Sunday, August 17th, 2008.
Happy Lord’s Day, everyone! We went to church and there was a grand total of 8 people there. What a difference between that and the winter attendance of 60 to 80 at two services!

Stephen and I visited a Dutch couple in their late 70’s after church. He is a painter and he shared his work with us. We seem to connect with artists everywhere we go. They live around the corner from the church on a dirt road. Their house has three stories with two rooms on each story. On the third story is an art studio and an outdoor patio. He had painted murals on the walls of his home and a very large on one on the side of a building on the street. They have a little black mix dog. The wife is a true Dutch woman--she offered to take me for a $3.50 hair-cut. I am taking her up on that because I have a $35.00 hair cut scheduled for when I get home. I also found out about the fish market from her. Their names are Cornelius and Marie. Great people that are very solid Christians.

We have met a very interesting fellow that is Swiss by heritage but lived in Utica NY for a time. He has been here for over 20 years now. He owns a hotel on the beach and has a sea turtle hatchery right at the hotel. Yesterday 40 eggs hatched and we were part of a small group (8) of people that sent the baby turtles out to sea after dark last night. We stood in the sand just at the edge of the water line and set the turtles down facing the sea. Some of the little fellows immediately started heading toward the water. I tried an experiment with one and placed it facing the shore-little turtle turned around and marched right out to the water. God does some amazing fine tuning of creatures.

When the wave comes up the babies just start swimming and out they go. They are let go at night so that fish don’t see them and eat them. It gives them a chance to acclimate overnight before they have to adapt to the business of swimming for their lives.

The hatchery currently has over 2, 500 sea turtle eggs incubating in the sand. We will go back later tonight to see if more have hatched and we can let them go. I think we have a couple of good photos of them to show the kids.
Breakfast today was leftover rice, veggies and some eggs from those free range chickens. Lunch was ham and tomato sandwiches. We are going out for tacos tonight. There are taco stands everywhere you look. Our sea turtle friend sent us to this particular stand because the food is clean, cheap and good. Indeed, the four ladies that work there were very friendly but speak no English. I ended up ordering one of each kind of taco (chicken, beef, sausage and pork) to sample. They have delicious freshly made tortillas and serve the tacos with a sort of huge relish tray with beans, onions, salsa, etc., for the grand total of 60 cents (US dollars) each. Dinner for both of us was $5.00 because we also each got beer. We liked it so much that we are going back tonight.

The dogs of Mexico are a story in themselves. There are at least 6 dogs in every block. There are no leash or poop laws. I have started taking some photos of the dogs.

We stopped and photographed a gang bang yesterday. There were four dogs waiting for a turn with a lady dog. As I was taking the picture, I realized a Mexican family was sitting nearby (everyone sits outside) and laughing. I think they were laughing at me and not the dogs. We all laughed together. The father said that (roughly translated) she (dog) has lots of love. Stephen responded that he finally understood something that was happening in Mexico. They all laughed.
Thirty percent of Mexicans are either wealthy or middle class. That means that seventy percent are poor. I am not sure who is who. The neighbor that gave us a mango a couple of days ago does electrical wiring. He has a beautiful wife and little girl. They live on the second floor of a building three houses from the beach. The front half of the building is open with a roof over it. It also has a railing around the edge so the baby won’t fall. The back half of the building appears to be the size of a bedroom and bathroom. Mom stays home with her baby and does the stuff of life. They cook and live in the front open room with the ocean view. They sleep in the back room. They have decent clothing and are kind enough to share with the American visitors. On the weekend the father fixes and cleans his home and takes his family out. I don’t know if they have a car. Mom listens to lovely opera and classical music during the day. They do have a TV. Are they poor? I don’t know.
Last night there was a bug from the cockroach family in our bedroom. It was big enough to make the entire city of St. Louis a meal. I turned off the light and went to sleep. When I woke up during the night to go to the bathroom, I turned on the light. Mr Golly that is a big roach was sitting in the same place on the opposite wall (Stephens side). I was glad of his preference. You need to turn on the light if you get up at night to watch out for other stinging bugs. So far, I have not seen one. However, every night there are also geccos on our walls, though, so far, they have not talked to us about insurance.
Today is Sunday. Most of the town is shut down. Only the little stores that appeal to tourists are open. It is rather refreshing to see. I keep trying to find things that the grandchildren would like to see. So far, there is nothing that I have seen that would be in any way edifying. Other than artists, I have not seen any crafts people. I was hoping to spend a little time with someone that was working on a creation.
Our apartment is just right. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms. We each have our own bathroom and I like it! We also have a fully equipped kitchen and living dining area. We have a private patio with tables, chairs, sunchairs and a hammock. We have lawn and many exotic flowers. It is really breathtaking. If we go up to the rooftop patio, we can see the ocean and sunsets. If we go outside our fence and look down the street we can see the ocean.
Hey kids, granddaddy is sleeping on the couch and snoring. Some things never change. Love to all Meema

Stephen here:
The swallows nesting at the right hook of our hammock had a life/death brush just as we did in the ocean. Our weight in the hammock dislodged the nest, and we found the babies on the floor, one in and one out of the nest. We fussed for quite a while about what to do with these poor little feathered friends. I remembered my older sister, Judy, and I once saving baby robins with an eye-dropper but somehow I had no faith that there’d be an eye-dropper in this little town or that I could locate one with my clumsy Spanish. So other games began. Following the lead of our caretaker’s wife, Angelica, first, we put the nest on the grass, but neither Mama nor Poppa swallow got the idea and the babies simply shut up for very fear and never thought to holler, “Here we are!” Then we put them underneath where the old nest had been but that was also in the midst of where the old nest’s poop had landed and we figured that might be discouraging to all concerned. Next we put the nest on a chair but by then, what with the parents continuing to fly to where the nest had been—not where we were putting it—we got the idea. Our final venture was to go to the streets looking for cardboard (the streets have had for us a few useful items) but found an even better thing than cardboard which was half a Styrofoam cup. To that we added two small ice-cream containers cut in half and with the back still attached. This new nest we skewered to the hook, pressed it into the hollow of the hook, and placed what was left of the old (real, original) nest on top.
Victory! Soon the family was involved with business as usual. The babies have grown up considerably and, today, they are stretching their wings and we expect them to be flying away before we leave here. Yes, of course, we see it as a sign, a metaphor—just as the Tortugas (baby sea-turtles) we saw wobble into the sea last night. Mitzi is back there tonight while I take a turn at the writing. New life: us aging logs saved from the washing machine of the Sea, the baby swallows rescued from the logs’ weights dislodging their nest, and the Tortugas rushing out to Sea as I continue this Log—uh, … Blog.
San Felipe, the turtle man, doesn’t go to church but is the first-born son and expected priest of his Roman Catholic family. He’s baptized and a Christian. At 62 he’s still not a church-goer but claims to believe what the Catholics once believed around the time of 60 a.d. (“late Peter” is how he describes the time). That sounds familiar so we talk well together, surprisingly. He tells Mitzi she’s lucky to have me (that’s a first!) and I call him San Felipe, though I doubt that the original Felipe smoked or drank nearly as much as he does. He’s a tall, skinny, practical-bright Gringo who married a Mexican woman who gave birth to three beautiful children, and all of that earned him the prospect of becoming the chief elder of this city. He once ran this town for three years and that’s were he got the name, San Felipe. I call him that because I expect him to go to church, and he said he would go to my church someday if fantasy becomes reality. He thinks he can stand listening to me preach even if it means sitting for a while and shutting up. Considering the number of sea turtles he’s “saved”—far beyond nature’s odds and he has frequent visits from biologists at the University in Guadalajara to prove it!—I’d like to do some street work with him in my fantasy about a ministry down here. His way of saving turtles is to go with nature’s flow, and maybe we can save sinners by going with the flow of the Holy Ghost. Felipe and I get on well. It’s been quite a week! I confess to enjoying talk of Jesus of the streets instead of Jesus of theological/ecclesiastical “jots and tittles” which is where I’ve been stationed for a number of years now. It’s like going back to the briar patch for a while.
Mind you, my ecclesiastical druthers have not abandoned me. Today, at church, when the same woman once again took the reins from the male church leader, I couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s in charge here?” In response, one woman cried real tears of pain but others expressed relief that something was finally said to right some wrongs of exactly that--who's in charge here; a bit of "decently and in order"--my elders have taught me something! I suspect Mitzi and I will return soon for a longer period of time and figure out what God has in store. Right now, it looks like we will probably come back for three or four months next year and revisit some places and include a few other places to explore. One of our revisits will be here in Melaque, and we may rent a place on the coast which contains an American-Mexican family, two noisy parrots, a constant turn-over of baby sea turtles and, yes, the owner of the place himself—San Felipe, who’s going to help me in the soul-saving business after I’ve gotten him into church!
We love it down here! Tomorrow, we go to where the fishing boats come in early in the morning and will buy some red-snapper for dinner; then we plan a complete ocean/beach day. At that end of the beaches the ocean is calm and gentle, and we are able to go in and out with no more fear of death. We are living and learning. Felipe has saved 13 people from drowning, including a missionary who never came back to thank him—we’d just discussed the nine healed lepers who never returned to Jesus.
Happiness is a golf cart! First, let me say, that many of my friends through life have been people that I don’t like at first. Well, I didn’t like the idea of riding around in a golf cart and protested Mitzi’s interest in same. Her pain of riding a bike finally got through to me, sort of, and soon she drove up all smiles in a blue golf cart. She’d made a good deal with San Felipe. Happiness is a golf cart!
Sometimes I even let Mitzi drive it. We bop around town waving and “Hola!”-ing and now people seem to notice what’s latest on our agenda. “You were visiting ‘the artist’ today,” said a “local” to Mitzi at tonight’s turtle-run. The artist was first-rate and seeing his work was a joy. He’s a Christian white man, a little leaner and taller and older than I and a testimony to us and our prospects down here. He says starting a white church in La Manzanilla is well nigh to impossible but his wife adds, “Just come down and go to church with us.” At least today, that’s how the future begins, though we’ll see what tomorrow brings. They were warning us of humility and sitting at the far end of the table = “just go to church.”
These are notes to myself so that I won’t forget some of the deep longings that draw me from the traditions of church and back toward the life of Jesus. I love both leanings but bemoan the pains of their frequent separation. Either you do church right and the broken people get left behind, or you go to the streets and righteous doctrine and formal traditions take a beating. I still don’t believe there has to be such a gap and maybe that’s why Mitzi and I will continue snooping around a life that includes Mexico. I need also to mention that both of us feel very young and alive again and, in my case, less trapped in a computer with my brains dancing on the head of a pin. With the whirl-a-gig of each day presenting a somewhat different future to us, we trust, increasingly, that—even at our age—God is taking us beyond ourselves and our comfy zones.
I can’t say enough good about Rick and Leigh Frederick. Rick is a direct cousin, my mother’s sister’s son. He was six years my junior, however, and was my brother Dan’s friend, not mine. All I remember was Ricky as the almost youngest boy and Granddaddy’s favorite and then Rick as the teenager always in trouble and finally not going to college. While I was finishing up hot-shot degrees and climbing the Ivory Tower, Rick was daring the police in our old township and standing eye-to-eye with Hell’s Angels and the like.
Our six-year difference is more than wiped out now and our one-turning-into-five days together were very special. Rick told me from the beginning that he was an atheist and didn’t want me “talking religion” but proceeded to ask me religious stuff throughout the rest of our time. “Rick, Steve doesn’t say a word,” chortled Leigh, “until you ask him about it.” Hoisted…! Anyway, I try to answer him in ways that don’t sound religious. We all are loving each other, and Mitzi and I hope to see them for another day at the end of the trip. The details of our itinerary are still a bit in the air other than being at the Guadalajara airport next Tuesday, August 26th, at 12 noon. With the Fredericks we visited friends with lovely, mountain haciendas (theirs is on the Lake Chapala and very beautiful), drove the narrow streets of many towns, danced in the 60’s hamburger spread for which they hope to be the next proprietors (we just learned they got the lease and a buying the restaurant!), wound up and down the beautiful, cool, obsidian mountains near the Lake (mountains which haven’t erupted in 12,000 years according to science accounts, though we know better), ate well, slept well, and never stopped talking. Finally, we hosted them here on the Pacific shores.
Rick and Leigh were highly successful campground owners in New Jersey and know how to work and have fun! Leigh’s mind is like a jewel even after a horrible two-year bout with rheumatoid arthritis which is healing now but which scrambled her brains for a while. Their best feature was liking us, seemingly with no strings attached. Why do I sometimes wonder that I’d rather be liked by non-churchgoing, non-believers who run from God but keep looking back than loved by holy people with magnifying glasses? Sorry. I’ll shut up—and pray to be over these antics before I return to civilization again. Saint Paul, I’ve come out from among them so why does our Lord allow us to check back once in a while?
The trouble with writing is that there is an either/or rationality and logic about it. Words and phrases get stuck as one side or the other, and that is not where my heart is right now. John 3:16 says that “God so loved the WORLD” but it’s easy to forget the “world” part in my continuing worship and existence with small and often isolated numbers of similar-believing friends. Mexico intrudes upon that isolated security and reminds me of the old hymn: “This is our Father’s world.” Although not all will be in heaven, I can only love us all. In my desire for the security of my own particular brand of “birds of a feather” I often forget that “world” part and get smug. In my mind, I hear again Ralph Selin’s recent sermon on “catholicity”. Down here that becomes very much a reality and not a self-righteous abstraction. “I wish you weren’t non-believers, Rick, and that you will become a more practicing Christian, Felipe, but I don’t want to lose you as new friends.”
August 19th, 2008.
Every day I study Spanish and speak it whenever possible. I’m going through still another textbook—now through seven lessons and hope to conquer another seven before I leave. I will always be a Gringo or Foreigner down here, but I don’t want to be an ugly American and that means becoming fluent in Spanish. Almost none of the US and Canadian people we’ve met speak fluent Spanish. I don’t know what to do with these observations but, as I say, these are notes to myself, and Mitzi’s willing to put them on her blog.
She bumped her head on the golf cart this morning and, hopefully, is sleeping it off. My own mind seems okay after the fall out of bed last spring. I watch this because before we left there were signs of repercussions from the concussion I received then. If I’m not clearly better, I will go to a neurologist when I return to the States.
Mitzi has her first serious migraine in a while so I’ve been left to my own devices. The message is that I could be quickly bored down here if I didn’t have something to do other than lie in a shady hammock or on a sunny beach. I don’t want to become a computer potato—a take-off of a couch potato. But today, not wanting to leave Mitzi for the beach, I lay on our back porch and think/pray about the particulars of what I might do if I were down here for three or four months. I can go to church on Sunday, and maybe even preach once in a while. We could even go to church on Sunday evenings to Ron Klein’s service in Manzanillo (distinct from La Manzanilla). I might start a Bible class with Frank and Anne Boset who would like a church started in La Manzanilla. They are lovely and deeply Christian people and, though starting a new church seems unlikely, a Bible class might be possible and there are at least four of us! So that takes care of Sunday or the time-equivalent of a day. Note that, as I’m lying there, I’m no longer thinking of starting a new church but the more practical problem of what to do with my time. A plan of God is designed to inspire, not enervate!
I don’t want to avoid the computer—for example, I would like to do more writing down here as I have done in Ithaca. But, as you’ve seen, I want to be out and about, doing more of the Lord’s work in a hands-on way with people. Since there are a limited number of Gringos like me, the notion of people has to be expanded. So my sundrenched reverie this afternoon runs full circle and once again I come to people in Mexico being Mexicans and Mexicans means speaking Spanish. But I can’t start there because I don’t, in fact, speak Spanish. So I’m stuck between older English people who don’t need me and Mexicans whom I can’t talk to because I don’t understand their language yet. What to do….
Have you any idea where my reverie is floating to? Who knows both Spanish and English? Who, though practicing in his own way, is, in fact, a baptized Christian? Who’s a bit of a nut like me? Who likes to help others—certainly Tortugas and, it turns out, people as well? Who has a place for us to stay and for me to set up shop, so to speak?
Mitzi’s still sound asleep and I won’t be long.
I leave the golf-cart keys visible next to the door, and then get on my bike and start peddling.
“San Felipe, will you help me set up Bible classes down here? I want to start with the parables.”
“Squaaawk!” screams a parrot near my head.
“Of course!” says Felipe. “Of course I will. That sort of thing is all I’ve been thinking about since we met last week. We’ll work mainly with children, though we can have a class for adults. We can do it right in my hotel. There are good rooms for teaching. You and I may have a few different words for it, but that’s been my dream for years. As I have already said, I have trouble with what the Roman Catholics have come to, so I struggle about going to church. We’ll stick with the Scriptures, though King James was a real jerk, and I think we can get a better translation.”
Felipe is a blurter like me. His pretty, Mexican wife is watching us with a look of interest.
With tears, I tell him the story of being called to the pastorate, telephoning Mitzi three days later (I was working for my sister in Massachusetts when it happened), and Mitzi saying “I know” and telling me she’d already been to a counselor and cried because she would not make a good pastor’s wife (Wrong!).
San Felipe and I talk a bit more and exchange e-mails, but before I leave he says, “Start studying your Spanish again.”
“I’m already on lesson seven of a new textbook,” I reply. That seems to satisfy him just as his mention of Scriptures satisfies me—at least for the moment. I shuffle past his ear-shattering parrots and ride on home.
Mitzi laughs when I tell her about my visit. She allows as how San Felipe is a good "con man," but soon she is busy thinking through the details of getting children’s art and teaching supplies to Mexico without glitches at the border.
Sound crazy? Of course, but now my schedule for our next visit to Mexico potentially could extend beyond just Sunday and involve teaching about Jesus during the week. Besides, if I’m running ahead of God, he’ll rein me in. He always does.
While I was visiting Felipe this afternoon, the baby swallows flew out of their nest.
Mitzi feels much better. We have promised each other a "red-snapper" fish dinner at home tonight.