Hey, hey, hey – no, I’m not Fat Albert – just excited that it’s Friday and time for another edition of Short Rounds! And be sure to check out the last link – it’ll crack you up!

Francis Schaeffer Websites:

Schaeffer was brilliant man who had a huge impact upon many of us in the Baby Boom generation, and his influence continues to this day. Here’s two sites devoted to his work that you ought to check out.

The Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation

The Shelter – A Francis A. Schaeffer Site

TWO WORLD WAR TWO SITES:

My love of military history in general and World War 2 history just won’t quit! Two more great sites to spend some time at!

World War 2 Panarama – Landmarks of World War II

The Doolittle Tokyo Raiders

SOME CHRISTIAN SITES OF INTEREST

Hydrate

A blog of interest that you might want to check out – it looks good.

John Piper Heard The Voice of God?

This is a must read post. It’ll give you pause to think a little more deeply about God’s Word and Spirit and how we respond to both.

Open Discipleship

A site devoted to helping you grow stronger and deeper in your faith. It has articles, podcasts, etc.

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Do you remember the date? It was August 28th, 1963.

Do you remember the place? It was Washington DC, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Whether or not you remember either of those facts, I know you remember at least some of the words that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at that time and in that place.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

Whatever else you may want to say about Martin Luther King, he clearly had a big dream! And in spite of his failings as a mortal man and a sinner (just like me and you and everyone else!) his dream helped change our world for the better.

And then of course there’s those world famous dreamers – you and I!

Or not!

I often wonder what happened to so many of our dreams? As we get older we seem to let them go by the wayside. Dropping them off because they aren’t “practical” or “it’s too difficult,” and then of course there’s the ever popular, “I don’t have time.”

It’s too bad we have so much time for excuses that keep us from at least trying to live our dreams!

In Acts chapter 2 Peter quotes the prophet Joel, who says that in the last days young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams! Of course I’m firmly in the dream category now – no doubt about that!

So why do I find it so hard to dream? Why do you?

Beyond that why can I “day dream” or fantasize about doing things, but then never have the courage or faith to start doing things that will make them happen?

I talked about this recently in sermon, and I’m repeating it here because it keeps coming back to me. Echos get fainter over time and distance, and quickly just fade away. Just like so many of our dreams.

But this idea of daring to dream, to dream big, to dream God’s Dream for my life, just keeps bouncing back to me. I believe I’ve neglected it for far too long, and for far to many false rationalizations.

How about you?

Could you tell me a Dream you believe is from God about your life? If it’s not clear are you seeking His Face and asking the Lord to help make it clear what I ought to do.

Yes, I’m preaching to a very small choir today – a choir of one – me! But somehow I imagine all of this will resonate with some of you out there in blogville as well!

And just in case you need more inspiration – here’s the whole speech by Dr. King, thanks to YouTube! Enjoy!

Life is full of all sorts of things that some people just can’t get enough of, and other people just don’t get.

As I get older, I find that I notice more of these things. I’m not sure if there are more of them than there used to be, or if I’m just noticing them.

Either way here’s a short list of a few things that I not only don’t get, but don’t want to get either.

American Idol – what is the deal with this show? A bunch of people with no talent get laughed at for a few weeks. Then the ones with some talent sing, get critiqued and in the end all but one gets voted off.

So what??

Lost – I’ve never seen it, have no real desire to see it, and don’t know why other people want to see it.

Anna Nicole Smith News. The rating go UP when this drek is discussed on TV?? Not getting that one at all!

Obama Mania. He’s a good speaker, attractive, and has no experience or ideas. All this excitement over an empty suit? Not getting it.

Mr. Straight Talk Express. Okay, not nearly as much excitement as 2000, but a lot of people seem to want him. I’m from his home state, and wouldn’t vote for him on a bet or for all the earmarks in the new Iraq funding bill!

Democrat Leadership Survey. I got one in the mail, if you can believe that. Along with a letter from Screamin’ Howard Dean himself! I was a registered Republican for over 20 years, and am now an Independent. How they messed up and got my name on their list I’m just not getting.

Drivers Licenses, etc for Illegal Aliens. They’re illegal right? Then how on earth can we legally give them documents, privileges or rights? It’s a complete contradiction in terms, an abandonment of logic and reason that I just don’t get.

Homosexual Bishops, Ministers, etc. The Bible is extremely clear that homosexual sex is a sin. I realize that most Americans probably don’t agree with that today. That’s their right of course. But why claim to be a Christian leader and teacher of the Bible, when you willfully deny and contradict it’s plain teaching? I don’t get that at all!

Our Loss of Will In Iraq. I know the horror of the deaths and wounds there, and things haven’t gone the way we wanted too. But if we cannot stick it out and make things right then who in their right minds will trust the US again? Between this and Vietnam, it shows that the United States has lost the will to be a leader in the world, and if we pull out too soon, we won’t be the only ones to pay for it.

The whole world will pay, and radical Islam will have won a huge victory.

Allowing that to happen, even wanting it to happen, is something I just don’t get!

I’ve been wondering lately about how things in our lives so often seem to be thematic.

Something happens in our lives and attracts our attention and concern. Thereafter it seems as though we seem the same theme playing out in our lives over and over again.

Let me give an example from my own life. In 2002 I took my first Short Term Mission trip. We went to Myanmar, and the ramifications of what happened on that trip are still echoing through my life.

That was the trip I discovered I had heart trouble – and I’m not talking about my heart muscle either. It became very clear to me that I had hardened my heart in many significant ways, and that God was calling me to change that.

Thereafter almost everywhere I went I kept running into information about the heart, or people who were talking about the condition of their hearts, etc.

It was amazing. That theme is still echoing today, and in about three weeks I’ll be leading a men’s retreat about the heart journey I believe God wants us all to take.

It certainly appears as if God works thematically in our lives. It makes sense too when you stop and think about it. God deals with us about a certain issue, which leads to another and then another, etc.

But it is true and can we ever know that it’s true?

Ah, now that’s another issue altogether, because that involves our oh so fallible perception of reality, and not just reality itself.

People like to try and sound profound by saying, Perception is reality.

Of course that’s not true and is in fact demonstrably false. Before Columbus discovered the New World almost everyone in Europe believed that the earth was flat. That perception did not change that fact that the earth is round!

It did however change how people acted! And that’s the real point. Perception isn’t reality, but it does guide and control how I act within our common reality.

Which brings us to the Reticular Activating System. This is a major control center in our brains. It works unconsciously and shapes how we perceive what’s going on around us.

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I have removed my Marshian Chronicles e-mail address from the site, and am going to shut down the account.

Why?

Because all it was generating was spam, spam, spam! I’m tired of spam! I get enough on my regular e-mail.

So if you don’t have my e-mail, and want to contact me, you’ll have to leave a comment saying so and I’ll contact you.

I hope that’s okay, because I don’t wasting time deleting worthless spam from an account that’s not used for anything else!

This post is a response to an e-mail I recieved asking for even more Myanmar stuff.

Can you imagine my surprise? Well probably not, but take it from me, surprised I was! I thought I was probably boring you with all these pictures and thoughts about some place you’d never been, nor will most of you ever go.

So I thought I’d share a few things that I learned on this trip. I talked about most of these with the church Sunday. Rick and I reported about the trip, and I think it went really well. In spite of our technical difficulties people were both informed and touched, and that’s about all you ask from something like this.

LESSONS LEARNED:

You Can Do Humor in Cross Cultural Situations!

I’ve had a lot of problems with that in all my trips, but I’ve slowly gotten better, and this trip I finally looked at it more analytically and figured somethings out.

The people in Myanmar (and most 3rd world countries I bet) laugh it up bit time when you…

1. Make fun of yourself! (They love it!)
2. Make fun of the US and our culture in a way that makes their culture and lifestyle look good. (They tend to have a totally unnecessary inferiority complex towards us, so they do enjoy laughing at us.).
3. Men and women, marriage type of humor works well. Men over there don’t understand women any better than we do! That’s a universal constant – and they enjoy laughing about it like we do.

Here’s another lesson – Pray Right Away!

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This Sunday will be the day Rick and I report on our trip to Myanmar. It’s about time! I’ve been working on it all week and doing these posts, and am ready to get it done!

If you can make it that’s great – if not then I hope you’ve enjoyed the few pictures I’ve posted here. I won’t be putting up the message online.

No pictures today tho, just enjoy your Friday and if you are in the area I hope to see you Sunday!

God bless and don’t forget to pray for Myanmar and all the believers living and ministering there.

I think that today I’d like to share a basic thought or two about Myanmar. It’s nearly 10 PM and I’m beat, so it’s the perfect time to talk about how to make sense of Myanmar.

And this picture sums it all up nicely:

How Do You Make Sense of Myanmar?

You don’t!

This sign was outside the first hotel we stayed at. You will note the Sea Food Restaurant, which is illustrated by a cooked pig!

Yep – it’s the famous Sea Pig of Myanmar!

Well, maybe not!

The best way of making sense of Myanmar (and probably by extenstion much of the rest of the 3rd world) is to not even try. Contradiction is it’s middle name. They are a part of life there, can only be accepted not explained. At least not always, as the infamous Sea Pig so clearly illustrates!

If you try and force Myanmar to make sense to your Western mind, you’ll probably go insane. In fact it is insane to try and make most things in an Asian culture make Western sense.

There’s a lot of reasons for this – some of which I can’t go into here on the Internet. Obviously politics, culture and translation difficulties all play their part in this. Some are intentional and others accidential and many are probably unavoidable.

But they exist and you just have to accept them for what they are, and not try and make them fit into our western way of thinking or doing things.

Which is probably one of the reasons why I love the place so much. Why make sense when you can confuse everyone, including yourself, while not even trying too, and still have a good time doing so?

You say that question didn’t make sense?

I just came back from Myanmar, what else did you expect??

Today I’m going to address one of the most somber moments of the trip, our visit to the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It’s the biggest Pagoda in Yangon, and is supposedly one of the wonders of the world.

Whatever! It’s a wonder the people continue to pour their money, time, effort and heart into it that’s for sure!

For us foreigners it costs five US dollars, or the equivalent in Kyat, to enter. In Myanmar terms – that’s huge! Here’s the Pagoda Pass you get to enter.

You have to take off your shoes to enter, and the place is simply huge! There’s shrines, altars and idols everwhere you look! It’s all quite beautiful, and the craftsmanship is supurb.

By the time we were done my feet were killing me! And I was feeling sad for the people I was seeing. Of course everyone knows that in Asia Buddhists pray to statues (idols) of Buddah.

But knowing about it is one thing, watching it happen is entirely another. What a tragic site. It hurt our hearts and made us realize what a big mission field we were involved in as we tried to help equip the believers there to reach their people.

I snapped this picture of this lone woman worshipping that thing, while a Monk strolled by. It’s just so sad to know that literally millions of people pray to those things, give time and money and treasure to serve and maintain those things, and actually believe those things will help them.

Of course we do the same thing. Everyone is an idolater, it’s just a matter of degree. What you see in Asia is so obvious that you can’t miss it. They worship statues, rocks and at Spirit Houses you see all over the place.

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I’m back with some more pictures of my recent trip. I’m still getting things together, but hope tomorrow to have the time and perspective to write a bit about things.

No promises – but I’ll try. And now to the pictures!

There’s actually a story behind this one. Rick took this shot of me in the new Bangkok airport (which is HUGE and beautiful!) on our way to spend the night at a motel before coming home.

The sign caught his eye because of something that happened early in our trip. I had been traveling in James car, in the back seat. At one stop he asked for me a Ryan, a much younger member of the team to switch places. So I went into the other taxi and Ryan took my spot.

Well at the next stop James reversed himself, and said I ought to sit in his backseat again. He thought that Ryan, being so much younger than I am, would have an easier time getting in and out, but he didn’t. I was more “squeezy!”

So my nickname for the trip was chosen – just call me Squeezy and I’ll answer to it!

Here’s what a bottle of pop to go looks like in Myanmar, or at least this one place there! I snapped this shot of Rick in the “lookout tower.” It’s part of a complex in Yangon that has recreations of different tribes way of life, how they build their homes, etc. I guess you could say it’s a Myanmar Disneyland, sort of – with almost no rides. But it seemed very popular and has been designed as a tourist attraction.

This is, without a doubt, my cute baby picture of the trip. I have another one that almost as good that I took shortly before I took this one.

I took this at the Shew Dagon Pagoda. We visited the site, along with most of the students, and it was my first time there. It was an incredible experience, which I’ll talk about later.

This baby is all dressed up because a family member is becoming a Monk and this is his induction ceremony. I guess the little guy didn’t like the outfit very much – or something. Anyway, I thought it was an adorable picture and wanted to share it with all of you.

More tomorrow – and hopefully I’ll write something!