Deep Thought: To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I can’t remember, all rolled into one big “thing.” This is truth, to me.

As funny as that sounds, it somewhat explains how I feel right now. As  I sit in the Bali airport where I can look out and see the Bukit and waves breaking at Aiport Rights and Kuta Reef, I am very torn with emotions. So emotional, I would like to cry but I dare not sitting in the airport.  I am torn because my heart feels very heavy as I leave Michaela and Lindsey. I am very proud of Michaela and although it was getting a little dramatic at the end (you try spending 10 days with your dad) I still hate to leave. I can’t imagine what it will be like if she moves here because as it stands now, I will see her in 10 days.

 But I also can’t wait to get home. I miss Darlene and Skyler. I miss Shoreline. I am ready to sleep in my bed and get a hot shower. I seemed to have trouble getting hot showers this week. I had to take a cold one before I left the house this morning. On the way to the airport, Michalea and I stopped at a spa and got a massage. A full 1 hour body massage for $9.00. Then afterwards there is supposed to be a hot relaxing shower. Mine was barley luke warm. So I got 2 cold showers today. But with 31 hours of air flight ahead of me, I had to take advantage of it.

 I am also torn because I got my surfing Mojo back. I surfed yesterday at Uluwatu for 4 hours and no reef mishaps. I could not let that reef have to last word.

 Lastly, Bali is a wonderful country and the people are so generous and pure. I cannot wait to bring a team over here next year. Working with Clare and Ado will be a real treat. If you are interested start saving your money. We will do one of 3 teams; either construction, medical or teaching. All work on the trip will be done around high tide so if you surf it is a plus. 

 This will probably be my last post for my Bali trip and if you talk to Darlene, she will tell you how I get when it is the end of camp or vacation. It is such a downer for me.

That is truth to me.

Deep Thought: I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.

Actually, we were walking through the Galleria yesterday and came upon the Cartoon Store and one of the main characters was Popeye. So it could be a deeper thought than you know.

We were at the Galleria yesterday because we were trying to find a new phone for Michaela as hers has finally died. While we were there, we ate at a restaurant that takes American Express, as I am getting low on funds. This restaurant also brewed real coffee, which was like a breath of fresh air. I have been living off of instant coffee. I find it ironic, that here I am in a country that exports some of the best coffee in the world and yet it is really hard to find a good cup of coffee.

After that we went to the youth center for a while. Tonight we are going there with CJ Hobgood. Today is a Hindu holiday that celebrates good triumphing over evil. So Clare and Ado have redeemed it for the groms who have received Christ. The girls (Lindsey and Michaela) and I will be dressed in traditional Balinese sarongs. There will be music and food. CJ will give his testimony and then a Balinese pastor will talk about how Christ has triumphed over evil and redeemed them. Lastly, all the kids who have recently received Christ will take their 1^st communion. Sound like it will be cool.

Yesterday, I did something that I now regret. I surfed Ulu’s at low tide. I was having a pretty good session. I was catching a lot of waves and them my last wave and there is a reason why it was my last wave, basically pulled down my shorts and spanked my bottom. Literally, it really pulled my shorts down to my knees and then dragged my along the reef. I have a gash in my lower back and then lacerations on my butt, my shoulder blades, my elbows and arms and a nice size one on my foot. I am very sore this morning.

I tell you what, that is when I was wishing I was Popeye. If I would have been Popeye that wave would have never made me its ….beach, we are going to the beach

Deep Thought: Some folks say it was a miracle. St. Francis suddenly appeared and caught a perfect ten tube ride. But I think he just got lucky.

• Well, the contest is over. Bruce Irons who announced his retirement earlier beat Fred Patacchia in the final of the Rip Curl Search in Uluwatu. We actually bribed our way into the Blue Point Resort on top of the cliff where all the pros were staying and we watched the semis and the finals standing around with the likes of Mick Fanning, Taj Burroughs and the Hobgoods.
• Speaking of the Hobgoods, we ran into CJ finally and he is going with us to the youth center on Tuesday night for surfer night.
• My trip is starting to wind down. I love it here. The waves are incredible and the people are very hospitable.
• Yesterday I prayed for Sam, as I knew he was going to bring the message. I am very proud of my staff, as I know they have worked hard to make Sunday pull off. I am very anxious to hear how it turned out. As Perry Noble would say, I am sure Sam hit it out of the park.
• I got a good night sleep last night. We are out in the country and the dogs bark all night. Most of the dogs will bark because they see or hear something.  This one dog, however, will go on a barking spree for 30 minutes. I don’t know what he is barking at; maybe that it is dark out or there is air outside. Finally last night, he didn’t.
• The other day, I posted about how fragrant Bali is. Another thing I noticed is that the girls spend their whole day making offerings. The teen girls sit in front of the TV all day watching MTV Asia and making offerings for the next offering time, which is many in a day.
• It makes me think about how Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden is light. Serving God is not so much a chore as it is a joy. That when I am going throughout my time here, that I can pray and talk to God. That I can enjoy him and this country.

We are about to go surfing and we have to go to immigration and get Michaela’s Visa renewed. We tried to do it the other day but they are making her come back. Maybe it will be a miracle and St. Francis will show up and get it for us. I think he would just be lucky. 

Deep Thought: If you’re a young Mafia gangster on your first date, I bet it’s really embarrassing if someone tries to kill you.

I killed it today. Best session that I have had so far. We surfed Balangan this morning and I got a pretty good shack that Lindsay saw. The swell dropped considerably today. After we surfed, we had to go to Immigration to get Michaela’s visa extended. Since we were in town we decided to visit the Galleria and went and saw the Dark Night. The movie theater was American quality and it was only $1.50.

      One of the things I have noticed about Bali is how fragrant it is. The reason is because every day, all day offerings are made to show respect and gratitude to the Hindu gods and even to bribe a demon into being less mischievous. So every house and place of business has a little shrine, temple or even just a place to leave the offerings. The offerings are like a work of art. The basic form is fresh food on a palm leave and crowned with a palm leave decoration. They are then topped of with burning incense. Needless to say it makes Bali very fragrant. I even catch whiffs of incense while I am surfing.

It got me thinking about my God. How my life is an offering to Him and when I honor Him with my life, it is a sweet smelling fragrance to Him. Ephesians says that when we live a life of love that it is a sweet smelling fragrance to Him. Furthermore, I don’t have to build a shrine to Him but if I live a life filled with Christ, I am His shrine. More on that tomorrow.  

Tonight we are hanging out at the youth center and watching the kids skate and tomorrow we surf Cannguu. 

Deep Thought: I scrambled to the tip of the precipice where Michaela was waiting.

     “That was fun,” I said.

     “You bet it was,” said Michaela. “Let’s climb higher.”

    “No,” I said. “I think we should be heading back now.”

     “We have time,” Michaela insisted.

     I said we didn’t, and Michaela said we did. We argue back and forth like that for about 20 minutes, than finally decided to head back down.

   I didn’t say it was an interesting story.”

We did some scrambling today. We surfed Bingin. Honestly it was some of the best surf I have ever been out in. Looked like Hawaii. We surfed for 3 hours today and then the walk back up the cliff was a workout in itself. 152 stair steps up the cliff around houses that are perched right on the cliff. The surf was so good but it is crowded. With the ASP or WCT in town, it os probably more crowded than normal. And you hear every language imaginable in the line up; English with American or Australian accent, Spanish, French, Portuguese, even German.

    The Internet availability has been sketchy. I haven’t posted since Taiwan. So, I have decided to write posts ahead of time and then copy them into my writer when I get to some WiFi. Let me give the bullet version of what has happened.

• Monday – Arrived in Bali about 4 pm. Michaela met me at the airport and we caught a taxi to my hotel in Kuta. Good hotel @ $11 per night with AC and hot water. Kuta is definitely a city with the sights and sounds of a 3^rd world metropolis. Surfing is a big thing here. Everything is about surfing. Kuta is the birthplace of Asian surfing. After 2 days though, I was ready to get out of Kuta with the entire “Hey boss you buy…” “Hey boss, you need car?” “Hey boss, me love you long time.”
• I went to the Surfing the Nations banquet. I saw Lindsey and Eddie (he is the one the kids in youth pitched in and bought a new surfboard for). They had a traditional Balinese cookout. Food was fabulous. The 46 hours without sleep caught up with me and I started falling asleep at the table halfway through the banquet so Michaela sent me back to my room where I fell asleep for the night. That was good because I immediately became Balinated. (On Bali time)
• The next day, Michaela and I hung out all-day and bummed around. That was it.
• Yesterday we rented a car and headed up to Uluwatu where we have a house. It is crazy enough driving in a 3^rd world country anyway but throw in driving on the left side and the steering wheel in the right and it was even crazier. 1^st stop, we took a tour of the youth center that we support. You can check it out @ www.elevatebali.org. We hung out with Ado for a while and he gave us a tour and we talked about a team trip here next year. We then went to the contest at Padang Padang. It was the biggest surf, outside of Hurricane surf, that I have ever seen. These pros made it look so easy. We watched 8 time world champion, from Michaela and Skyler’s birthplace, Kelly Slater get a perfect 10 switch foot barrel in his heat. CJ and Damien Hobgood also won their 1^st heats. After the contest, we surfed Dreamland @ 5’-6’. It is a beach break.
• Today we surfed Bingin, which was fun and my first day surfing over reef and no mishaps. Now we are back at our house napping.

I will try and post tomorrow and hopefully I will have something more interesting to tell.  

That is what I thought about when we landed in Taiwan this morning during a Typhoon. I was a rather bumpy landing. I am in Taiwan and I don’t remember when I slept last. It is Monday morning 7 am. The last time I slept was Friday night/ Saturday morning. I surfed in Cali Saturday morning. I had sushi with Anthony and Haley on Saturday night. They dropped me off at the airport at 11:30 pm and my flight took off at 1:30 am Sunday morning.

I actually blogged on my phone on Saturday but I couldn’t get it to post. So I am going to repost it right here.

Well the anticipation is building as I leave tonight for Bali. I am super excited about going there as I have wanted to go there since I was 17. As I sit here waiting on Brian to get some equipment out of his storage, I started thinking about Shoreline and how for the next 2 weeks I probably won’t be thinking about it much. I need that. I have never missed 2 Sundays in a row. Makes me very grateful for my staff and Darlene. They are the ones who have enabled me to make this trip. So thanks to Sam, Dani, Esther, Matt, Brian and big thanks to Darlene.

   On a church note, we can use somebody to put up signs on the weekends. We are looking for people who will take one intersection and put signs out on Friday night and pick them up on Sunday. If you can do this, please call Dani at the office at 650-8658. This is the most effective advertising we do. Honestly, you would be surprised at how many lives have been changed after seeing those signs.

On a trip note, I surfed my new board this morning in Newport. It was overhead and pounding. I got pummeled a couple of times to prepare me for the waves in Bali.

I leave tonight so I don’t know when I will be able to post next. I leave at 1:30 in the morning (Sunday) and land 13 hours later in Taiwan at 5:30 am Monday. I totally lose Sunday. So I am pretty sure I can’t blog on Sunday.

By the way, Brain wanted to take a drive into the desert. I politely refused.

One more flight to make and then I attend the Surfing the Nations Banquet on Monday night right after I get in. That ought to be fun. But now it is back out into the typhoon.

If they could press charges for being angry, they could have sentenced me to life in prison this morning. At 4:50 am this morning, I was told by Delta’s airlines that services Okaloosa County, ASA, that they no longer allow surfboards. Here I am planning a trip to Bali and I can’t take my surfboard. Darlene had to come back in get my board and I had to buy a new one in Huntington Beach.

Seth Godin had a great post yesterday about how he was charged $160 for extra bags and then a friend on the same flight was charged anything for the same bags. He says this:

Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.

Airlines, on the other hand, surround the very thing they sell (getting you home) with armed guards, untrained TSA agents, long lines and sneering gate agents eager to take your money when you have absolutely no expectation or choice and when your stress is at its highest. This is a problem in the long run.

One good thing that happened. Michaela has been trying to get me to call CJ Hobgood because the ASP is going to be in Bali when we are there. I haven’t wanted to call him because I don’t know him that well and I haven’t talked to him in 3 years. They would like CJ, the 2001 world champ and also a strong Christian, to come by the youth center and visit the kids. So, I go to Huntington Beach to buy a board and the US Open is in town and I run into CJ. Well, he remembers me and I ask him if he is going to Bali for the Search Contest at Uluwatu. He says that he is and that he is leaving tomorrow on the flight before mine. So, I tell him about Michaela, whom he has surfed with before, and they would like him to come visit the kids at the youth center. He said he would love to and told me where he is staying and to come see him when I get there. That is so cool how God worked that out.

In the end, If I ever go to apply for a job at Delta, I will for sure have to ask if they press charges.

]]> http://www.shorelinechurch.net/wordpress/2008/07/25/never-fly-delta/feed/ http://www.shorelinechurch.net/wordpress/2008/06/14/blind-guide-dogs-and-stinky-fish/ http://www.shorelinechurch.net/wordpress/2008/06/14/blind-guide-dogs-and-stinky-fish/#comments Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:09:55 +0000 Pastor Eric http://www.shorelinechurch.net/wordpress/?p=101 Deep Thought: When shops post a sign that says, “Guide dogs only”, who is supposed to read it? The dog?

The are a lot of things that businesses do that I don’t understand. For instance, we had lunch yesterday at a pretty well known restaurant in Jenson Beach called Conchy Joe’s. I have had lunch there before and dinner at the one in Melbourne and have had pretty enjoyable experiences. Instead of having normal lunch entrees, we ordered things to share like fish fingers, conch fritters, gator bits, etc. Well, the fish comes and Harbor takes a bite and his face goes white. Right away, my powers of deductions kick in and I deduce that the fish is bad. One whiff confirms that they must have accidently cooked the bait that was sitting in the bucket on the back porch. 

   Now everything we are eating becomes extremely suspect. So we tell the waitress and she confirms that it is bad and says she will take it off the bill. I ask, can we have some more conch fritters instead. Later when we get the bill, she of course has taken off the fish but went ahead and charged us for more conch fritters. 

Here is my thoughts on this; as far as the bill is concerned everything is even. She took the fish off and charged us for the fritters. What we paid for is what we ate. As far as our experience went though, it was far from even. Why would the manager not make up for the fact that we now have had a negative experience at the restaurant. What could they have done to make the experience positive instead of negative? They could have comped the fritters, bought a round of drinks or even given a gift card for dinner at a future date. But not doing anything, caused us to leave with a negative experience meaning we will probably never be back again. 

   The question I have for me and all four people who read this blog is how many times as a church has this happened at Shoreline? Somebody has a negative experience and for whatever reason, we don’t recognize it or we don’t care, they never come back. Or even worse, never go to any church again. 

Too many times, churches do things that make no sense, equivalent to putting a sign up that says “Guide dogs only” and create a negative experience.

That, my friends, is like eating stinky fish.  

Shoreline is now at an age in its existence where other church planters are making the trip to see us. Just last week there was a church planter from New Orleans in our McGuires service. (BTW - I am actually posting from California right at the very moment that the McGuires service is happening. Spooky isn’t it. But I digress; that is why I put parenthesis around this thought.)

Anyway, Brian and I had lunch with a couple of church planters 2 weeks ago. One of them, James, just planted Mosaic Church in Crestview. Their website is www.mosaiccrestview.com. We have decided to support them financially as Crestview needs a new life-giving church.

The other planter, who is still in bible college up in Graceville, Trip would like to eventually plant in south Walton. I suggested to him to intern some where first. He e-mailed me back with 2 good questions. First, he mentioned about how difficult it would be to intern at Shoreline with a 2 hour drive from Graceville, a wife and the price of gas. Then he closed with 2 very good questions;

1. What is the wise thing to do?
2. What would I do if I were in his shoes?

So, I thought I would share my answers to those questions with the readers of this blog.

Trip,

Those were good questions and here are some thoughts;

What do you think that the wise thing is for me to do & If you were in my shoes what would you do??

The wise thing for you to do is if you KNOW that you are called to plant a church, besides an education, get as much experience as possible in the type of church you are desiring as possible.
I think, as I look back, the 20’s were the most difficult time for me as minister and I have seen it in the lives of others as well. That was the time when through a series of events, I became a broken man. I have seen though, that God only uses broken men so it is kind of His bible college whether you attend man’s institution or not, you will go through this. Now I have met a few men, that had a heart of brokenness and humility when they were young, but as I got to know them discovered that it came from early on in their lives from something in their families and how they were raised and what happened to them as a child, etc.
I say this because, as I look back, I would have liked to plant in my 30’s but I wasn’t ready and I think this community wasn’t ready. But there is no way, I would have wanted to plant in my 20’s, because too many people would have been hurt.
So get as much experience as you can. Look & listen a lot. Learn as much from other people’s mistakes and success as you can. I didn’t mean for this to be a lecture on brokenness, but the question is what is the wise thing for me to do? Get as much experience as possible any way possible because your life may depend on it. ON a side note, when you are getting the experience, never quit looking at the big picture and remembering why you are there. Even the most mundane tasks assigned to you are part of the process but you can’t lose sight of the big picture.
Secondly, what would I do if I were in your shoes? I once counseled someone to empty out there 401K to come up with the funds to help finance their own church plant. It is worth the investment. Same for you. For you it may not be money but time and relationship. If I were you, I would find any way to put myself in the position to not only get experience but to glean from somebody who has done this before and is making the opportunity for me to do this. As Paul said, you have many teachers but not many fathers.
I have had the opportunity to mentor guys like you before, mostly in youth ministry. The first thing I tell them, is show up. I don’t go out of my way in the beginning to make it happen. I wait for their desire to make it happen. Some came a few times and left. Others are still with me at this church after 10 years. Others are ministering somewhere else. So, if I were you, I would find a way to be in a position that was available to me. High gas prices, 2 hour drives are just hoops that stop some people but at the same time bring the cream to the top.
I say all this, not just concerning you and Shoreline, this is good advice for you and pursuing the call on your life. If this is part of God’s plan for you to intern, then there is a way to make it happen. While I am telling you this, I have no idea of what your schedule is, whether you are attending classes this summer, whether you have a job, etc. That is stuff we should talk about.
Bottom line: Get as much experience and mentoring as possible any way possible.
It is an investment in your future and in the lives of people you don’t even know yet.
I hope this helps.
Eric

PS - the reason I am in California is I am doing the same thing. I am out here to learn from a pastor that has opened that door to me. So, I am going through that door at great expense.

Comments and questions are welcome.

Today: The Destin Log
Wednesday: The DeFuniak Herald