The Ultra Mondo Update

Howdy hey!

This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but the internet cafe was closed last night. Greeks are significantly more lax over store hours compared to North Americans. They have a four siesta from 2 until 6 when everything is closed, and the rest of the time is hit or miss. I'm sure it would be significantly more predictable during tourist season, but nevertheless.

It really feels like forever since I’ve sat down to hack out a solid post, time feels quite odd here. It’s similar to a couple weeks at camp, but different than even that. I’m currently borrowing James’ (one of the guys in the room next door) laptop to type this up, so I don’t have to pay for typing time. I’m not doing the condensed uncondensed thing this time around, if I had been posting more frequently with substance I might, but I haven’t been.

I can’t tell anyone who hasn’t done something like this before how freaking ultra it is, it’s incredible. I’m on spiritual overload at the moment and I love it. We’re being taught an incredible amount in very short periods of time, and it’s nothing like school. As soon as a lecture is done, we head off to try and work at it. It’s kind of hard to explain, but for those of you who go to church regularly, there are always some Sundays where the message hits like an elephant and it sticks to the center of your soul like syrup. We have three of these (sometimes four) crammed into 5 hours, 4 days a week. It’s insane and there’s no way to possibly process it all normally. I’m taking tons and tons of notes, cause this is crackers and cheese for the rest of my life. It’s so wicked.

This week we had Hans Peter Royer, the director of the school in Austria as our speaker. He is incredible. We’ve heard him talk for about 11 or 12 hours so far this week, and every minute of it has been amazing. I would go the Taurenof school there just to hear him to speak. He has tied everything that’s been running through my head for the past two years together into one giant knot of awesome insanity.

God has this very cool way of tying everything together and making it all a chain link fence. On the first or second night we all sat down and made an outline for where we were spiritually at the moment, and what we want to learn and our general objectives for the next two and a half months. Mine was a giant smorgasborg of arrows, words and pictures all connected to truly understanding humility and acting it out, and sticking myself and everything tied to me entirely in the clouds. It’s been two weeks and already a lot of the arrows I remember drawing connect to arrows in my notes. I can’t wait to look through it all at the end.

Each of us is responsible for creating a twenty minute devotion once during the program. It was my turn last Thursday, so I followed what I had been mulling over and talked about humility through our everyday interactions. I used a blank piece of canvas as a metaphor for a usual conversation, with dominating, proud etc (the usual anti-humble adjectives) people (myself more often than not unfortunately) using big fat brushes to cover as much of the space with as much paint as possible. Generally humble people use a small brush in comparison and paint a more beautiful picture. A cheesy comparison on paper, but I filled it out with typically Geordan antics and such. I had originally come up with a slightly less clear (but ever so clear in my mind) image of giant wooden spheres with hidden tapestries inside, but Christine (the lady who helps us out with our devotions) thought (/knew – it always takes someone else to tell you you’re a nut drawer) it would be too hard to make people understand. The painting thing worked out quite well in the end.

Anyways, why I’m saying that all, is that me working through the devotion and hunting through scripture for the right references and stuff was just an alley-oop (white man spelling I know, don’t correct me) for the rest of the lectures that day. God (without the speakers even knowing) tied everything to what I had said that morning, right down to using the same scripture. It was so cool, and it seems to happen more often than not. Every day or two days seems to have a theme attached to it, all wildly attached with arrows in the sweet notebook victor gave me. The overarching God plans that keep popping out in lectures, interactions with people during the, and other seemingly random experiences, are incredibly wicked.

There’s so much to work through, I’m having a tough time keeping track of it all. I’m learning so much, and because we are a concentrated group of people living together for nearly one hundred percent of two more months, we all have a very wicked way to practice some of the things that we’re learning. Humility and the throwing away of all things related to me are what I’ve been working at the most, and it’s so so so hard. I suck at it so much, and catch myself being my usual self-centered self far more than I see me being like the Essence of Ultimate Sweetness.

Solitude is probably the most valuable thing we have here. There are planned activities every single afternoon, but they are optional. We have work projects some afternoons, and we start outreach stuff with a church in a town a ways away from here next week, but we have the four hours in between lunch and dinner to do whatever we want. We have to get a prescribed amount of exercise each week, and there are papers to write and Bible verses to memorize, but there is still plenty of time for some solid solitude. We’re having so much thrown at us in the mornings (especially this week – Hans Peter is insanity) that there’s no way to actually work it over without a chunk of time by yourself, so I’m glad that they give us time. Twice a week we’ll have our small groups (we are about 35 students split into three groups) where one person will tell their life story then someone will lead a bible study. We’re working through the two Timothy’s in our group. Our group is pretty solid for the most part.

Each group is headed up by a leader (or RA – I don’t know what it stands for) who sticks with us for a lot of the activities. Our leader James (there are two James’s ((how does that work? James’? James’s? Jameses? Jamesesesesssses? ) grew up as a missionary kid in Bolivia, had more or less a falling out with Christianity and such after high school, ended up in Wheaton Bible College after floating a while, then did over a year leading wilderness programs with Juvenile ruckus starters. He has some thoroughly amazing stories that came out of that. It was a state program (forget which state) but it would always turn out that by the end of the month or so (I think it was that long for one session) he would always be reading the bible every night before bed to juvie thugs who had never heard a word of it in their lives. He has some pretty wicked stories.

Breakfast is optional and there is no curfew, which is awesome. This school just because it’s only 7 or 8 years old is not nearly as strict as the other Torchbearers schools are, which is nice. Basic rules are kept in place quite firmly, but trivial things aren’t enforced as much. There aren’t very many staff here, The director and his wife don’t spend a great deal of time on campus, but Theo always leads us on our out trips and he teaches a number of lectures as well. The head cook and his wife are kind of the caretakers of the building (which is rented out from a camp that is run during the summer) and they are both 25 and from Seattle. There’s another administrator, Marita, who’s from Austria and does some of our lectures. There are three assistant cooks and three leaders. Definitely a small staff, but there don’t need to be more either.

I’ve settled into a more stable diet than the first week and a half (all of us guys gorged at the super market and had regular self made unhealthy meals at regular intervals) and the food has gotten progressively more tasty as well. All of the salad is doused in balsamic vinegar, and the cooks always seem to forget my pleas for sweet plains greens, but that’s fine. The head cook, Ross (he’s twenty five), is the closest thing to a professional comedian ever – he’s one of the funniest men in the universe. He looks like a velociraptor and says the most retarded things I’ve ever heard. It’s wicked. He probably spends more time laughing hysterically at his own jokes than actually telling them, but it’s infectious. He sounds sort of like Dane Cook, and apparently spends a great deal of time listening to him as well.

We bought some airsoft pistols a week and a bit ago, but out of the four we bought, only mine is working now. We’re gonna go buy some more on Saturday hopefully. There are twelve guys here in four rooms, and about 23 girls. Out of the guys there are 3 other guys just as interested in becoming secret agents as myself. We’ve spent plenty of time climbing around and rappelling off balconies and such, it’s wicked. We can use the harnesses and ropes whenever we want.

It snowed here two days ago -it was quite a storm. There was lots of wind and rushing snow flying through all the corridors and such. Everything is icy and really cold, but it’s starting to warm up today.

The bad weather came a couple days ago, so Dan and I went out to run along the monster waves that looked like they should be warm but most definitely weren’t. I ended up going in with my clothes on – when you reach a certain level of wetness it doesn’t really matter anymore. We all went in as a big group later that afternoon - it was wicked.

Because of the bad weather, the mountain tour we were going to go on tomorrow has been cancelled, so Theo is covering train tickets to Thessalonica for us. I’ll be buying some proper hiking pants and between us males we should be able to nab a healthy chunk of plastic firearm goodness.

The coolest part about traveling is realizing your mistakes so you don’t make them again.

Mistake 1: I left my freaking 50mm f1.8 lens at home. It’s tiny and I’m a retard for not bringing it.

Mistake 2: I should have invested in some proper pants. I couldn’t justify $60 pants from MEC, but I’ll be buying some lightweight quick dry pants tomorrow.

Mistake 3: I should have bought a sturdier camera bag than the one I bought. It does its job, but its not very rugged.

Mistake 4: Buy things that dry quickly! I didn’t put very much money at all into my clothes before I left, and I wish I had spent a little more on some attire from MEC.

Mistake 5: It’s not really a mistake seeing as they are quite expensive and I don’t need one, but a Powerbook (or a Macbook – dang those Intels look sweet) or anything else that could handle Photoshop would be nice just to work with photos while the ideas behind the picture are still fresh in my head. It was quite nice of James to let me use his for this regardless. I’ve dumped my 2 gigs of pictures on it as well and I’ll weed through them and burn a couple cds at some point.

Most of my regrets for how I allotted my money are in regards to my clothing. Just a few articles of synthetic quick drying clothes that don’t get smelly quickly would be wonderful. I have a loose fleece zip up and a zip up fleece vest, but that’s about it. For pants I have jeans, cords, and some bulky snow pants. Ah well, the camera generally tends to outweigh any issues with my day to day attire. I’m quite privileged to use such a fine instrument, and I’m still learning tons with every picture I take. I love it.

My iPod also broke a week and a bit ago, which smells. I went to bed with it, I woke up, and it didn’t play music and the screen was cracked in multiple places. I must have fallen asleep on it in a way that put pressure on the entire iPod squishing the screen against the components behind it (which is what usually happens with nano’s). Anyways, I’ve gotten in to play music with a few tricks (I have to reset it multiple times to turn it on), and I can’t see anything, but I just leave it on random which is fine. Apple will replace it when I get back, cause it’s a known problem with nano’s (the components behind the screen will crack the screen from inside if there’s pressure in the right areas) but I’m glad that it at least plays music now. I bought some 9 Euro speakers which end up all over the place.

I’ll keep putting more pictures of people in the program up, and I’ll post a picture of what our room looks like as well.

That was a buttload of typing (and even more reading) but I should have gotten some of the basics of what I’m doing out of the way earlier on. Ah well, post any questions and whatnot! Thanks for reading,

Word out.