The Argentina Chronicles

We have finally gotten settled into a house. Now I have no excuse to not generate some content on the blog and in other spaces. I had been using the excuse that I didn’t have a routine time to work on the blog. But all excuses are out of the way. It is just a matter of doing it.

Fireplace

We have moved into our new house for the next couple of years. It is a nice place. Very rustic feeling. There is a huge fireplace that I just can’t wait for it to get cold enough to use. The stairs are made from rough cut wood, but sanded and waxed to a nice slippery shine. So slippery that our daughter lost her footing on the last four steps and landed smack on her back and slid the rest of the way down. When she hit the bottom of the stairs her legs crumpled under her and she immediately fell forward doing a faceplant right onto the tile floor.

We are getting around with bikes, taxis, buses and shoe leather. It is nice living in a place that has good, cheap public transportation. We may eventually get a car, but at this point I think we are going to be just fine without one.

There are neighborhood markets for just about anything we need on a regular basis. Wal-Mart is also just a 5 minute bike ride from the house. But if the Wal-Mart trip is going to generate more bags of stuff than will fit in the basket on front of the bike, we have to walk 10-15 minutes to get there and take a cab back home with the loot.

We can be in downtown La Plata in about 20 minutes for $0.50 on the local buses.

We really enjoy the church we are working in. The pastor will probably become a lifelong friend. Even though he is about 10 years younger than we are, we have learned quite a bit from him and his preaching. It is an honor to be able to assist him in the ministry God has used him to start.

We are still getting some basic things together. Trying to get all the utilities worked out has been my big challenge this week. One of the terms of the rental contract was that we would put all utilities in our name. I still have one more to go. When I was at that office the other day there  was a line of 58 people which caused me to walk out the door and try again when I can get there first thing in the morning. Friday will be the day I attempt to make that trip.

So it has begun, our life in Argentina. I look forward to telling you all about it.

Book Review: Sunday’s Child

I knew my friend Garvin Dykes had been working on a book, and was excited to see him mention that it was available for the Kindle. I purchased it that day and started reading it on my iPhone.

I don’t read much fiction, so I surprised even myself as to how fascinated I was with the story of Sunday’s Child. It only took me 2 days to consume the book.

The story involves a college student in the south who meets a girl during his first few days at school. She is from the Middle East and is Muslim. The boy is a Christian, but tries to be a friend to the girl and help her feel comfortable in her new surroundings. The book is set in the early 80s and goes through the early 90s. The plot involves their growing relationship through the time when radical Islamic terrorists begin to attack the United States.

Besides being from two very different cultures geographically, they are also religiously very different. They seek to work through their differences.

As I read the first few pages I thought the book was going to spend more time on separating Christianity from Patriotism. While I love my country, I often feel that American Christians think their Christianity and love of country go hand in hand. When someone culturally worships the Lord in a different manner, they fall back on thinking that it is because the person is not a mature Christian. However, the book did not deal with that aspect of Christianity.

What I did learn from the book is a perspective of all the stories I heard in the news through my teenage years. All the conflict with Iran, Iraq, PLO and the fight for the land that Israel occupies makes more sense to me after reading this book. My school principal would share the news with us about what was going on over there, but it seemed so far away from me at the time. Of course we are still involved in the same conflicts today in that region as we were back in the 80s. Through this book I now understand where it started and how it developed.

I am not sure if the Kindle version is different from the printed version, but I did find several inconsistencies in the storyline. Apparently the author and editor made some last minute changes to the military rank of the hero in the story. He is a Lieutenant, then Capitan (then Lieutenant again) and twice he was called Major even though he only advanced to Capitan in the story. The printed version may have those inconsistencies cleared up.

The author told me these are “developing characters.” I take that to mean he has another book planned to follow this one. He mentions in the introduction that the story started forming with him as he was stuck in Africa during the September 11, 2001 attack on the US. Since this story ended in the early 90s, then there must be more to take us up to at least to 2001. I look forward to it.

It was refreshing to read a book that had no cursing. Since the author is a long time conservative preacher I expected nothing less. However, I did not even really notice that it was missing until I sat down to write this. More proof that a good story–even involving the military–can be told without stooping to filthy language.

Sunday’s Child. Garvin Dykes. Tate Publishing. 2010. 296 pages.

The church and their missionary

This is a sermon I preached this weekend in Kentucky. The pastor is a man that went to the same high school as I. He was a few years older than me and we really did not get to know one another as friends until many years after we had both moved away from Texas.

There was a missionary to Togo, West Africa in the service. She is a nurse who works with a hospital in Togo as well as many other hospitals through her mission agency as a leadership counselor. I refer to her several times in the message.

I wanted to put this up here because a friend recently asked me how a church can be a blessing to their missionaries. This is just a small part of what I want to tell her, but it is a good introduction to what I have to say. Maybe I will write a series of posts and share the ideas I have with you as I share them with her.

Missionary Talks 73: Travis Snode

Missionary Talks 73 is an interview with Travis Snode, missionary in Northern Ireland. Travis is a missionary I met through Twitter. I am not sure how we got connected originally, but Monday I was thinking out loud on Twitter about how I have 4 potential interviews in the wings, but no one had confirmed a time to actually record a phone call. I figured I would look through my Twitter followers/followees and see if I had a missionaries I could interview from there. Beings that they are on Twitter I figured they would be the connected type of people who could do an interview quickly.

I found Travis’ name and looked up his website. Come to find out, while I did not know him personally, it seems that we had a lot of mutual friends in the ministry. I sent him a quick email and he replied positively about doing an interview. When we got on Skype together I asked him what he knew about Missionary Talks. Turns out he had never even heard of Missionary Talks previous to my email. That is not unusual for the missionaries I interview, but the fact that he was gung-ho about doing the interview with me made me think he probably was a listener.

We are in the middle of trying to get ready for our move to Argentina while also being involved in a pastor’s conference this week, traveling to a church in Kentucky this weekend and spending most of next week in a mission’s conference in Tennessee. I am trying to do anything I can to distract me from the fact that I should be packing for a major move in 13 days. So, I spent all morning yesterday recording an interview and editing it. Seemed like the responsible thing to do.

As an added bonus to this episode, if you go to the Missionary Talks fan page on Facebook you can listen to a clip of the interview that did not survive the editing process, but was a very interesting section of our conversation. Don’t forget to become a fan if you go there.

Yes, the above linked Twitter account is the account where I say more mature type things as opposed to my other Twitter account which is the real me.

Book Review: Made to Stick

At the recommendation of a missionary friend I picked up a copy of Made to Stick at the local library. His comment was something like: “It is not a mission’s book, but it certainly is applicable to missionary work.”

While I tend to agree with many pastors that business books can be dangerous when you try to apply the principles of running a corporation to a church, I also think that there are many good things we can glean from reading books that make businesses successful. This book is not so much a business book as it is about communication; regardless of the work environment.

The authors, brothers Chip and Dan Heath, have isolated 6 principles that help make an idea ‘sticky.’ What I loved about the way they explained the principles is they used urban legends as many of their examples. There are reasons that urban legends get passed around and tend to stick no matter how much information is on the web to the contrary. If you could communicate real ideas, stories and principles in a way that cause them to stick like an urban legend, then you would get your message across. The book is filled with real examples as well.

In Made to Stick you will find the 6 principles and examples illustrating those ideas. Not every sticky idea will contain all 6, but the more you can communicate using the 6 principles, the stickier your communication will be.

What are the principles? Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story. SUCCESs is used as the trigger to help you remember these principles.

Simple: Find the core of what you want to communicate. This has to do with the idea you want to share more than the way you share it. Sometimes an elaborate story can get the message across in a more sticky way than just sharing the core. Therefore, Simple is about the message, not necessarily the way it is delivered.

Unexpected: At the end of the story did you expect that the person was going to wake up in an ice-filled tub having had his kidney’s stolen? Giving examples of how you want your sales staff to meet the customer’s needs is much more sticky than saying, “Take care of the customer.”

Concrete: Help your audience work through the thought process instead of just teaching them the bottom line. An example is how students learn math better when they think through adding members to make up a baseball team as opposed to just telling the students that 3+6=9.

Credible: Being credible is not just being able to spout off statistics that no one will remember. Credibility can come through showing an example of a person going through a similar problem and how they are dealing with it. Better yet, have that person become your spokesperson. Real people dealing with real issues.

Emotion: Help people see themselves either experiencing the problem or being a solution to the problem. Instead of asking the crowd to give money to support all the missionaries in South America, I should help you understand that if you support my ministry in Argentina I will be able to share the Gospel of Christ with a deaf boy in La Plata who may never have another person love him enough to teach him the Bible. By sending $50 a month you can help my family do just that.

Story: Take any opportunity you have to illustrate with a story as opposed to just giving the facts. In the book they say that the story and the moral are both important. However, if you just tell the story the listener can figure out the moral. But if you only have the moral (the facts) then the listener has no clear understanding of what the moral means nor a good way to remember it.

I have to say that this is probably THE BEST BOOK I have read in a long time. While I borrowed this copy from the local library, I will be on the lookout for a copy of my own. This is a book that I could easily read several more times and go back and reference often in the future. I think it is a great book for missionaries and pastors as well as anyone who needs to communicate a message.

Made to Stick. Chip and Dan Heath. Random House, 2007. 291 pages.