I truly am independant

According to ontheissues.org I am this dot:

Collect All Four!

Two blog posts ago, I mentioned that I had been stolen from, conned, and had then had been robbed. I assumed that this meant that I finally had the complete collection. However, I forgot one: identity theft! I can now proudly say, I have collected all 4 specially marked thefts...

Last Saturday, I realized that I had not paid the school for the next week so I went to an ATM. Oddly enough, not one of the ATMs I went to were working. They all said that I had problems with my card. However, I knew that I had plenty in my account and it was telling the same thing to everyone else who tried to use the ATM that morning. This was even happening with ATMs from different companies. I wasn't able to withdraw anything but I paid with my card at a restaurant on Sunday and had no problems. On Monday, I went back to the ATM and all my money was there and I made a withdrawal without any problems whatsoever. After this, I put the situation out of my mind.

Thursday, a friend of mine told me that she went on Saturday too. Somehow, somebody used the machine (maybe a virus of some sort) and stole her number and was using it as a credit card. Her bank caught it and she didn't lose any money. However, it canceled her card so she no longer has money to live here in Guatemala.

I decided that maybe I should look at my account online...

I was $400 in the hole!!! I had over $400 the last time I checked. That means I lost over $800 dollars!!!!

Yeah.

Apparently they did the same with me but my bank did not catch it quite fast enough. There were a series of withdrawals made Monday morning after I made my withdrawal. however, they did eventually cancel my card. So now even if I had money in my account, I could not use it.

I am currently trying to work with my bank from afar, trying to figure out if I can get any of the money back. Please pray. Also, my family plans on visiting and bring a card or some money so I should be fine. Just pray that it will all work out and pray for anyone else who was a victim--tourists who would be stuck here, locals who would not have $800 to lose. There was even a little elderly Guatemalan lady in front of me in the line having the same problems. It was actually quite a large line.

A List of Some Things I Have Learned the Hard Way

Never eat sausage in foreign countries.

Don't walk near an open sewage gutter with 50 pounds of rice on your head.

If a ladder looks homemade and dangerous, don't climb it.

Don't skip class and go to the glass walled cafeteria while wearing a pleather trench coat and a unique hat.

Don't make fun of professors' sons who have passed away because they were wearing short shorts in a photo.

Don't walk in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at night.

If traveling in a European city, never trust Spanish women in pants suits carrying petitions.

Just because he's your watchman, doesn't mean he won't steal from you.

Avoid war zones.

If starring in a play, be sure to check the floor for vomit when making your entrance on stage.

McDonald's isn't ever as good of an idea as it sounds.

Don't stay in hotels that rent by the hour.

Don't trust people.

Trust people.

If it's good for you, it's painful.

If it's bad for you, it will be painful.

Passports with stamps from Jamaica, the Netherlands, and various countries in Africa and Latin America make it difficult for weekend trips to Canada.

If you wait a while to update the homefront about difficult situations that occurred overseas, rumors will be rampant.

If you immediately update the homefront about difficult situations that occurred overseas, rumors will be rampant.

If somebody has a lot of interesting stories to tell, the truth is that they probably lead a very boring life and have lots of spare time to make up interesting stories.

Poor kids can be spoiled too.

Don't get too comfortable, things might change.

Don't get too excited, things might stay the same.

No news is good news. Good news is an oxy-moron. No news is an oxy-moron??

The thing that you think you will do in any certain situation is probably the very thing you can be sure you won't do. That's why you want to do it.

Optimists are foolish and pessimists are depressing. Have optimists as your friends and pessimists as your business partners.

Always have someone on your side (that one I've learned by having it, the hard part is just that it is not always the same people you think it is at the time).

Always be on someone's side.

Four months away from your loved one is a lot harder than it sounds. And it sounds pretty darn hard.

Never promise a sequel to a blog post.


I'll write more later...

I´ve been robbed.

I have been stolen from and I have been conned, but this marks the first time I have been robbed.

I have a large imagination as many of you know. So I had always imagined what I would do in such situations. When I was a kid, it was more heroic and action figure-esque. But as I became more aware of Jesus´teachings (and perhaps gained a better understanding of my own limitations...) my ideas changed. For a while I thought maybe I could call on the Holy Spirit. Sort of what Elisha did when the youth made fun of him for being bald. Then I thought, perhaps that´s not the purpose of the Holy Spirit. So my day dreams changed. My most recent ones I thought of saying in Spanish "I am a man of God, are you sure you want to do this?" and then maybe the Holy Spirit might convict him. This is actually how my mind works.

Well, I was robbed and it didn´t go down like this.

I was walking down the main road at about 8:00 PM and I heard someone walking behind me. Instead of walking faster, I (being a good Oklahoman) turned around to greet the person. Wrong move. A man (whose face I remember very clearly) pulled out a knife and asked me for my cell phone. All I could say was "Oh my gosh!" Only the words didn´t exactly come out and I sounded more like a dog whose tail had been stepped on or perhaps Lou Costello. The knife was actually quite small but rusty enough so that the only thought going through my mind was "I really don't want to be stabbed by that." It didn't helped that I had seen a few ambulences that day and noticed how nobody pulled over for them and it just didn´t seem like a good idea to have to ride in an ambulence going 35 miles per hour.

I gave him my cell phone. He was quite anxious as we were on a main road and I was taking my sweet time. He kept telling me to hurry up. He asked for my money and I gave him all the money I had with me. One lempira and seventy centavos. That´s about eight cents. He looked at me incredulously and asked if that was all. This was not a good night for the poor guy as my cell phone was also the cheap phone that everyone has. He asked for my wallet. At this point I could only respond in English even though I understood what he was saying. I started shouting at him, "I don´t have one!" I was shouting quite loudly and once again we were on a main street. Finally he gave up and walked away. At this point I remembered what I had always daydreamed and was disappointed how I acted nothing like this. So as he walked away, I shouted at him in English,

"I´m a man of God!"



Surprisingly, he wasn´t suddenly convicted and didn´t return my phone.

The Bride who Beats her own Body

There was once a man marrooned on an island. Years passed by and he eventually gave up on being rescued and began to make a new life for himself. One day a cargo ship was passing by and saw the distressed man on the beach and came to rescue him. As they took care of the man, found him some clean clothes and cooked him a hot meal, the captain looked around and noticed that there were three buildings on the island. He asked the marrooned man, "Are there more people on this island?"
"No," replied the man.
The captain was curious, "Then why do you have three houses?"
He said, "Oh that! Only one is my house. The other two are churches."
Well, now the captain was truly puzzled. He asked the man, "But if there is only one of you, then why do you have two churches?"
The man explained, "That church over there is the one I attend. The other one is where I used to attend, but I left because of doctrinal issues with the pastor."

I heard that joke today. It made me laugh but only because I didn´t cry. It was told in the context of a man describing his distress on going to a small island that weekend with only 600 people. And it had six different churches. Then he went around on Sunday and didn´t see more than 30-50 people in a single church.

I used to be a youth minister in a small town in Northeastern Oklahoma. The year I was there, they had one of the biggest graduating classes they had had in years--18 kids! However, the town had five different churches.

I went to college in the town of Joplin, MO. It´s a town of 48,000 people. And it has 221 churches! During my final year at college, there was a church plant started in Joplin (not the first one in my five years in Joplin). The church´s arguement was that after you factored in the number of churches and then found the average number of seats and then added that together, the number was smaller than the population of Joplin. So the obvious answer: plant more churches! Despite the obvious fallacy of adding together averages or the fact that many of these churches have multiple services, I know for a fact that most of these churches are dying and empty. Why not start with the wounded and bring healing before giving up on them? Should we treat churches like horses, and pull out our shotgun after it breaks a leg? Why do we insist on starting over? Why do we insist on competition instead of working together for the same cause? Why are numbers more important than making sure the people we already have are in authentic relationships with Christ?

I come from the Independent Christian Churches. We are part of what is called the Restoration Movement, a movement that was started as a movement to create unity within the Church. And out of that moment sprung (at least) three different groups of churches. Recently there has been a lot of celebration in our churches that we are amongst talks to recconcile differences between us and the non-instrumental Churches of Christ. And as wonderful and beautiful as that is, that isn´t a step forward. That is just recovering from one of our steps back. We should be on the forefront of creating unity amongst the Bride of Christ, but instead are just another unhealed wound, a surface ulcer on the her skin.

Brothers and Sisters, we have a lot of work to do. But I don´t want this just to be a rant pointing out another bruise on the Beloved of Christ. This is a very important issue. So much so that on the night before our Savior died, he prayed for unity amongst his future believers. He was well aware it would be a problem. But Jesus never prayed without thinking an answer would not be possible. If faith can move mountains, maybe we can act like we are related to our brothers in sisters in Christ. As a mother says to her fighting children while she tries to take a picture of her squirming loved ones, "Act like you love eachother!" So my question is what are you doing to bring about unity in the Church or what would you like to do? Let me know your ideas. Let´s move from talk to action.

Love and Blessings,
Mateo

"For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: ´Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.´" --1 Cor. 1:25-31