Back at the end of June, my sisters Cheryl and Karen flew out to BC to visit Shannon and I. After touring around Vancouver a bit, we drove to Kelowna, then on to Banff National Park where we met up with Chad and Mel. After transferring Cheryl and Karen to them, Shannon and I continued our trek, camping our way through south-eastern BC and northern Washington. To check out the pictures, look at the Picasa web album here.
I finally am getting a chance to post the MRI picture of Shannon’s knee, in case any of you wanted to see it. First, though, here’s a link to a site that shows an MRI of a normal ACL ligament. As you can see, the ACL goes diagonally from the lower left to upper right. Behind it is the PCL, another ligament that crosses it in an X from upper left to lower right (although in the normal MRI picture, it is a little hidden). Below is Shannon’s MRI. You can see the PCL clearly, but the ACL is totally missing!
Shannon and I have been in classes all this week. We’re taking a course called “Perspectives on the World Christian Movement” (www.perspectives.org) which is taught all over the place. It gives biblical, historical, cultural, and strategic perspectives on missions, and it’s fantastic.
The course started for us about a month ago when we signed up. Since the course is so intense, they expect you to do all the readings and quizzes ahead of time. Shannon and I worked on them together, and they were a huge amount of work. There are 15 lessons, and each one took us between 4 and 8 hours to complete! But, the readings are so good. And this week, we’ve been getting a variety of speakers - at least 2 every day - discussing the material from each lesson, telling stories from the mission field, challenging our assumptions, and stimulating our thinking.
One of the biggest take-away lessons for me so far can be summed up by a quote from John Piper - “Missions exist because worship doesn’t.” Let me unpack that a bit.
First, I’ve been impacted by the centrality of worship. Worship of God is the goal. He’s created us to worship, and to bring Him glory. It’s not because God is insecure, and so He needs us to tell Him how great He is to feel ok about Himself. God desires our worship because He alone is worthy of our worship! And, He knows that we will only find true joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment when we give Him glory. After all, we will always worship something, whether it be family, material possesions, career, or something else. But all of those things will en-slave us to them, and will let us down at times. Only God is a worthy object of our worship.
Second, God doesn’t just want me to worship Him. He wants to be glorified by people everywhere around the world! He’s created each nation, language, tribe, and culture uniquely, and He desires that each one would bring Him worship in their unique way as well. The story of God’s plan to bring people from ALL nations to worship Him is throughout the Bible, starting with the promise to Abraham in Gen 12 (”through you all the nations will be blessed”), through the Psalms, through the Prophets, and culminating in the great commission: go and make disciples of ALL nations.
And that is why missions exists. It’s purpose is to proclaim God’s greatness and glory throughout the world, in places where He is not yet worshipped, so that people will be drawn to Him and He will receive the glory He deserves.
That’s one of the main nuggets that I’ve taken away. But, there have been many more, and I’m still processing much of what I’ve heard. Maybe I’ll share a few more thoughts that come out over the next weeks. Oh, and I’d highly recommend this course to anyone who is committed to seeing God’s purpose in the earth go forward, whether you are thinking of becoming a cross-cultural missionary or not.
Guess what we got today?
They’re sleek and fast…
New bikes! We’ve been wanting to get new bikes for a while, since it’s one of our favorite ways to exercise and explore. We’re hoping to enjoy some long bike rides this summer!
Oh, how I enjoy time to get away from the regular routine, to relax, reflect, and hang out with people! Shannon and I needed some time like that, so we planned a trip over to Vancouver Island from Feb 29 to March 3rd. We stayed with Chris and Judy Gytenbeek and their 4 kids, who now live in Comox. They used to live in Langley and go to Home Church, and we got to know them pretty well - especially when we babysat their kids for a weekend!
Anyway, they are a great family. They love the outdoors, are adventurous, and keep family as a top priority - things Shannon and I connect with really well! They are also quite laid back and relaxed, something Shannon and I aren’t so good at. But, being on the island for a weekend certainly helped.
One of the highlights of our visit was going skiing / snowboarding at Mount Washington. We rose to a beautiful, sunny day on Saturday morning, with 5cm of fresh snow on the hills. It was fantastic being outside all day, taking in the incredible vistas from the top of the chairlifts. (I managed to pull off a few fun jumps too, without hurting myself!)
God definitely used this trip to re-energize us, but also to slow us down enough to reflect. We spent quite a bit of time hanging out and talking, especially about missions. Chris pulled out his old slide projector and dusty slides and gave us a great tour of his time in Africa before he and Judy were married. We also got to hear from a missionary from India at their Sunday morning service. We talked about our thoughts, plans, and dreams for what we’d love to do. But, we were also reminded that this life is more about our relationship with God then about what we do. How hard it is for us to get that through our heads! I’m always so concerned about what I’m doing, and about how productive I am. It’s so hard to let go of that, and to realize that all my running around might not be what God really desires most.
If you want to see more pics from our trip, check out the online album.
We moved to a new place in Surrey in September, and finally got a chance to post some pictures. I put them in a web album rather than inline in this post - click here to view them.
When I was a kid, there was one birthday where I got a new remote control truck. That stands out as one of the times I was most excited about a present. Well, this past birthday rivals that one. Shannon secretly talked to a bunch of friends and family, and asked them to contibute towards a gift that was too expensive for us to buy on our own - a new digital SLR camera!
We first bought the Canon Rebel XT from FutureShop. After talking to a guy at an actual camera store and doing some more research, though, we decided to return that and get the Nikon D40X instead. It was newer, was 10 Megapixels instead of 8, had a better warranty, a larger LCD screen, a better quality kit lens, a smaller, harder-to-damage memory card format, and was only $50 more. That seemed like a good deal to us!
On the Saturday of my birthday weekend Shannon and I went to Cresent Beach to go for a walk, and to try out the new camera. We ended up taking over 200 pictures! Here are a few of the better ones.
Shannon had her graduation ceremony from UBC nursing on Nov 21st. She has put a TON of work into this, and so it was pretty exciting to see her finally graduate. She’s only the second person that we know of in her mom or dad’s family to graduate from university (her uncle is the other one).
