9:30 am on Wednesday, September 7th at the foreign police office in Banská Bystrica, the police officer is rolling her eyes in disbelief and sighs with a sense of compassion. Foreign Police Officer (FPO): So close. It’s too bad it didn’t come sooner. Todd: It’ll be here tomorrow, I’ve got it set up for official translation tomorrow night and we can have it in your office first thing on Friday.
When we left the United States in June neither Max nor Elisabeth were speaking Slovak. Elisabeth was able to spit out a few ideas, but hardly ever a full sentence without getting help from Jana or me. Max couldn’t say any more than a single word at a time. In fact, when we got to Slovakia I was a little worried because Max was speaking English with his cousins and friends as if everyone in the world knew English.
In Jesus’ programmatic statement of Acts 1:8 he says that his disciples will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. We’ve already looked at their witness in Jerusalem, to the Jews and in this post we look at Judea and Samaria. Of course, as I mentioned in The Beginning of Acts, this is more than just a geographical statement. Samaria is home to the Samaritans.
On June 7 my dad and I packed our boxes of belongings into his horse trailer (power washed) and dropped them off at Perfect Express by the airport in Chicago. So far, so good.
As usual, the visa process is coming down to the wire. It never fails. There is always something about it that brings you face to face with the barbarous beast of bureaucracy. You might remember I called it Kafkaesque. It turns out that’s actually a word.
We’ve now been in Slovakia for a little more than one week. It’s been quite an adventure so far with our main adjustments coming in the area of the kids’ school, my visa arrangements, and Jana’s Music Together project. In this post I’ll stick to talking about the kids’ adjustments to Slovakia.
In this series of posts we’re addressing the question as to whether there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 (or 1:2 and 1:3). You can read more about the implications of this in the first post of this series. In this post I’m looking at the plausibility of a gap in the text by looking closely at the Hebrew grammar. Our site was hacked. Someone gained access to our servers and placed malicious code in our site that injected spam links in every post. It seemed like the quickest way to fix the problem was to delete everything and start all over again. Luckily, it’s fairly easy to renew the content. But it’s going to take much longer to restore the look and functionality and since we’re in the process of moving right now it’s going to take that much longer.
The end of the school year brings with it end of the year recitals. We don’t have any gymnastics videos this year but we do have a video of Elisabeth playing with the Bannockburn Elementary School Symphonetta. The symphonetta is made up almost entirely of third graders, which is the first year of orchestra at Bannockburn. In the clip below they play “Calypso.” At the end you can watch a related video in which they play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
A few weeks ago I was asked to be the student speaker at a luncheon for the Kenneth Kantzer Society. This is a group of people who have made large donations to Trinity via some sort of planned giving and the luncheon was an expression of thanks from the University. The speakers included the president of the University (Dr. Carig Williford) on behalf of the administration, a professor (Dr. Perry Downs) on behalf of the faculty, and myself on behalf of the students. My job was to give a student’s perspective on how Trinity has impacted me and my ministry. |   |
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