Yay for vacation

February was pretty uneventful for most of it, school, started climbing in the gym again, working with my refugee kids. But last Friday and old friend that I met through YDA and went to WWU with me, came to visit. Kurtis was here for 9 days, while I had a week off for semester break and we had a blast. I don't have time to put up all the pictures now so I've just put up a couple. We spent some time around here hiking, snowboarding, drinking cappuccino and talking for hours on end and then we went to Italy to climb. We had one day of great weather and then one day of not good weather so we wandered the nearby town, then went to Verona for a day. Kurt left this morning and I have to start school again tomorrow. Sad.

Hopefully more to come later!

In the News..From Lake Wobogon and Wenatchee

I was stoked today to hear of two little Washington (state) towns in the news on several of my National Public Radio shows. A story from Concrete was used for a quiz question on "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" and the other one was from Wenatchee where a guy with the last name of Moron ran his car into something after drinking. Oh WA, how proud I am of you and your little towns!

In other news, if you haven't been following the primaries much, and don't know where to start,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21116732 has a big, interactive graph of all the remaining candidates and their veiws on big issues, so you can click how much you agree with differnt things, and then see which candidate you match up with best. Pretty cool. So check it out! And Vote!!!!

Another cool article I found, from the New York Times entitled, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin And a couple quotes from it:

"Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives."

"In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians. In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic."

So if you fall into the category of "Christian", Be a crazy Christian! In a positive way, not just for the sake of being crazy, just to clarify. And if you are a crazy-anything-else-positive, Be crazy about being positive!

Hard Core Running and Big Decisions

So I was on a run last week, and as usual, after 5 minutes of warm up, I take a fork up a little hill to a playground where I attempt to do pull-ups so that Allie doesn't kick my but when we go climbing in the summer. While I was up there I saw a big group of people heading down the trail in dark clothes; it was just getting dark out (again, don't tell my mom I was running in the dark), so it was hard to see. But then they dissapeared behind the cover of trees. But they didn't come into view again in a minute or so, as their former pace would have suggested. I continued my little strength routine wondering if it was a group of mourners or some strange Tirolian holiday I missed. Finally they were on the move again. As they passed below me, I went near the edge of the playground to look. They had big packs; mountain rescue doing training? But then I realized they were all wearing the same thing. It was the army. Kinda funny that they were passing through on this trail in the dark at 6pm. I thought of a few extra excercises to do in the hopes that we wouldn't have to cross paths in a minutes or two.

But no such luck. I started down the trail again, and they had stopped, all lined up, so I figured I could just run to one side of their neat line. As I jogged toward the front of the line of 20-30 guys, the front ones had spread to two rows on either side of the trail facing with their weapons pointed out toward the dark night, woods, and the river. At this point, I was commited, so I just kept running through hoping that they wouldn't take me as a sample hostage for training purposes. the whole thing was so eerie though, first trying to figure out what big group would be wandering the trail at night and then jogging right through the middle of their little training thing, but it is a completely public path with loads of people going down it all the time, even in the evening.

In the meantime, I am trying to save money so that I can spend some of the summer travelling and camping out in a few places and go rock climbing as much as possible and maybe pick up some work at a farm here and there (WWOOFing). I was considering renewing my Fulbright for another year. And even though I have really enjoyed my time here, I have achieved my goals of checking out teaching, improving my German, and travelling a bit. I have decided to move on to a couple other goals which are to do some kind of longer-term mission or ministry, explore a job in the outdoors, and be closer to family and friends.

So the big decision is that after much prayer and consideration, I have decided to do a one year internship with YD Adventures (see www.yd.org), the ministry I have served with for two summers. I have been thinking about it for a while, excited about the opportunity to give a whole year serving God in this youth ministry, working with people who I look up to and are like another family to me, and getting to be out in God’s creation. But I had been nervous about the prospect of raising support for a whole year. I have been reading Matthew and when I got to chapter 6, Jesus says, “So do not worry, saying, ’What shall we eat?’ or “What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’… your heavenly father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” After getting encouragement from friends and family, that was all I needed to push me to commit. Now the fear has disappeared and been replaced with excitement and purpose, knowing that I will be serving God. If all goes as planned I will be starting in September. As it gets closer I will be keeping you all updated.