Roses of Grace

Edy and I wrapped up our Paraguay trip (which you can read about here if you'd like the details) a little under two weeks ago, and man did we learn a lot.  It's good to be back home. I didn't realize just how draining living in another culture would be, and when we first got back it felt very strange that the majority of my conversations were in English—not to mention the sweetness of our reunions with family and friends.  So how was it?  The short answer is "good." There were very high highs, and very low lows. Some aspects of the culture we enjoyed, while others were a little harder to get used to. Did the experience change us? Absolutely.  You can't go to another country for any significant period of time without changing. Even if the change is small, or you didn't feel like the discomfort was paying off at the time—when you're forced to do hard things, you grow.  When I announced the trip two months ago, I wrote down some prayer requests. I belie...

This post shall be in a different vein than my usual content due to my lack of mental energy at the moment. (Learning Spanish is hard, and socializing is hard. Therefore, learning Spanish by socializing is a great recipe for well-deserved exhaustion.) It's a story about an ice cream shop here in Asunción. And it's a story about ambiguous marketing designs and the funny situations that can arise from them.  Here is the shop:  (There's also me eating an ice cream cone. It was delicious, in case you were wondering.) You see the name? What do you think it says?  Parvs, right. I agree. Good eye. And cool design. A while ago, our hosts saw that ice cream store and decided that they wanted to check it out at some point. Since they didn't have time that day, they drove on past, intending to return later.  Eventually it was time to get some ice cream. So they pulled up Google Maps and started looking for Parvs.  For some reason, they couldn't find it.  Parvs just wa...

I've had several experiences in my life that make me pause and think: "The heavens really do declare the glory of God." The first was the total solar eclipse of 2017. (Kind of hard to beat the sun being replaced by a black hole.) But visiting the Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil certainly comes close.  Getting to the falls was quite the process. Our whole group piled into the van and drove over the border from Paraguay to Brazil—they didn't check our passports for some reason, so it didn't take too long—and arrived at the Iguazu Falls National Park.  All we had to do then was take a taxi or bus up to the falls themselves. And, despite several transport mishaps (including a taxi driving one group back to Paraguay instead of to the falls by mistake), we made it to Iguazu.  Iguazu Falls is the largest waterfall system in the world. Though it isn't the highest, there are 275 waterfalls on the cliffs—and if you see it in person, the sight goes bey...

(Note: Please excuse the quality of the photographs in this post. I have an iPhone 7 for a camera, and very little skill in using it.) (That aside, let us get to the post.)   One interesting thing about Paraguay is the incredible diversity of the sidewalks here.  The system is different, you see. Instead of the government owning part of your front yard so that they can put in nice off-white squares of cement, every homeowner is responsible for their own sidewalk. It comes with the house. So, you'll get wonderful beautiful sidewalks like this one with the black swirly design: ... as well as less beautiful ones. Not everyone can afford to put in a nice sidewalk, and that shows. Asuncion is a diverse place—almost shockingly so, sometimes, when you see sleek modern duplexes next to houses that probably haven't seen better days.  That's the way the city works. Lower-class people buy some cheap land on the edges of the city and build a small house. Then the population grows, a...

This week we had the privilege of going to a school in Asuncion to give a presentation about responding to bullying with Biblical principles. The school was lovely (second graders are very cute, y'all), and it was a wonderful time. There was a sign on the wall that made me pause, though. It read, "Con Dios siempre es primavera." Translated, that means, "with God it's always spring."  While I was happy to see a sign like that at a government-run school, I wasn't really sure whether or not I agreed. Literally, of course, spring is only around 25% of the time—but the metaphor isn't so accurate either.  The walk of a Christian isn't one of perpetual sunshine and birdsong. Sometimes the winds come, and the storm clouds gather. But that doesn't mean that God isn't good.   A time for spring Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 says, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to pl...

My first bonus post from the foreign land of Paraguay actually isn't about Paraguay at all—it's about a cat.  There are a lot of cats here. My friend has been counting all the strays that we come across on walks and in the car, and so far the number is 45. By the end of the summer, I expect it to be over a hundred.  They aren't just strays, either; any households have cats or dogs of their own. Edy's aunt and uncle have two and a half cats in their house—an indoor cat named Streaky, an outdoor cat named Samsung, and Samsung's mom who hangs around the house sometimes. Her name is Scrawny, since, well, she didn't eat too well when she was a stray.  Soon after we arrived in Paraguay, Samsung had caught a cold from Scrawny. And for some reason, the cold gave him an eye infection. Don't ask me how that works—I am by no means a veterinarian, and know next to nothing about animals—but his eye looked pretty bad.  Well, we took him to the vet and got him some eye dro...

Paraguay is a small country in South America. It's right below Brazil, and borders Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina. Its capital is Asunción. It is landlocked, and has a population of roughly 7 million people. It's also where I'm going to be spending my summer. That's right, I'm going to Paraguay! I'm so excited for this opportunity—more details about it coming later—and, when you're reading this, I'll likely already be on my way to the airport. This will, of course, be a very new experience for me. I've never left the United States, and I've never flown on a plane except for a recreational flight once at the Outer Banks.  But God has given me this opportunity, and I am looking forward to seeing what comes of it!   Who are you going with? I'm going with one of my closest friends, named Edy Gardner, who I've known basically since birth. We're flying down together, and I can't wait to be able to grow together and make these memories! ...