This is one of the neatest things I’ve stumbled on in a while. It’s fun and slightly addicting. Check it out!
I haven’t written in a while… and, according to my last post, that could mean that I haven’t been very deep in thought for a while. It could have also partially been due to the full time job and no regular internet access over the past few months. But, as of today, I have no job, internet access, and time to walk around barefooted and let my imagination roam freely to my heart’s content.
I have also saved a handful of thought-fragments on my phone that I never had the time to sit and fully develop, but I feel like this summer I’ll have the time to write about it all.
There are so many things I want to do this summer, I’m both excited and exhausted just thinking about them. I want to play with magnets and things that glow in the dark. I want to draw more. I want to run around barefoot. I want to read the half dozen books lying in my floor right now, and at least another half dozen I haven’t been able to get my hands on yet. I want to sit on a bridge and drop things in the water. I want to make a device that hovers off the ground, preferably big enough for a person to ride on. I want to climb trees. I want to dive into the Bible. I want to hike, kayak, and hike some more. I want to learn a(nother) foreign language. I want to start writing smartphone apps. I want to sit down with a box of junk and turn it into something marvelous. I want to go swimming. I want to go new places, meet new people, and not lose touch with them.
More than anything, I want someone to do these things with. I doubt if there’s anyone who would want to do all of this, but I’m sure there are people that would like to do some of it. Please tell me if you’re that person, even if we haven’t talked in years or barely know one another.
Tonight I think I’ll sit on my roof (or perhaps go lie down in a field) to watch the stars.
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost”
— The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
It’s been some time since I have written. I rarely have time anymore, and I miss it. Although, why do I want to write? I cannot, it seems, conceive anything creative or artistic, dramatic or poetic. All that I can seem to record are my own thoughts and experiences, and sometimes feelings. Which leads me to question: if I already know what I am thinking, why concern myself with transcribing those stray ideas? Perhaps precisely because of the haphazard nature of my mind- which really is not, but rather appears so because the turbulence of the world and its demands prematurely strip my attention from such contemplations. (How rude of it to do so without first asking, although I suppose it is plausible that I spend too much time absorbed in introspection to expect the world to wait for me to finish.) Yes, because of the surrounding world, ideas can be fleeting, and only the most resilient of notions remain unscathed. But if I write them, if I bring them here, then they are no longer evanescent. I spend all the more time pondering, transmuting abstract conceptions into words, extending their lifespan, and thus once-fragmented thoughts become fully formed. I write because writing is thinking.
I might think it absurd to expect others to want to read the sporadic musings of my non sequitur mind were it not for the fact that I appreciate knowing the musings of others. They give me more to think about and new perspective to consider. And so, if like-minded others looking for things to ponder should stumble upon my thoughts, may they derive from them a fraction of the enjoyment that I do.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning” — Albert Einstein
I found an old photo that was taken a long time ago- of our white country house before it was remodeled. The photo, with the white edges of the paper still showing, was untouched. As I often do, I think of what I could do to enhance the picture. I would shape up the amorphous gravel driveway. I would replace the metal culvert in the ditch with grass. I would erase the rust from the roof of the barn in the background.
Only, I wouldn’t. That’s how it was in my childhood, and I wouldn’t change it- any of it- for the world.
Hi Eastanallee!
I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m doing well here in Nicaragua. The first week a team of nurses from Pennsylvania came and provided all sorts of medical help to the community. It was the first secular team that Eric and Melissa had ever hosted, and not surprisingly God touched many of their hearts on the trip. The second week was a little more laid back as Melissa, Seth and Sage prepared to go back to the States, but part of the week I did get to work with another team staying in the city. I only have one more week left here! Please pray that God will prepare the hearts of the people that we will come in contact with this week, and that He would prepare my heart to be used by Him.
I thank God that He lets me be part of a church as loving and supportive as you. Thank you for all of your material support leading up to this trip, but most importantly for your encouragement and your prayers. They mean the world to me!
In Christ,
Michael Parkison
Time for a play-by-play of week two! I would have loved to do this for week one, but it was just too busy.
It was really quiet without the group from Pennsylvania here. Sunday we went to a neat little church in Leon, ate at a chicken place called Tip-Top for lunch, and did a lot of re-organizing of supplies and donated materials. Monday I rode with Melissa to distribute food to the feeding programs and pick up/deliver other things in the morning. Most of the evening they spent packing.
Tuesday we went to Leon so Seth and Sage could pick up some souvenirs for their friends, and to get medicine for a man in Salinas. On the way back we stopped at his house to give it to him, and Melissa freaked out over it to the point that I was laughing- it was an injection, and she was the one to give it. Last week the doc said explained that there was no way to mess it up since the injection site was the stomach and not a vein. Me and Seth played soccer with some of the guys in the neighborhood for a while, before he and his friend Gato went surfing. That night Eric drove the rest of the family to a hotel, and they left the next morning for the States. I stayed back so I could enjoy some quiet time to myself (I’ve been known to disappear for a few hours at home to get some mental breathing room), and I munched on some snacks while I read more out of the Bible and Forgotten God.
Starting Wednesday, it was just me and Eric staying at the house. We went to Leon in the morning to check up on the psychology team (a Christian team) that was staying at a hotel there, and I went with them to a couple different schools while they did a couple different lectures and discussions. I actually met a member of their team during the first week when we were in Leon, and I pretended I didn’t speak any English for the first few minutes of the conversation. I wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t look like and good sport, and we both had a laugh afterwards. Anyway, there was one sweet lady there that I met named Laverne. I think she was a team leader, and I did some minor tranlating for her when we were at a school. During our lunch break, she asked me to go with her to the bank to get some money out of the ATM. So, we had a little adventure that consisted of finding the bank, finding out her card declined, going to an internet cafe to make a call to her credit card company, then going back to the bank to find out that her card declined again. Later that night she discovered we were actually just selecting the wrong option on the ATM haha. But on that little adventure I picked up some amazing sweet bread from a bakery we saw coming back =)
Thursday I woke up around 5:00 (just half an hour earlier than normal) to go with one of the teams in the psych group to a maximum security prison in Chinandega, a city almost two hours north of Leon. So, once we got there and waited for at least an hour in the street (where it HAD to be at least 100 degrees), they told us that we couldn’t come in because of a stabbing that had occured the night before. But. We were able to go to the city’s court house, where there just happened to be five teenagers that were tangled up in some legal issue or another that needed counselling, and it just happened that the judge was sitting in her chamber about to go see these kids. And it just so happened that a lady that was with us knew the judge well enough that the judge let us in on her good word, without knowing who we were or what we were doing there five minutes beforehand. In case you don’t catch my sarcasm, God just happened to be guiding us that day. That night me, Eric, and his friend Anry went to stay at Eric’s other house in Granada so they could do some business there.
Friday. I kill some time in an internet cafe and walk around on the square while Anry and Eric check out different hotels and accomodations for a team coming in September. I got to talk with a few guys in the square about Christianity and give them some Spanish New Testaments. I went to a bank and got some money out of the ATM (the right way this time) since I had all of $3 in my pocket. The rest of the day consisted of riding around with Eric and Anry while they looked around and made reservations at various places for that team, and because of that I saw basically the entire country! I kinda wish we could have spent more time in certain places, but I’m not here to be a tourist. We had macaroni and tacos for dinner when we got back to Salinas.
So, finally it is Saturday. This morning we went to Leon to do various errands, the biggest of which was to get groceries for the new team. We bought about half my weight in meat, at least the same in vegetables, and had to use two full carts to get everything. When we got back there were a few household tasks for me to do. I’m now sitting alone at the house, like on Tuesday night, while Eric goes and gets the next team (of optometrists). Since they’re pushed for space in the vehicles, it was actually necessary that I stay behind this time; don’t think I’m a total recluse. They will be here in a couple of hours, then we’ll have dinner and I’ll get to meet some new people! The final week is about to begin!
The first week in Nicaragua was pretty interesting. Oh, it’s actually the end of the second week right now; I’m just slow at updating. We had a team of Nurses from a university in Pennsylvania and their professor come down to conduct clinics and help local doctors with their work. We split up into two groups in the mornings: one stayed in Salinas Grandes, which is the very rural area where we are staying, and the other went into the city of León to visit a nursing home or tour the hospital. I always stayed with the group here to talk to and pray with the people they were helping. In the afternoons we would hold a clinic or give free consultation at a private clinic in León. This was the pattern Monday through Thursday.
The difficult part of this, which I didn’t know ahead of time, was that this was not a Christian team. I feel like I was spiritually attacked more in the two weeks leading up to this trip than I have been in a long time, and I was expecting a lot of encouraging Christian fellowship when I got here. I was expecting worship services every night or two. I was expecting to do evangelistic events. And none of those expectations were correct. But I believe God used that in many ways throughout the week. For one, God was telling me: “You are too old to be spoon-fed. If you want Me, come seek Me for yourself.” So that’s just what I did. Since we didn’t go to services or on crusades every night, we had a lot more free time than the last time I came, which made it easy to take time out to find a quiet place for praying and reading the Word. I’ve been re-reading Radical by David Platt, and the missionaries happened to have a copy of Forgotten God by Francis Chan that I’d been wanting to read.
Maybe this is another reason God set things up that way: most people on the team seemed to have this messed up view of what Christianity is- of self-righteous people whose actions never matched their beliefs. For some of them, going to Sunday morning church defined believers. It was our job to show them what true Christians are made of. Our mission wasn’t just to the Nicaraguan people, it was to the Americans! And I believe that God worked through different people and situations to really touch hearts in that group.
Here is one really cool thing that happened: The first Thursday, my group was going around with a local doctor to certain houses in the community to write down information for government records. We were collecting that information, along with diagnosing and treating anyone that we could on the way. Well, the first five houses we came to were the exact five houses that the mission team had visited a week earlier to present the gospel. These houses weren’t together; they were actually spread out across a couple different streets. This really amazed the professor (who I know was a believer at least at an intellectual level). A few minutes later, we met a small boy with a burned arm. The group brought different medicines in bulk, so whatever we had there was lots of- why pack random, unlikely-to-be-needed supplies? But when we happened to have one single, seemingly random patch to treat that boy’s burn with, there could be no doubt that God had touched that day. Many on the team had a head knowledge of God, but now they have seen Him work. I pray that the experience changed their lives, and that now they realize they need to seek Him.
Nicaragua journal, day twelve:
I woke up at 5:00. It’s a quarter past 7:00, and I just got to my first destination. Why do early? Because I’m going to prison. Wish me luck!