From Pressures to Blessings

One thing I have become convinced of over time is that Jehovah is a fan of poetic justice. You know how we always read these accounts of the work being banned, only for the population of Witnesses to explode into greater and greater numbers? It seems like that's always how it goes. The harder Satan pushes, the more Jehovah turns that pressure into blessings.

Living in a territory like this, which never ceases to have its fair share of pressure from Satan, I've been able to be eyewitness to this exact scenario more times than I can count. Whether things go wrong at the last minute for our assemblies or our travels out to conventions, it has never failed to turn into a positive for us.

Let me share the most recent example of this with you. Maybe you're familiar with our beloved congregation boat, Kingdom Proclaimer VII.

Or "K-Pro" for short.

In the last few years this boat has endured 50-60ish trips to Siparuta, and it has received a heavy amount of wear and tear throughout its faithful service to us. Until of course two weeks ago when it wound up getting stolen, right in the middle of our Circuit Assembly.

So here was our original plan: we were going to take K-Pro to Siparuta the Thursday after assembly, cover the whole village (or as much as possible) with the invitations for Special Talk/Memorial, and then go over again the morning of the Special Talk, get everything set up, and just hope everyone who was interested would remember the event. Repeat for Memorial.

Once news broke of our boat being stolen, we had a problem. How to get to Siparuta? Walk three hours through the jungle, in the midst of a borderline monsoon? (We're experiencing rainy season here at the moment) That didn't seem a good option. Here was the pressure. But what would the blessing turn out to be?

A Bible student over in Siparuta made a tantalizing offer. See, there's a commercial boat that goes from Orealla to Siparuta on Friday night, and travels back Sunday afternoon. So this study suggested that if we came on the boat Friday night, we could stay at their house until Sunday, and then ride back. Added bonus, the boat captain offered to take us for free.

You can see how distraught we are over our predicament.

So now instead of taking a small boat that holds six people over to Siparuta to preach for a few hours and go back home once every month (and spending a decent amount of money buying the fuel for it), now we have the option of going any weekend we want, with as many people as we want, spending all Saturday in house-to-house and Bible studies, keep a Public Talk/Watchtower study on Sunday (which many in the village have been literally begging for) and then get a ride back. All for free.

Yet another bonus! Now we can spend several leisurely hours swimming in Siparuta's wonderful blackwater creeks!

We first used this method for the Special Talk weekend, which resulted in nine people attending. We intend to make use of this new arrangement as often as possible, at least once a month. Stay tuned to see how this pans out in the future.

Bob the Priest

Nearly every single drama that we've had features fictional characters. Even though they highlight real historical accounts, they often add new people to flesh out the story and illustrate important points. We're all familiar with that.

I do similar for myself. I've begun fabricating characters in the framework of Bible stories as a way to keep straight the lessons and whatnot. Sometimes though, as I go through my reading, I learn more details and tidbits that add more to these mental dramas and introduce further lessons. On very rare occasions however, my reading will lead me to a discovery that completely changes the moral of this invented drama.

On that note, allow me to introduce you to Bob the Priest.

In my personal Bible reading I was going through the arc of Leviticus-Numbers-Deuteronomy. There's a lot of laws, regulations, architectural designs, divisions of tribes and lands, etc. What I had an especially hard time with was the 12 tribes of Israel, specifically the Levites (like when I realized they weren't counted among the 12). See, you have the 12 tribes that have normal divisions of land, and then the Levites who are set apart for work relating to the Tabernacle (and later the temple) and all that. But the Levites are subdivided even further into three families: the Kohathites, the Gershonites, and the Merarites. But wait! In the family of Kohath is Aaron, who becomes the High Priest, and his descendants make up the priesthood.

So to simplify this for myself, I made two characters. Bob the Priest, and Doug the Levite. They are both of the tribe of Levi, both descended from Kohath, but Bob is from Aaron's line, so he is a priest and fulfills the role of a priest, while Doug is a Kohathite who does the work of a Levite.

Still a little confusing, yes, but it helped me keep the families and arrangements straight. So then anytime I read about the Levites transporting the Tabernacle, I see Doug helping out. When I read about a bull being sacrificed, that's Bob. This developed into a very useful memory aid. I even began adding short scenes of Bob and Doug's work overlapping (for example, the priests would cover the Ark of the Covenant, and would then turn it over to the Kohathites to carry it. Insert scene of Bob seeing his third cousin Doug and going “Hey Doug! How's the wife!” “Good, Bob. Thanks for asking.” “That patchy spot of skin clear up?” “Yep, no leprosy to be seen!” Etc.) It was pleasant and made for a lively way to go about Bible reading.

But then I came to the festivals, and the picture changed entirely, and in a way I was not at all prepared for. To understand the changed lesson, I must briefly summarize these festivals.

Many of them involved the Israelites gathering together into a central location (Jerusalem, eventually) and having a week of relaxation, spiritual instruction, association, all that fun stuff. So with this mental picture, I tried imagining Doug. What is Doug doing? Non-priestly spiritual duties. So maybe Doug is reading aloud from the Law to a crowd. Maybe he's singing praises with a group of other Levites. Whatever he's doing, it's fun. It's spiritual. It's encouraging. And he gets to do all this while enjoying the companionship of the Levites and other Israelite men, maybe friends he hasn't seen in a long while. It's a period of time for great enjoyment.

But. Then I thought about Bob. What would he, as a priest, be doing? Killing bulls and rams at the Tabernacle/temple, removing the skin and dung and intestines. In my head he's sitting outside the temple, hearing the singing and rejoicing off in the distance. Close enough to hear it, far enough that he doesn't get to join in on the fun. While his friend Doug is over there reading the Law aloud to a gathering of his closest friends, here's Bob cleaning an animal carcass, preparing to carry the dung outside the camp, only to return and begin the process again. Repeat dozens of times.

The lesson began forming in my mind from this point. See, from Bob's point of view, he could begin to develop a negative viewpoint of what he's doing. He could dwell on the monotony of it, how gross it is, how he's missing out on the association with his friends. But what would happen if he did? He might rush through his work so he could join them sooner, or maybe he wouldn't do his work to the best of his ability. The problem of course is that all his actions have significance. The sacrifices foreshadow Jesus and everything he does, so the work of the priests must be done exactly the way it was commanded or else it would be a gross disrespect of Jesus' sacrifice.

We know that. Bob doesn't. He probably doesn't get the intricacies and the full significance of what's going on. So how could he maintain the proper viewpoint of his work and not get negative about it?

Simply put, he just has to remind himself that Jehovah knows best. He has to acknowledge his lack of information and trust that if he does his best, Jehovah will be pleased. In my mind, Bob knows this, but he has to keep reminding himself. When he hears his friend Doug singing or reading to a crowd, and he hears the Israelites celebrating and enjoying themselves, he keeps reminding himself that he has his assignment and that he needs to do his best, even if it means sacrificing the fun he could be having.

This imaginary scenario resonates with me, because I've been both Bob and Doug in this setting. I've been the one organizing gatherings where we can have fun with one another and help each other relieve the stresses or worries life gives us. But then I've also been the one who gets invited out to do something, but has to turn it down so I can stay home and audit the congregation accounts. And let's be honest, the first option is way more fun. But the second one is just as important, even when it feels thankless and the friends you have just think you're being antisocial or a grump or something. I've found you just need to keep reminding yourself of the importance of what's being done, and that helps to prevent it from dragging you down. Instead, it becomes enjoyable and motivates you to give it your all, and eventually you find yourself getting even more joy from fulfilling your assignments than you would from going out to the gathering or whatever it is that threatens to distract you.

Of course, I still enjoy the opportunities to be Doug, whenever they come around. But I've found that now I'm okay with being Bob too.

"When I Am Weak, Then I Am Powerful"

Looking back through older posts on this blog, I noticed at the beginning of my need greater career in Guyana I was updating once a week. When I moved deeper into the interior, the updates became more like once a month. We now seem to have reached a limit of four times per year, every three months. Here's a simple - though roundabout - explanation why.

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While preparing for the Watchtower lesson about our yeartext (Isaiah 40:31, "Those hoping in Jehovah will regain power"), I began thinking about myself. I am, for lack of a better term, useless. I tend to be scatter brained. It looks to many as though I procrastinate a lot, but the truth of the matter is I just forget everything important that I'm supposed to do, so it doesn't get done until the last possible minute. Yes, even that pile of dirty dishes that's sitting across from me right now, that somehow has developed into a blind spot that I never even see until an inopportune moment, such as right now.

Where was I going with this...

Ah yes. I cannot be relied upon to handle nearly anything of importance whatsoever. Which is why the last four months have been incredibly terrifying for me. You see, the congregation here has only one other elder, which is a huge help for me because he's been appointed much longer and has more experience and is more intelligent and pretty much everything along those lines. He does most of the work. But then one day in October we learned he and his wife had been invited to SKE, and would be gone from mid-December until mid-March. This would leave me with no support from an experienced brother.

Begin the cold sweats.

Having spent four years in such a small congregation (and having already tackled numerous jobs) I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it takes to keep a congregation going, and that overwhelmed me. Turns out it's even more. But once I thought I had wrapped my mind around what was going to be involved in managing a congregation's affairs for three months, a frightening realization came to me. Memorial. We keep two Memorials simultaneously, both here and in our neighboring village. So I had to get both of those set up best I could. Then came another revelation. Circuit Assembly in Orealla. In case you missed it, we host our own Circuit Assembly, and the prep work for this one would begin in the midst of the SKE class (in other words, while the COBE is still away).

So as you can imagine, things have been busy. I'm averaging 12 hours a day. But here's the thing, the part that I cannot believe and that has spurred this blog update.

Nothing has gone wrong. I repeat, not a single thing has gone wrong. Sure, there's been minor setbacks here and there, but in each instance they have been quickly dealt with, and several times things have turned out better because of the setbacks. Why so? To put it simply, this is why...

"For when I am weak, then I am powerful." - 2 Corinthians 12:10.

There is not a chance I could manage this on my own. I can't even manage a cell phone plan. Trust me, I've tried, several times, and it doesn't work. But with Jehovah's help, the last few weeks and months have gone along smoothly, almost without event.

You know, a few weeks ago I wrote out a to-do list, and it was so long and complicated and full of tasks I could barely comprehend that when I finally sat down and took a look through it, I had to shut off my laptop and stare at the river for a good long while because that was the only way I could keep from panicking. But you know what? It's finished. I don't remember a single thing proving difficult or going wrong. Actually, looking back through it, I see there is exactly one task remaining.

"Collect field service report from (name)." And that's it. Once that's done, I am completely caught up on the work I need to be doing. I'm sure there will be another batch coming soon, but now I have no fear about its chances of getting done.

So please accept this as my apology for lack of updates, and also my personal experience of the truthfulness of this year's theme text. The fact that we have made it this far and the Kingdom Hall hasn't burned down or anything is a testament to the fact that Jehovah will make sure his work gets done, no matter how incompetent the people are that he has to use for his work.

Two more weeks of this and our COBE returns and hopefully things go back to normal. Or as normal as they can get in my life.

(And yes, the name I blanked out on the field service report was my name. I'm the one who still needs to turn in a field service report.)

Orealla's First Circuit Assembly

Welp. It has finally come and gone. After only a few short years in existence as a congregation, Orealla has successfully hosted its own Circuit Assembly. As a reminder, let me tell you why this was such an important and necessary occasion for us.

Orealla is located far from the main coastal area of Guyana, so going out to the Circuit Assembly requires several days of travel for us, and the cost for many of the families just to attend a one day program is equivalent to about three months of living expenses. Additionally, the boats (the only available method of travel out) are highly unreliable, which has caused us to nearly miss the assemblies numerous times.

Due to this, the branch eventually gave permission for us to host our own assembly, even providing visiting speakers to come in and help us out. Happily, we got this permission several months in advance, allowing us to figure out where we could find a location that would hold the 100-200 people we were expecting for it.

Consider the difficulty in this: for a small village (1,000+ people) to have a venue of that size is unlikely, and the only one that we do have isn't equipped with running water or any of the related facilities.

Finally we learned that the school here has an auditorium that is broken up into smaller classrooms by the use of mobile wooden walls, so if we would come in and reorganize those, the head mistress would let us use the building free of charge.

However, another difficulty quickly arose. Our assembly was scheduled for a Saturday (for numerous reasons no Sundays could be considered), but here we were going to be using a school. Which is in session from Monday - Friday. And hosts evening classes for students seeking extra credit. The question came up, how will we get inside to set everything up? We needed to set up the sound system (including bringing a generator as the school doesn't have a source of electricity), remove the auditorium walls, reorganize the chairs, set up the stage, find spots for the various departments, and install the sign with the assembly theme. We would have to find a way to get all that done late on Friday, all through the night into Saturday morning, and somehow still be awake enough to actually get something out of the assembly. On top of all that, the school's water is provided by water tanks that fill up Monday morning, and usually are exhausted by Friday afternoon, so we'd have to find some way to fill up the water tanks. As if all this wasn't enough, after exhausting ourselves we would then have to clean the entire school all day Sunday and put everything back up the way it was before in time for classes to resume Monday morning.

So you know how anytime on this blog when I begin mentioning some huge obstacle that seems impossible to work around, it always happens that some ridiculously off-the-wall thing happens that makes everything go incredibly smoothly?

Thursday morning the head mistress calls us (she also happens to be my landlady, so we've got a good relationship going, which is an added bonus) and asks if we'd like the keys to get into the school and begin setting up. We're very confused by this, since it's, again, Thursday morning. We ask if we'd be disrupting class, and she says not at all. Why not?

Thursday was a school sports day, so no one would be in the school all day long. That night they would be traveling out to the coastal area to play against the schools out there, and they wouldn't get back until Monday night. So we had from Thursday - Monday to do as we liked with the place. So, as soon as we'd finished with door-to-door work that morning, we proceeded up the hill leisurely to begin setting up. On Thursday alone we finished all the wall removal and reorganizing of the chairs, leaving all day Friday to set up the sound equipment and stuff. And because there was no school for the last two days, the water tanks still had a good supply of water.

OK, so yes, everyone is sitting down in this picture, but that's because they'd all been working nonstop since 5 o'clock that morning.

We were thankful for the slower pace, because the work was intense. See, this school is located at the top of a 140 foot hill, one which is steep as all get out. Our Kingdom Hall, where all the material was stored, is at the bottom of the hill. So repeatedly hauling load after load of generator, sound equipment, speaker stand, cleaning supplies, etc etc etc got tiring incredibly quickly. We started at 5 AM, hoping we could get everything carried up before the sun got hot. We made it. Barely.

Barely any catastrophes to be seen!

The main work finished at about 8 PM that night, though there were scattered jobs needing done that kept some of us there until near midnight (and then of course there was the night watch brothers ...)

The following morning though, all went well. No disasters to be seen, all the parts went off great, and the baptism was amazing.

Best pool ever.

We had two candidates: Florine Herman, a thirty-something woman who had begun studying a little over a year earlier; and Queeneth Miguel, an eight year old girl who is far more spiritually mature than I've ever been.

Speaking of her, she was there throughout the entire process of setting up. She'd heard all the difficulties we'd had getting this assembly to happen. She knew of the things Florine had gone through to reach this point. She knew what the visiting brothers were experiencing, coming into a remote location like this. And she'd thoroughly examined the program for this assembly, about not giving up in dealing with the troubles we face through life. And factoring all this together, she left a message for everyone on the blackboard backstage, a message that I'm now going to conclude this blog by sharing with you.

Changing Attitudes/Big News

Wait for it....

Let's begin with the titular "big news". Last blog update I had concluded by saying I "awoke this morning to yet another piece of shockingly good news. I believe next blog post will have some information about it". So here we go.

I've discussed at great length the difficulties involved for us to go out for assembly and convention. It involves either three days of nonstop panic and rushing, or a week and a half of sitting around doing nothing. This is due to the inconsistent and sporadic boat schedules. For many years we've joked about how nice it would be if we could just have an assembly of our own in Orealla.

I'm going to pause a moment and see if you can guess where this is going.

Day after arriving back from our convention, we received approval from the branch to hold the upcoming assembly program in Orealla. Even though this was over a month back, I've refrained from sharing much information about it, specifically because we didn't yet have much info. We knew we could do it, but we had to decide for sure where, when, how, etc.

So for the last month, several of us have focused on little else. I'm happy to say that as of yesterday we've locked down the venue, arranged to have a sufficient number of outside help to come in, worked out where most of them will stay, and on and on.

For starters, the venue will be uphill at the Primary School (if you're not familiar with the schooling system used here, it's basically equivalent to Middle School in the US. I think) which is pictured above. We have use of the downstairs auditorium, which seats between 150-180. This left us with the issue of where to seat everyone else, since our attendance estimates are continually being adjusted upwards (we're now expecting over 300). After an exhaustive tour of the grounds yesterday we've sorted out an arrangement to cover the large concrete area outside, fill it with chairs, and set up camera and projector to allow people outside to see the program just as well.

We have no baptism pool, but that isn't much of a worry for us since we have this...

"Look, a body of water! Good gracious, what a body of water ... what prevents me from being baptized?"

Assembly is going to be held October 7, and then the following day the regular pioneers will be heading out to attend the pioneer seminar before the other Circuit Assembly, which will be the 14th. We're realizing this will put our congregation in a difficult spot because the pioneers won't make it back in time for the Sunday meeting in Orealla. Consider who the pioneers are in our hall. Both elders and both ministerial servants, among others. So, um, the other brothers should have a lot of fun with this.

On that note, this congregation is insane. We have 35 publishers, and we just hit 11 regular pioneers. I'm going to attempt to soon have a writeup on all of them on this blog, but we'll see how that goes.

Now we move on to the other piece, Changing Attitudes.

For a long time, ministry was difficult in Orealla. Not because people weren't willing to listen, but because it was hard for Witnesses to stand out. Think of it, in most places Witnesses are known for being clean, for being peaceful, for getting along with one another to an unusual degree, and for being people you could trust with anything. Here's the thing though: in Orealla, that's just how everyone is, that's the whole mindset of the village.

Or at least, it was.

It's strange to think that even in the short time I've been here (coming up on four years) how much I've seen change. As more and more modern conveniences come in such as electricity, running water, cell phones, and especially the internet, the modern attitudes have come in as well. Everyone here sees it happening too, but are unsure of how to stop it. People have gone from just expecting to help others out with whatever they need (mashramani in the local language) to being considerably more selfish and even lazy. Monday morning used to be the time that everyone would gather together and clean up the roads and public village areas, but in just the last four years it's become something that people will only do if the village offers to pay them for the work they do.

Except the Witnesses.

Recent example: there's a section of the village where all the houses are populated by widows and single mothers. This wasn't planned, it just kind of happened. A while back a storm came and destroyed the light poles in this small segment of the village (which left them without electricity entirely), so they requested for them to be repaired. Days passed with no reply. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Finally, acting on his own, one of the congregation's Bible students felled the necessary trees and trimmed them up to serve as poles. Then he called the village office and told them he had the poles the widows needed, and all the village had to do was send some people to drag them down the hill and install them.

Weeks passed, nothing. Now, one of the widows who lives in this area is a Witness, and her neighbors started making fun of her, saying she should ask her "church" to do it for her.

So she did.

Before the day was over, the poles were dragged downhill and placed in the right positions. Since we weren't technically village workers, we weren't allowed use of the tractors or things that were available, so we had to do it by hand. But enough brothers came (and one sister) and we got them downhill, through mud, through bush, and over a creek. One of the brothers is also a qualified electrician and offered to plant the posts in the ground and hook the wiring up right away, but the offer was refused, with the village saying it had to be one of their approved people doing that work.

Three months later, it still hasn't been done.

Later on, another issue came up. The roads leading to this same area became overgrown with weeds and brush. Now again, cleaning up these places is village responsibility since they're public areas, but the path became so bad it was impassable, and yet nothing was done. On this same path is a church, so the women living on the road asked the church members to clean it up, but nothing was done. The churchgoers would merely trudge though and do nothing to clean it.

Once again, the residents of the street told our sister to ask the Witnesses to look after it. Only this time, they weren't poking fun.

In a day the entire path was cleaned. The brush was cut, opening a path six feet wide (for a four foot wide trail) and all the grass was raked up.

So as painful as it is for me to see such an idyllic, peaceful and considerate village be absorbed by the selfishness of Satan's world, I must begrudgingly acknowledge that it's happening and will continue to happen. But there is an upside to this.

As I'd said before, in most areas the Witnesses stand out clearly when compared with others. Now this is happening in Orealla. While the attitude keeps changing, Jehovah's Witnesses stay the same. And people are noticing. How can I tell?

For the longest time, the Kingdom Hall was something of the minority of the village. 15-20 people attending while the nearby churches were pulling in hundreds. What's happened with these changing attitudes? Here's how I like to demonstrate the change:

There's two men who have a freezer and will push ice blocks around the village in a wheelbarrow so people can buy ice or have something similar to a slushie made for them. I began noticing the two men would wait outside the Kingdom Hall every Sunday morning. Finally I asked them why they wait outside, and they said "Because we know once your meeting lets out, that's where we'll find the biggest number of people."

This same day, they sold out. One stop and they went back home.

So yes, in just the course of four years we've become larger than any of the churches in the village. Some days we pull in more than the seven churches combined. Naturally, most of these attendees aren't baptized Witnesses, so clearly we have lots, lots more work to do.

This too is why we continually have to revise our attendance prediction for the assembly. So stay tuned, we'll see how this goes.

"Don't Give Up!" - 2017 Regional Convention

Let's play a game. See if you can guess how many blog posts I've done.

Now that we've got the jocularity out of the way, on to the news. As you likely guessed from the title of this post, Guyana recently got to enjoy the "Don't Give Up!" Regional Convention. Thankfully, this time there was none of the usual nonsense we go through regarding the boats getting us out (for stories like that, see literally any other blog post I've ever done about assembly or convention season). This time, it actually went better than we could've expected!

See, the boats usually take us out Thursday night, so they land early Friday morning, which leaves a scant few hours available to get to the homes we're staying at, unpack, iron out wrinkles and all, and then book it over to the convention venue. This year, a boat was traveling out Wednesday night, so most of the congregation got to land Thursday morning and have an entire relaxing day to get settled and prepare for convention the following day. Additionally, we were able to find homes for a lot of the brothers and sisters to stay in so they could be closer to the convention location, and thus not have to travel so long, and also pay less in bus fare.

As was usual for me, however, I and a few others came out Sunday night/Monday morning. There was a three day cleaning planned, but I for various reasons couldn't make it to the first two. By time I got there on Thursday, the final for cleaning, most of the work was done. All that remained was getting the stage set up and hooking up the video and audio equipment.

This raises an interesting detail: last two years we've rented everything from a company and they've sent two employees to help us out during the program. That setup changed this year. Turns out someone donated almost all the equipment to the Branch office for use in Guyana, and this equipment was better than what we'd used last two years. The only slight hitch in this is that we no longer have the two specialists from the company to give us a hand in case of accidents or glitches. But not to worry, as there's a crew of brothers from Georgetown who do this kind of stuff for work, so they came down to work with us to figure out how to get it set up properly. In the midst of this process, the convention overseer gathers two brothers and myself and tells us "Pay close attention. They're only here this year, so next year you three are doing this."

Pray for me.

Yes, someone saw this trio and thought to themselves "They look like people I'd trust with $5 million of fragile equipment."

Thankfully though, everything was set up nicely and the test late Thursday showed no signs of worry.

Now if you're a regular reader of this blog, you can probably tell when I'm setting up for a disaster or some such thing. Amazingly though, the story does not take a turn for the worse. At all. It continued running smoothly throughout the program. The closest thing we had to a problem was when we arrived Friday morning and saw the overnight rain had caused some minor flooding, so we had to elevate the wires, speakers, and other items with a variety of hastily assembled mounts. None of us had come to the convention intending to wade through water, so we didn't have long boots or anything of the kind. Thus, Ohio logic quickly wins out...

You can take the boy out of Ohio, but...

I never thought I'd get to play in the mud, barefoot, during a convention program, and call it sacred service. Scratch one off the bucket list.

As I said before, aside from this the program went incredibly smoothly. I'm not going to share specific points from it, because duh. However, there was one illustration that was used which was so good I simply must share it (and I feel I safely can, as it was a personal experience by the brother, and therefore I can be sure of not copying and distributing material from the branch outlines).

The brother was speaking of 2 Corinthians 4:7 where it tells us "... so that the power beyond what is normal may be God's and not from us."

To illustrate it, he referred to the frequently muddy roads and hills found in these parts. He said he had seen a large hill that, because of heavy rains, had become saturated with mud, to the point where any vehicle attempting to traverse it couldn't reach the top. Happily, there was a bulldozer nearby which had the power to make it to the top. So what would happen is each truck would rev up, accelerate forward, and see how far up this impassable hill it could go. Once it finally got stuck, once it could finally go no further, the bulldozer would come behind it and push it the rest of the way up. Naturally, every vehicle reached different heights. Some were nearly to the top, some could barely get started. But each one made it over the top because the bulldozer pushed them.

Of course, the bulldozer didn't push them from the bottom. Each one had to go as far as it could, but no matter how far they got, they could be sure that after they'd put in their best, the bulldozer would take it from there.

The brother then applied this to that verse. The power that is normal is how far we can make it up whatever our respective "hill" is. Once we've used that up, then Jehovah provides the rest. So as long as we put in our best first, we can be sure to make it over the hill.

Alright, plagiarism over.

After all three days had finished, a group of eleven of us went over to a newly built restaurant in Skeldon that we'd all been wanting to try. This place is clearly too fancy for me.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack!"

They use FORKS in this place. Clearly not my scene.

You may spy, all the way to the right, one of my former roommates Kojo seated. He came down for a visit, all the way from .... um, wherever he's living now. I should've checked my records before starting this. Anyway, it was a long travel, and we weren't expecting to see him for this, so it came as a welcome surprise.

So after an entirely stress free, problem free, easy, relaxing, and superbly enjoyable week out, I'm now back home in Orealla, and awoke this morning to yet another piece of shockingly good news. I believe next blog post will have some information about it. Stay tuned. Seriously. This is super exciting.

"Live No Longer for Themselves"

In our midweek meeting recently, we watched the video together about two Witnesses looking back on decisions they made and how their lives turned out because of it. One giving up a football career, the other a career as an opera singer. In the course of the video, the sister quoted 2 Corinthians 5:15.

"And he died for all so that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised up."

Fairly familiar verse. Read it multiple times, heard it quoted even more. Now I'll be perfectly honest, I never gave it much thought. For one, I have no marketable skill that would lead someone to offer me a multi-million dollar contract, so no worries there. But more than that, I felt like I was already doing a pretty good job of applying this verse. When I was 18 I moved to where the need was greater, spent some time at Bethel, and I have no goals of a career in the world, pretty much no possessions, and pretty much no money. So what's the worry?

(Aside from the horrific lack of humility this line of thinking reveals in me, which is definitely something I'll have to give attention to soon)

"I believe this book has some excellent advice for you about that. Let me find that section..."

As the video played at the meeting and the words of the verse were popped up on the big screen, a small piece of that scripture stuck in my mind.

"Live no longer for themselves."

It occurred to me that the way we live involved a lot more than what we do for work. Throughout the rest of that part (and meeting) those words kept nagging at me, so when I got home I decided to do some reading about them. Looking 2 Corinthians 5:15 up in the Watchtower Library led me to the May 15, 2010 Watchtower. Towards the end of that magazine there's an article titled "Sow to the Spirit and Reach Out". In the article they discuss the verse in question over two paragraphs. Here's a brief piece with the most relevance to my sudden rant.

"Meditating on the love Christ has for people stirs up gratitude within us. As a result, we realize that it would be most unfitting for us to keep on ‘sowing with a view to the flesh’ by pursuing selfish goals..."

Perfect, I thought, I'm avoiding selfish goals! (Argh, there's that humility thing again) But the paragraph isn't finished yet.

"... and living largely to gratify ourselves."

There's the problem. Even though I'm serving where the need is greater, this made me consider how much time I'm actually spending doing what I should be doing, versus how much time I'm basically just goofing off doing whatever I feel like.

Case in point: I recently finished reading an 897 page novel ... for the third time. The day I finished it, I was home and laying in a hammock, despite the fact that it was one of my regular service days. I opted to stay home because I'd made my time for the month, and chose to just relax instead.

It's worth noting I wasn't stressed out or overworked or anything of the sort. Obviously relaxation is important, but I wasn't seeking much needed R&R. This was just laziness.

"Siiiiiigh ... for shame Josh. For shame."

I realized this was in fact much worse than I'd anticipated as I thought about how much work I'd put into preparing for that meeting we just had, and specifically the part with that video. Sure, I read through all the material, but did I really take the time to make sure I understood it and could apply it to myself? Clearly not, as I didn't even watch the video. I reasoned to myself I'd seen it when it first came out, seen it a second time when we had a Kingdom Ministry part about it, and seen it a third time when I watched it at Jeff Guess' house. Instead, I willfully chose to skip watching it in preparation for that meeting, and rather watched a Spencer Tracy movie I'd been hoping to see for some time.

Obviously I'm not saying all recreation is bad, but I'm realizing I need to re-examine how much time I'm spending living for me, doing stuff just because I think it sounds fun.

And also work some more on that humility thing, clearly.

"Get your act together. Yeesh."