naomi in spain

hey, phew.
we've been to Poland and come back again.
the EFCA organizes a missionary summer camp of sorts every year or two, and that's where we've been.
the trip to Poland started with a train to Madrid where took a flight to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt we caught a flight to Krakow. Joshua (good man!) sat next to the boys on this flight, and Rachel and I sat across the aisle from them along side of a pleasant woman from Barcelona; Rachel and I grilled her on all of Barcelona's hot spots - - where to eat, where to shop, where to find Spain's best quirky cute shoes.
We asked her about her trip to Poland and tried to explain why exactly we are living in Spain and why exactly we were traveling to Poland. we told her about how we love Jesus, his world, and his church; we told her about our Christian community in Pamplona - and how we study the bible to better understand what Christ's church should look like, how we are willing to abandon tradition for tradition sake, and how we are trying every day of every week to live out what we see the church to be in the bible.
we told her how we wonder if Europe as a whole is rejecting Christianity partly because they are mistaken about who Christ really was and about what he called his church to be. we told her how excited we were to be going to this conference to engage with other Christians who are taking seriously their responsibility to communicate the true gospel as well as working hard to understand their respective cultures so as to communicate that good gospel in a way that would be heard and understood.

we said our inevitable good-by's at the end of the flight, and told her we wished we would be flying back together so that we could hear her evaluation of Polish food at the end of her three week tour (she suspected it would be fairly bland partly due to the fact that they don't use olive oil)
and for your enjoyment, over this next week, I'll be writing about some of my favorite bits of our Poland trip.
maybe.
if things aren't too crazy around here.
we'll see . . .