Not My Own

Photo by John Van't Land

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I am not my own but belong--

body and soul,in life and in death--

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

The catch phrases of Heildelberg catechism Question and Answer #1 (see above) are “comfort” and “belonging”—two great concepts. However, for some reason, the phrase “not my own” has resonated with me the past few weeks as I considered about what to write for this posting. Truly understanding and living that I am “not my own” is tricky for educated 21st century people who want to and think we can control everything in our lives.

A Sunday ago, Neil publicly professed that he is “not his own” but belongs to his faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

Know it…

and struggle with what it means for your life, Neil. I still do.
.

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I am not my own but belong--

body and soul, in life and in death--

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way

.

that not a hair can fall from my head

without the will of my Father in heaven:

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

.

Because I belong to him, Christ,

by his Holy Spirit,assures me of eternal life

and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready

from now on to live for him.

End of the year

Two Grade 12 students and I at the reception of the SPH "farewell" ceremony (graduation)

After enduring countless PowerPoint slide shows of pictures of the past year set to Christian Praise songs in chapels, graduations, proms, assemblies, staff meetings and homerooms, I am happy to announce the school year is complete! I put up with most of the sappiness as I got to enjoy the kids I teach as well as the kids I fathered move on to bigger things.

Neil at the Grade 6 "Thanksgiving" Celebration (Graduation)

Hope at the Kindy "concert" (Graduation) where she dressed in a dutch costume

In a cruel twist of fate, Eric, who would have enjoyed an 8th grade graduation in the U.S., was the only Weeda child to not graduate this year. In lieu of a graduation or presents, maybe I'll make him a nice PowerPoint :).

Complete Weekend

We celebrated another holiday here this past Friday. Waisak is referred to as “Buddha’s birthday”, although the day really celebrates Siddharta Gautama’s (Buddha’s) birth, enlightenment and death, which apparently happened on the same day on different years. Even though the day celebrates many other things for Buddhists,the unifying theme of this holiday could be summarized as “completeness.”

I celebrated it and the weekend by being “completely" busy.

Hope and classmates at ballet concert. She is in the back.

Mountain Biking in Sentul

Thursday night started with a ballet concert for Hope followed by a sleepover with one of her friends (at our house). Then Friday morning at 5:15 AM, I loaded up our new mountain bike, drove to Sentul (a suburb of Jakarta just near the slopes of local mountains) with two others and biked all morning. After returning as close to 12 noon as possible (8 minutes late), we attended not one, but two holiday BBQ’s (sorry, no pictures here). I think I also drove Hope to and from a birthday party somewhere in there too.

At the Volcano Tangkupan Parahu

On Saturday, 14 of us from our church went on a day trip to Bandung, which is a large city about 100 miles away from Jakarta. Besides sitting in terrible holiday traffic for hours, we drove to the top of a volcano named Tangkuban Parahu, attended an amazing cultural show (based around the Indonesian instrument called an angklung), squeezed in a little shopping and had two fantastic meals. We returned near Midnight.

At the end of the cultural show, performers invited us to the floor to dance with them.

Following church today, I will be grading lots of exams I have put off the rest of the weekend.

During the weekend, I also learned that my uncle, Les Dykhouse, passed away on Friday (Waisak). He found his eternal completeness, not in self enlightenment or in extreme busyness, but in a life of Grace and Gratitude, in that order.

May we know and live in that Truth.

But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
Romans 8:11

Train to Jogjakarta

Java is the most populated island in the world with over 100 million people on it. It's always been easy to believe this living in Jakarta (likely over 10 million). Our travels on Java have always been to other big cities (Surabaya, Jogjakarta and Bandung) and have either been by plane or along busy roads. To see the rural side of this island, we took our four day weekend and trained from Northwest (Jakarta) to South central Java (Yogjakarta). You can check out our route on the following train map of java here-- http://www.happychap.eu/travel_info/indonesia_2008/java/railway_map.htm

(we took the route through Cirebon).

Here are a few pictures from our trip:

Waiting for the train in Jakarta

(I'm actually a little more excited than I appear:)

Hope enjoying the spacious seat.

We took the "eksekutif" train, complete with A/C, comfortable

seats and few stops.

Terraced rice fields along the way through a very dirty train window.

Eric and Neil complained that the scenery never changed.

Proof that Eric and Neil were correct.




Enjoying a becak (bicycle taxi) in Jogja along with other

activities for 2 days following the train ride.

We cheated and took a 45 minute flight back to Jakarta on Saturday!

(It cost the same as the train ticket)

When I was a kid....

When I was a kid, a 6^th grade report or project involved the following:

• Choosing a topic—usually a static item like a country (Ecuador), issue (Abortion), thing (cell) or an event (moon landing).
• Researching—going to the small elementary library and looking up information in the encyclopedia.
• Writing—hand writing the information on neat lined paper along with traced or hand drawn maps, diagrams. If the teacher was quite good, they made sure you didn’t copy information and properly cited things in a bibliography.
• Presentation—hand drawing a nice title page with some sort of free handed graphic.

Neil's 6th grade class is continuing a huge project called exhibition. Here's how it works ( without getting into Education speak). In addition to all of the above elements, students engage in reflective journaling (both weekly and daily), field work (interviews and surveys), presentations (movies and powerpoints), and action (they actually try to help people struggling in the issue they are studying). It's quite amazing to see. In fact, what I have been struggling to succinctly state was summed up well by our head of school in his weekly thoughts to staff:

"It was a delight to spend some time chatting with Grade 6 students during their Exhibition last
week. Two things were impressive for me. Firstly, the knowledge that these young
people were sharing was “internalized” – they knew what they were talking about.
Secondly, many of them were doing something with their knowledge in relation to
injustice or bad practices. They were involved with plans and activities that
will cause positive change. I learned a lot, particularly about the incredibly
wide ranging effects of polluted water. These young people had a positive and
significant influence on me."

.

Neil shows 1st graders his Power Point (below as well)

$10,000 smile

Children are adored here. Smiles abound in Indonesia, especially around kids. On top of that, blond hair and blue eyes add to the appeal (likely because of their respective scarcity).

I think our school knows that. Even though SPH consists of 98% Asian kids, our kids have made a few of promotional publications. On top of this, Hope recently found her way onto a large billboard on one of the biggest interchanges in the city. Here it is:

Who wouldn't want to spend a lot of money so their kid can attend a school with a cutie like that!?

Strange Site

What is the strange citing in this photo? A Weeda relative in Asia, a Gecko or a hand of Neil's that is actually quite clean?

Answer: See below.

While we have lots of lizards, or Cicaks (pronounced Chee-chucks) and Iguana's here, we have never seen the above gecko before. Very cool.

We are also enjoying family visiting.

Talk more in a week or so!