The God of the weather created an exquisite panorama ten days ago. And we worshipped Him outdoors with praise and truth and baptized those who have turned to Him through His Son, Jesus Christ.
In the “Newsletters” section of our site, there’s a new one. Feel free to download and read it. More than that, partner with us in the advance of the Gospel through prayer. If you’d like to give financially, send us an email and we’ll let you know a number of convenient ways you can do that.
The dollar hit its all-time record low this week against the Euro. European vacations and living costs 40% more than it did about six years ago.
Ever move houses? Ever build your own home? Ever do either in Italy? We’re on the last stretch of finishing up phase 1 of our construction project with our Ministry Center (that’s a “Church Facility” for those who are afraid of the words “Ministry Center”). Yesterday, the electrician stopped in his tracks and asked me, “Have you ever studied architecture professionally because you sure have an eye for it…” I replied, “Only with you guys…” knowing that we have to watch what they’re doing like a hawk to prevent mistakes (we’ve caught some big ones). And I definitely feel that we’ve gotten a degree without the certificate. If we did receive the diploma, our major would be something like, ”How the World Works — Slowly.”
I know you’re a faithful reader if you get to the fifth paragraph. I’m pausing here to give you an e-high-five of thanks for keeping up with us.
FUNNY: Another American girl has started attending Reilly’s school. She’s in the 2nd grade too. Well, the two of them have really hit it off and all of the other boys are starting to tease Reilly that he has a girlfriend and Reilly really doesn’t know what that means (thank Heaven). So Reilly came home the other day and put an awkward question to us. He told us that the boys were teasing him and then asked, “What’s an amarosa?” Literally, the Italian word is used to mean “Lover”. You’ve gotta’ be in Italy when you have an amarosa in the 2nd grade.
I’ve been teaching through the first chapter of Philippians and digging deep into each word that Paul pens from prison. One word: wow.
We’re developing and organizing a ministry function called an International Prayer Coordinator. The coordinator will collect and collate the many various requests that we have and make them available to our prayer partners. This is something you can be a part of. I’ll post something about it in the future when we have more information available.
Fans, short-sleeve shirts, & mosquitos made it feel more like June than October on the third of this month. We just completed our second annual discipleship conference and we were running the air conditioner with fans the entire time. By this time, we’ve already experienced our “seasonal-shift.” What I mean by seasonal-shift is that the seasons are so full and so pronounced here in the North that there are a few days a year where you can actually feel the dividing-time as one season overtakes another. Strangely later than usual, a beautiful lightning storm rolled in on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, the smell of the air was different, the color of the light had changed, and the weather had a crispness to it. Fall had arrived and Summer wasn’t coming back.
To digress for a moment, the discipleship conference was a lot of work and a great success. We had around 32 people training to be one-to-one disciplers. Also, after a year of effort, we were able to announce that we have completed the translation of all of the discipleship material into Italian. With this, we can assist many churches across Italy to care for their new believers and preserve a legacy within an embattled nation. There’s still a fair amount of work to accomplish before we’re able to assist Italy on a larger scale, but we reached our first milestone.
With the arrival of Fall comes the harvest and the many culinary tastes that accompany it. Pumpkin is often mixed into the sauces on pastas and two long-anticipated delights are reaped: chestnuts and pomegranates. Italy has wonderful pomegranates, second only to Israel in my opinion. We’ll devour a couple of these tomorrow. By the way, there is a lot easier way to eat this great fruit than picking at it seed by seed. If you would like to have this “fruit-hack,” just let me know and I’ll be glad to share it with you.
The joy of chestnuts, on the other hand, is when we roast them over our stove here at the house. The fragrant smoke they emit fills the entire house. Couple the roasted chestnuts with ice-cold Vanilla Coke and you’ve got an unbeatable combination that makes it worth living in Italy the whole year. Tonight, I was able to re-acquaint the kiddos with this harvest tradition. What a blast! Reilly’s quickly picked up the intricacies of shelling them well and eating them quick. Things like this make for great memories.
Tonight, Sandy is up in the Dolomites with a group of women from our Church. This weekend is our Women’s Breakthrough Weekend. The Men’s will follow in a couple weeks. These are also times of great memories as many men and women have their lives changed through the work of the Holy Spirit. All of these great things happen in the Fall.
This is a short post on a giant topic: Italy’s culture
For our spiritual-minded readers, it’s the culture & its complexity that becomes like cement to the Seed. Hardened through centuries of empty tradition and ceaseless opining, the average Italian has become a strange synthetic of secularist-religious swirl. Everything is about appearances; refined appearances. In other words, it matters more how your dress your baby, what kind of watch you wear, or how clean your house is than how much you’re cheating on your taxes, cheating on your spouse, or cursing God with the vilest of language. This syndrome of “externalism” is called, La Bella Figura (The Beautiful Figure) and Italians are both artisan and artist in its performance.
I was sent a great article the other day. Actually, it’s a book review (on the New York Times site — can’t stand the NYT just to let you know). However, if any of you are at all interested in the nation of Italy - please read this article. Here’s a great quote from the article to help you catch the idea of the beautiful figure. “Italians, in other words, would just as soon look good as be good. The country suffers from an ethics deficit…Lying outrageously…is considered normal.” Ethics are the practices of an anchored moral system. Therefore, the best ethics are biblical ethics and Italy is so void of care for the Bible that whoa-la — disappearing ethics.
Take a few minutes and read the article. I’d love to hear your thoughts or answer your questions (that’s diplomatic code for “leave a comment on this post”).
After laboring these many years in Italy, we were able to reach a milestone today (I began writing this on April 9th, 2006). Some might say “milestone” and others might say “starting line” depending on your point of view.
For the first time, we were able to host our full Italian Missions Sunday. It was beautiful. We held it with our folks, in our own place, in Italian, & permeated with Italian culture. It has taken us a number of years to arrive at this point and it was a real highlight of the year for us thus far.
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So, Silvio Berlusconi loses last week’s election (President — or Champion o’ Bureaucracy) by a narrow margin to Romano Prodi. Italian politics are hilarious. The Italians are generally upset about feeling the pinch of the poor condition of the Euro. So, they blame the richest man in Italy who also happens to be their president - Silvio. Then, they elect the man that brought the Euro both to Italy and the EU commission. Oh ya, that’s gonna’ make it all better.
Italy & Politics
Politics is enormous, gigantic, grandissimo to the Italians.
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Ever hear the phrase, “My ship’s come in!”? We had an experience like that. Well, it was more like a long-lost canoe washing ashore but here’s the story.
Three years ago we were renewing all of our insurance policies for our family, the church, and another missionary family. We wrote a check out for around $5,000 which was to cover our various policies for the entire year. What we didn’t know was three of our policies could only be renewed 6 months at a time. The total for those policies would be around $2100. Our Italian insurance agent was a friend and was going to apply the rest of the money at the 6-month mark and renew the policies for us without having to go through the extra paperwork etc.
In October 2003, we received an urgent notice from our insurance company requesting that we pay the $2100 to keep our policies maintained for the second have of 2003. After meeting with the company, we knew something was askew. So, we went back and researched our bank statements (bank statements here are not written with the customer in mind — they are written for budding code-crackers), our check stubs, and our receipts. Sure enough! We had paid the insurance for the entire year. With a folder of copies in hand, it was time to go back to the company, calculate through the whole mess, and ever-so-gently reveal their error to them.
In true European/Italian fashion, we recalculated every policy and reviewed every page. Continuing to form, the agent looks at our check stub and replies, “Oh, you wrote the check out to our agent who is no longer working with us. You still need to pay us for the policy.” Our incredulous but ever-so-gentle response was, “So what!? We still paid out this $2100.” The insurance company said, “Well, we never received the money from the agent so it looks like you still owe us and he pocketed the cash when he left.”
It’s hard to remember my response at that moment because I’ve blacked it out as one of my not-so-finer-moments on the mission field. Well, I called up my friend and brother Roberto and we all met at a local cafe to get to the bottom of the “double-priced insurance.” My friend explained right away that he and his wife had just decided to divorce. He said that his wife’s attorney managed to clean out his bank account and take all the money he was saving for the church with which he was going to buy the new policy at mid-year. We were a bit dumbfounded. We were surprised that they didn’t tell us about the divorce, didn’t tell us about the policies only lasting 6 months, and didn’t tell us that he lost our money hoping we would overlook the mistake. He asked us for mercy. We gave him mercy. We wanted him to see God’s mercy because he is not yet born again in Mercy. But we still asked him to restore the church’s money. He asked us for 9 months to pay it back. We gave him two years. He wrote us a check for $400 right away and then promised to have it back to us soon. We wrote out a gentlemen’s contract and prayed with him.
Nine months went by… no word. So I called my friend only to find out that home and cell phone numbers had been changed (in Italy, there’s not a syruppy woman’s voice that gives you the new numbers either). The insurance company (for devious reasons of their own) was pressing me every time I went in there to join them in a lawsuit against my friend to recover the money. They said, “Don’t you want justice?” to which I thought, “You people gotta’ stop lobbing me softballs like this — you have no idea what you mean when you say justice.” The other problem would have been that the church would have had a black eye in the local papers and a giant paper trail that ended at a mountain of legal fees.
Fast-forwarding through 15 months, we’re thinking we’re left with a bag of empty promises so we’re just living as if the money is lost for good and the “nice guys get walked-on again”. Still no word from our friend, contract expiring on the 19th, & consistently thinking about how to “find” our friend we decided to try one more time after the New Year. We had also hit brick walls on about 8 other projects we were working on this last month too. Lo and behold, this morning and out-of-nowhere a new cell number appears on our phone, our friend materializes in an hour, a check materializes 30 mins. later, and a gentlemen’s contract went up in flames right after that. We walked through the difficulties of the past couple years (which were pretty dark) and our friend said, “Every month when I got paid, I would think - Rob & the Church - and I’d put a little money away. Even though we didn’t get to talk much over these past couple years, you’re a real friend and good person.”
I’m happy for the Church. I’m blown away that two years of wondering what-to-do ends in an hour. I’m thankful to God for the blessing & encouragement & being so good. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the lessons to learn from this. Maybe I’ll see some more when I take my friend to lunch on Tuesday.
I’d like to introduce a new blog that has entered the blogosphere called From Israel to Italy. The author is Roberto Battistuzzi who is one of our deacons at Serenissima and leader of our Italian ministry. Roberto’s wife, Adele, is our office administrator and does a wonderful job in this capacity.
Roberto has worked with us for a little over three years now and the Lord has knit our lives together in a tremendous way.
Every day, a group of our folks (we never know who it will be from day to day — which is a lot of fun) including the Battistuzzis meets for coffee, reading of the Word, and prayer before commencing our work. Almost every time that we meet together, Roberto and I have new thoughts and discoveries to share with each other. Many of Roberto’s discoveries are so didactic by nature that I’ve encouraged him to put them down for others. Today, Roberto made his first two entries. His specialties are the Hebrew worldview and Italian culture. So, you should see a number of future insights into those fields.
Godspeed to you Roberto as you write for His glory!
Here’s a recent picture of Roberto utilizing one of his best talents.
Every page drips Italy. Each paragraph peels another layer which exposes the deep darkness that the nation veils. The author consistently draws out my envy that I didn’t write it first. The book is a compilation of the eight years of our experience with this culture; at times we laugh with tears of first-hand knowledge and at times we cry with the same. Certainly, this book will be a required read for any future visitor that would join us in this land.
I’m speaking of the book entitled The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones. The author is a journalist by trade and, to this point, offers no solid confession of the revealed Faith. However, Jones is uncannily observant, simply descriptive, and brutally honest about the Italian culture.
As I read through the book, I will share insights here on the webjournal. If you would like to have a powerful look into an untouched nation, buy the book. It will help you intercede for more than 60 million people.
Here are the opening lines to the Foreword and some commentary:
“Travellers, without exception,” wrote Stendhal in 1824, “are wont to confine their descriptions of Italy to the realm of the inanimate; their portraits concern only the monuments, the sites, the sublime manifestations of nature in that happy land.” Even today, this is still very much the case. People talk or write about Italy because they are obsessed by the age, the beauty, and the hedonism of the country, by the Roman ruins, the Renaissance art, by a favourite duomo or palazzo. Visitors flock toward cathedrals and canals…
In other words, the shroud is not only in Turin. I guess we can’t blame the traveller who wants that inanimate “experience.” But I do think that we here should come to expect more from the Christian traveller to this land. We’re not speaking of more historical knowledge of the country (although that definitely wouldn’t hurt). When we say that we are coming to expect more, we mean to say more spiritual discernment. Eyes of the believer-priest should be able to see beyond the facade (almost everything about Italy is a facade; a wanton superficiality) and know that a nation is not made up of its shopping, its vistas, or its cuisine. Rather, our encouragement is for our steady stream of visitors (and our church) to assume the weight of the shroud and intercede with fervency for a trapped people. Italy’s monies want you to see the romantic outdoor cafes with tastes of cappuccino, but Italy’s devils prohibit you to see its curses and spiritual fortresses. We cry for more believer-priests to see the latter and call upon the Spirit of Freedom with us.
