Weller’s Whereabouts

Saying Aloha to Maui

Mon, 7 Jul 2008 01:07:41 +0100

I love Mie

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:00:35 +0100

Just so you know... mie is pronounced like “me” and it means noodles in Bahasa Indonesia. So if you ask someone if you love mie (‘me’) you can have fun playing with the words...

My journey next found me back in Borneo, where I got to go on my DTS outreach as a student. I almost didn’t make it on the plane out of Beijing, but the Lord knew what He was doing and made sure to get me back to Kuching safely and smoothly. This was my fourth time back to this island and I count it a blessing every time.

I stayed overnight with Frank and Belinda, a couple who so graciously continue to bless and serve our teams that come through to the island. After one night, I got in a van and headed to the Indonesian border. I was greeted by Paulus, an Indonesian man from Timor who is just over 50 years old. He is one of our translators. we went back to his house where I met the outreach leaders. They had arrived the night before and just finished their time away from the team. A little later that afternoon the team arrived from another town and they were excited to see their leaders again and surprised to see their school leader as well.

During my time with the team we stayed in Balai Karangan and went to three villages in five days. The team did dramas, shared testimonies, went on house visits and taught at the churches and house churches. They are all doing so well and I am sure that I left being more encouraged than I was able to encourage them. They have pressed in through many illnesses and poor living conditions and endured many hardships for the sake of the gospel. I am so proud of them.

I think my favourite part of my time in Borneo was getting to slip right into the team dynamic. I really felt at home and welcomed into the team and had such a great time building friendships with them. It was so nice to relax a bit, not have much responsibility and just enjoy relationships. I also got to reconnect with all my INdonesian friends and speak Indonesian again. Such a blessing! I love the people out there and pray that the Lord will allow me back there as much as possible throughout my life.

One of the most random nights of my time out there was on a Saturday night. The team had helped to bring rocks and gravel from the river to the church in the morning, in order to help build the new church. I spent the day fasting and preparing teachings for my return to Maui and speaking in the Summer DTS as well as for the following morning at church. In the afternoon we went on a few house visits to the five families that are Christians in the village and then we had a house church service. After it was over, we planned to have a suprise graduation party for on eof the students. She graduated high school early to come to DTS and that day was her official high school graduation ceremony back at home.

Unbeknownst to us, it was the same night as the village harvest festival party, so after church we went o the public hall where the entire village was gathered. We joined them and shared in their celebration of the harvest. In the midst of all this, I was called to the front and I had no idea why. Once I got up there, I was asked to share about the way we celebrate the harvest in America. So I got to share about the Thanksgiving story, which I had thankfully just read all about in the month before I came on my trip. The Lord provides! It was so unexpected but it was great t share about how the Lord blessed some of the early settlers in America.

After that, we had a drink of their rice wine and danced to some techno, traditional dance music and then more techno. This went on for about 30 minutes before we were able to leave and head back to the house we were staying at. Once we were back and had finished laughing about what had just happened, we threw a surprise graduation ceremony and party for Lauren. I got to officiate the event, naturally. We are some snacks and then put up our mosquito nets and went to bed. The next morning I got to preach for the last time in Indonesia for a while.

It really was such a blessing to be back in Indonesia and enjoy so many sweet relationships. The Lord is definitely into relationships and connecting people all over the world. I think that has been the main thing for me on this whole trip... relationships. I had a crazy time getting out to Ch.na, but got to meet up with more friends than expected and even while in Ch.na I made so many new friends. Since being in Borneo I got to reconnect with old friends and make new ones and even here in Taiwan while I was waiting to come to the hotel I got to meet and chat with a few people and here a bit of there stories. I love it! I am sad to say good bye to such good friends in Indonesia, but I can’t wait to come back again with my wife in the future! As I sat in Kuala Lumpur, waiting to get on my plane back to Hawaii, I realized that I am leaving this last time in Asia very thankful and satisfied with the past few weeks. I’ve spent about 3 1/2 weeks out here and it’s been amazing. I am also even more exited to get home, move to Scotland and marry Ruth in two months! My only regret through all this has been my inability to see the Nepal team and the Fiji team.

Please continue to pray for the nation of Indonesia. It is the largest Muslim nation in the world and persecution of Christians is still a very real threat. Thankfully, persecution isn’t as strong in Borneo, but there is still a need to take precautions when sharing the gospel and traveling about. pray that the Spirit of God would come upon the Church and stir up a deep passion to know Him and to spread the gospel powerfully throughout the islands of Indonesia. The Indonesian people are incredible and so hospitable and generous. The Lord is longing to be worshipped and glorified in every tongue and culture. Pray that He would be worshipped and glorified through INdonesia. Pray for the unity of the Christian Church as it remains very divided because of small offenses between pastors and denominations, and thus the Church is fairly ineffective in reaching people. Pray for humility in the churches and love to abound throughout the believers, along with the boldness to preach the gospel, no matter what the cost.

Oriental Blessing

Mon, 26 May 2008 06:00:23 +0100

The purpose of my trip to Ch.na was two-fold: to teach for a week in the D school and to visit and encourage our outreach team there. My original plan for the trip was to teach for a week and connect with the outreach leaders (they would leave the team for a week and meet up with me in D-lian) and then hang out with the team for a week. The Lord would have other plans however, and it seems that He thought it best to delay my departure so that I wold be speaking in the D school and visiting with the team all at once. Since this was the case, I didn’t get as much time as I had hoped to get to be with the team. Nonetheless, it was a great time to encourage them as well as be encouraged by them.

Teaching in the school went well. The school ran in a 3 story house, which was quite nice. Everyone lived in the house and lecture took place on the second floor. It was a new experience to have dual translators, simultaneously translating. I spoke on Basic Christianity and we took a look at more of the foundational aspects of our faith, specifically in regards to doctrine. We discussed the importance of building solid foundations in our walk with God, the nature and character of God being both infinite and personal, Jesus being fully God, fully man, a king, a prophet and a priest and we also talked about sin and salvation a bit more in depth than we usually do. The week finished up with discussing the biblical basis for the Trinity and then we had a Q & A time together. The school consisted of 18 students and a handful of staff. Some of the students were 50 year old pastors from Korea, living as missionaries in Ch.na. Others were 18,19 and 20 year olds from Ch.na and Korea. There was also a young ch.nese couple, recently married, named Jack and Lydia. They are planning to attend Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary in Dallas later this year, which would be great! THere was even one student from n0rth Korea in the school.

Admittedly, it was a bit intimidating to teach people who have gone to school longer than me, have much more life experience than me, and live in a country that experiences very real persecution for their faith. Who was I to go in there and pretend like I had something to teach them? I should be the one learning from them! However, I knew that the Lord opened the door for me to go and that it was on His heart for me to teach, so I trusted that He did have something for me to give to these students. It was such a privilege and honor to have the opportunity to meet so many new friends in Ch.na and get to pour into the church over there and to be a part of pouring into n0rth Korea as well. I truly am thankful for such an honor to be out there.

One of the highlights from the week was right as I was about to begin teaching on Thursday morning. There was a knock on the door and it was a police officer. THis was the 2nd time a police officer showed up, so this was a very bad thing. The Koreans went upstairs to their rooms, the N. Korean hid under a bed (if she was caught she would be sent back to her country and spend the rest of her life in jail and/or be executed) and the rest of the Ch.nese students put away the extra chairs and the lecture turned into an english lesson. So Jack and I began teaching English for about 20 minutes, until the police officer left and the base director came upstairs to tell us what was going on.

The conversation initially started off with the officer being upset that there were still so many foreigners there at the house (the security guard to the housing complex tipped him off) but in the end the Lord turned it all around and the officer wound up leaving much more pleased and excited that this “cultural exchange center” was here to help Ch.na and the base director even offered to teach the police english! God truly does work all things out for the good of those who love HIm and are called according to His purposes (Romans 8:28).

Along with teaching in the D school, I had the privilege of speaking at a mini-D school for University students (in English) for several hours on a sunday evening and I got to be the guest speaker on the commissioning night for the first D-school in D-lian. What an honor to help send these missionaries out into China, Vietnam, Cambodia and North Korea and focusing on reaching out to the Jews and the Muslims in those countries as well!

The team got to plug in and do a few dramas and start to build relationships and teach while I was there as well. Along with our team, there was a team from Finland (representing Finland, Germany Holland, Australia, Canada, America and the Philippines) and a Korean D-school from Honolulu. We all had a great time building relationships and worshipping all together in so many different cultures and languages. In a day and age where so many people long for unity, peace and love, we see that it is only possible when Jesus is the center of everything.

Our team had just come out of 5 1/2 weeks in the villages teaching English, building relationships and doing a lot of intercession. COming to D-lian was a bit of a shock as they saw so many people driving Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Ford and even Lexus and Hummer luxury cars around town at three times the cost in America! D-lian is one of the wealthiest cities in all of China and is only 3 hours away from the North Korean border and 15 hours from the Russian border. Many people speak English there, which presents a great opportunity for the team to build relationships and even teach in English.

They have been doing so well on outreach and really pressing into all that the Lord has for them. It has been difficult for them and they’ve gone through many physical challenges and illnesses, but they are very excited to be in this town for a month and finally get to teach, preach and share the gospel even. PLease continue to pray for the gospel to be shared boldly in this country and that its doors and hearts would open up to Christianity and that as it emreges as the next world super power, it would be a nation passionately in love with Jesus and making HIm known to the rest of the world. Pray for these amazing D-school missionaries whoa re out on outreach making an impact int heir own nations. Pray for the finances to get them out to Cambodia and Vietnam as well. Pray for the base in D-lian, that the Lord would continue to bless them, increase their vision, favor and resources, while keeping them focused on Jesus and falling more in love with Him.

Flying Adventures

Thu, 15 May 2008 05:21:22 +0100

“Man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps,” Proverbs 16:9

This scripture could not ringing any truer during my trip out to visit the teams. Ten days before I was supposed to travel to Asia, I had to go to Honolulu for an appointment regarding my UK visa application and then send my passport away to get processed in Los Angeles. It normally takes about 5 days to process the application and on the fifth day I received a call from one of the ladies at the British Consulate telling me that I still needed a few more documents for her to approve my visa. She told me that she would get back to me to let me know what I still needed to send her. The following day, having not heard from her yet, I called back, got a list of documents that I still needed, phoned up Scotland at 10pm their time and had Ruth and her mom try and track down some of what I still needed to get them to fax over a copy of those forms. This was a Wednesday and I was supposed to leave on Friday, two days later.
At this point I had to phone up our travel agent and ask him to reschedule my flights for the following Tuesday, hoping that my passport would be back in time. I was scheduled to teach in a DTS in a “restricted-access” country on the following monday, so I also had to get in touch with them to see if they could reschedule my week or let me speak just a half week. Thankfully, they were able to switch the following week and my week, so I would still have a full week of teaching with the school.
Friday morning I received a call from the British Embassy telling me that my visa had been approved and was being shipped back to me. I spent much time praying that it would return by monday so I could leave on Tuesday. At this point I had a choice: I could either be upset and wish I was in Asia all weekend like I originally thought I would be and not enjoy the weekend, or I could choose to ask the Lord what He was up to and to trust that He knew what was best for me. I thought what was best for me was to be in Asia that weekend and beginning to teach, the Lord knew what was best was for me to hang back in Maui a few extra days.
That night a few of us on base bought some Ahi steaks and had quite a good meal together, I got to talk to Ruth on the phone one more time than expected, I got to see my friend Will who was my outreach leader in DTS since he was speaking the following week in SBFM and I got to go to church one more time, play drums, and enjoy fellowship with everyone there. All those events were unexpected blessings that the Lord knew was better for me to enjoy than being on a plane at that time.

Monday morning came around and then the afternoon came around... no passport. I was just on my way into the office to phone up our travel agent before he left his office to ask him to reschedule my flights, again. On my way there, the UPS truck pulled up and with it, my passport! Praise the Lord for that! So I finished packing, knowing now that I would indeed be traveling out on Tuesday morning. I said goodbye to people after dinner and went to bed in preparation for the next day of traveling.
Tuesday morning found me at the Maui airport waiting for my flight to arrive so I could fly to Honolulu. The plane coming from Honolulu had a tire problem and so we were delayed an hour. Because of this, I missed my flight from Honolulu to Tokyo, Japan. I had to pay an extra $100 to fly out the next day since China Airlines only flies out once a day from Honolulu. Now I was faced with another choice: I could get upset because I now had to wait longer to get out to Asia and had to pay more money and miss out on what God would have for me that day, or I could ask the Lord, “Okay, I thought I was supposed to be on the plane today, but apparently You have different plans. What do You have for me today, Lord?”
I called up some people at the YWAM base in Honolulu and wound up staying over there for the day and night. The DTS director over there had just returned from visiting their teams in India and Thailand about an hour before I called, but when I arrived at the base I got to go out to lunch with him and my other friend Dan who was speaking over there for a couple days. I didn’t know when the next time I would see Dan would be, since I am moving to Scotland, but the Lord knew what was best for me. The three of us went out to lunch and then took Dan back to the airport since he was leaving. I had about a 45 minute window to see him, and the Lord worked it out and delayed a plane in Honolulu so I could have lunch with Dan, and then spend more time getting to know some of the other people in Honolulu and have an extra night in a bed by myself! It was quite a blessing.
The next morning I returned to the Honolulu airport, this time determined that I would indeed get on a plane and make it out to Ch!na. I got to see the nice ladies at the China Airlines counter again, check in and go to the gate. I was even more expectant of what the Lord had for me on this plane ride, since it was apparent that I was supposed to be on this plane and not the one the previous friday or even the day before. I don’t normally get into great conversations on the plane, but this time I was eager to find out who I was sitting next to since obviously I was supposed to be on this plane and no others. When I got on the plane I found myself in an aisle seat in row 16, with no one next to me. I figured that this was just an added blessing to enjoy some extra leg space for once! Thank you Jesus for that. The plane had a personal TV, so I got to catch up on some movies and after about 8 hrs of watching movies, we started our descent into Japan. About this time, some people started to stand up and put a few things away into the overhead compartment. I looked up and about 8 rows ahead of me, on the other side of the plane, was our old DTS Director in Maui, Andy Byrd!
I called out his name, got his attention and we were both shocked to not only see each other on the same plane, but also the fact that we had been about 20 feet away from one another for the past 8 hrs and hadn’t noticed one another! So we got to catch up a bit, which was a huge blessing and then pray together once we got in the Tokyo Airport. I also didn’t know when the next time I would see Andy again since I am moving to Scotland, but the Lord also worked it out for me to connect with him and for us to be encouraged and pray together as well, and on a plane to Japan of all places!
Since all of my plane tickets said May 9 or 10 on them, and it was now May 13 and 14, every time I stopped I had to go to the airline counters and see if I could get on the next flights. I managed to get on my next flight to Beij!ng but I didn’t know if I would make the next flight to D-lian. Once I got to the next airport, I had to find my way around and try to get on the flight I was supposed to, since I had friends picking me up at the airport in the next city.The flight I was supposed to be on was full, but they managed to get me on another flight about an hour and a half later, which I was grateful for, even if it did prolong my trip again. So they hand wrote the change on my ticket and told me the time of my next flight. I had to get on a free shuttle and drive to the older terminal at the airport and then walk 10 mins with my bags to the terminal area to check in. The people behind the previous counter managed to tell me the right time of my next flight, but wrote in the wrong flight information, so when I went to check in the person behind the counter told me my ticket was for a different airline. I couldn’t believe it, I knew I was supposed to be on that specific flight, so the agent behind the counter asked his manager and he said it was okay for me to travel on the flight I needed to be on. After that I tried to get through security and since my boarding pass didn’t match the info on my ticket, it took another bit of explaining in broken english to get me through security and into the gate I needed to be at. At this point I realized that I hadn’t exchanged any money and had no way of getting in touch with the people who were supposed to pick me up and let them know I was on a later flight. So I just prayed that they would still be there when I arrived.
I arrived in D-lian at about 1130pm. There was no one there to pick me up. Most of the sstores were closed and I could exchange any more money. I had the name of the hotel I was supposed to stay at written down on a piece of scrap paper, took out money at an ATM (I had no idea what the exchange rate was, so I thought 500 in multiples of 100 sounded good...) and tried to get a ride to this hotel. The mini-bus driver looked like he had no idea where he was going, so I thought, “Great, I make it all the way out here and now its nearly midnight in a country I’ve never been to before, where I can’t speak the language, and my one hope of finding someone I know is to make it to this hotel and this guy is lost...” Thankfully, he wasn’t completely lost and I managed to find the hotel and get in touch with my friend who I was staying with, who was quite surprised to hear my voice on the phone at the hotel lobby. I was quite grateful for him to come down and bring me up to the room.
So despite all the plans I made in my mind and heart, the Lord knew what was best for me and not only allowed me to connect with good friends that I wasn’t expecting to, but also sent me on a bit of adventure through it all and reminded me of how much He is in control and not me. Once I arrived at the hotel everything worked out fine for the week and you can read about my time there in another blog.

Airplane Thoughts

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:56:44 +0100

This is just a wee transcription of some of my journaling as I was leaving Thailand and heading home the other day:

I've finished Francis Schaeffer's Trilogy while being out here, so my mind has been challenged and I've thought through and processed a fair amount of what he has been communicating his books. He has a lot of good hings to say. The Trilogy lays a foundation for the rest of his books. Now he could go much more in depth in his discussion of the progression of thoughts from Greek philosophy to today- post-modern, irrational man- but the overview he takes his reader through lays the groundwork for further discussion in his later books.
His general layout is as follows:
Philosophy|
|__Arts|
|__Music|
|__General Culture|
|__Theology

This is the progression of how ideas infiltrate culture. He would say that Kierkegaard, with the help of Karl Barth and Immanuel Kant, pushed the theological culture into existentialism, but the birth pangs were mainly felt by Jean-Paul Sarte in the "secular" world. He refers to this final "jump" into irrationality as the jump after the line of despair. Rational thought could only take men so far and when they came up bankrupt and devoid of meaning, purpose, knowledge of truth, morality, etc. the only answer they could come up with at this point of despair, was to just believe for the sake of believing.

Personal Infinite
-------------God------------
__________
Man | Man
________________________________| Nature
Nature Machine
Machine Creation
Creation

This is the chasm we face. Only God is infinite, but man is unique in the fact that he was also created in the image of God and this is personal, or he has personality. Man is unique compared to the rest of creation in regards to being personal, but on the same level in regards to his finiteness.
The traditional tension has always been between:

Grace___
Nature [man/nature}
The Judeo-Christian tradition is comfortable with this tension and diversity and finds unity in the two as God created nature and is the ultimate, un-created One who has always and will always, existed. God gives us this revelation and though creation is good, but fallen, we can have unity on both sides of this line.
As man grew more autonomous and his thinking began to change (starting in many ways with Thomas Aquinas and his incomplete view of the fall [mind is still good and we can use it to figure God out] and mixing of theology with classical Greek thought and literature), nature began taking a more prominent view. This began as man recognized nature as good and part of God’s creation and we can enjoy it, but soon nature began to take on an equal to man:
Grace____
Nature [man-nature]

As this progressed, man started to close the system and God became distant (Deism) and uninvolved in our day to day lives. This quickly led into not need God at all and nature became the absolute (naturalism). As nature and man (man at the top of nature [humanism]) took center stage, they became autonomous from God. Whenever this happens, nature “eats up” grace, as Schaeffer points out. If God isn’t absolute any longer, we still “need” something higher than ourselves. Thoughts began changing. “Freedom” began to replace “grace” as the highest goal:

Freedom
Nature- man’s ability to think used to KNOW

This expanded the chasm even more and prepared the way for modern existentialism. Reason was bound up in the lower-story part. Man’s ability to reason and use rational thought was part of nature, and we begin to see non-reason take on the characteristics of the upper story. As man continued to look to his own ability to take thought and use reason as his epistemological base, he quickly began to see that this was not sufficient to provide a solid base. If man’s ability to reason wasn’t sufficient in itself, then true freedom most come from somewhere else:

Non-reason
Reason

This opened the door for Sarte, Kierkegaard, Barth and Kant (among others) to make their irrational jump into non-reason. This came at the heels of men like Heidegger and Hegel changing the entire way of thinking away from antithesis to synthesis. It used to be that “O” represented a system of thought as a whole, a unity. When someone found this lacking, they would cross it out “Ø” and start over with a new “O”, or a new system. “O” represented a unity of a thought system, everything that can be known. This would continue on and on and on, grounded in antithetical thinking that if A, then A is not non-A. So we see this:

Ø Ø Ø Ø Ø Ø Ø O

Hegel, followed by Heidegger, blasted this away and introduced the idea of dialectical synthesis. The previous way of using antithetical thinking used the idea of Thesis (T) and Antithesis (A). Hegel proposed that instead of starting over (as he saw that within this closed-system universe there will never be an adequate system of thought encompassed in an “O”) he saw the answer lies in a synthesis (S) of T and A. It’s not either T or A, but an arbitrary combination, or synthesis, of both T and A:

S
|
T-----A
This goes on and on as the synthesis becomes the new thesis, etc. Marx and Engels applied this epistemological structure to the realm of society, politics and economics and birthed what we know today as Marxism, carried out in the form of Maxist-Leninist Socialism (typically categorized as a more violent attempt of reaching pure communism) and Fabian Socialism (popularly defined as reaching the same goal- a classless, utopian society or community- but the attempt to achieve this is a bit more diplomatic than it’s counterpart).
This dialectical thinking then paved the way for relativism and the total absolvement of truth. Kierkegaard and his company wouldn’t have been able to take hold and shift thought, had there not been Hegel or Heidegger. Since there was no longer any foundation for truth and we were only left with arbitrary, relativistic synthesis (which is where REASON brought us), our only hope to find truth, purpose and meaning was to make the “leap of faith” into the area of non-reason and irrationality. Thus, existentialism. Life has no inherent meaning, so we must create our own meaning. How we do this, is the process which tkes us from Kierkegaard (Freud, Jung, Jaspers, etc all give us more detail in what specifically brings meaning, along with Cage, Leary, Alduous Huxley, etc) towards our current “post-modern” trend towards mysticism, which is even more irrational thought.

This is just some thoughts on the plane and so I am sure I am off on some of this and open to correction. I also had the opportunity to process some more of this while I was still Thailand, so hopefully I will be able to take some more time now that I am home to clean up the thoughts and present it in a more coherent form.