Dear friends and family,
It’s a brisk and beautiful Autumn day in central Pennsylvania. Days like this—’football weather‘, as my Dad used to call it—speak volumes about the change of seasons, gradual but inexorable. Winter will be upon us, then Springtime after that, then these suddenly cool, corn-bounded roads on which I bike in splendid solitude will once more become steamy hot.
It’s how things roll.
Same with the changing seasons of Karen’s and my shared life. We are rolling with satisfaction, commitment, and joy towards Colombia, rich with new opportunities, challenges, and surprises.
Here is a catch-up summary, which the nip in the air tells me is slightly overdue:
- Karen is in Florida with four women from our church in Indianapolis with whom she gathers for three or four days every year, a life-giving sisterhood that I once upon a time accidentally named ‘The Turtle Club’. The name stuck.
- Tomorrow, Karen will fly back to Baltimore. I’ll meet her there and on Sunday we’ll fly down to our soon-future home at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia for an intense work week.
- Why a week in Colombia now? Over the last year, I’ve been investing 5-8 hours per week in a marvelous translation and adaptation project that will bring instruction in Biblical Hebrew online to Spanish speakers. It’s now time to push through a bottleneck by recording Spanish-Hebrew voiceovers, which I can best accomplish onsite at the Seminary.
- Karen will spend her days face-to-face with Magdalena, whom you may remember as Karen’s Skype-inhabiting Spanish language teacher. They’ll giggle, chuckle, and hug their way to greater mastery of elementary Spanish. They’re a little crazy, these two.
- The seminary has invited Karen and me to stay in the apartment that will become ‘ours’ when we move to Colombia in May, which will be fun and allow us to identify any changes, repairs, and furnishing that will turn this space into our home in about six months. We already get a kick out of overhearing our seminary colleagues refer to the space as el apartmento de los Baer ( = ‘the Baers’ apartment’).
- Our schedule has now shaped up rather firmly: (a) now to December: finish our support-raising marathon, moving from 83% to 100%; (b) January-February: pre-field training in North Carolina; (c) March-April; final speaking/convening assignments Stateside, prepare for move to Colombia; (d) first week of May: move to Medellín, Colombia!
- I’ve been keeping a fairly busy speaking and ministry schedule, mainly in connection with churches that in one way or another have become partners of us and of our work.
- The seminary dean has given me my first teaching assignments in Colombia for the year’s second semester of 2018 (July-December): (a) Biblical Theology and (b) Sacred Writings (the third section of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Old Testament’s ‘wisdom’ and ‘poetic’ sections are prevalent). It’s exciting to see how much good literature (sadly, most of it still translations) has become available in this field since I was last teaching full-time in Latin America, c. 2004.
- Karen is making strides in figuring out the stomach ailments that have plagued her in occasionally acute manner over the last year. Email is probably not the place to discuss this further. No, please, I really mean that.
- The huge Belgian plow horses at the Amish farm just down the road now hustle over to get their immense heads scratched when we walk by with Rhea. Our farms here in the Lykens Valley have had such a harvest of corn for silage this year that their silos are full to the brim and they’re storing the excess in gigantic white-plastic ‘worms’ on the ground. Their livestock will eat well this winter. But the price of milk is in the gutter, which is partly because Karen is making me drink almond milk. I bet you didn’t think I knew about this stuff.
- As part of my Theological Education Initiative responsibilities (the other half of my portfolio, of which the first half is anchored at the seminary in Colombia), I’ll teach an Old Testament course and make a general nuisance of myself in other ways once per year at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut, Lebanon. Karen and I will leverage that anchor in the calendar to develop TEI relationships with other seminaries in the Middle East and then probably do the same with one seminary in Latin America each year. My TEI colleague Dr. Daniel Salinas and I will coordinate to make sure we’re deepening and intelligently broadening our TEI network in ways that more or less cover the globe. That last clause sounded a little more pompous than it was supposed to.
- Overseas Council, which I directed from 2004-2016 has just announced that they’re being acquired by our own United World Mission and will function under the ‘OC’ name as a division of United World Mission. Life is peculiar, inscrutable, and quite often beautiful.
- We are now at 83% of the full funding required for us to launch. May I ask you to consider becoming part of the final 17%? Email me if this is for you. Or if I got the math wrong.
- If you’re a Strava user and would like us to track with each other’s fitness routes, let me know. If this means nothing to you, don’t feel left out but please do move quickly to the next bullet point before you are overtaken by foolish ideas.
- I’ve nearly finished taking the 15-week online Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course and am hearing positive sounds from the Perspectives organization about my proposal that I offer the course online to a small number of highly motivated influencers in the seven churches to which we principally relate. If you want to know more about this absolutely stupendous learning opportunity, shoot me an email. I’m not kidding, it will change everything you thought you knew about ‘missions’.
- Things we’ll do around the margins of our Colombia work next week: √ one: locate the best places to ride in and around Medellín √ two: find a reputable and welcoming bike shop √ three: pour over a map of Medellín with colleagues to get our bearings √ four: locate and check out a big-box DIY (think Home Depot, Lowes, Menards) to price stuff we’ll need for our apartment; ditto on a furniture store √ five: check out the nearest gym and figure out what hours a person can safely run to it from the challenged neighborhood in which the seminary is located √ six: enjoy dinners with future colleagues and students √ seven: suck the high Andean evening air into our lungs and wonder about the surprises God has in store for us over these next 11 years.
- Here’s an addition to that last list: √ eight: laugh a lot. A few days ago a long-time friend who taught for some years at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia wrote this unsolicited description of the seminary community: ‘There’s a marketing slogan at the seminary – Una vivencia única (“a unique way of living”)- and it is all of that and much more … That place is special in so many ways. There’s a word in Spanish “acogedor” which really sums it nicely. But it is also intergenerational and a great mentoring environment.’ Karen and I don’t live chasing utopias, which always disappoint with a loud crashing sound anyway. But the seminary is at a beautiful place on its own organizational cycle, and we feel so privileged to be putting our skinny little shoulders to the plough in that place with these people at this unique moment.
- Here’s what Karen would say if she were not with the Turtle Club Ladies in Florida right now: ‘Ask them to pray that my Spanish will take a leap forward and that we’ll make progress on managing a health-diet-and-medical regimen that will empower me to serve from strength in Colombia.’ I think.
- Even if I didn’t get that exactly right, please do pray for us as we travel and serve and prepare and travel and serve. And prepare.
- Go, Astros!
- We love youse guys.
Warmly,
David (for Karen, too)
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