A Week in Belgium

A week in Belgium (some observations)...
-Cute little houses. I'm not sure why, but the Family Matters house kept coming to mind as I drove through Brussels.
-Bilingual. Every sign in Brussels written in 2 languages, Flemish and French. That was odd. I was told that most Flemish folk learn French and often English or more. The French-speaking Belgians, just French. I loved them all, because when I spoke French they asked me why a French person was vacationing in Belgium. You go Belgium!
-Did I mention I now like Belgians? All of them.
-Having the flu on vacation, on your birthday, stinks.
-But... Pizza Hut! All over the place. Good call Belgium.
-Belgium isn't big. Since we were staying in Belgium, we considered ourselves tourists and spent much of our time visiting German villages or passing through the Netherlands of Luxemburg.-The first time I drove into Holland I passed my first bicyclists of the day less than 1 minute across the border. Stereotypes. *Snicker*
-The waffles killed it. Admittedly, the only Belgian waffles we ate were actually ordered on the German side of the border. But they were melt-in-your-mouth good.
-Eupen is in Belgium. Belgium's official languages are Flemish and French. Signs in Eupen were in German. Our waiter in Eupen spoke German and Italian, and a little bit of Polish. We speak English and French and a little bit of Swahili. No overlap. We ordered 2 cokes and a water. We received 2 cokes and an orange juice.
-I could eat German brats everyday.
-German McDonalds have milkshakes.
-'-fahrt' is a common prefix in German relating to directionality. Street signs everywhere end in '-fahrt'. I laughed every time.
-We stayed in a roadside hotel one night. A sign on the front door said a trucker had recently been stabbed to death in the parking lot, and information on the killer was sought. So that was nice.
-"Wurst Restaurant" is one of the best establishment names I've ever seen. I would suggest adding "The".
-Hiking through the woods is fun. An added bonus is hiking through 3 countries in 30 minutes.
-When my 3-year-old son fell and muddies his knees, he did the only logical thing and took off his pants mid-hike.
-Did I mention I love Belgians? Good people.
-Belgium is nothing like France. I always assumed it was like a little brother, but it's not. Different.

Our family, spread across 3 countries. Whoa.

Ski Ze Alps

You may be aware that Europe is currently experiencing a continent-rocking wave of cold. Even in sunny Marseille, the temperatures have plummeted and last week it snowed like, 3 or 4 times! None of it stuck to the ground, but it was enough to totally disrupt life and freak everyone out. It is legitimately cold though. Add in the wind from the Med with the cold temps? Brrrr.

So when it’s cold, what’s the only logical thing to do? Drive two hours north and hit the slopes! The French Alps are not far away, and together with a couple of friends I took a Saturday run to the mountains for some crazy skiing fun.

I ski on average once every two years or so. I’d previously only skied a few places in the US (Lake Placid, Breckenridge, and a couple mole hills in Indiana and Ohio). I don’t really know what I’m doing on the mountain and I’m just good enough to get myself into situations that I probably shouldn’t. I love that point of being just slightly out of control. So I figure that pretty much makes me an expert.

This was my first time skiing in France. First time in the Alps. I’d like to make some observations. Yes, I only spent one day skiing, and yes it was only one small location. But just as stereotypes always prove true 100% of the time, I will assume that every experience I had on Saturday holds true for all skiing in all of France.

Here are my observations on skiing in France:

-The French really like those T-bar lifts. You know, the ones that take you up one person at a time? A bar hangs with something like a metal frisbee on the end, you hold it between your legs and lean back on the metal frisbee, then stand and get pulled up the mountain. In the States, I’d only ever seen and used them on the bunny hills. Here, they are everywhere, and the only way to get anywhere. In all, this 2-peak ski area had 3 chair lifts and 15 T-bar lifts. In fact, the lift to each peak is one of those things. Near the top, there are signs noting that they are difficult lifts, with inclines over 50 degrees. I hate them. I like to sit and rest on my lifts. And enjoy the scenery. I don’t like clinging to a cold metal pole and losing feeling in my fingers. It also didn’t help that I fell off those silly things 3 times. I get bored and distracted, then fall.

-Great Britain doesn’t have mountains. I’m sure I learned that once in school or sometime, but I don’t ever really learn anything until I experience it first-hand. And I experienced it first-hand this weekend when all around me I heard British accents, in the French Alps.

-General winter gloves are not ski gloves. I thought I could get by. Bad idea. Skied the last few runs like I was drinking tea in Britain: pinky out. That was because I’d lost all feeling and couldn’t wrap all of my fingers around my ski poles.

-Higher elevation is colder. Up top, coooooold. And did I mention how awful those metal pole pull lifts are?

-I keep a list of things that are cheaper in (south) France than in the US. It goes like this: Wine. Olive Oil. And... I’m done. Add skiing to the list. 20€ for a day’s ski rentals and 25€ for a lift ticket. Not bad.

-When I’ve skied in the US, I’ve always noticed that people relished the opportunity of being covered head-to-toe and whipping down mountainsides as a great time to show off individual style. Crazy headwear, bright patters or colors, tons of brands and fits and accessories. In the alps, I think I saw all of about 3 different pairs of pants all day. All black. As to coats, I could count the brands and styles on one hand. Everyone basically looked the same. My French friend with me pointed out a couple times skiers passing us wearing the exact same coat as him. When we did see a hint of individuality, it was always accompanied by a British accent. The only real style I saw all day was a 30/40-something woman wearing a pink and teal jumpsuit and a beltbag, traveling about 2mph on a snowboard with both arms outstretched like a 64-bit nintendo character. Sweet.

-Colorblind skiers are not welcomed in France. In the US, the level of difficulty of each slope is noted with a shape and a color. Green circles are the easiest, then blue squares are moderate, with black diamonds hardest (adding diamonds for added difficulty). In France, the slopes are marked with colors, Green, Blue, Red, and Black. No shapes. At the start of each run was a circular sign, and the color of that sign told you how difficult the drops and turns ahead would be.

-Lifts and ski trails make even less sense in France than the roads do. There were not good central hubs from which to choose multiple lifts. There were not long shot lifts to the top. In fact, to get to the top from the base, allow me to describe the path: You start off by riding a short T-bar to the top of the bunny hill. Then you ski down and across to catch the biggest, longest chair lift. At the top of the char lift, you ski about 500m across mostly flat ground to a long and steep T-bar. Take that up, carefully choose the right trail that comes down and across to a zig-zag of trails which leads to a couple of T-bar lifts. One of those goes to a run with jumps and half-pipes, one goes to the top of the lower peak. Once at the top, take a path in the right direction and ski across and downhill to another chair lift. Take that chair lift to where it drops off, ski some trails in the trees to a somewhat hidden small T-bar lift which takes you to a chair lift which takes you to two T-bar lifts, and one of those two lifts will take you to the top. Assuming you are an olympic Super-G skier, and assuming you began your ascent at the start of the morning, you should have just enough time for a descent before darkness falls.

My day in the alps. With this expert information, you are now set to make the transition to skiing in France. Come on over!

Confession

Have you ever followed up a juicy spurt of blurting out wrongdoings (or even personal hurts) of the recent past with the phrase, “I just had to get that off my chest,” or some similar idiom?

Is there something therapeutic about confession?

The Catholic church has been doing it for centuries. People go and confess, and I think we’d be hard-pressed to call every visitor to confessionals a devoted spiritual being. So is every successful confession laced with divine intervention, or is there something simple and naturally cleansing about confession?

Do you often feel better after opening up to a trusted friend and revealing the whole ugly truth?

I’d argue that we do. That there is.

Look at movies and stories, especially relational stories. Often the struggle presents itself because of a lie, a cover-up, a falsehood that’s then compounded. A climax comes when the main character at the heart of the deception comes clean. Typically there’s a dramatic moment in which the whole truth comes out, and whether or not the situation is resolved, there’s nearly always a change in the confessing character.

There’s something healing in unburdening.

I know little about the fields of psychology and counseling, but I do have an understanding that a lot of therapy seems to come in the form of telling the full story, the whole truth.

Has christiandom today, specifically protestantism (but maybe to some degree modern catholicism too), lost the art of confession?

We have our accountability. It was a hot word a decade or two ago. Now ‘accountability’ seems to be a simple and accepted requirement to entry into the Christian faith (along with ‘quiet time’, ‘praise band’, and ‘fair-trade coffee’). But isn’t accountability kind of sort of based on guilt? Doing things or not doing things to avoid the guilt we’ll feel in having to admit weekly or whatever that we’ve failed.

I think a life lived in openness - practicing on-going confession - is an existence that at least allows the possibility of victory over sin without the fear of guilt as the driving factor. The times in my life when I’ve been the most open, generally surrounded by people who were deeply invested in the innermost aspects of my life, have been the times that I’ve felt the most free from sin. Integrity comes not from inner willpower, but from having nothing to hide and from hiding nothing.

And when we do mess up, confess. Make it a habit, and life actually may become easier to live.

That’s my opinion, and my experience. And it’s not actually all that spiritual. It’s just simple. Could it be that God made us that way?

Self-Worth in Song

Depression. Self-Worth. Self-Esteem.

All issues I’ve never faced. At least not personally. I have many struggles, but those are not among them. Anyone who knows me can probably attest to it. If anything, I tend toward an inflated view of self and I may be a little overly happy at times. But they are ongoing struggles for many of the wonderful women in my life. So I try to understand, but I usually don’t. I try to help, but am best stepping into the shadows and letting someone else do the empathizing and encouraging.

I’ve said here before that there are two primary ways I experience and understand emotion: through the psalms and through music. I often can’t express emotions that are deep down inside, and even more frequent I feel I have no basis for understanding the emotions of others. Songs help me, especially with the latter.

Today I had a bit of extra time after lunch so I went for an afternoon run in sunny Marseille. I don’t usually visit the park near our house on weekday afternoons, and discovered today that I didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the crowd. I was surrounded by walking pregnant women, homeless people (one of whom may have been Santa Claus), and young lovers. As I ran through the sparsely populated park, a song came on my headphones and I listened intently for the first time.

The voice belonging to Jenny - of Jenny and Tyler (a married music duo) - came cutting through in what sounded like raw emotion, and for the first time I felt something I’d never understood. I stood on top of a hill and looked over a city, wondering how many people were feeling the same awful, cutting feelings. As the song ended, I immediately wished my baby daughter were already a teenager, so I could share this piece of art as a way to open up and to show hope. A great song. Listen to the end.

Through Your Eyes: Jenny and Tyler


The backstory.