Can Change, by Tim Chester and it has been smacking me around over the last few weeks of reading it. Here is what smacking me around today:

Sin is fundamentally an orientation towards self. Many of us suffer from self-absorption. We’re preoccupied with your problems and successes. We bring every conversation round to our favorite subject: me. Or we develop habits of self-centeredness in which we live for our own comfort and security.” {pg. 158}

Ouch, that hurts. Um, yeah guilty. What is one way to combat this? Service. Go out and serve someone. Make deliberate decisions to fight against the self-absorption, against the self-centeredness, against turning yourself into a little god, which you bow to. Dang, I’m guilty of this, but I’m thankful that I’ve been set free to live a new life, a new way…. The way of Jesus… How will you serve someone other than yourself today? Join me in this fight and SERVE!

humility and pride.

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humilityandpride

pride.

Do you have it? I’ll be honest, apart from Christ, I am a prideful jerk. I know it and it tears me up. I find myself daily wrestling with myself and the deep, selfish pride that I know I’m capable of. I’m thankful I wrestle with it though, because if I ever get to the point where I don’t, I pray earnestly that I’m no longer breathing and I’m in heaven. Why? Because I never want to be okay with the pridefulness that resides in me and/or the amount of pride I’m capable of, because when you are okay with it, the fights done. The pride wins. I refuse, as far as I am able, to let pride win!

But what is pride exactly?

Pride defined:

1pride \?pr?d\ n
1 : the quality or state of being proud: as
a : inordinate self-esteem : conceit
b : a reasonable or justifiable self-respect
c : delight or elation arising from some act, possession, or relationship ?parental pride?
2 : proud or disdainful behavior or treatment : disdain
3 a : ostentatious display
b : highest pitch : prime
4 : a source of pride : the best in a group or class
5 : a company of lions
6 : a showy or impressive group ?a pride of dancers?

Pride can have some positive definitions, but it can also have sicking definitions that reek of sheer arrogance played out in life. In fact, when you look at the Bible and what God thinks of pride, it’s not positive! I don’t want to share with an exhaustive word study on pride but I did want to share with you some things I’ve been kicking around and a couple of resources. The first resource, is simply a link on the word PRIDE in the Bible. (click here) I encourage you to click away, then read away, the pray away, and then repent away! Sit in some of these verses and ask God to work you and your heart over, thus exposing your pride!

The other resource is a talk from Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church, in Seattle, WA. I had the opportunity to visit Mars Hill Church a few weeks back and I happened to be there for the start of their new series and the first talk – HUMILITY! It was like a 2×4 board to the face, especially about 10 minutes in when I thought, “So and so should listen to this!” That is when God swung the spiritual 2×4 and hit me right between the eyes and I realized that I needed just as bad, if not worse than “so and so.” Here it is, listen to it, journal it and see what God might say to you….


Beyond that, I’ve pondered things like, “How do I know I’m living a prideful existence?”
PRIDE CHECK – here are somethings that I came up with, as “pride checks” to spot it in my life:

  1. Thinking something like, “I’m not ‘that’ prideful.” Denial, very often, IS the first sign we are suffering from “said” thing.
  2. An unwillingness to listen to the opinions and/or thoughts of others.
  3. Any, and I do mean ANY, from of prejudice in my heart. I’ll be real, I see surprising things come out of my own heart as I ask this one, living in a foreign country.
  4. Refusing to apologize, even if I know I was wrong.
  5. An absolute belief that “I’m always right.”
  6. Thus the inability and unwillingness to say the 3 words, “I was wrong.”
  7. Self-righteousness. Enough said.
  8. Lack of repentance towards God or anyone else for that matter.
  9. Isolating myself and not giving others the opportunity to call me out.
  10. Refusing to submit myself to godly leadership.

There are 10 PRIDE CHECKS that I’ve been asking of myself as of late. How did you do? If you think you made it through the list, you should probably start over and dig a little deeper in your soul and life! Ask God, by His Spirit, who give you eyes to see your junk and the courage to repent of it.

Before I close this entry (which again, isn’t attended to exhaustive, but to serve as a launching point) I want to share with you, what I keep coming back to as the solution to my own pride – the Gospel – the fact that “I’m more prideful, sinful, hated, despised by God, wretched and much, much more than I could ever imagine outside of Christ BUT (thank God there is a BUT here) in Christ I’m more loved, cherished, clean, pure, innocent and so on infinitely more than I can even begin to imagine!” It’s this that is the answer to our pride. It’s running to the Gospel of Christ – the only truly humble and pure person ever to walk this planet died in my place, even though I was a rebel against him and I was vile. He graciously hung there for me and my sins, so that I would be made right before God! It wasn’t anything I did, nothing I could contrive. Oh how beautiful this Gospel (Good News) is! It’s so beautiful and deep, and yet simple and to the point. So I will choose today, right now, to apply this Gospel to my life and allow God to gut me of my pride for my good and His glory! Will you join me? Will you fight the pride?

learning how to love the city

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rutgers2009_1 73.jpg

It’s no secret, when you read the Bible that God has a heart for cities. (click here to read Timothy Keller’s A Biblical Theology of the City on theresurgence.com.) Time and time again, you have to wrestle with the fact that God has a heart for cities. Today, as I was reading through the four Gospels’ takes on the Passion week, I stopped in Luke 19:41-44, and pondered.

And when he {Jesus} drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

I found myself at a point I’ve been at many times before. That point is a longing that I can’t explain. A longing that goes deeper than anything I know. This longing is for the city that God has called me to. Granted, I’m not Jesus. I just wasn’t greeted with palm branches and adoration proclaiming that I was indeed the Messiah. I’m not looking ahead knowing that I will be betrayed, left for dead by those that are closest to me, will hang on a cross in shear humiliation and more. That’s not me, that’s Jesus, clearly. Although there is an aspect of Jesus’ heart for Jerusalem, that I pray that I would have for this great city, Prague, that God has called me to.

There are three brief insights from verse 41 that can serve us, as believers, well for loving the cities that God has called us to. It must be noted that these three insights, are not, indeed, rocket science, but as I read them today and meditated on them, I realized I get lost in the shuffle of practicing them here in Prague.

Drew Near
Simple isn’t it. Draw near. All too often, the problems in the city (crime, homelessness, noise and more) keep us from drawing near to the city, and we find ourselves keep the city at arms length. That way we don’t have to get our hands dirty. So we keep the problems of the city at a distance and we scoff at the city and it’s problems. The whole time forgetting that there are people that God loves in that city. We need to be reminded that Jesus drew near in a way that we cannot even begin to understand in the incarnation – God, Himself, becoming flesh and getting his hands dirty mixing it up in the midst of sin-wrecked humanity. So my question for myself, and for you, is – Are you drawing near and loving the city? Or are you standing at a distance scoffing at the evil of the city, refusing to follow Jesus’ lead and entering?

Saw the City
It seems to be a very logical flow, doesn’t it? As you draw near to something, or someone, you then see what is really going on, you see the situation. As Jesus, drew near to the city, he saw it. He observed it. What was to come to the city, came to his mind. So as we, make the decision to draw near to the city, we don’t know what the future will bring, but we can observe. We can see where God is working. We can see desperate areas where God is desperately needed. We see. We diagnose. We then can pray. So how are you “seeing” your city? Are you “seeing” it purposely? What observations are you making? Where does it appear that God is moving? What areas need His touch?

Wept Over It
To follow the progression, as we draw near (enter) the city, we will see the city (make observations), then we will be moved and weep for the city (empathize, sympathize, move forward and do something). The four words – He wept over it – always move me. They move me to pray. First, to pray that God would give me a genuine desire to love ‘my Jerusalem’ (the city God has called me to and put me in), Prague, in ways that are out of myself, no matter what happens. It’s always challenged me that Jesus knew what the people in the city of Jerusalem would do to him in the days to come, he what ‘Jerusalem’ would do to Him and He still wept. He still loved in ways that I can’t. This is convicting as I find myself, secretly cursing aspects of the city, and people in the city when things don’t ‘go my way.’ Oh how fickle I am. Oh how quickly I can forget that apart from Jesus’ work in my heart, that I am just as vile, as the vile parts of the city that drive me crazy. I need God to continually work in me to get me to this point of weeping for Prague. So where are you in the ‘weeping’ process? Are you like me, secretly cursing the ills and evils of the city? How are you weeping over your city? As we weep, may God call us to action to see His Kingdom advance in our cities, and his radical love and grace break through!

So as we journey through Passion Week together, may we not forget the places that God has called us to live, work and play. May we follow Jesus’ lead and draw near (enter the city), see (observe where God is working or what areas need God’s touch) and lastly weep over it (being moved to make a difference in our cities).

Getting lost in loving your city? Here is a great post over at Church Planting Novice – 8 Ways to Easily be Missional.

the liberated puritan, busting out of moralizing peeps!

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Quite some time ago, I read a post over at theresurgence.com , entitled The Liberated Puritan, which peaked my interest, but I never blogged on it and recently this week, for some reason I returned to it. I’m not sure why, but I think it was in my frustration as of late, with us (Christians) trying to moralize people!

“Moralize people Zach? What do you mean?” What I mean is this, we become so reactionary to the “so-called evils” of the culture and the world, we start trying to make the culture or people more moral! It’s as if we think, “Hmmm if I could get this person to stop drinking, or stop sleeping around, then they will be a better person and then the Gospel will make sense to them.” As I look through the pages of the Bible, specifically the New Testament, I don’t see this. I don’t see Jesus going around on moral crusades attempting to clean people up morally so they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I see Jesus, and his boys, moving within culture and peoples’ lives as they are and watching God change the hearts and then their actions follow. The examples of this would seem to be endless throughout the pages of Scripture. Take your pick! In every case of Jesus interacting with a moral “nobody,” so to speak, he comes to them, as they are. Then their interaction with Him changed the outworking of their life. It was never, “Change your sinful way, then I will come to you, and you will be good enough.”

Yet for some apparent reason, we, as Christians, continue to try to do this. Why? Why? Why? As you can tell, this makes me uber frustrated! Why can’t we love people as they are and bring a real Gospel to them that says, “You know what you, like me, are jacked up beyond what we can believe, and you can’t do anything on your own to clean yourself up, but my God says, ‘I love you anyway, and I’ll invade your world and give you the ability to break out of the rut you’ve been stuck in, through the life, death and resurrection of my very own son!” Can we get there? Or are we going to continue to push our morals on people who have absolutely no categories for them?

This brings me back to the post, The Liberated Puritan, it was interesting reading, because it breaks down the stereotype so many have against the puritans. It would appear he, Douglas Wilson, blows that up in looking at the earliest puritans who in his words had been slayed by the Gospel of grace and liberty not the Gospel of moralism and empty works!

How easily we forget! The potency of the Gospel is always seen best in what it does to old wineskins. Religious man, ethical man, always wants a certain kind of ecclesiastical doing and bustling about. This doing is always careful to color inside the lines, and to keep off the grass. But whenever the Gospel breaks forth in the church, slaying its thousands, one of the first casualties is simple moralism. In the Gospel of Christ, men are charged to repent of all their doings, and to be something other than what they are. This of course provokes the hostility of religious man because he is always in control of what he does, but only God can be sovereign over what a man is. The Gospel of grace is therefore obnoxious to such a man.

Hmmm… Strong words. There might be some disagreement with his words, but I see his words playing out in my life. See, before I left for college, I was the ethical/moral young man, who gazed down his nose at others who drank, smoke, fooled around with the opposite sex and more. College had (has) a way of undoing that to a degree, and I started to see myself slip away from my “moral self”, and it was in that season of life that the Gospel slayed me and I was free. However, something changed. As I became more and more entrenched into, what could be called, “The Christian Ghetto,” I found myself falling from the Gospel of grace and liberty and once again turning to a form of ‘baptized moralism.’ It’s this form of ‘baptized moralism’ that Wilson unpacks in the article. Generation, after generation something changed in the lives of the Puritans, they resorted to a mere moralism, which I can see happening in the life of a Christian within in a matter of a couple of years, not just a couple of generations.

Now please hear me, I’m not saying morals are bad, and I’m in no way endorsing license (going off and doing as we would like and then just dropping the ‘Grace card’ on sin and saying I’m forgiven!). Indeed, when we enter into a relationship with this God of grace and liberty holiness will naturally follow, in the process of sanctification. What I’m calling for is, us, as Christians, to bust out of pushing morals on people, and start getting grace in front of people! Thus, meeting them where they are at and allowing God to then change them! Oh I dream, long and pray for this of myself, my organization and the Bride of Christ, the Church! How would our lives look different? How would our organizations look different? How would our churches look different? How would others’ perceptions of Christians look different? Ultimately, how would the world look different? I will pray and dream to this end!

a morning cup of kava with eugene

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That morning cup of coffee is with my new, dear friend, Eugene Peterson, and sadly it doesn’t mean I sit and have coffee with him in person, but through his writing. Last fall, I read The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction, with my pastor, Phil, after good friends, in Athens, Greece, recommended it to me. I really enjoyed the book, but now it would seem that the words of Mr. Peterson are penetrating my heart in a way that they did not, when I read The Contemplative Pastor. My director (Billy) and I are reading are now reading A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society. I know another long title! I love long titles!

The title alone seems so timely for myself and for the world you and we live in. I’m only a mere two chapters into the book and I’ve already have had so much to ponder, pray and meditate on. I wanted to share some quotes that made me go, “hmmmmm, that’s good!” Or, “ouch that stings a bit!” I hope these move you as well! Swing by a bookstore and pick this book up and enjoy a morning cup of kava with Eugene as well!

“Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In our kind of culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.”

“Meanwhile the world whispers, ‘Why bother? There is plenty to enjoy without involving yourself in all that. The past is a graveyard – ignore it; the future is a holocaust – avoid it. There is no payoff for discipleship, there is no destination for pilgrimage. Get God the quick way; buy instant charisma.’”

Ah, there is so much more, but we will leave it there for now. What hit you about those quotes? Any reactions? Here’s to setting forward on the long, rugged path of discipleship, that the world, and even much of the quick-fix, Evangelical church shuns!

eclectic/old school style and me…

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This a completely random post, but I thought it would be fun. So here is a confession, over the past couple of years I feel that my true self has come out more and more. There was a moment, somewhere in high school, where I thought, “I’m the head football coach’s son, the captain of the football team and etc…..” When I thought that, I began making subconsciousness decisions to become someone I wasn’t. That someone was the all-American, clean-cut, golden boy who was what everyone else wanted him to be, so to speak. With that said, since I first moved to Europe, and I guess right before too, I’ve been on a rediscovery of ‘who is Zach Harrod.’ It’s been cool, because this isn’t merely evident, nor dictated, by my style or the things I choose to wear, but it is a reflection of it, to a degree. As I what I choose to wear is a reflection, of sorts, of my true self, I’ve seen that I’ve grown more and more comfortable in my own flesh and who I am in Christ. Which then leads to the out-workings of this in what I wear, watch, listen to, say, read and etc. So this is a circle of sorts, but the circle originates in me truly discovering who I’ve been made to be and not what I think others want me to be. It has been a fun adventure of rediscovery and I love feeling like I’m me and not some vanilla version of me.

Anyway, I’ve mentioned before, that I’ve been enjoying checking out the ART OF MANLINESS blog over the last month or so, and one of the posts that was entertaining was 10 Outdated Men’s Fashions That Still Have The Charm. The reason being because I love to combine old-school with contemporary and it usually leads to a bit of ‘eclecticness’, which I’m finding is very much part of me. As I read it and looked at the pictures I realized something! I want a cool pair of knickers!


I’m a fan. (btw click on the pic to see the actual pic) I’m also a fan of the hat he is rocking in the pic, and am intrigued by the guy who makes this particular hat. So I tried to find some ‘knickers’ in the same vein yesterday, well I learned that I shouldn’t do google searches for ‘knickers!’ It was more than a bit suspect! So if you know of any place where I can peruse a selection of knickers like you see above, hook a brother up with some info! Um yeah, I just thought I’d share a little randomness, or ‘eclecticness’ I guess, with you this Sunday afternoon. Here is a little bit of me that my good friend Mark Stewart captured as of late. Check out his pics, he’s a stud!

Well, have a blessed Sunday!

one crazy morning…

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“Do you like it here?” asked the twenty something working on my visa at the infamous Foreigner’s Police here in Prague. (The pic you see comes from this article over at the Prague Post, have a read) I looked at her and tried to just say, “Yes,” and move on but it wasn’t happening. I responded with, what I thought, was charming smile, “I love it here, except days like this.” She smiled in agreement and then asked what the situation was like outside the Foreigner’s Police before they opened the doors. I thought to myself, “Billy [my director] told me not to say anything, be quiet Zach!” Yeah that didn’t happen, I told her two words sum it up, “crazy” and “chaos.”

Chaos at it’s finest too! I’m not down with what Charles Darwin spun off, but I can see what he meant by “survival of the fittest” as I yearly endure the Foreigner’s Police. It’s intriguing. I told Erin, that I wish I didn’t have to worry about anything else and just document the whole experience because it is indeed an unique social experiment of sorts. So at this point you are probably wondering two things, 1) Did you get your visa, and 2) What happened? Yes, Erin and I did get our visas renewed! Praise God, I’m thankful for that… As far as the story goes, that is a bit longer.

Erin and I showed up a little before 4 am to try to get a good jump start on the process. What we found was about 20 people sitting in the waiting room and some people milling about outside. No line had been started in front of the doors, where the line usually begins, and with delight Erin and situated ourselves for the 3 hour wait, but that delight ended quickly. One of the “unofficial” workers at the Foreigner’s Police started talking about a list that we had to get on and that the line started at the corner. Erin’s Czech is a year and half better than mine and she is pretty confident, I’m also getting more and more confident, which is good, but dangerous too. This “unofficial” worker then verbally tore into us for the next 2 hours asking us if we knew what the word “politeness” meant and ridiculing our country (England, sorry to my British friends, but he assumed we were British and we didn’t feel like fighting that one.) It was very apparent that this man was trying to be “helpful” (please sense the sarcasm here) and direct us, but for the most part we were the pebble in this man’s shoe this morning. It wasn’t because we wanted to be indigent with him, but we were not “buying,” literally, into his system. See this man, and couple of his comrades, are there nearly every day and start “a list” that they spin as being “the list.” Which it isn’t and Erin and I didn’t feel like we wanted to buy into it, nor was it right to buy into. Thus the two hours of the man verbally drilling us commenced. If it would have stayed here, verbal abuse, that would have been fine with us, we can handle it. But it didn’t…

When I was there last time, my first time, it went too smooth. They had 10+ police officers and there wasn’t any of the sketchy “you need to be on our list” stuff going down. Today, that wasn’t the case. A little after 5:30 am two police officers came out and it was clear they didn’t want anything to do with us, or their jobs. To sum it up quickly, Erin and I were wondering if we would just get thrown to the back of the line, if we would get a number to get in the door and if we should have got on the “fake list.” This is where it went from bad to worse… The line formed on the corner and we held our own at the beginning, where the police officer told us to wait, but the 50 other foreigners that were there were very angry with us, because we weren’t on “the list.” We tried to, patiently, tell them, “That a list didn’t exist and that we were doing what the police officer had told us to do, wait in line at the corner.” So the verbal abuse continued but this time from this large group. Again, if it was merely verbal abuse, Erin and I could deal with that, but it didn’t end there. They began pushing us, lightly at first, but as soon as the two police officers left it reached the point where it was very clear that they wanted to start a fight with me.

We tried to reason, reason didn’t work at all. We tried to ignore them, ignoring them didn’t work. At one point, Erin said, “Don’t make eye contact.” I calmly responded, “Erin if I don’t keep my eyes up I could get a fist to my fast and I’d like a chance to at least block it.” Shortly after I said that to Erin, sure enough, “BOOM!” I thought, “Did that happen? Did I just get punched in the ribs?” I see a small man, one of whom had been pushing me, pulling his fist back with a chester cat grin on his face, quickly disappearing into the crowd. Yeah, he just sucker punched me in the ribs! I couldn’t believe it. I was filled with confusion, sadness because I felt something less than human, and quite a bit of anger. I took a deep, deep breath and was thankful that Erin and I were there together. Because if she wasn’t there other situations might have played out, well maybe not but they played out in my mind…

The initial situation that played out was a little Indiana Jone: Temple of Doom action on this little man and his buddies that are paid by other foreigners to stand in line for them (It is these people that create the majority of the problems/injustices at the Foreigner’s Police and where the biggest injustices are felt. Sadly, they make money from this, because people will pay them. I could just rant about this, but I will hold it here.). So I wanted to go straight “Mola Rom” (I know, he was a bad guy, but I’m just being honest with you!) on these guys and rain down justice and vengeance, but alas I was reminded of words that I just preached from 1 Peter 3 two Sundays ago “about absorbing injustices for the sake of the Gospel.” You might ask, “How is not going straight medieval, or primeval, on these dudes, absorbing injustices for the Gospel?” Well, one of the the few things I know for certain is that God has called me here and wants me to lay my life down for the sake of the Czechs, and even the other foreigners that are creating injustices at the Foreigner’s Police, for, what appears, a long, long time. If I were to go all “Mola Ram” on these dudes, that would probably mean me thrown in jail and if that were to happen, kiss good-bye to any chance of getting a visa (These guys know this too, knowing this leads to them creating problems. They also know that is like in sports, the person that starts the fight doesn’t get called for the foul/penalty, but those who retaliate.). So I [we] took a deep breath and went from first and second to 101 and 102 in line!

But praise God! We have our visas! We walked out with them and had very pleasant experience with the women who served us today. I’m also was reminded in the midst of all of this, that I love this country and the people of this county so, so deeply, that I would take a hundred more punches from a little Russian man! Thanks for the prayers and thanks for reading this long post… Okay, I’m going to go back to bed again!

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