Countdown to Tübingen

Globalscope Germany's peanut gallery.

Team Leader Beth asked every team member to fill out a little blurb about ourselves for an upcoming newsletter to all supporters of Globalscope Germany. We want to share more about the team that works alongside the individual team members that each person, family, and church supports.

Here’s my info:

Hometown: Tucker, GA
Favorite German Word: “in der Nähe” – “in the nearness”. It’s hard to appreciate in English.
Mac or PC: PC. Now use all that extra money I just saved you to get me to the field.

Why campus ministry? I love Jesus, but I also love the work of campus ministry: it’s different every day, it’s always a challenge, and it requires every ability you have. I counsel, I preach, I talk about the Bible – but I also play Frisbee, I play in a band, I dance, I write sketch comedy, I design, I drink *lots* of coffee, I lift weights, I code… I do everything I have in me to share my love for Jesus with students.

Wordle from today's devotional @ Devo Lunch.

Another Monday, another Devo Lunch, another week of raising support. This week at Devo Lunch, I talked from the heart about frustration with God’s timing (my favorite line: “If your pizza was delivered ten months late, would you pay for it? If your baby was delivered ten months late… would you pay for it?”). It’s easy for me to speak from the heart on this issue as it’s almost always on my mind. Our goal is to get to Germany by January – and many things depend on us getting back in January – but the progress we’re not making in raising support makes it look like we’ll be once again waiting on the sideline for God to put us back in the game.

It’s great to get a little boost of encouragement every once in a while when you’re on the bench. Beth emailed us about the recent Unterwegs summer retreat to Taize:

Except for three of the students, this was the first overtly Christian worship service that any of them had been in since Confirmation, when they were 12. Talk about throwing someone in the deep end! But they loved it. And I learned again that empowering the students is what it is all about. Two students wanted to go to Taize and they helped put this group together. And the result was we all had an encounter with God through each other and the prayer services. I hope and pray that this will all take root in all of us and you will see the result this year at Unterwegs.

Man. I wish I was there.

ACTING!

I’m tempted to file this entry under “Reasons to Support Globalscope Germany”… After all, good skits are no longer considered isolated incidents at Unterwegs’s flagship event, Thursday Night. Rather, they consistently evoke laughter and surprise from a population with a well-deserved reputation for earnestness and seriousness. But, hey, I can brag on my own time when I’m not on the clock.

Last night was our first Thursday Night of the semester. There were a lot of elements working against us: the worst Spring weather you can imagine (if you can imagine sub-40 and 48 hours of rain), a higher risk topic (relationships, romantic and otherwise), and no momentum going in from previous Thursday Nights. Despite all that, last night was a huge success for our team.

For my part, one of my main responsibilities for the night was introducing the topic with a skit. Along with a couple student volunteers, I presented a skit in which a father gave “the talk” to his three sons. I brought a clip (and translated it to English):

Wife: It has been about a year since the last time we talked to them about girls. What will you tell them this year?
Husband: I’ll lie to them, of course. Just like we do with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the existence of Canada. They are children, and it is our duty as parents to protect them from the truth by constantly deceiving them at every turn.

Okay, so maybe I’ll brag a little… That’s pretty funny.

I want to go where everybody knows my name. And where everyone can pronounce it.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s the girl I’m engaged to.

If there’s two things I love, it’s my fiancee and peanut butter (JIF, please send to Wilhelmstrasse 100 c/o Unterwegs, jumbo jars preferred but all sizes accepted).

But if there’s three things I love, it’s Shalynn, JIF, and Mighty Joe Espresso. Yes, almost one year out of the country now (May 6 of last year was my first day on the job), and I have still found no equal to Tucker’s finest caffeine-based community. Here I am on a Sunday afternoon drinking a cup of imported MJE at the Unterwegs house.

Our team of four has been putting forth a super-human effort, burning every end of the candle we can find to build our own community here at the Unterwegs house. That’s why I’m here, sipping liquid electric at 6 in the afternoon. While Beth has spent the last 10 days in the States touring supporting churches and organizations, drumming up support, the Colemans and I have been playing host to a host of activities and events here to get students engaged. I have seen my bed before midnight once in the last week.

This week we host our first official Thursday Night – our flagship event – and we’ll be talking about relationships between girls and guys… or at least opening up the dialogue. As with our Thursday Nights up until now, there will be no scripture, no worship songs, and, at least in the public speaking, no mention of Jesus or God. As the ultra-athletes who run 100-mile races say, when you can’t see the top, walk. Thus, our goal is to reflect Christ in every way that we can without making it an outright Bible Study – and relationships are a great place to do just that.

Pray for us. Wish us luck. Send us peanut butter.

we run on less power 'cause we run on fewer staff members!

Energy savings are all the rage – or so I am told. It’s kind of hard to keep that kind of thing in perspective in Germany – where energy prices are so high that energy savings have been all the tax-incentivized rage for 20-plus years now. All the rage that it is as such, there has been much effort to find ways to make our day-to-day lives more energy efficient: unplugging cell phone chargers when not in use; turning on lights for only 2-3 hours a day; switching to acoustic guitar from electric. Every little bit helps, even if it means no reverb effects for your thrashing.

We here at Unterwegs are proud to help save our earth and our environment by switching into low-power mode during the semester break here in Tübingen. Instead of the five staff members we ran on in February, we are currently running on two: Beth and myself. Chandler, the other, handsomer single male on the team, has moved back to the States. Chris and Stef are in Turkey for ten days’ vacation.

But don’t think that just because we’re fewer in number and in semester break that we’re slacking: Beth and I are still meeting with language partners, playing host to a Bible study group at the campus house, hosting our own small group meeting, and cooking a free dinner for students every Thursday – among other things. “Low power mode” at Unterwegs means we still do lots with less, and that’s all the rage – or so I am told.

It's so close to the Hope/Fear project, it's bound to be great.

This is the brainstorming for my piece on Thursday on “what makes a home a ‘home’”.

In a few months, my house at 4330 Tucker North Drive will cease to be my home. My parents, who have retired, will make the move from Tucker to their smaller, more practical retirement house in the mountains of North Georgia.

Ever since I left for college in the fall of 2002, 4330 Tucker North Drive was always a fallback. There was always a free meal there. My bed – the only bed I had ever owned until sleeping in the GT dorms – was always available for me. There’s wireless internet. The clothes that I don’t wear but don’t want to throw away (and the toys I never play with but don’t want to give away) are still in my closet. I still own every video game system I have ever bought with my own hard-earned money – 7 in all – and they are all in that house.

We moved into 4330 when I was five. I remember because I had chicken pox. It’s where I mowed the lawn for the first time. I learned how to change the oil in a car in the garage. I learned how to use a circular saw in the basement. I learned how to cook in the kitchen. I learned how to sew in the guest bedroom. I trained my dog in the back yard (although not very well). I fell asleep on top of my books doing calculus homework in the computer room. I got my first kiss from my first girlfriend in front of the house, and I got crushed when she dumped me in front of the house a year and half later.

But in a few weeks, 4330 Tucker North Drive will no longer be my house. It’s a weird feeling. I still feel at home in Tucker – the Atlanta suburb where you can find Tucker North Drive – despite the fact that I don’t – or, rather, won’t – have a house there. And I think the reason why I feel like that goes something like this…

There is my house in Tucker, and there is every other building in Tucker: my old school, my church, my favorite coffee shop, my gym. When you take my house away, there are still a lot of buildings that I have memories of. Where I graduated 3rd grade, where I learned to sing in a choir, where I drank a latte every day for a month, where I developed these incredible biceps. But take all those buildings away, and what’s left is this: the people.

Here is everyone I know in Tucker. This is my family, these are my friends from school, these are the people at church, these are the people who work at Mighty Joe Espresso, these are the people who I work out with. These people are the reason I’m at home in Tucker. Even with no bed to my name in Tucker – and no collection of aging video game systems – these are people that love me. Even without my parents, there are still hundreds of people in Tucker who care about me, and that’s what makes a place home for me. Home is where you are loved.

And because of that, I also feel like Tübingen is becoming a home to me. The fact that I have an apartment and a bike and a campus house here doesn’t even compare to the fact that while I was gone in December, people here in Tübingen missed me – and I missed people here in Tübingen. I’m at home here in Tübingen because I feel loved.

grown ups are kids with more expensive toys.

When I think about all the writing I have done for blog posts and newsletters, I believe too many of them start off with a thought or a clever play on words regarding the current weather conditions. Nevertheless, in just a few seconds, I will be using the weather as a starting point for making a point totally irrelevant to weather once more. Are you ready?

Nice weather we’re having.

Fifty-one degrees and rainy without a glimpse of the sun all day. It doesn’t get any better than this… in England. Ha, ha. We tease England.

As summer goes into its early death throes, it’s time to look at the climate we are setting here at Unterwegs. It’s kind of hard to know how to feel as a campus minister at this point in building a ministry… for a while now, we’ve been playing the roles of social planners, organizing parties, going out with students, hosting dinners, that kind of thing. At the same time, we’re trying to move in a deeper direction with students… talk about meaningful relationships, forgiveness, convincing them of their incredible worth.

One of the things we talked about in raising support was the global youth culture. We watch the same movies (and close our eyes during the same scary scenes), listen to the same music (well, Germans apply their techno a little more liberally), wear the same jeans (especially when it costs so much to do laundry :P). But one thing we didn’t realize while we were discussing the global culture is just how much the struggles of the global youth are the same wherever the culture goes. Kids here struggle with looks, acceptance, finding a boyfriend/girlfriend, alcohol, drugs… it’s just in German.

And there are fewer people ready for them with love and support. There are lots of churches over here, lots of campus ministries that are ready and waiting to tell people about Jesus, but there are very few who are willing to be Jesus to people. That’s where we come in.

In the last couple of weeks, as we’ve started to make the transition from party people to ministers, it’s been a mix of feelings – surprise at how much heartbreak there can be, confusion at how people react to hurt and pain, but – more than anything – shocked at how similar it all is to what we know from back in the States.

and so, the sun sets on summer

It’s beautiful fall weather outside – the kind of conditions that make a guy want go inside and update his blog with an entry about the beautiful fall weather outside. Seriously, though, there is a comfort in wearing a thin sweater with a collared shirt underneath that I never really appreciated while living in Atlanta.

The next semester doesn’t start until the middle of October here in Germany. To really drive home the mistimed feeling of academic excitement for us Americans, students are just now leaving for short-term study abroad trips. While College Gameday kicks off an exciting new season in the States, we follow the Bundesliga on Sky (Go, Stuttgart!). While students buy expensive textbooks and graphing calculators at universities across the country back home, we join the few students remaining in Tu in the beer garden for a pretzel at sunset.

With just Beth and myself here leading our two new exchange students, we have entered a really exciting point in our ministry – a point at which students are emotionally invested in us and the ministry and we are emotionally invested in them in return. We share concerns for each other and with each other, Americans to Germans and Germans to Americans. Students call us when they are worried or need someone to talk to, and we worry with them and we talk it out. We are connecting, and that is exciting.

this isn't trick photography - it isn't even poor photography. this is actually how things look here

As tempting as it is to update the blog on a regular, timely basis, I have been able to fight the urge for a while now. No more of that. Today I give in.

Debunking myths has become a popular pastime of Americans as of late – first started by a pair of pyromaniacs on the Discovery Channel and most recently adopted by our very own President in discussing national health care options – though the televised explosions occurring in the latter situation are a lot less enjoyable to watch.

As such, I’d like to comment on one of the more pervasive misunderstandings… about summer. I had heard that there was less work to be done during the summer break than what one might expect during the regular school year. This is simply not true.

On top of demand for website work (which extends my stay here, little by little), students have increased time for activities while school is out, our team is down to myself and Beth while the others raise support stateside, and we now have two lovely exchange students who we are in charge of training – that means two weeks of orientation, language classes, and integrating into the culture. Shorthanded, short-staffed, and short of breath. I’ve literally been sleeping at work – much to the chagrin of the Colemans’ cat, whose care I have been charged with.

It will most likely continue this way for a while – at least until teammates start returning and slowly easing the burdens. I invite you – during this time where blog updates may take a back seat to other priorities, like, say, eating – to follow our new student website at www.unterwegstu.com and to follow me and our exchange students on Facebook.

In German, it's a double entendre - which means that there are two entendres.

I don’t know about where you are, but it’s August here in Germany. Among Europeans, August means one thing: vacation. At these higher latitudes, the summer heat is now reaching it’s peak, and everyone packs their bags and heads out of town to use up four weeks out of their six weeks’ vacation (I know, right?). Where you go is not important – the single criteria is that you spend August away from where you live.

Meanwhile, work at Unterwegs continues, albeit at a little more relaxed pace from the breakneck speed of things during the regular semester. We’ve celebrated a late-night birthday party. We’ve finally made steps in turning our utility closet into an office – plastered the walls, sanded, painted, and even put in some fantastic furniture we pulled from the dumpster. We put together a new wall (above) to start putting pictures and signatures of everyone who comes through Unterwegs on.

I’ve even found an apartment (the homelessness ends on September 1).

So it’s been productive, even if it doesn’t make for terribly interesting blog material. Don’t you worry, though – the newest batch of exchange students arrives from the States in 11 days. With the Colemans and Chandler still stateside until the middle of September, the job will most likely become more interesting than the standard German vacation time is long.