Ryan & Jordan

with Pioneer Bible Translators

Month: August, 2013

There & Back Again: Day Two

by ryan

We awoke to a cheerful dog and an ever so pleasant breakfast with family–we love them! And then we were off.

We cut through Oregon partly along the Oregon Trail.

Oregontrail

Some of my ancestors came across on the Oregon Trail, but they stopped before they got to Oregon and homesteaded in Boise.

welcometoIdaho

The highlight of this day was celebrating my Nana’s 90th birthday with family. She is a wonderful woman and the best (and only) Nana I have.

Bliss. Lots of family, so many smiles.

There & Back Again: Day One

by Jordee

beginning

For any who may have noticed the recent lack of posts, we will now explain.

Ryan and I have been on the road, a trip we decided to take just before it began on Saturday, August 10th. Because it has been so eventful and because we have soaked in a lot of life and adventure and conversation and people, we’d like to take you through the trip (mostly) day by day.

As with all my prior experience with road trips, the morning of Day One went as we might’ve expected: waking up early, packing, making checklists, packing, coffee, packing, loading up the car, driving out of the neighborhood excitedly, remembering what we forgot, turning around at the stoplight, a joke about “if we ever leave,” and finally heading south toward the United States of America.

The border wait was the longest we’ve experienced and the traffic was a bit unexpectedly heavy, but we made it to our first stop in Yakima, Washington. There we enjoyed dinner with Ryan’s old friends and my new friends. We got back on the road and continued east toward Pasco, our final destination for the day. We arrived and enjoyed time with family whom I met for the first time, explaining we didn’t have much of a plan for the following two weeks.

Day One: taking things as they come and the sweet times with friends and family foreshadowed the rest of this trip as we would find out soon enough.

Stay tuned for Day Two and beyond.

Have Mercy: second part

by ryan

This is an extension of the July 25 post Have Mercy.  We reflect more on what our friend Matthew is teaching us (in a sense two friends named Matthew if you count the one who wrote the book almost 2000 years ago).

And on the mountain Jesus also taught:

μακάριοι οἱ ἐλεήμονες,

ὅτι αὐτοὶ ἐλεηθήσονται.

In English:

The merciful are blessed

because they will be shown mercy.

God is the source of mercy; we are to be conduits of mercy.  We must first receive from God.  If we receive mercy, we must also extend mercy. To better understand this, let’s look at an analogy from the geography of the Jordan River.

The Jordan (which means ‘Descender’) flows out of the Sea of Galilee down into the Dead Sea.  The moving water is God’s life-giving mercy.   The Sea of Galilee was a great spot to fish in Jesus’ time.  The fish are people.  You might have guessed this, but there are no fish in the Dead Sea, because it has no outlet and so mineral concentrations are too high.

So in the Jordan River valley, fish live where water flows.  People live where mercy flows.  The Jordan used to be large and teaming with fish, but now the fish aren’t doing so well because the flow has been diminished by dams.

People don’t do so well when they block the flow of God’s mercy. So let’s stop building dams and start passing on the mercy we receive. Let’s be like the Jordan, receiving water from on high and then passing it on to the people downstream.  That’s where life happens.

Jordan my wife is a good reminder and her name is fitting, because she passes God’s mercy along to me every day.