Over my head

My brain was aching yesterday as I edited several documents related to the Manual da Bíblia Hebraica (Handbook to the Hebrew Bible), published by Edições Vida Nova in Brazil. My job was to polish up the English in a descriptive preview of the book and in the sample translation of one of the chapters. Both of these documents will be sent to potential buyers of the English language rights. (This could be the first Vida Nova book to be sold for translation outside of Brazil!)

Hebrew is an unexplored frontier for me, so I was struggling to make sense of the references to Hebrew textual criticism and to the many related source documents which elucidate the text of the Hebrew Bible. I carefully stuck to the English grammatical questions, while at the same time hoping not to accidentally change the meaning of the material!

Today, an article on the web put my (mild) suffering into perspective, and even made me feel good about the process!

Mortimer Adler argues in "Invitation to the Pain of Learning" that true learning does not happen without painful effort. That's because learning is an "internal intellectual activity" that requires thinking, and thinking is hard work! (The locker room version: No Pain, No Gain.)

When I felt adrift in Hebrew studies technical jargon, I was learning. Adler explains it like this:

Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles.

Some of Adler's comments could well apply to our Bible study habits.

So, embrace the pain of learning. If smoke starts coming out of your head, take a break!

Unpredictable God

God is unpredictable!

That was one of the themes of the pastor's message last night at IBNU--Igreja Batista Nações Unidas, our home church. For example, God told Abraham to leave Ur and head for Canaan, where he would be blessed. When he arrived they threw a big party. Well, not exactly. Abraham's welcome to the Promised Land was a severe famine, which forced him to move to Egypt! How's that for unpredictability! What's going on, God?

In the 21st century, God continues to surprise us.

We just received an email from Gary Bennett, a WorldVenture colleague in Rwanda, East Africa. He is working with an international team from Engineering Ministries International to design several buildings in Rwanda. Gary told us that one of the engineers is a Brazilian, Suellen Maia, from São Paulo. She is a 24-year-old architecture student and helps with the youth ministry at her church here. Suellen has also served as a translator for the Promifé evangelism project, and lives just a few short blocks from our home!

Now, I would like to say that we set up this whole connection, but that would not be true. We had nothing to do with it. We can only admire God's unpredictability as he uses believers in creative ways to build his kingdom around the world!

(The photos show Suellen in her 6-month Africa mission experience.)

Economy dampens Sao Paulo's birthday bash

There will be no giant cake today for Sao Paulo's birthday celebration.


The traditional cake, which measures one meter for each year of the city's age, would have been 455 meters (five football fields) long this year. But sponsors were unwilling to fork over almost US$100,000 to make the massive treat. It's one more sign that tremors from the worldwide economic earthquake are shaking Brazil.

Shortly after hearing this news, I happened across John Piper's comments on the economic downturn (see video below). He suggests that hardship has the potential of drawing us closer to God, more than prosperity. And much more is at issue than 500 yards of cake!

For me, as a missionary, the question boils down to this: Do I want more funding or do I want more faith? Maybe those gifts are not mutually exclusive, but one thing is certain--without repentance and life-changing faith in Jesus, all the funding in the world will not make an eternal difference.

John Piper on the economic downturn

The uniqueness of books

So what's the big deal about books? Brazilian writer Jorge Luis Borges gives us a hint.

Among the instruments invented by man,
the most impressive is, without a doubt, the book.
Other inventions are extensions of our bodies.
The microscope and telescope are extensions of our vision.
The telephone is an extension of our voice,
and finally we have the plow and the sword, extensions of our arms.
The book, however, is something else.
The book is an extension of our memory and our imagination.

Is it any wonder, then, that God's Word has come to us in the form of a book?

Christmas in Brazil

In Brazil, as in the United States, Christmas is a time for family reunions. Here, Alan (left) reconnects with two cousins: Tony and Nelsinho.

Below, Lalia (right) chats with her sister-in-law, Rosa.

Extreme makeover: A baby changes everything

Thanks to Marie Foote, fellow WorldVenture missionary, for a reminder of how babies break into our life story, and of how a certain baby changed history.

Marie's insightful comments can be found on her Facebook profile.

Marie, in turn, was inspired by singer Faith Hill's song, "A Baby Changes Everything."

My inspiration comes from a variety of sources. Every Christmas season I try to reread Philip Yancey's "Birth: The Visited Planet," from one of his best books, The Jesus I Never Knew. (You can find most of this chapter and more at Google Books.) Yancey contrasts the cheeriness of our Christmas greeting cards with "the starkness of the Gospels."

We get a Herod's-eye-view of the first Christmas when Yancey quotes a vivid W. H. Auden:

Today has been one of those perfect winter days, cold, brilliant, and utterly still, when the bark of a shepherd's dog carries for miles, and the great wild mountains come up quite close to the city walls, and the mind feels intensely awake, and this evening as I stand at this window high up in the citadel there is nothing in the whole magnificent panorama of plain and mountains to indicate that the Empire is threatened by a danger more dreadful than any invasion of Tartar on racing camels or conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard...
O dear, Why couldn't this wretched infant be born somewhere else?

Yancey jolts his readers with another startling paradigm shift:

"'God is great,' the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men," writes Father Neville Figgis. "That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man." The God who roared, who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenage couple for shelter, food, and love.

Another book that Lalia and I are reading through again this year is The Handel's Messiah Family Advent Reader. It has 28 readings which cover each day of the four weeks of Advent. Each reading is accompanied by a musical selection from Handel's Messiah, on a CD included with the book.

Yesterday's reading about swaddling clothes was an eye-opener:

Everywhere, parents swaddled their babies because they loved them and wanted to protect them. Swaddling is a loving act, but it also means to tie up, control, hold down, restrict, and restrain. And... can you imagine? God was swaddled!

If swaddling clothes were so common, why did the angel mention them to the shepherds? Our theory goes something like this: If the shepherds were merely looking for a baby in a manger, they might think that it was an abandoned child. But the detail of the swaddling cloths told them that someone loved the baby and was taking care of him, in spite of the spartan conditions in which he would be found.

We challenge you to take some time this month to escape the ubiquitous year-end craziness and recapture the wonder of the incarnation.

25 years and counting

One third of a lifetime ago I arrived in Brazil, wet behind the ears, terrified.

I didn’t speak Portuguese, and didn’t know if I could learn. Not being a pastor, I was an atypical missionary. Would I be accepted? Could I do the job? Would my rigid Scandinavian worldview flex to the exuberant Brazilian heartbeat?

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Twenty-five years ago I would have read that verse and told you about my goals for the future. Today I see that “the things hoped for” are not about my pet projects, but about what God plans to accomplish in me! “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

Incredible! God says that faith is about drawing near to him. What about all the important stuff that I do every day? Extraneous at best.

How, then, do I write my 25-year report? In fear—that all of the stuff I have done is the only thing I have to show to God and to our steady ministry partners. In that spirit, Lalia and I send Christmas joy and thanks to all of you.

(In the photo above, Richard Sturz, right, wraps 25 years into 5 minutes at a celebration of Curt’s time with WorldVenture in Brazil.)

Intuition, wisdom and beauty. From left to right, Lucimar Davis, Jennifer Kierstead, Karen Sipes, Lalia Kregness, Mirian Sturz, Corine Thorp and Lois McKinney. At a recent WorldVenture fellowship near São Paulo.