What is happening to me?

I have been continuing on my regular exercise and eating program. Basically I exercise 4 to 6 days a week and eat whatever sounds good. Probably could do a bit better on the diet than I do, but I don’t really eat that poorly.

This week I have gained almost 10 lbs in one week! Today was the first day that my weight was the same as the day before. Previous to this I had gained at least a pound a day for several days in a row. I thought that the batteries in the scale must be at fault, but my wife has been using the scale and has not seen any change in its behavior.

I did my normal Tae-Bo workout this morning and then this evening I ran for an hour. Hopefully that will help me see some drop in weight. I am not really starving myself trying to get to a certain number, but you would think with all the work I put into this I could at least maintain my weight instead of gaining back several months worth of losses in just a week.

Definitely a different culture

Today I was teaching about John the Baptist in Sunday School class at the Deaf church. He is not the John who wrote the book of John nor First, Second and Third John or the book of The Revelation. John, the author, is the one we refer to as Saint John.
John the Baptist however was a cousin to Jesus and was his “forerunner.” He went around preaching that Jesus was coming. John attracted some attention. The Bible says that he dressed in camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey.

The insect that the Bible calls locusts are what I called grasshoppers when I was growing up. I think that is pretty common in the US. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about locusts and shows that they are capable of the destruction of “biblical proportions” that has been attributed to them.Desert Locust

In Spanish the word for locusts (or grasshopper) is langosta. If you are up on your seafood in various languages, you will know that langosta is lobster as well. I did my best to describe lobsters for them. Though they are teens and fairly well educated, they are Deaf and do not know all the names of animals that do not affect their lives regularly. After my great description of a lobster and they knew what I was talking about, I asked them if they liked lobster / langosta. Basically…no. It was “OK,” but nothing too exciting for them.

I then told them that what John the Baptist was eating was not lobster anyway. He was eating an insect by the name langosta. They did not know what it could be. So, I pulled out some pictures that I had of grasshoppers. They got excited. One blurted out (in signs), “Oh! Those are really good. Especially with chocolate!” They not only knew what they were, but could tell how best to eat them!

After we were done being grossed out and amused by their excitement I said that John probably did not eat them with chocolate. But the Bible does say that he ate wild honey. So perhaps he dipped his grasshoppers in the honey instead.

Just because we don’t understand something that the Bible says, does not make it untrue or unbelievable. Maybe from our perspective we cannot wrap our heads around it, but it may just be a matter of experiencing a new culture to get an understanding.

Missionary Talks 03: Shane Rice

Episode 3 is out! I am excited about this one. Not that I was not excited about the others, but this one was actually the first one I recorded. Shane and I have been friends for about 6 years and I knew he would step up to the plate to help me get my feet wet and get this started.

The hard part about this episode was that to keep within my 15 minute goal, I had to cut a bunch of stuff out. Also, I had to remove some of the silence between questions and answers, so it does not sound as natural.

This was the second recording since my computer ate the first recording. I had it all recorded, but ran out of space. When my computer was trying to convert the raw files to mp3 with no hard drive space, it just lost it all. It was kinda good. Gave us a chance to do it the second time around without being so stiff.

Enjoy!