THE JOURNEY

On Sabbatical

As of today I am on Sabbatical. I know: that sounds sudden. Sorry about that. I started discussing this with Rob Fairbanks, CA's President, when he visited The Netherlands in March. I had a couple of really good conversations with him.

What did we talk about?

First, I've been with CA for 14 years and have been involved in church planting for 21 years. I have been on CA's European Leadership Team for 3 years and have led the work in Europe for three (co-leading first with Phil Graf and next with Kevin Johnson). Truth is: I am tired. I am tired and I feel empty. I feel I cannot go on as is. There is no crisis now — but if a change is not made, a crisis will happen.

Second, I cannot sustain my way of life. I make my living as a photographer and I am grateful that I have been allowed to build up a growing business in spite of the economic situation in Europe. At the same time I have a serious responsibility with regards to CA's work in Europe. Doing both is challenging, very challenging. In fact: as both are growing it is becoming obvious this is not sustainable.

When Rob heard this he recommended I'd take a Sabbatical. We discussed this with the other leaders and, as of May 1st, I am officially on leave.

I'd never thought I'd take a Sabbatical. I thought Sabbaticals were for pussies... :-) But here we are and I can already sense this is probably a really good thing.

Not that I am going to be sitting on a beach somewhere, sipping Martini's. Well, not the whole time at least. Over the course of the last month me and some of the people around me have made a 'Sabbatical Plan.' It involves reading, resting, thinking, talking, doing some things I like, prayer and reflection and stuff like that. Roughly speaking there are three phases to this Sabbatical: Resting, Reflection and Reorientation. I like those three R's...

Current thinking is this Sabbatical will end on Dec 31st. What happens then is uncertain. That's what the next few months are about... I need to do (want to do) lots of good thinking. I've got lots of questions milling through my mind!

My intention is to journal some of my questions here on this blog and to see what response I get. You're thoughts are invited!

Celebrating 25 years with Carlton and Shannon in Brussels!

Our good friends Carlton and Shannon celebrated 25 years of marriage today. They invited us down for a party. And what a party it was! Here are some pictures...

Carlton and Shannon lead CA's work in Brussels. They also spearhead the evergrowing work of Serve The City.

Carlton and Shannon have two GREAT kids: Ani and Parker. They sang some songs together. They way those 2 voices melt together, you think you've died and gone to heaven!

Carlton and Shannon shared with us that the artifacts on tonight's cake should have been on the cake 25 years ago — but they never made it there.

Also present were our friends Horace and Tina. They lead CA's work in Leuven, Belgium. Horace is a really smart dude — really, he is. But for some reason in this picture he looks really confused!

Quiet moment

Between jobs today, I got to enjoy this quiet moment on the heath in the south of Holland. Beautiful, peaceful, quiet.

January newsletter

I know, it's amazing: two newsletters so close together. What can I tell you other than that I am trying to make a positive change and inform you more often of what is going on?

Read it here.

Fixing a light on a day of rest?

So this morning I woke up because Sophie had to go to work. It's Sunday, but Sophie works in a restaurant and that's what people who work in a restaurant sometimes have to do. I lay there thinking about all the things I thought I needed to do, but then picked up my iPhone and did my daily scripture reading. I'm not much into the daily quiet time thing, but do think it's good to have scripture in your mind, so I went to my iPhone bible application and read the three passages it gave me. 

One of the passages was Exodus 35. It starts out talking about the Sabbath.

Moses assembled the whole Israelite community and said to them, "These are the things the LORD has commanded you to do: 2 For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death. 3 Do not light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day."

I thought about it for a minute. Wow, 'put to death' if you even so much as put on a light!' Then my mind drifted and I got up. As I was getting dressed I thought about the day and the things I wanted to accomplish. I want to upload some pictures, build a new website, put a business-plan together... That's when it hit me: today is Sunday, I've worked all week... how am I going to make today a 'holy day?'.

I did some cleaning up. It struck me that is not exactly what the scripture had in mind, but at least it's different than what I do usually. Then I decided to re-string my guitar (one of the other passages I read was a Psalm that said God was really pleased with music from a stringed instrument). Unfortunately I did not have a complete set of strings, so that plan went out the window. Then I remembered we have company coming and I needed to clean some gear out of the living room (or Sophie would not be so happy). Some of the gear had to go in the car, and as I was walking to the car I remembered one of my headlights needs to be replaced. Ah, I thought, that's not work (or at least the work I do usually); it will be relaxing... so I got out my car-manual and learned how to unplug and take out my head lights. I brought it to the kitchen (top picture) and step-by-step replaced the broken bulb. Took me 20 minutes to figure out - which, considering I've never done it before and can hardly be considered to be a mechanic, was pretty good. I even cut myself and bled!

Ah, the moment of sweet victory when you re-insert your headlight, plug it back in and turn on the lights... below a picture to show you it worked....

But the whole time this scripture is going through my mind: 'do not light a fire in your home...' 

I am trying not to work today. At least, not my usual work. You may wonder where I am typing this, but I am sitting in the living room rather than my usual place, which is my office.

I want to honor and obey God. I really do. I think the Sabbath-commandment is good - good for me as a person. But just how do I keep it well? 

I wonder how you do it. Do you struggle with it? Do you think about it? How do you feel I did?

How to live your life

Here is a powerful quote that has been going through my mind lately:

To live a life of pleasure you only need to mind the present. T love a life of purpose you must agonize over the past and pursue the future with passion!

Making two worlds into one

Let me elaborate a little more about my business. In my last post I wrote how Studio Rogier Bos generates income that enables us to work in church planting and leadership development (which we do mostly in CA). But I often get questions about how this works.

Let me be quick to say that I often experience a real tension between my business and my ‘kingdom’-work. That’s how I call it in my mind — even though I really view my business as part of my ‘kingdom’ work. I want Studio Rogier Bos to be an expression of who God has made me to be and of what he is giving me to do.

Not easy, though, to have two endeavors. Feels a little like having two mistresses; each demands all the attention she can get! Operating a business in 50% of your time that is supposed to feed tour family is challenging; leading CA’s work in Northern Europe and helping it expand in the other 50% of my time can also be a bit challenging. Wish the day had 36 hours in it and a week consisted of 10 days…

In reality these businesses are less at odds with each other as they sometimes are in my mind. Truth is that I have made connections with people through church that have resulted in lucrative projects (I sometimes need to be careful to not make ‘church’ a wonderful networking opportunity). But I have also met people in and through my business, who have offered wonderful ministry opportunity. The church planting project I was privileged to lead for the Dutch Reformed Church last year was the result of a relationship that started in my business. What do you know! It’s amazing how strange things can sometimes develop: I call this the ‘cross-pollination’ effect.

Still, I do feel a tension between my business-world and my CA-world. I would like to see them more as ‘dynamic extensions’ of each other.

One of the reasons for me to re-design my website was to create that effect. In my last post I wrote that I needed a new website to better showcase my particular photographic abilities and services; but an additional reason for the overhaul as to integrate my business and my CA world more.
How do I do this?

• My website links to my (many) social networking ID’s, such as a photoblog, my Flickr page, my facebook profile, my Hyves (a Dutch thing, don’t ask) and my YouTube channel. Yes, I have them all. My clients get to see who I really am and all I do.
• Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, I include a personal profile and a page called ‘for a better world’ in which I talk about my endeavor for, well… a better world.
  It’s not that these pages are evangelistic. They don’t seek to convert anyone. But they do give me an opportunity to show who I am and how my faith propels me to action — and that in turn generates a lot of conversation and interested questions.

Well, that’s enough self-revelation for a while…

A picture that is a prayer

I would not claim I pray a lot. In fact, I find prayer rather difficult. Not that I don’t pray – it’s more that I wrestle with prayer, and wrestle in my prayers.

I wrestle with myself. And with God. I don’t wrestle with the ‘why’ question very much (as in ‘why did that happen?’), but on occasion I do. I do wrestle with the ‘how’ question (as in: ‘how should I be?’). And I wrestle with what I can and should pray – and what I can’t or shouldn’t pray…

I take prayer seriously. I don’t say that to sound spiritual, it’s just that I realize that I do. The premier way we humans connect to God is through prayer. In prayer, we bring ourselves and our lives before him. We ask for his intervention.  That’s quite something: to ask the creator of the universe to intervene in our lives and world.

So prayer fascinates me. I have seen all kind of prayer-styles in my life: from silent to loud, from simple to complex, from approaching God as awesome distant deity to approaching God as lover. Some prayers have made me cry, while others have made me laugh. Some prayers totally express my heart, while other prayers make me utterly uncomfortable. I remember joining a prayer meeting in one of the Serve The City projects in an Antillean church. The lady who led prayed for 10 minutes. She started quietly and became increasingly louder, her pitch getting higher and higher, while she got more and more wrapped up in her prayer. her pitch increased until it was somewhere between a scream and a squeek. And then, all of a sudden it was over and she quieted down. My friends and I looked at each other and could barely keep ourselves from laughing. “It was like she achieved an orgasm through prayer,” said one of them, which of course was a very disrespectful thing to say – but I had already had the same thought. Prayer, it would seem, is also culturally defined.

One thing that has been interesting me a lot lately is how artists pray through their art. A writer can write his prayer. Obviously songwriters and singers can sing their prayers. Poets can write their prayers. I have seen dancers dance a prayer. I wrote a poem about photography that was a prayer on this blog back in December.

But how does a photographer photograph his prayer? Not that I fancy myself much of an artist, but I aspire to be one. Can one make a photograph that expresses a prayer - perhaps more meaningful, and more whole, than words ever could?

Last Saturday I set out with that question in mind. We are presently on holiday in Aix-en-Provence, which is a beautiful area – and certainly very picturesque. What is a photographer to photograph as his prayer? Another church on a hill? A sunset? A cross in some landscape?

I spent the afternoon in the centre of Aix photographing people. Aix has such an amazing variety of people and of course the French are an amazing bunch of people: beautiful women, tired men, old people, tourists, shoppers, homeless folk… (Click here for some of the images I shot). I had a great time ...

... but I did not find the image that expressed my prayer. If anything, being there in the centre of Aix made me feel more depressed and more uncertain. I love these European people: their joys, sorrow, happiness, emptiness and beauty gets to me – and it gets me that God seems to be the last thing on their mind.

I left Aix after fours hours of photography and drove to the home where we are staying. I had a little time left before Sophie expected me home, so I drove on to the next village (our new car drives really nice!). And that’s when I saw the image that expresses my prayer. I was almost going too fast and missed it, but I caught it from the corner of my eye. I knew immediately: that's the image I am looking for.

It is the image at the top of this article. It's a photo of a simple water-fountain, like you have them all over France. My prayer is that I become like that water fountain, bubbling up living water, that spills over all its sides, that flows into the world around.

Not that I am that fountain. At least, I don’t feel like it. Jesus’ promise to the woman at the well in John 4 was that ‘streams of living water would flow from within you.’ I have wrestled with that promise over and over and over. Why does it often seem like that is not happening? What does one need to do to make that a reality? It’s the ‘how’ question I mentioned before: how do I need to ‘be’ for that living water to flow out?

I don’t know. But if art helps me to make my request known to heaven more vehemently and emphatically, as well as more beautifully and more expressive, than let the above image be my prayer.

I don't have Him, but...

The three transitions I mentioned in my previous post can really mess with your faith. Sometimes it feels like the carpet is being pulled out from right underneath your feet. It’s not that you don’t believe anymore — but it can feel like they way you have always believed suddenly stops working altogether. It’s called an epistemological crisis and lots of people are having them these days: it’s one of the reasons I think Emergent is such a necessary movement: it helps Christians find new ways of believing and practicing here in the postmodern world.

One of the participants this weekend may have been going through an epistemological crisis this weekend. He asked me if I have gone through this (many times) and how I coped. Did I ever feel scared? (Yes). Did I ever wonder if my faith might survive? (Absolutely).
I thought about that and then gave my answer. As I later reflected on what I said in my answer I realized how true it was.

What I said was this: what I have come to realize is that I have had to learn to trust not in the fact that I have Him, but rather that He has me.
I’m thankful for that insight. Over and over in scripture I read that God watches over us and holds us and keeps us. Yet in the middle of these questions regarding faith we get so scared that we might loose Him. As if we have to hold on really tight. The truth is: this is His world, we are His children, nothing scares Him — and He holds on to us.

Why I am not a member of the EO – and never will be

In Holland we have a Christian Broadcasting company. The Dutch broadcasting system has 11 channels (on a population of 16 million); three of which are State-owned. These three channels are divided over 9 Broadcasting major companies, and a bunch of smaller ones. These companies get to produce and broadcast TV programs according to there personal flavor. And so the Evangelical Broadcasting Company, the EO, has been transmitting evangelistic programs into the Dutch airwaves for around 40 years - paid for a large part with tax monies.

Wonderful, you say? No, absolutely horrible! I wish the EO would disappear from Dutch Television today! The intent of the EO has been to reach people with the gospel through TV and Radio, and while this may seem like a good intention, I think they fail spectacularly, and actually are counter-productive.