neighbors, interns, teams, police

We have been in Brussels for eight weeks now. One friend said, “It is like you never left!” Sometimes it feels that way to us, and sometimes everything seems different. We have reconnected with many people we knew before, but in some cases relationships and circumstances have changed. It is interesting to see which old friendships are being renewed and also to make new relationships. We met a neighbor from the apartment upstairs when he rang our doorbell to ask if we would help him bail out the cellar that was covered in a couple of inches of water from a flash flood.

This week our three summer interns arrived. Sara is here for four weeks, and Jazmyn and Whit are here for six weeks. Pray for them as they adjust to the culture and as they make friends and serve and learn.

On July 9 a large team arrives from our churches in Tennessee. We always love welcoming teams. When we had returned to the states, the first time I was really homesick for Belgium was when a team was preparing to go, and I realized we would not be there to welcome them. This team is special for us because our son Josiah and daughter-in-law Becky are leading. In addition to the original team of adults that had planned to come at this time, this group will include several of the students who were scheduled to come in March but were unable to because of the terror attacks. The team will be participating in “Serve the Church”, working with other teams from the U.S. along with local volunteers, to support several churches in the Brussels area. Please pray for safety traveling and for all the activities they will be involved in.

We continue to settle in to life in Belgium. Last week workers came to refinish the hardwood floor of our living and dining area. It looks beautiful! We still have to get dining room furniture. Our residency has been approved and we are now waiting for our identity cards. Other bits of bureaucracy are gradually being worked through.

One part of the approval process is a visit from the local police to verify that we are actually living here. That visit happened at the exact time that Dan was returning from a day trip with four teenage boys in a rented car. He called ahead to let me know they were almost back, and I heard him open the garage door to bring the car through into the courtyard. At the same time the buzzer for the main door to the apartment building rang. Thinking that he had let the boys out to come in from the front, I picked up the phone and said “come on in!” then opened the door to our apartment, and went on with whatever I was doing. Soon there is a policeman in uniform standing at my door, wondering I am sure, what kind of person opens the door without finding out who is there. In the meantime, Dan who was tired from mountain-biking, was throwing a plastic water bottle at the kitchen window to try to get my attention to come and help him carry things in from the car. They approved us anyway!

Blessings!

Elizabeth & Dan

Why do we help the poor?

Deuteronomy 15:10-11

Give freely and spontaneously. Don’t have a stingy heart. The way you handle matters like this triggers God, your God’s, blessing in everything you do, all your work and ventures. There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbors in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbors.

1 Samuel 2:6-10

God brings death and God brings life, brings down to the grave and raises up. God brings poverty and God brings wealth; he lowers, he also lifts up. He puts poor people on their feet again; he rekindles burned-out lives with fresh hope, Restoring dignity and respect to their lives— a place in the sun! For the very structures of earth are God’s; he has laid out his operations on a firm foundation. He protectively cares for his faithful friends, step by step, but leaves the wicked to stumble in the dark. No one makes it in this life by sheer muscle! God’s enemies will be blasted out of the sky, crashed in a heap and burned. God will set things right all over the earth, he’ll give strength to his king, he’ll set his anointed on top of the world!

Job 31:19-20

“Have I ever left a poor family shivering in the cold when they had no warm clothes? Didn’t the poor bless me when they saw me coming, knowing I’d brought coats from my closet?

Luke 12:33-34

“Be generous. Give to the poor. Get yourselves a bank that can’t go bankrupt, a bank in heaven far from bankrobbers, safe from embezzlers, a bank you can bank on. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.

1 Corinthians 13:3-7

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, Doesn’t have a swelled head, Doesn’t force itself on others, Isn’t always “me first,” Doesn’t fly off the handle, Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, Doesn’t revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end.

Ruth 2:13

She said, “Oh sir, such grace, such kindness—I don’t deserve it. You’ve touched my heart, treated me like one of your own. And I don’t even belong here!

Why do we help the poor?

Most of you who read my blogs know that we are Christians and we are living in Brussels to help start a church that is relevant to the people of Belgium.  We are not the pastor who preaches and we do not lead the music.  We work in the community, mostly outside the doors of where we meet, doing whatever we can, whenever we can, to do what we believe Jesus would do if  He were here walking ahead of us.  So, one of the main things we do is to work with the poor and disadvantaged.  We do it because it is a main concern of the Bible.  We don’t do it because we have to - it is not on a master checklist to be a Christ follower.  We do it because Jesus and his disciples helped the poor. We do it because we love Jesus.

In the Old Testament it says in Deuteronomy 15:10-11 (The Message translation)

“Give freely and spontaneously. Don’t have a stingy heart. The way you handle matters like this triggers God, your God’s, blessing in everything you do, all your work and ventures. There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbors in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbors.”

You can’t work yourself out of a job.  We understand that if we help one person out of their situation there will be two or more to take their place.  We serve the unfortunate for God’s blessing, and we don’t expect that it will be money or possessions.  It is not quid pro quo; it is more like doing things our children or spouse appreciates - we are deeper in love because of it.

We do it because of the concept of grace - something that you receive that you did not earn. In the story of Ruth in the Old Testament, Ruth is a poor widowed, foreign girl living with her destitute mother-in-law. She meets a wealthy in-law, a pillar of the community, and he comes to her aid.

She says in Ruth 2:13

“She said, “Oh sir, such grace, such kindness—I don’t deserve it. You’ve touched my heart, treated me like one of your own. And I don’t even belong here!””

That verse really sums up how the people that are helped should feel - how we want them to feel. But if they don’t, does that mean we should not help them?  We have raised two boys who are adults now and we are very proud of them.  They are nice men, kind and honest with wonderful wives and families.  Sometimes though, when they were growing up, they did not always do what they should have, but we still loved and cared for them. 

We love people - not a special group of people, just people in general.  It is easiest to love people who look and act like you, who have the same values and culture.  If we only loved those who it is easy to love, we would not be loving like God does. You see if God was not willing to love those who are not exactly like him (perfect, Holy) we would never be loved by him.  That is why we help the poor.

Learning French with Johan, Pirlouit et Claudette

When someone asks, "What is the hardest thing about living and working in Brussels?" we always say, "learning French".  This is the one thing our entire team agrees on. We are not in an environment where we are totally immersed - you can always find someone who speaks English. A salesperson or receptionist might have to go and search for them for a few minutes.  We don't always ask.  We would prefer to try to converse in French, but they often hear our accent and slow speech and go to find the multilingual people.

I started out with a professional, expensive business school.  I was able to keep up, but I never really completely understood the concepts before we would move into the next part.  The most we ever had in the class was four students - three women and me.  Several units were just me.  They finally decided after a particularly bad final exam that I should not go on.  I felt that they should have realized that closer to the beginning rather than expecting me to repeat the last class when I felt lost for a long time. It would be more economical to do something else. Next I studied with a very good private tutor at our apartment.  She was excellent but also expensive.  Then after that I went to a commune class, kind of like Continuing Education in a local school.  I enjoyed that.  It was a class of twenty-five students and we spent a lot of time conversing rather than just learning grammar and verb conjugations.  I made a lot of progress but I didn't finish because I returned to the States to visit friends and relatives.  Upon returning to Belgium, Elizabeth and "Claudette" (not her real name - if I fail I don't want to embarrass her), decided that I should study with Claudette for a half hour every day.  Claudette lives on the top floor of our building, the sixth.  We live on the second.  I rode the elevator up to find that we would be using a Belgian comic strip book as a text book.  That seemed great until I started to read it to her.  It was incredibly difficult!  It looked like a children's story but it had high school vocabulary!

"Johan et Pirlouit" was written by Payo, who also developed the Smurfs out of this series. In French the Smurfs are called les Schtroumpfs.  Anyways, Johan is a knight in training in the king's court and Pirouette is a short guy who is the Court Jester and rides a nanny goat for a horse.  This, and going over a grade school phonetics book, is working very well.  The difficult words provoke conversations about the definitions and the comic book promotes laughter, so it working quite well and by the time that I am seventy-five I expect that there will be no need to search for the person who is good in English.