After a long Hiatus

As you have almost certainly noticed, I took a little break from blogging for the last couple of months that I was in the Jungles of Costa Rica. Life circumstances became quite overwhelming, and my blog, sadly, got placed on a back burner. My life did not stop, though, and I have quite a lot to catch you up on. Thus I present to you:

The Last Few Months of Andrew's Life, Montage!

Andrew clears a pasture! Andrew's neighbor poisons the pasture. Andrew gets a ton of new farmyard animals. Several of those farmyard animals produce more farmyard animals. Andrew is overwhelmed by the cuteness of the baby chicks in his yard. Andrew goes to Panama with Yancy Reach. Andrew translates for Panamanian immigration officials. Andrew helps an African War refugee avoid jail. Andrew visits the best fair of his life, with 19 city blocks of awesome! Andrew Meets some Swedes and then hikes with Yancy 18.6 miles up and down a volcano at midnight with only one working flashlight. Andrew and Yancy see a giant jungle cat. Andrew and Yancy pray for angels to protect them from said jungle cat. Two Canadians, a Britt, and an American come cussing up the mountain. The Jungle cat magically transforms into a sheep. Andrew and Yancy sleep in a seemingly abandoned building at the top of the mountain, and are greeted by a Panamanian in the morning. Andrew and Yancy go to the best beach in the world and meet an awesome girl. Yancy misses his flight home. Andrew and Yancy are met by the same girl who joins them on a trip to the Nicoya Peninsula. Yancy finally gets home, Andrew and the girl go do missions work on the farm. The girl gets angry and leaves. Andrew is depressed and decides to give fancy water catchment systems to his neighbors with the help of Grace Church! Andrew comes home and does nothing productive for two months, except of course starting the most awesome photography company ever with his friend Samantha Nandez

http://www.AndrewandSamPhotography.com

http://www.facebook.com/SamanthaNandezPhotography

http://samanthanandez.blogspot.com/

Andrew dates a really awesome girl for a couple of weeks. She is a lesbian and freaks out after dating Andrew for just a little while, but they are cool now, just not together. Andrew does not get some jobs he applied for. Andrew scores 1460 out of 1600 on the GRE! Andrew looks in his bank account and finds nothing. Andrew gets scared and starts hunting for ways to make money fast and legally. Andrew considers becoming homeless. Andrew writes this blog post.

I hope you enjoyed the last several months of my life as much as I did! Besides hunting for ways to make a quick buck, I am currently processing images from my travels and trying to put together a body of work. for the next month and a half, I hope to upload one finished landscape a day for your viewing pleasure. All of these landscapes are for sale, so shoot me an email if one strikes your fancy!

Bare Bishop

A Bump on the Rump

Just in case you ever though of buying cattle, Don’t. They very quickly become a pain in the neck when they start jumping fences to get into your front yard, but they are especially bad when you have to transport them along a half mile jungle trail to get them home from the north pasture. The problem is that cattle have this curious character flaw that compels them to take any possible side trail that they can find, regardless of whether or not that trail leads straight into deep jungle and swamp. It seems like the only important characteristic that I cow uses in selecting which trail to walk down, is whether or not you want them to walk down that trail. The only way I was finally able to get my cattle home was to bribe them with salt, which meant that for the entire half mile hike, I had the constant companion of a hungry bull head butting me in an attempt to get my bowl of salt.

There are few jobs that I hate more in life than hauling lumber, especially freshly cut, heavy, wet, tropical lumber. For that reason, I guess today is my lucky day.

For my whole life I have been ashamed of my inability to play team sports. I have tried to compensate for this important gap in my life as a man by being good at other things such as spear throwing, shooting, running, hiking, and other manly outdoor sports, but try as I might, I cannot move past the shame that I feel every time someone is watching a football game and I don’t know what is going on. I have been so ashamed by my lack of knowledge, that I have been unwilling to risk the humiliation involved in trying to actually learn a sport at my advanced age. At least, that was the case until I came to Costa Rica.

For the past month I have been playing soccer regularly with my neighbors. I have gotten better to the point that I am no longer ashamed, and I have even scored a few goals. It is extremely difficult to play in the slippery mud, so I invested in a cheap pair of soccer cleats, which improved my playing tremendously. There is only one catch. The cleats have moved me out of the world of slipping and falling every 5 minutes, into the world of too much traction and sprained ankles.

Yesterday, I was trying to steal the ball from a particularly agile opponent named Daniel, when my foot planted the wrong way, and with a loud “Pop!” I was on the ground, holding my ankle and trying not to cuss. It was a very respectable sprain, one that merited me limping off the field for all of ten minutes, before returning to play stationary defense in front of the goal.

I managed to walk the half mile home that evening, but I woke about 10 times during the night because of the pain, and then this morning I found myself almost unable to walk. Pain killers and working with the joint have helped to improve the situation so that I can now walk around the house and yard (which is good considering that I am here by myself while Juan is with his family), but luckily I am not well enough to haul the lumber that we are cutting for the corral. I guess today really is my lucky day!

As a child, I wanted to believe that if I was a Christian and served God, my life would be happy all the time. I thought that life was about making yourself as happy as possible and protecting yourself from as much pain as you could. I no longer believe that. Now I see God and life on earth as something to be cherished and appreciated, but not as something that will always be happy. Part of growing is learning to cherish even the sad parts of life. One line from Stranger in a Strange Land says that the Martians would spend several thousand years Grokking (knowing and understanding) Earth and Humans, and then, once they had properly Grokked and Cherished and hated Earth, they would destroy it. I don’t necessarily agree with the Martian attitude toward Cherishing, but I do think that it paints a powerful picture.

Juan is going through one of those painful times in life at this moment. We just received word from the police that his grandfather has passed away in San Jose. The death was not unexpected (should death ever be unexpected?), but nevertheless, it is painful to have someone die. The typle evangelical attitude toward death is that, in theory at least, we should be happy and rejoice at funerals, and those times should be used to preach the Gospel. I definitely agree with some of the theory behind this attitude. A funeral is a great way to preach the Gospel, and we should both rejoice in the life of our loved ones, and in the new life that a believer now has for eternity. I don’t, however, believe in trying to make family members of the deceased feel happy at funerals.

I tend to agree more with the Jewish approach toward death, which involves a short time of symbolic death (mourning, uncomforted and unbothered by the need to be a part of the living world), followed by an extended and gradual period of being comforted and gradually reentering the world of the living. When our loved ones die, we die with them, and I believe that it is important to recognize that.

Please pray for Juan and his family. Even though you will not read this till long after the death of his Grandfather, I do not believe that G-d is any more bound by the time of our prayers than he is by the walls of our church.

Beware of Alligator

One of the first rules of being a teenage boy is that Manliness is next to G-dliness. I grew up beneath the iron fisted tyranny of this law, and I was not alone. It is practically impossible for a teenage boy to walk past a mirror without stopping to repeat this mantra while doing his best impersonation of a Michelangelo sculpture. Even in the animal kingdom I can see this law being observed on a regular basis in the form of the 17 young bulls that are constantly butting heads in attempt to establish their dominance over our small heard.

My teenage neighbors are no exception to this law. It is hard for me to recall a single afternoon spent with 14 year old Alfredo that did not involve some form of bloody knuckles, pushups, arm wrestling, boxing, racing, or some other type of competition. Thus, I was not terribly surprised the other day when Alfredo invited me for a friendly swim. I believe his exact words were, “Vamos a cruzar el rio para ver quien llegara primero.” Which can be roughly translated as, “Lets go swim across the river to see who can get to the other side first.”

After many comments about alligators smelling blood in the water, we had stripped off the majority of our clothes and were swimming with all our strength to see who would be the first to cross the hundred yards of swift currents and deadly wildlife. A small convoy of canoes trailed close behind us in the case of an emergency.

I swam with all the strength I could muster, trying hard to regulate my breathing and push my body through the water with the best possible technique. I managed to maintain a short lead over Alfredo for most of the crossing, but as we got within 20 yards of the finish, I saw a miracle take place. Suddenly Alfredo was swimming faster, and his head was high out of the water! At first I was shocked, until the finger tips of my left hand brushed the sand bar beneath me. Our swim had turned into a foot race. Amidst cries of cheater, and splashes of water, I raced with Alfredo to the muddy banks of the shallow river.

As I collapsed into the canoe, I was satisfied, knowing that I had once again proven that I was manlier than a 14 year old boy. Oh, sweet victory.

It is hard for me to write out here in Delta. It feels like I am always busy, but nothing ever happens here. There is a weird time distortion that takes place on the river. Nobody is in a hurry, and time passes slowly. The most exciting events in my recent life have been the planting of a small garden, baking, and repairing a damaged board in the kitchen floor. I have been studying for the GRE, and I am mildly excited about the prospect of graduate school. I have also been thinking about doing freelance photography, and I am more excited about that. The thing that has me the most excited is, as usual, relational. I cannot wait to see certain people back home.

I finished Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinland, a couple of days ago. I was most impressed by the character of Jubal Harshaw, a cranky old man who is said to be the only human who can grok (understand) without speaking Martian. This character is even more interesting to me than ****Mr. Universe**** in The Watchmen.

In a discussion toward the end of the book, Jubal defines love as “a state of being in which ones own wellbeing is directly tied to the wellbeing of another.” While I do not accept this definition as final, nor would I completely accept any definition of love that came from a human, I do consider it to be one of the better attempts to define an indefinable word that I have come across. After reading this, I spent a while considering all of my relationships and trying to determine who I really loved according to this definition. I was surprised at how neatly the results coincided with the people that I already believed that I love. The most valuable insight that I gained from this was the realization that my mother loves me, my dad, and my siblings (and strangers) more than anyone else that I have ever seen. Her well being is so intimately tied up in our own that it is impossible for any of us to suffer without her suffering, or be happy without her being happy (she has somehow learned to be happy and suffer at the same time, which is an impressive feat).

I was amazed to think about how deeply I am known by my mom, and how little that is in comparison to how I am known by G-d. I want to know, and I want to be known. I believe that this is fundamental to how and why G-d made me.

“Dreams are a way for your mind to process potential reactions to various scenarios (or fears), so that when the scenario actually takes place, you will know how, or how not, to react.”

About a week ago, I had a dream that my father had decided to become an orthodox Jew. I found the idea extremely upsetting for some reason. I particularly remember being upset when I realized that my mom would have to buy two new complete sets of dishes and cookware, one for dairy products, and one for meat.

A few days later, I had a dream that I was on a family vacation at a tropical beach. My brother in Law was there. He had everything so orchestrated and planned out, that it left no time for me to actually hang out with him and enjoy his company. Every attempt I made to get him to deviate from his plan and actually hang out with me was met with cheerfully obstinate refusal.

The third dream that I had was different from the first two. The first two dreams seemed to be my mind processing extreme versions of fears that I have with respect to some of my closest relationships.

In my third dream, I was dating a girl that I care about greatly. This dream was not about dealing with fear. This dream was about finally gaining a new understanding of my friend. For so long, I have held this friend on a very high pedestal. When I think of this girl, I think of beauty and romance. I have always thought of her as having a pure life, at least a form of a pure life. In my mind, she is on a never-ending quest for beauty, a quest that in my opinion can only have one end (or one beginning).

Through this dream, I felt peace in our relationship. Rather than thinking of her as this inhuman work of art, I was finally able to look at her and honestly say, “I know that you are just a person, but you are an extraordinary person.” This realization has brought me some peace that I did not know that I lacked. She is just a person, like you and like me. She is an extraordinary person. I appreciate her.