Jeneta's Birthday

We were not able to make it out to Veseli's house until later then we wanted. Turns out Jeneta was pretty upset and they thought we were not going to make it at all. She wouldn't let the cake be cut because her American friends were not there yet. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story for the evening...

How do you answer this?

My Captain that I work for almost broke my heart tonight. Or maybe it was the children that were breaking my heart. You decide. How would you have answered? Keep in mind what is really best for the children, not just the emotions of your heart. Search your heart for what is best in God's eyes. I'll leave it open-ended for you to decide, but here is the story...

Tonight we went back to a friends house that we visited last week for the celebration of his new baby girl. Veseli is a bodyguard for one of the TMK Generals that we work with. The TMK is currently a civil disaster reaction force in Kosovo that my section is partially responsible for their supervision and training. Veseli is a great friendly guy and treated us to more hospitality then we deserved when we were there to celebrate a good thing for him! He has many children, 6 or 7 if I understand correctly. Last week we played with a few of them throughout the evening. Tonight, there were more then last week! Haha. Funny how the word spreads about soldiers and how much the kids want to be around them. The children range from the new two week old, a one and a half year old boy, a one and a half year old girl, a two year old boy, a 5 year old boy, a 6 year old girl, and then Jeneta who will be 8 years old tomorrow. Jeneta was one that we heavily played/talked with last week and I was interacting with her again.

Veseli was telling us how Jeneta has always told him that she wants to go and live in America for the "good life." Interesting how many people still believe in the dream of America and just want to get there for a better life. My captain was telling Veseli and Jeneta that next year for her birthday they should come visit him on his farm and he would have us soldiers (myself and our other sergeant) come there as well. Of course she is interested in it and my captain gave her one of his business cards to include his home email address and phone number on it. She treasured that. A little while later Jeneta is curled up under my arm and trying to learn to read the business card that my captain had given her. She is asking what everything says on it and I'm teaching her to say all of the words. Veseli and my captian were talking about how Veseli would really like for all of his kids to go to America and be raised there and taught in school there. The captain was explaining how it might be possible but they would definitely need to learn their English first so they would not be too much of a delay in getting them transitioned into school in America as well. They were talking for quite a bit and I hadn't realized how serious they were and all they must have been saying until my captain told me to come over there a minute because he seriously needed to talk to me about this. (I was only a seat away to begin with.) Jeneta slid down from the chair we are sitting on and I went and sat next to my captain. Jeneta knew what he was talking to me about because she came over and rested her elbows on my leg and propped her head up there and listened to everything the captain was saying to me. It would have been tough enough without her there, let alone her right there in front of me cuddled up. I'm being asked if I would be willing to move to Illinois and raise Veseli's children. Not all at once but a few at a time is how they would bring them over and I could take care of them. The captain was seriously proposing to me that he would purchase a trailer to put on his farm for me to live in with the kids. All I would have to worry about was some job that I could pay the utilities for the trailer and he would take care of the rest. My job would be to raise the kids and help integrate them into America. He even told me if I have a significant other that she could come along and together we could raise the kids. He asked what I thought about that? He told me that this isn't just a question to answer tonight, but something for me to think about as this would change the course of my life.

Here is Jeneta:



How would you answer that?

[Don't misunderstand me. I'm leaving this open ended not because I don't know my answer, but because this story doesn't need my answer. It's more something for you to question yourself. Please feel free to leave your thoughts in a comment. I'd love to hear your opinion of this matter and have it shared with others.]

[BTW, we are returning tomorrow to Veseli's house. You see from when we had been there last week and interacted with Jeneta, she asked her father Veseli if he would call the Americans and ask us to come to their house for her birthday. So tomorrow we head back again, as undeserving guests for a very special little girl's birthday.]

Kissed by a Girl

Ok. Ok. Before you get too excited or jump all over me please let me do a lot of explaining!

Most of you know that I've been saying for a long time that I want to wait and kiss my wife for the first time on wedding day. It's one of the extremes I talk about to help myself not fall into temptation early.

And...

Hopefully you are also wondering what the heck is up with my blog! It's gone and then it's back and I claim it will be to the glory of God and about His Love and then I post about being kissed by a girl?

Well, give me time, and you will see how this is exactly the love of God at work.

Let me start near the beginning...

Last Monday I went along with Captain Hodge and Sergeant Ferdinand to visit with an Imam, a Muslim leader. He lives in a town called Gornje Karacevo which is about the farthest away from Camp Bondsteel that you can get and still be in our sector. This town is right along the Adminstrative Boundary Line (ABL) with Serbia. In fact the main road to get there crosses over into Serbia and back into Kosovo due to the use of bad maps when they established the ABL. KFOR, the multi-national military forces here, actually had to build a gravel road bypass so that our military vehicles do not cross over into Serbia to get to the towns of Karacevo.

This Imam is a very young influential man in a town of about 1300 people. Boy is this Imam a talker. We spent three hours there and America has a lot to learn about hospitality. I hope to bring some of theier culture of hospitality back with me. As we were getting ready to leave his home, we stepped outside and begin to put our boots back on. There were 3 young children hanging around outside and of course I begin to interact with them. At first I was just doing my normal routine where I greet them in their own laungage and shake their hand. They think it's funny enough just hearing us speak to them in Albanian. Then I moved on pointing at things on their shirt and getting them to look down just to slide your finger up and bop them in the nose. Kids are pretty smart everywhere. They usually don't fall for it more then once per visit. There was one little boy about 2 years old and two girls about 2 and 3 years old. The boy was very outgoing and saluted and so I taught him how to properly salute and got him looking like a good soldier. Then something else came to mind that I hadn't done yet with the children in Kosovo before. Bear with me as I try to explain something techinal to do with your arms. Remember when you extend your arms with both palms facing outwards, clasped your hands together, then twisted your arms up and pulled your hands close into your chest? Unless you place your hands right to begin with you can't twist your arms inwards. Well, I did it real quick and off course the kids tried it and couldn't get it at first. Then I attempted to show them and help them get it right. The boy caught on quickly and smiled real big with a huge grin from ear to ear. Another older girl that was there had to help out one of the girls so she could figure it out. Then they both were smiling and we had to go, so I said my goodbyes. :(

But the story continues...

Today we went back to visit the Imam again. We had along some engineers and some TMK members to evaluate a project in the town that the Imam was wanting us to do. The Imam treated us to a very traditional meal and we spent a few hours talking with him, the municipality president, and other locals at the Imam's house. At one point early in the evening the same little girl that needed help to learn how to twist her arms tried to come into the room from outside but was shooshed away. Finally towards the end of the evening the little girl came from behind a curtain that lead to the rest of the house and saw me and waved. Of course I waved back and thankfully the TMK member next to me motioned and told her to come over. They greeted her and shook her hand and then she came down the line of us soldiers and shook and greeted each of us. The TMK member next to me then picked her up and sat her down next to him and wrapped his arm around her. After a little bit she looked over at me, put her two hands together, plams facing out, and twisted her arms up into her chest and smiled. I had to laugh. I pointed at her shirt and she looked down and fell for the classic old trick. So she did it back to me and of course I fell for it as well. You would think that I would know my own tricks! :) Then I pointed at the TMK member next to her and got him on the trick too. She looked up at me, pointed to the ceiling and I wondered what this trick would be but decided to play along and looked straight up at the ceiling. Next thing I know she wraps her arms around my neck pulls herself up into a hug and kiss me smack on the neck! I've just been kissed by a girl.

Everyone sitting around us laughed. I had to laugh and smile too as she definitely pulled one over on me. I praise God for this instance tonight. You see, what do you think really happened through all of the interaction between this girl and I? I know one thing for sure. I was kissed not just by a little girl tonight, I was kissed by God.

If it was my own love pouring out onto others as I play with the children through language barriers, it would get no where. My love would fail. But since it is God's love that is in me that I choose to pour out onto others through interacting with them, then His love is returned. This little girl may not have heard about the love of the God that I believe in, but I know that she has experienced it. For that I praise God. I thank Him for a little girl tonight that took His love and continued to pass it right on to someone else. I pray that some day she will understand the true meaning of God's Love in her life.

Here she is along with two of the gentlemen that treated us with much hospitality.



May you be kissed by God in your own life.

An article from Ben Stein...

I recently received this via email from Debbie Demsky. As she told me, it is worth reading...

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time. Ben Stein's Last Column... (read all of this or you will have missed the best).
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How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World? As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction; and when we turn over our lives to Him, He takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the fire fighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

To God be the glory

Yes, I had taken my blog down and there was some reasoning to it.

Thanks to a recent email I received from Katy Wright I have decided to put my blog back up. It will be under the light of a new focus. I don't want this to be just about me and what I've been up to. I want this to be about the love of God and through the story of my life and the stories of others I plan to share with you, I pray that you will see God at work and experience His love in your own life. To God be the glory.