courtesy of australia vol.1

courtesy of australia vol.2

courtesy of australia vol.3

never in my life, did i think that i would love fighting kangaroos as much as i do. it brings me such joy to see these creatures fight, throwing punches, wrestling, standing on their tales and kicking each other. it is odd, because i normally hate fighting.

i believe that if the world would fight its wars with kangaroos, we would live in harmony due to the unavoidable laughter and happiness kangaroo feuds bring.

i also find it odd that these golfers continue with their game, almost oblivious to the event taking place. it leads me to believe that australians have grown weary of seeing kangaroo fights. it must happen all the time if men can simply ignore it.

you're having a party...... kangaroo fight.
you're getting married..... kangaroo fight.
taking mail to the post office..... kangaroo fight.
birthing a child..... kangaroo fight.

and so on and so forth. in fact, just behind me a kangaroo fight has broken out.

finishing a blog post...... kangaroo fight.

i've got to go. i'm laying down a significant amount of coin on a kangaroo the locals simply call "the inflicter."

the what

recently, i finished reading a book by dave eggers: 'what is the what,' about the life of one of the 'lost boys'-achak deng- from sudan and its war, born a year after me in 1983 and ending a horrific 22 years later in 2005 killing millions and displacing even more . i highly recommend it if your looking for a good long read with substance and heart.

yesterday in an australian k-mart, i was sitting with a man from nigeria having a chat. a dark, thin security guard possibly in his early 20's walked up to us. his gaunt frame and appearance was almost exactly what i had imagined achak deng's to be. he looked much like the image on the book's cover. he was one of the lost boys, i was sure.

after a while, my friend and i were able to get him to confirm my suspicions. 'jon' was from sudan and was settled here outside of brisbane. we had a brief conversation, all of us aware of the depth it could have contained, and he went back to his duties.

the whole time i felt a guilty connection with him. having read the story of achak deng, i felt i knew a part of what jon must have gone through. there was so much he had to tell and neither of us had the time to converse.

it was as though, through jon, God was reminding me of the book's reality and of the fact that there are countless numbers of people forced through outrageous struggle by things completely beyond their control. people like jon and achak deng have experienced things that people like me have no way of understanding.

books, like egger's, and stories help, much like pictures. but pictures and words rarely represent their subjects in fullness. this became totally evident when i saw the sydney opera house last week.

never in my life did i expect to be impacted so much in that place, by that place. i could have stayed in the harbor for days being comforted by the scenery and the sounds. (fitting that the only piece of music i heard while by the opera house was 'let's get it on' covered by a band at a local bar) pictures and words don't prepare you for that type of encounter, they can't.

in the effort to listen and tell somebody's story or an attempt to capture a moment in a picture we can share a small portion of reality. it is God only that can truly comprehend and understand it in every way. God connects our souls to these things. He speaks the truth of the matter into our depths, into our gut. moments of understanding and clarity in matters is great grace.

i feel like it is God in us that can only truly connect us to each other and to the moments we are in. we are in His world, His creation. Only His presence allows us to see the truth, because God is the Truth.

there are some things you have to encounter. tozer says "it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth." we must engage our lives, our experiences, our thoughts and actions with the Heavenly Father for them to grow in truth.

this is, to a degree and in part, my answer to the question that is begged but not answered in the title of egger's book, taken from a story told within it. it is that great unknown, that thing only God can answer because only He knows what the what is.

"set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth. for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." col 3.2-3

the what is about thinking above, about seeing the hidden life, found only with Christ in God.

a little backwords

i'm here in australia, near sydney, and to be honest i'm having a bit of a rough go of things. my brand new computer (purchased the day after thanksgiving) decided to kill its hard drive. i'm not too surprised though. the hard drive has never gotten along with the rest of the computer. i guess it was a little arrogant, thinking it could do all the computing itself. well, push came to shove and there was a bit of a civil war which left the hard drive completely dead.

with its untimely death, the hard drive took with it every bit of data i had. it is all, as the rotund gentlemen at the computer repair shop would tell me, unretrievable.

unretrievable.

this is a horrible word, outside of a few crazy exceptions (use your imagination). i've lost many pictures, some music and movie files i had on there. but worst of all, i lost all the stuff i have been writing the last couple weeks. they were all still in progress, but nearly finished and not backed up on anything. it is all disapressing (def. is somewhere in the archives).

thus, i have been trying to retrieve the articles and musings from my head. for the most part, they are unretrievable. i am starting over on a lot of them and trying to write some new stuff too. it is a bit of a pain.

i'm not a very fast writer when it comes to other people. when i get to be introspective and write about what i'm going through, it comes easily (typically). i feel added pressure when writing about other people, because i don't want to misrepresent them or, worse, not show their passion or their heart in it. being a journalist might not be a good fit for me. it makes me feel a bit backwords.

if you didn't know, the street traffic is reversed from america. cars come at me from the opposite side i'm used to. when i'm looking left, i should be looking right. when i'm looking right, i should be looking left. i fear that eventually, i'll be looking at the ceiling of a hospital.

it is unnatural for me. i continually have my head on a swivel in the attempts of not dying. this type of writing is a tiny bit like that. i feel like i'm looking the wrong way. and in the process of being confused, my words don't come out. eventually they will, i hope. but for now, i'm learning to look at things differently, to cross the street safely.

classic rambling

i just read the last two posts and now see that a trend has begun. i started at 15, then 14. if i continue this pattern i have, i'll only have 13 posts left. the last of these will provide me with only a single minute. what could i say in a minute? probably more than i think.

i've found myself really listening on this trip. in the process of this, i've also started listening to my own words. God has allowed me to step outside myself a bit. He is trying to teach me to be more of a minimalist with my tongue. the things i would talk in circles about for days, God wants me to edit, to be more concise and quit adding to the noise. but, i'll probably still ramble a bit on this thing.

last week was spent in vanuatu. the people at the base we stayed at were really amazing, really driven and ambitious. it is humbling to be around people with the type of passion nearly everyone we ran into had. not only humbling, it is really quite challenging as well.

i've spent the last few days going though the notes i took from the days of conversations i had. trying to make sense of my notes is a bit like trying to finish a crossword puzzle. i am still wrestling with myself as a writer, trying to find my voice. it has proven very difficult for me to tell other people's stories. my nature is so introspective that i find it difficult not to write myself into the story. i'm also not sure if that is or isn't a bad thing.

i definitely feel a bit of guilt for that though, for making everything personal. these stories aren't about me, i'm not confused about that. but i cannot help but look at things with eyes longing for growth. when i hear something, i let it challenge me. i don't know how else to engage the people with which i am having a conversation. in the talks, i'm not constantly trying to shift the focus onto me. it isn't like that. i just have to personally interact with their words, it is how i listen.

it has been a blessing to see that God is using me in these places. that has been a prayer and fear of mine, just to sort of be here not really adding to anything. but God has blessed me with the tangible knowledge that there is purpose in my being here and that i won't have to wait to know what that is. that hasn't been the theme in my last 5+ years and i am really grateful for it. you can see some pictures of a place in vanuatu called black sands paama in the flickr thing to the right (there actually pretty good pictures for ones i've taken -they're usually pretty awful).

i am in wollongong, australia now. wollongong, australia? seriously? i am still a bit humbled that God is taking me to these places. i'm quite a bit humbled by the things i am witnessing. i'll talk about australia later (i'm going to be here a little over two weeks) but for now i've probably said enough (maybe even nothing at all). i just thank God australia is not a sauna.

14 minutes or so

time is not a luxury i can afford right now. the time i have at this internet cafe in vanuatu is close to running out, but i thought that i would get a quick post in before i left.

firstly, i cannot stop sweating. i feel like i could irrigate crops with the neverending streams of perspiration. it is hot and humid, i feel like i'm giving the sun a piggy back ride. hopefully, i'll adjust and me and the sun can make peace.

the other day, somebody asked me if my feet were still swollen from the plane ride. study of my feet showed that they were the same size they have been for years now. i just have fat feet. but i decided to use this comment to my advantage. i said yes. in fact i think my whole body is a bit swollen from the plane ride, especially my belly.

thirdly, i've been having a lot of good conversations with the people serving here. the task i have here is a bit overwelming to me, to be honest. i've never considered myself a writer and trying to catch a bit of the passion they have and put it into words seems like a task i'm not up to. but i trust God wanted me, specifically me, here to do this for a reason. at some point, it would be nice to know what, exactly, that is. but this is nothing new for me. i always wonder about that, always ask God what i'm doing here, the world specifically.

i was talking with an austrailian woman here the other day. i'll call her mommy from here on, that is what every body else does. she was going from story to story about the movement of God in her life and ministry. she told a brief story about elijah, when he was lighting the fire to prove our God as the real God. mommy told me that she felt like the fire, that God wanted her to come to these islands and help spread it. and then she looked at me and pointed right through my chest into my heart.

that fire is churning in you, and one of these days it is going to catch.

she told me this, and in doing so summed up how i've felt for the last few years. i have this groaning inside of me and it just won't come out. i don't know how to let it out. it is a fire, churning deep down in my gut. if i don't get it out, it will break me down and make me useless.

i don't really know what i'm doing here. i know i'm supposed to be doing some writing, but there is something more than that. there is something beyond the sweat, the heat and the bug bites. there is a movement here, in these islands and in my soul. i'm supposed to witness one and let it start the other.

with that, i bid you Godspeed. posts will come, maybe not regularly, but whenever i get a chance. thanks for reading and recycling.

adventure now

in 15 minutes or so, i will head to the airport here in seattle (by the way, i've been in seattle for the last few days) and hop on a series of planes that will take me to the other side of the world. planes are sort of a modern-torture device to me. i have a generous circumference and i am just tall enough for comfort to completely escape me. sky mall, however, i do enjoy. i like seeing the rediculous things they sell on airplanes.

when the plane lands and the torture subsides, i'll be doing some writing with ywam about some of the things they've got going on in the south pacific, and presumably i'll be sweating. hopefully God will use my stammering tongue and chubby fingers to say/write something that will help convey just a part of what He is doing in this world to bring his children home.

this journey will last for about three months, take me to about 8 different countries and dump me into an unknown number of situations for which i fell totally unprepared. but that is kind of the way i like it. i like being a little unprepared. i like having to rely and depend on something bigger than me to put things in order. there is probably a great deal of God's grace that has been missed because we have been too prepared. of course, that works both ways. no preperation can get in the way of God's moving in our lives.

with this adventure coming up, this blog will again take on the purpose for which it was started: letting people like my mom know a) that i am still alive b) what/where in the world i am c) the stories i have experienced. i feel like i've kind of been drifting a bit on this blog, heck in this world, so perhaps this will help it be more consistent. i'll do my best to be forthcoming and honest, because i would hate to waste your time with things that don't have any heart. inevitably there will be the blogs inspired by exhaustion/insanity that will have the same impact as one i wrote about a specific school of cereal eating. but, i'll just hope to be honest enough to maybe make you think a bit.

Godspeed.

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some of you know how much i enjoy the tv show lost. i'm not sure if i'll be able to keep up with the new season. but there is a possibility that one of my planes will crash and i will join the castaways in their mystical and mysterious adventures. so keep your fingers crossed.

my dinner with andre

in the epic film Waiting For Guffman, Christopher Guest showed off his My Dinner With Andre action figures along side his Remains of the Day lunch box. the former instilled wild curiosity in the heart of the young, impressionable mind of one timothy william bedi.

that curiosity grew into a very mild desire to see My Dinner With Andre, the film of two men (one down-to-earth and the other with head extravagantly in the clouds) simply having dinner and discussing everything from theatre to the nature of reality. i suppose the seemingly bland premise made me want to watch it, 110 minutes of conversation. you see at 15, i could not imagine that an entire movie could be devoted to something which seemed so trivial and, well, boring. thus it was sophisticated and i should watch it. 10 years later it sounds much more exciting for reasons other than pseudo sophistication.

to date, i've seen roughly 7-odd minutes of it, somewhere right smack dab in the middle. it was interesting. i wanted an andre. i wanted to be able to sit and talk with somebody and be completely riveted. and over the years, i've been blessed with many andre's. tonight, i was able to spend a little time with two of them. one of them has a great deal of worth to say, but seems to think i get tired of hearing it. with the other, i had dinner.

my andre for the evening was a close college friend of mine. we've had countless long conversations, most of which occurred over food. tonight we dined on Las Palmas. i need both of those things: good conversation and good mexican food. if i don't get them regularly, i grow uneasy (i prefer to be easy like sunday morning).

we talked about the church, about worship, about woman, about what we were doing with our lives and the deliciousness of a number 4, with chicken. all of these things i'll keep thinking about over the next couple of days. i'll weigh and measure our thoughts and statements. i'll digest them much like my pork chimichaunga. that's what i love about having andre's, about good conversations, they stay with you for a while and become a part of who you are.

i suppose that is what is different about myself now from the 15 year old version. i don't care if people find me sophisticated or intelligent or even completely stupid and asinine. i want to learn, to understand as much as i can simply to learn and to understand things rather than being thought __________. thank God for Andre's.

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quote of the evening, made by my friend during the aforementioned 'women' section of our dialogue:

"i find myself increasingly attracted to the nubian goddess that works in underwriting. mona...... she looks like donna summer, 1974 donna summer."

donna summer, queen of disco/possible co-worker of a guy i know

Merry Christmas '07

"blitzen gets impatient" by t.w.bedi

"paint" has become one of my hobbies. i started this one off with the intentions of making another santa, only this time with a sleigh (which for some reason i modeled after a chili pepper). but by the time i finished the reindeer, i had grown weary of making this. also, the reindeer proved to be much harder to create then anticipated and i don't think i could have made a santa with the same level of "craftsmenship." i also added a lightning bolt to the sleigh for aesthetic reasons.

God rest ye merry gentlemen!

ch-ch-ch-changes

yes, i too have become tired of our cup stacking friend. this is not to say that i don't admire his talent. he is going to make some woman very lucky some day. it just needed to be changed.

i've also decided to change the appearance of this endeavor. the heavily cropped picture behind the title of the blog was used in my very first post ever. it is "four trees" by an artist named egon schiele, seen below in amazing color.

four trees

egon must have painted this somewhere in between batteling a rediculously oversized marshmellow man and saving the city of new york from an overabundance of slime, stemming from their own hate, animosity and general stinkin thinkin. neither ray nor venkman ever really approved of his art.

but from what i can tell, the egon that painted the four trees was not of the most admirable character (particularly in areas of his relationships with minors). truthfully, i've never really seen much of his work outside of this particular painting and a quick image googling. there is something about this painting that gets me.

it's that second tree that does it. unlike his tree brethren, he's lost his leaves and it makes me wonder. has he given up or is he just ready for change? either way, he's different. the other three are still clothed in their fall gown but he is sitting there with his branches exposed to the world.

at times i 've felt like that second tree. i've wanted change. heck, i want it now. i'm ready for something new to come, for a change in seasons. there too are times i feel like i've given up. i grew weary of holding on to my leaves and just let them fall to the ground in hopes that something would grow back in their place. with each set of feelings there is a sense of solitude, a feeling i'd have a hard time describing better than that tree probably could.

for me there is change coming and not just the blog. seminary is on the horizon, which means pulling up roots for a while. i will also spend a few months of the next year doing some writing with ywam all over the south pacific. (ywam=youth with a mission)http://www.ywam.org/

it's coming and i'm ready for it.

so i'll leave you with a few more of egon's tree paintings :

autumn sun

autumn trees

autumn puff

Make it in Moldova

james has single-handedly changed the way i pronounce moldova. i wasn't putting enough force behind the 'dova.' i wonder if these men will make it..........
in molDOVA!

where on earth?