Let’s Start at the Very Beginning…

Today was a very full day! The JAARS center’s biannual spiritual vitality meeting was in the morning, and I had a center tour, hangar tour, and general job introduction in the afternoon.

The morning’s speaker was Dr. Jim Garlow, who pastors a church in San Diego. His doctorate is in historical theology, and he’s written several books, with Cracking the Da Vinci Code among them. His primary topic was “The American National Condition”, describing the establishment, domination, and then marginalization of the church in the United States; he described the three primary assaults on the church as being against procreation, marriage, and gender specificity. This leads to the question – what is a Christian to do about this?

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Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon… more or less. I went to the open-air market, kind of a bazaar, in the city. Vegetables are so cheap there! I paid the equivalent of fifty cents for three really good tomatoes – which is significant because the tomatoes in the supermarket are expensive and look really sick. I may have mentioned this before, but I have never seen so much candy in my life. The usual American stuff, but also things like German and Swiss chocolates. I may have to bring some back. Mmmm, chocolate.

The atmosphere of the market was very tangible – not unlike those of other markets of that type. Booths crammed with vegetables, trinkets, fabric, artwork, household wares and completely useless items, stall owners enthusiastically hawking their goods, customers haggling with smooth vendors (“yes, usually it’s fifty, but for you, I make it forty” “what! that’s a rip-off! I can get it cheaper in the store”), and the combined smells of fish, spices, and cheap perfume. So many languages, too, and different types of people – students, tourists, housewives, businesspeople, and tiny children constantly running about and somehow managing not to get tripped, squished, or yelled at. Mostly.