Author Archives: Karyn

Safely Home from Sudan (and Uganda and Kenya)

We are home! Thanks so much for all your prayers. We have been up for about 28 hours now, and are ready to hit the sack (but I wanted to get a few pictures up to hold you until we get a chance to really decompress and write about our time). Actually, the team is only half home. It’s a long story, but half the team ended up having to stay one extra day in London. They should be back in the US at 7 pm on Monday night. The other thing that is not home yet is all our checked luggage. We had a very tight connection between our Entebbe, Uganda flight and our Nairobi, Kenya flight. Fortunately, we made it on the plane… unfortunately, our luggage didn’t. But the luggage is not lost, it will just be delayed getting to us. Mark, Karyn, Esther and Nick arrived around midnight on Sunday/Monday and we were picked up at the airport by our pastor (thanks Geoff!). We were so thankful to finally walk up the stairs to our apartment, only to discover that both locks on the apartment door had been locked and we only had one of the keys! Our neighbor had placed some mail in the apartment and had dutifully locked everything up. We were beginning to think we would have to sleep in the hallway until the office opened (it was almost 3 a.m.), but we were able to call on our cell phone to our neighbor’s phone and leave a message. Fortunately for us she heard the phone and woke up and she passed the extra keys out through her door (thanks Elizabeth!). We’ll be traveling up to the Newark airport tomorrow evening to rejoin the remainder of the team as they arrive home. We promise we’ll get more stories, details, photos, etc. up on the blog soon.

This is a view of the Yei River from the back of the CWEP compound where we stayed.
View of Yei River

The building with the bicycle in front is the kitchen. You can see where the women wash the dishes in the back.
kitchen

This is a view of the side of the church and some goats resting in the shade. This is the building where Karyn and Anna held the teacher workshop.
EPC church building Continue reading →

On the Way

Greetings from London! The team metup at Newark’s Liberty International Airport yesterday and begin the long trek to Yei, Sudan. We had a relatively uneventful first leg to London. The only hiccup (that we know of) is that half the team was able to check their baggage on through to their final destination (Entebbe, Uganda) and the other half wasn’t. It may have been new ticketcounter employee training day. There was no apparent reason for why some were allowed and others were denied (one agent said for security, another said, “no, that’s not true”). One other agent told part of our group that they had standby tickets for Kenya, but this was apparently not the code for standby, but the initials of someone who issued part of the ticket. Anyway, we were able to claim our luggage in London and will have to just check it on to Nairobi and Entebbe when we check in for our flight. The Virgin Atlantic flight was fine, but I think a quick survey of the team would find that we would give up the choice of 24 movies, dozens of TV shows, text-messaging on personal monitors between passengers, and the breakfast for a few more inches to spread out.

That may be why most of the team went to stretch their legs for a bit in London. We have a 10 hour layover, so everyone except Mark and Karyn (who chose to sleep and guard luggage for the day…albeit in the airport hotel) took the Tube (London Underground) and went off for a bit of exploring. Nick was thrilled to finally see the signs and hear the announcements to “Mind the Gap.”

We did get to have a team prayer time in the airport before starting out on the trip, and we are so thankful for all your thoughts and prayers for us. Our next leg will be the 8 and ½ hour trip to Nairobi, then a quick one hour jaunt to Entebbe, and then we meet the MAF pilot for our small plane trip to Yei. We won’t be able to get internet access again until we are in Yei. We will try to post some pictures as soon as we can.

Fractals, The Scriptures, and Infinity

I am so in favour of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author. Georg Cantor, 1845-1918

Fractals are awesome (too bad that adjective is so blunted by overuse and misuse). Sure they are beautiful and of course the fact that math is involved is intriquing to me. But the real reason I like fractals so much is because I can think of no better way to describe how I think about the universe and eternity. And today, as I was taking time to just “contemplate,” I came to the conclusion that a fractal also best describes my understanding of scripture.

“Whoa, back up!” some of you are saying. “Fractals? Is that some kind of crunchy new candy?” OK, Fractals 101.

  • Definition: “A fractal is a geometric object which can be divided into parts, each of which is similar to the original object. Fractals are said to possess infinite detail, and are generally self-similar and independent of scale. In many cases a fractal can be generated by a repeating pattern, typically a recursive or iterative process. The term fractal was coined in 1975 by Benoît Mandelbrot, from the Latin fractus or “broken” (full citation can be found here).
  • A great website for further exploration can be found here (really worth your time).
  • Here’s a nice explanation of self-similarity.

So what do fractals have to do with anything? For one, they are an easily accessible visual aid to the complex idea of infinity. One of the most amazing things to teach, I think, is astronomy. When you contemplate what you are really seeing when you look at the night sky it takes your breath away. With the naked eye you see the moon, constellations, planets. Zoom out… with binoculars or a telescope you can see more. And when you look at images from the Hubble telescope you are looking at stars and galaxies that are huge, old, distant, beautiful, and oh-so-numerous. A field of what looks like stars is really a field of entire galaxies. Kind of reminds me of the end of the movie Men in Black when the camera pans out from earth, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to a marble that contains the galaxy and is in the hands of some alien who is playing a game with it. I’m not interested in the alien aspect… I’ve just always been fascinated by the degrees of immensity. Now go the other way… zoom in to the earth, to the rocks, the minerals, the elements, the molecules, the atoms, the sub-atomic particles. But it is so hard to see the “big” picture of the universe and the “small” picture of the details all at the same time… except in a fractal! Looking at that one image I can keep going deeper and deeper and pondering the immensity of the created universe.

But just as amazing as that (or maybe even more so), is being able to look at scripture in the same way. For so long I looked at scripture far too linearly. I saw the history and the stories and prophesies. I memorized the Gospel accounts and looked for the symbols and types in the Old Testament and fulfillment in the New. That was good. But there is so much more. Just as a fractal is one whole that beautifully communicates a single equation, so the Scripture is one communication–a breaking into creation by God–with both a singleness and multiplicity. One story, unfolded in many iterations. Acted out over centuries, through many generations, cultures, languages, and individuals. Story upon story. But all part of the same one communication. God is breaking through to us to tell us about Himself. Using our own human context to speak to us, so that we can understand. It’s more beautiful and more amazing than a hundred thousand galaxies or the patterns repeated over and over in nature or the dancing movement of electrons and quarks and leptons. So fractals will be in my mind as I write my hermeneutics papers… telling one redemptive story, embedded in a bigger story, part of an entire progressive redemptive history culminating in the revelation of Jesus Christ. The pattern keeps revealing itself over and over, whether I zoom in to an individual story or zoom out to the big picture. Sometimes the beauty and majesty are hard to see in the black and white text, and so I keep a mental bookmark of a fractal image in my Bible to remind me of just how glorious and precious the book in my hands is.

It is Greek to me

Westminster places a high value on knowing the original languages of the Bible. There are 19 hours of Greek and Hebrew courses to be completed prior to beginning some of the biblical theology courses. Typically, incoming students spend the summer before their initial fall semester in an intensive Greek or Hebrew course. Basically, one month of language boot camp. The idea is to get a semester’s worth of vocabulary and grammar under your belt in one language before you begin the rest of your courses (and your second language!) The Greek course begins August 2nd–a week after we move. Mark will be ready to go, probably sitting in the first row. I, however, will be in Maine. Yes, due to the arrival of grandchild #4, I will not be able to attend that first Greek course. I will be helping out with Hannah’s homebirth experience and being Amm� to �va and the new little one (we don’t know if it is a girl or boy yet). There are priorities you know.

But I am not one to fall behind… so I have been studying Greek on my own and should finish the first semester material by the end of August. Just in time to take the placement test. The goal is to do well enough on the exam so that I “place” out of that first semester and can slide right into the next course alongside Mark. My life is currently filled with lots of little flash cards on a large keyring that travel everywhere with me. If I am stuck in traffic, out comes a card and I am looking at paradigms I haven’t memorized yet. When I drive to North Carolina to visit Sarah Joy (my oldest daughter) and her family, I have 3 hours of vocabulary on CD that I can listen to and repeat. This only works when I drive separately from Mark. He can’t quite get into the vocab repetitions yet. I’ve also found some great study guides and a listserv: B-Greek- The Biblcal Greek Mailing List.

It sounds like work, but really it’s just a big, fun puzzle. I love languages. I love writing systems. I love that I will have time to learn more. To see how languages work is beautiful. To understand the order (and chaos) is like appreciating a symphony. If Eric Liddell could say “When I run I feel [God’s] pleasure” then I say “When I study languages I am worshiping.” I am embracing the creative process of a God who communicates with us. Sure, I get some grief for wanting to learn Ugaritic. No one thinks it is practical. “What will you use it for?” I think it is a great misfortune when we believe that only that which is pragmatic is worth studying. Sure, I want to learn Greek and Hebrew to better understand the Bible, to read the OT and NT in their original languages and appreciate the fullness of what is being communicated. But I also want to just savor the language for itself. The language itself, not only what it communicates, reveals to me more of the character of God. And that’s worth all the flashcards and study time I can muster.