Thursday, March 15, 2007

News You Can Use

For those who check this blog to find out what's happening next as we prepare to move to Dallas, here are some of the answers to the FAQ's that I've received.
My last Sunday at Emmanuel is July 8th. By then we will have been out of our house (most likely) and will have stored what we are going to store and gotten rid of what we need to get rid of. We are moving into a fully furnished home for missionaries adjacent to the International Linguistics Center in Dallas. It's about 1600 sq ft. School starts for me on July 16th. We have obtained information on schools from the dean of students and will look in to them closer once we are in Dallas. Having said that, my initial reaction to them is that we will not use them, but will opt to homeschool instead. We already have all the materials we need for this year coming up, and most of what we would need the following year as well.

In the meantime, we continue to get our house ready for sale. All the big painting is done, with some trim and touch up to be finished up in the next week. All new flooring will be installed throughout the house for five grueling days next week, and then we should be about ready to go. We'll still need to continue to tinker around with some outside projects, a little detail painting and landscaping, but the lion's share of the job will be packing for storage or unloading. When we go to Dallas, we'll mainly be taking only clothes, personal stuff, books, and computers.

Well that's about all for now. If you think of other questions, please leave them on the comments section below.

Thanks!

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Strep Hits! (or 'It Came from Within!')

Hey gang,

All seven Ohio Rudowskes have strep at one stage or another. It is possible that Joshua contracted it from inside a play tube at a Burger King in Michigan. His aunt noticed that he and one of his cousins had little dots on their legs when they came out of the tubes.
Those little bumps grew and got ugly and swollen and may be the source of everyone else's infection. (lab tests will clarify that early next week). In the mean time, pray for our healing and sanity. Chris and Katherine are doing well already. Matt's not bad, but has a nasty cough with his. Maya is dragging tired, and Rich, Josh, and Becca all have a nasty rash with their case. (Aren't microbes fun?)

This little bit of down time has provided me a great opportunity to read and I recommend a great book by a guy named Andy Stanley called, "It Came From Within!". It deals with the matters of the heart that negatively influence behavior. It has very practical advice for how to go at being healed of these 'monsters'. It's easy to read, I highly recommend it!

See you (itch itch) soon!
Rich

Friday, March 02, 2007

Naaman - The Renewal of the Mind Part One

One of the earliest memories I have of Bible stories is the story of Naaman, the syrian general. My mom and dad bought me an Arch book with a record, (yes, I'm old enough to be in on the tail end of the record phase) of the story of Naaman when I was five years old and we lived in North Carolina. The story of Naaman is about a general who thinks hes got life all figured out, but his life is turned upside down and in the end he discovers that there is a God in Israel who can do things that his local gods apparently couldn't do. His discovery points to the discovery waiting for all who follow Jesus: this journey following Jesus will require a complete renewal of the mind.

Perhaps you remember the story, which occurs in 2 Kings 5. The great general Naaman was suffering from an incurable skin disease known as leprosy. He was told that Elisha, the prophet in Israel could heal him. He hoped for royal treatement: Elisha, this prophet of a vanquished nation would certainly come out and deal with him as one would deal with a great man. Instead, he was treated rather unceremoniously by Elisha who only sent a messenger out to talk to him and told him to go wash seven times in the Jordan River. Initially, Naaman lost his temper, but his servants talked him into it, and he left his pride behind on the banks of the Jordan River, washed seven times and was healed.

And it was at that point where Naaman realized that he now had a new problem. A new reality had entered his life, and we see him struggling to come to grips with it, to put together the parts of his old life in a new way so they will make sense around a new belief he has in a new God. You see, up until now, he had worshipped his local Syrian god, Rimmon. But Naaman has discovered something new about Rimmon: he may look great sitting up there in his shrine, but he's not much good when it comes to leprosy. And the bad news is that his enemies to the south, the people of Israel, worship a god who doesn't have a statue sitting in a shrine, but who beats Rimmon hands down in the healing business. And this god has reached out and touched HIM!

He comes back to Elisha and declares, "Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel." He offers Elisha a gift which is refused and then he does two things to show that he is trying to get his mind around what has happened to him, trying to reorder his life around his new belief in the one true God.

The first is kind of unusual. He asks for two loads of soil from Israel? Now why does he do this? It's because he's still thinking about gods the way he's always thought about them. In ancient times, people believed each region had its own god. He's discovered that the god in Israel is the only one who has power, so he wants the dirt so that he can worship this new found god on His own turf. He hasn't worked out the truth yet that if the God of Israel is the one true God then he is just as present in Syria as he is in Israel. So he asks for a load of dirt.

The next, I find fascinating. He says to Elisha basically, "Look, when I get back home, my master, the King of Syria, will expect me to go with him as usual to the house of Rimmon. He's an old man; he leans on my arm; when he bows, I bow. What else can I do? I know it's wrong, but I've still got to do it. And I'm sorry.

Naaman finds his life compromised. He is caught between the vision of a living, loving, and healing God and the reality of his compromised life hemmed in by lifeless and useless idols. You see, when you start to get your thinking about God straight, the old familiar lines of your life get all mixed up and you see them from an entirely different angle. Those who meet the living Jesus and are trying to follow him will run into the same sorts of questions.

But was Naaman a compromiser? Shouldn't he have been ready to say, "to heck with Rimmon, to heck with the king of Syria, I'm going to worship Israel's God and I don't care who knows it!"? Shouldn't he have been like Daniel, opening his window towards Jerusalem to pray to Israel's God even when he was in Babylon?

Well, maybe. But it takes a while to learn to be a Daniel. You've got to start somewhere, and Naaman starts with the most important thing of all: to recognize the truth that you are in a broken and confused situation, to ask forgiveness where you seem to be compromising, and to take it one step at a time from there. Naaman is moving in the right direction. If Daniel had shrunk back and worshipped the king of Babylon, he would have been moving the wrong direction, but more about that in a little bit.