With the economy still in the doldrums, one should look to save money where possible. One easy way to save some cash is changing your routine for the commute to work. One possibility (totally hypothetical, here) is to ditch your Corolla for a bike – a tuneup at Bikeways of Tucker will run you less than a tank of gas – but perhaps a better solution is to not have a commute at all.
The modern miracle of the internet allows you to virtually be virtually anywhere from the comfort of your butt at home. You can be working at the office – from home! Vis-a-vis, I can be working in Germany from Mighty Joe Espresso in Tucker, GA.
Even though I may be Stateside, I am currently keeping contact via email, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, et. al. with many of the Unterwegs students in Tübingen. We continue to exchange music, we check in on how exams are going and how work is, how personal lives are progressing (or degressing… or digressing), and we get to know each other even while half a world apart.
As one student wrote: It’s a pity that we met only a few weeks before you had to go back. I really liked talking to you. Maybe we can stay in contact via email and get to know each other a little bit better.
I know I’m less than impartial on the subject, but if you ask me, a campus minister in Germany who can continue to work in Germany while in the United States is one heck of a deal, and is definitely someone worth supporting.
I am a lover, not a fighter. But don’t second-guess me: I’m also a fighter.
There’s a lot I do in my line of work to share Jesus with German students that one who is unfamiliar with campus ministry might not associate with that line of work: for example, I wash dishes. Lots of dishes. I drink coffee – not out of necessity, mind you, but in order to meet with students. It’s not unusual for me two have two latte machiatto’s and three to four mugs of some Mighty Joe in the course of a day in which I am sitting down and talking with students during the semester.
But going to the hospital to get an open wound stitched up is a new one, even for me. It’s a scar I earned at frisbee practice in my continuing ministry with the ultimate frisbee team. It’s now official: I have shed blood for glory of the kingdom of God – even if the injury was the inglorious result of tripping clumsily over my teammate in a no-contact sport and hitting my head on the floor.
Well, when you invest in this campus minister, you get your money’s worth in durability. The only break I’ll need from work is a return trip to the hospital to have the stitches pulled out. That, and a couple bathroom breaks. I’ve been drinking way too much coffee.
Better mileage than a Prius, smaller chance of malfunctioning accelerator pedal.
Allow me, if you will, to fawn for a minute, if you will, over my bicycle. If you will.
My carbon footprint has become something of a small marvel in my time here in Germany. My electric bill at the apartment runs 15 bucks a month. I recycle like you wouldn’t believe. I hang my clothes to dry after a run through the eco-friendly wash cycle. Also, I ride a bike – everywhere.
When I first got to Germany and was handed a freebie, off-brand, second-hand bicycle, riding the thing felt downright childish. Years of driving a car had jaded me and relegated the riding of bicycles to something I did from the ages of 6-15, and then only when the weather was optimal. Well, such is no longer the case.
A bicycle, as I have come to realize, is your passport to a larger, more wonderful world of transportation. Forget waiting on the bus for 8 minutes (which is still pretty darn convenient) – you can hop on your Huffy now and be there in 8 minutes! You can pedal right past the Jet gas station and laugh at the people paying 1.20 Euro per liter to fill up their tiny cars (although your max speed on the Autobahn may not earn you the envy of your friends – probably better to avoid major highways on your bike altogether). Insurance is not required. In fact, accidents in general are much easier on your budget with a bike. A slip on the ice in your car, for example, may run you $600 for a new bumper and the cost of a new mailbox (hypothetically), while a slip on the ice on your bike will cost you no more than a cold butt until you get back on and pedal it off.
On top of all that, I have developed these incredible quadriceps whose form would – if weather here allowed for shorts – inspire drivers and pedestrians to greater levels of leg-based fitness. I’m the muscular envy of my teenage self.
I never thought I would be riding my bicycle in sub-freezing temperatures as an adult, but here we are. My bike is good stewardship – it allows me to do my campus minister job with less money – and that’s something worth supporting.
“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten,” writes Hugh MacLeod. Feh.
When I was a child, I was not just creative – I was the five year-old da Vinci of my time. I drew, I painted, I glued macaroni in thought-provoking formations to contruction paper before having a qualified adult spray-paint the entire thing gold. My pipe cleaner sculptures put the shallow, pedantic pipe cleaner sculptures of my classmates to shame. I was the Matisse of finger paint. I was the Rembrandt of the Number 2 pencil with extra-thick grip for persons with small hands.
I’m not saying other children weren’t born creative – I’m just saying that I was imbued with the kind of creativity that put all the other children with similar crayon boxes to shame. The kind of creativity that got awards for the comic strips in the high school newspaper. The kind of creativity that survived four and a half years of cybernetic hybernation while I was at Georgia Tech.
And now, that incredible, undying, and unyielding creativity that started with a box of crayons is at work for you in the field.
Only now instead of crayons, I use Photoshop. Instead of producing macaroni art, I produce vector-based Web 2.0 graphics. And instead of home-made, VHS-taped sock puppet shows with stuffed animal cameos, I now put out network-quality multimedia of our time and events at Unterwegs.
In 1989, as a smaller, cuter version of me sat in my kindergarten classroom, painting a blue horse in front of a red house with a green rocket ship flying overhead, I had no clue that in twenty years I would be living in Germany working as a missionary, using those same skills to help share a life-changing Christian experience with university students. But here we are. That’s a creative effort worth supporting.
I’ve received a lot of comments as of late about the number of fun activities we here at Globalscope Germany engage in. There are grill parties, birthday parties, partying at the club, partying at student homes, games at Unterwegs, games not at Unterwegs, and singalong guitar sessions – to name a few. Are we really working on the job like we say we are in my monthly newsletters (and, just as importantly, does anybody read my newsletters)?
At this point in building a campus ministry in Germany, social life is the work. We go to the club for the same reason that fishermen go to the lake, an apropos metaphor given Jesus’ use of the fishing metaphor for the disciples. It’s where German students are.
If you need more proof, than you need only ask how dehydrated I get sweating through my two layers of shirts while I do the circle-dance with our group of students for hours at a time; or ask me how many nights I’ve had in the last month to myself; or about what time I get home after a cookout at the Unterwegs house.
The answers, in no particular order: 4am, 1 liter of water, zero.
So there’s the rub: work here is fun and games, fun and games are the work here, and work is hard. We are a great team of ministers, and if we can share Christ with students by packing into a miserable club like smoked sardines, or by not giving into our introverted tendencies for weeks at a time, or by staying out till ridiculous hours of the morning, we’ll do it. That’s worth supporting.
my place of work varies - my time of work, not so much.
I remember pulling all-nighters at Tech… The blurring of two days into one is really romanticized in movies and television. Jack Bauer, as stressful as his annual 24-hour stints are, never had to come up with a lock-and-release protocol for editing embedded documents between client and server and build a Java app around it in the span of a day. Looking back, the torture Kiefer Sutherland has suffered at the hands of the baddies is comparable – nay, preferable – to torture I suffered at the hands of the Advanced Object-Oriented Programming deadlines.
But nowadays, those all-nighters in front of the computer are no more. Instead, we spend our nights-through-mornings with students. Dancing at the club goes till 4 in the morning. Birthday parties till 5. One thing that is common among European students is that, when they hang out, they are deeply committed. Come hell or high water, we’re talking and sharing stories until the sun gets back from the other side of the Earth. The building may burn, but we are sweating it out on the crowded dance floor… we’ll just raise the roof to let in some more air.
In that sense, we’re kind of like superheroes. By day, we are unassuming paper-pushers, programmers, and manual laborers.By night, we are ministers. Yeah.
athletes, couch potatoes... inside the four squares, everyone is equal
Earl Warren once said of reading the newspaper: “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.” Mr. Warren may have been overlooking the flip-side of all those uplifting sports stories (“Braves win! Braves win! Braves win!”… “Pirates Return Home Defeated, Disappointed, and Overall a Little More Bitter and Jaded Than When Series Started”), but I think I prefer my supreme court justices romantic.
Sports truly are a great thing. Not only are they fun, they help build connections between people that might otherwise never talk to each other. The World Cup brings countries from a warring world together in one place (and eventually into one warring stadium). The Olympic Games do, too, though historically they play second fiddle to the Political Games, which in many ways are more entertaining to watch.
Here at Globalscope Germany, we are on the cutting edge of using sports to connect people. We invent new sports (“Washers” – a cross between horseshoes and construction work). We invent new ways to play old sports (four square doubles, anyone?). We learn new sports (volleyball may be more difficult to learn than the language). Students love it, and, after nursing our injuries and pride back to health, we are stronger for the experience. Old relationships are deepened, new relationships are forged, and stories are made that will be passed around for many Chill-n-Grills to come.
Why not invest your good support in a mission team that can really flex its muscle – and in a missionary that is well-versed in so many international sports? Take the advice of one of history’s most influential supreme court justices, and join our team to help build a ministry worthy of the front page of the sports section.
If you’re like me, you are a stickler for quality. Call it perfectionism. Call it anal retentivity. I just like things good ‘n polished. And then polished some more.
The point, of course, is that I set a high bar for everything I do. In tenth grade, I was the star/envy/object-of-hatred-and-misunderstanding of my algebra class because I drew all my graphed functions on graph paper, cut them out with neat, square corners, and pasted them onto the notebook-paper where I would write sub-captions and explanations. Don’t worry, I’ve relaxed a little since then to a more reasonable level. But doesn’t the thought of a person with such professionalism in even the smallest details excite you about supporting that person as a professional missionary?Please say it does!
There’s something to be said for spinning straw into gold. Exhibit A: Cirque du Soleil has made a huge business out of it – taking the lowly art of the circus and elevating and perfecting it into something beautiful and amazing – and expensive. Exhibit B: Life for Children Ministry had a bunch of video clips and pictures from their work in Kenya and needed someone to put it all together in an engaging, exciting package. They came to me and asked me to make a video for them in my spare time – check it out above. It ain’t perfect, but I have to take a step back and admire that, yes, even my half-hearted attempts still turn out pretty good.
Now I just need to charge Cirque du Soleil prices.
You wouldn’t buy milk you knew would go sour the next day. You wouldn’t buy a car you knew would turn lemon the next month. So why would you support a missionary you knew would get sick?
Globalscope is proud to send to the field only missionaries that pass the strictest of medical and health tests. In order to meet these requirements, I am going through the cleaners, you might say, if by “cleaners” you meant a series of medical doctors.
Yesterday I visited the dentist, which is always a treat. There is a peculiar mix of guilt – for having to ask the poor dental technician to clean the “build-up” (from those nights when you were too tired to brush) off the back of your teeth – and fear of the news of how much your teeth have decayed since the last visit. Adult teeth are practically the opposite of progressing through grade school – you are always regressing unless, in the miraculous best case scenario, you are able to somehow maintain your previous grade. That was yesterday.
Today I visited the good folks at Passport Health in Roswell to get some of those immunizations I’ve been craving for so long. Here’s a question for you: how do you spend $265 in under a minute? There are several less wholesome ways I can think of – or, if you’re kind of a health nut like me, run out and get yourself some Typhoid and Menactra shots.
The doctor at Passport was one of the jolliest doctors I have ever been patient to. As I entered the front door, she was inviting the office to check out the “eye candy” of a man-patient that had landed in her patient chair with his shirt off. The office did just that, and then I took Mr. Candy’s place. The good doctor talked a little with me about Germany before opening up her mini-fridge full of syringes (where one might, were it not a doctor’s office, expect to find a beer stash) and gave me two quick, successive injections as she hummed a song she was making up on the fly and told me “we’re just having a little fun here”.
Feeling a little more invincible than I was this past weekend, I’m ready for anything the modern world can throw at my digestive and immune systems. That’s a missionary you can feel secure about investing in.
Good guy friends are hard to find. Great guy friends especially so.
History and popular culture are riddled with the names of guy friends that have really clicked: Tango and Cash, The Green Hornet and Kato, Lawler and Beirnes, Paul and Silas, FDR and Churchill… the list goes on. To the degree that the rules and customs of relationships between men is unwritten, it sure seems that the guys who do manage to build said relationships go much further as a duo than they could have gone alone. Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell are largely underwhelming by themselves, but when a sneaky L.A. narcotics dealer frames them both for a crime they did not commit, they are forced to work together to make an altogether average movie. That is the power of testosterone squared.
Imagine what that power can do when harnessed for campus ministry – rather than for your stereotypical late-80′s action movie. Two single guys without attachment (at least inside the country) are a driving force in building a ministry (see: Globalscope Spain). We stay out later. We work longer. We play harder. All because we don’t have wives to report to to keep things reasonable. It’s kind of like penguins pushing each other closer and closer to the edge of the iceberg towards the murky water below.
Lucky for Unterwegs, we will soon have just such an irresponsibly awesome duo: Chandler and Me. Yes, we come from two incredibly different backgrounds… Chandler is a football athlete who likes hunting and trucks; I am a soccer athlete who likes lattes and hybrid cars. But if Ray Tango and Gabriel Cash can work together to bust the biggest L.A. drug deal of the decade, Creel and Crawford can help build a campus ministry in Tübingen, Germany.
