In His Service: Citybuilders

Books

2009-04-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

For whoever may find it interesting, these are some of the books I've recently read and plan on reading:

Currently working on:
The Problem with Evangelical Theology

Shenandoah Religion

Appalachian Mountain Religion

Books recently read:
The Lion and the Lamb -William Shea
(Informative, author wears his opinions on his sleeve)

Seeds of Hope -Tim Muldoon
(Some great insights)

Toward a New Catholic Church -James Carroll
(Don't recommend, but didn't finish, so...)

Handbook of Denominations -Frank Mead
(Fun read)

The Ecumenical Scandal on Main Street -William B Cate
(Didn't finish)

For the record...
My reading list recently has been a lot like throwing darts, i.e. I don't necessarily recommend ANY of these books before you talk to me about them.

More knowledge or more firepower?

2009-02-11T07:36:00.000-08:00

“With or without Russian participation, NASA and ESA plan to collaborate on a major initiative to the outer planets that would launch around 2020 and have a transit time of about six years. A mission to either Titan or Europa would cost between $2 billion and $3 billion.” - Discovery.com

Many scientists, astronomers in particular, are holding out hope that either Titan (a moon of Saturn) or Europa (a moon of Jupiter) contains life in the oceans found beneath their frozen surfaces.

At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, the F-22 fighter plane program of the U.S. Airforce will have cost $65 billion. -Slate.com

How's that for spending priorities?

2009-02-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

This is a Wordle of this blog. It's a fun way to see what Tom and I have emphasized on this blog thus far... at least as far as text goes. I think it's a fun snapshot.

Mom, Dad, and my older sister Mary in hawaii for the holidays

2008-12-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

Covenant!

2008-10-24T04:41:00.001-07:00

This last month Thomas, four other Company men, three other sisters and I had the privilege of making the covenant of the People of Praise together. I was invited to make the covenant earlier this year. I have spent the last five years underway in the People of Praise, discerning if this is how Jesus and I want to work in the world for the rest of my life. At the end of the discernment, as you can see, the Lord and I decided to throw our lot in with the People of Praise permanently! Glory!

As is probably the case with any life-long commitment, there are a lot of reasons for why I chose to make the covenant but I'll share just one here: Brothers.

The primary reason I came underway five years ago was brotherhood. I had spent the last four years trying to find it in Arizona and Oklahoma and I had not yet found a group of men who's greatest desire in life was to serve Jesus, become friends with Him, and bring others into that friendship. That's what I've spent the last five years doing with these men in the People of Praise. We've built houses together, gone door to door talking to people about Jesus together, we've prayed together, we've argued, we've asked forgiveness. Together we've left college, home and security behind to follow Jesus and most importantly we've helped each other fall in love with Him and taught each other how to work tirelessly for Him.

One paragraph is hardly sufficient to capture the robust friendship that has come about through the common life I've lived with these guys. I fear that trying to capture our life in a blog post would somehow sell it all short. These men and the People of Praise mean the world to me. The best way I have to describe my life and the brotherhood Jesus has given me is in His own words, "Come, and you will see."

Jesus' death

2008-09-03T05:06:00.000-07:00

These last few weeks I've been doing the meditations from the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The Third Week is on the passion and death of Jesus. As a result I wanted to learn some more about what theologians had to say about how Jesus' death atoned for our sins. This particular passage (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church) I found to be a clear concise way of putting Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. I found it very helpful and figured I would share it.

"By embracing in his human heart the Father's love for men, Jesus 'loved them to the end', for 'greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' In suffering and death his humanity became the free and perfect instrument of his divine love which desires the salvation of men. Indeed, out of love for his Father and for men, whom the Father wants to save, Jesus freely accepted his Passion and death: 'No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.' Hence the sovereign freedom of God's Son as he went out to his death. ... This sacrifice of Christ is unique; it completes and surpasses all other sacrifices. First, it is a gift from God the Father himself, for the Father handed his Son over to sinners in order to reconcile us with himself. At the same time it is the offering of the Son of God made man, who in freedom and love offered his life to his Father through the Holy Spirit in reparation for our disobedience."

Jesus, we strive to love as you, your Father and your Holy Spirit do!

This Summer

2008-08-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth and Joe did one of their last videos of the summer on what we've been doing on the North side of Indianapolis. This video is pretty much my whole summer in a nutshell. Thanks Joe and Liz!

Video 3

2008-06-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

Once again, Elizabeth and Joe turned out a wonderful movie. This time they were joined by J-T Kelly in filming and editing. Jesus is alive on the south side of Indianapolis, and He's working through His People of Praise!

Video 2

2008-06-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

1435 Demolition

2008-06-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

We had all of the young men on the Company Summer Institute (CSI for short) come down for the weekend and help us tear out the insides of the house the People of Praise just purchased in Indianapolis. We're going to be working on it this summer with the two action teams slotted to come in July. We hope to have a household of men living there in the fall.

This is a short video from Collin Anderson of one of the highlights of our demo work:

Yes, If you go on the CSI we teach you how to run through walls.

More pictures to come soon on my flickr page.

Everything for the greater Glory of God!
Brian

New Video

2008-06-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

This is a new video from the Communications department of the People of Praise. Elizabeth Grams and Joe Gleason are down here in Indy and they'll be shooting footage of what's going on this summer here and posting videos on a weekly basis. This is the first of many, take a look!

Summer's coming

2008-05-15T11:59:00.001-07:00

Holy Buckets!
It's been a long time since I posted.

We've been up to a ton of fun stuff here in Indy. The biggest thing in life recently has been a shift in what my daily pattern of life looks like. Most of ya'll know we've been doing some renovation on half of our duplex. We recently decided that we wanted to finish it before the summer got into full swing. This meant I dropped just about everything else I was doing and started working on the house full time. We've made some major progress. Here's some photos to show ya'll what I mean.

This is a picture of the very early stages of work:

The inside of the kitchen:

Sheetrock up (Ellen took the picture):

And here's a video of what it looks like now!

In other fun news, Abe Rus and I went out to Albuquerque, New Mexico for my brothers Sean and Patrick's birthdays. We also got to tour my dad's work and fly a jet simulator. Lots of fun. Oh, and who could forget the rock climbing we got to do in the Sandia's! (Pictures on my flickr account... )

I'm heading to Hot Springs, Arkansas tomorrow with Nick, Rus, Abe, Mike Wacker and Nathan Barrett. We're going to do some praying, summer planning, and resting. Going to be fun, Praise God.

'Till next time

Wednseday in Allendale

2008-04-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

For a while now Wednesday's have been an active day on Yale St. It starts at around 4pm when a bunch of kids and youth come over to learn and play. Jeanette and Laura started having kids over on Wednesdays, and Nathan and Gerry have joined to be able to have more guys. So now Nathan and Gerry take the guys and Laura and Jeanette take the girls. I got Cathy's Camera out and took some pictures of the afternoon. More will be on my flikr page.
After the kids go home we get ready for the neighborhood dinner. Which has been a huge success. We have some regulars, and everyone who comes is really learning a lot. We are currently learning the Our Father line by line. Today's meal is being cooked by Patti Deacon, Cathy Grill, and Nicky Howell(spelling?). I'm looking forward to it, gotta go.

(having a distance jump competition)

(Gerry giving advice to the jumpers)

(L to R: Cathy, Nicky, and Patti)

On the road

2008-02-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

Ahh.... the open road, the Holovaty mini-van, sunflower seeds left over from the last trip, stale water and great conversation. This is a scene becoming quite familiar nowadays and I get to acquaint myself with it once again here in the next week and a half.

I leave for Louisville in a half hour with JT and Nick. We will be meeting Jen Torma there and staying with a family who we met 9 months ago on a 1 day recon trip to Louisville. We then head on to Memphis where we will meet Nathan and Genevieve Barret to do some more extensive recon and mission work until Friday afternoon. In Memphis we will be staying with the a daughter and her family of an Indianapolis branch member.

Glory to God! Pray for our work in Memphis. Our hope is to find out more about where the Lord wants us to be working there in the near future.

Indy Missionary Work Day

2008-02-13T13:11:00.000-08:00

Recently my parents got me a wonderful, fast and brand new laptop. This has been a wonderful gift, and as an unexpected bonus it has video editing software. We've been taking footage around the house here and there, and I've thrown them into a pair of videos. Turns out I really like video editing, at least to a degree. It's also a really fun way to update ya'll on what life is like here in more ways than words. Hope ya'll enjoy.
-Brian

Household video

2008-02-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

Time in Hawaii

2007-12-22T20:55:00.001-08:00

I was able to spend this last week in hawaii visiting my parents and two sisters. It was a great time, full of catching up and going to the beach. I was able to see my older sister Mary who I hadn't seen in two years, as well as attend my younger sisters college graduation party.
On my last day on the Island I went to the North Shore with my mom and two sisters. It was a blast ,went boogy boarding (pictured) while my family hung out and enjoyed the beach. Than we drove home, and stopped at a surfing joint and got some island food.
When I get a chance I'd like to acquire some more pictures of the family. My younger sister Theresa graduated from the University of Hawaii this December. I was blessed to be there for her grad/send off party. She will be doing 2 years with the peacecore in Madagascar, starting in February. The grad/send off party was a real highlight. It included singing by my dad, an educational slideshow of Madagascar(4th biggest Island in the world), and the community kids shared with "Mrs Theresa" things they have in common with her(she's babysat every one of these kids).
It's always nice to be back on Oahu. The branch there is doing well. I was able to share at an informal gathering about the missionaries, and our work. Which went really well, a small gathering of people came and were all very encouraged by the stories I told. I shared a lot about the summer in Indianapolis. Highlighting the fact that we didn't know what we were doing. The Lord really taught us as we went. Instructing us to teach and preach all that he had taught us. Glory to God. Continue to teach us Lord!

On the road

2007-12-02T11:29:00.000-08:00

At about 12:30 PM on Thursday Nov. 8th, Nathan and I left Shreveport for Memphis, TN. It took us a little while to get going, including one false start and a whole cup of coffee in my lap two minutes out, but we were determined to get out as fast as we could. We had a deadline, sunset in Memphis. We needed to get there before the sun was down so that we could set up the two tents we would be staying in the upcoming weekend. Rus, Nick, Abe and Wacker would be meeting us later that night driving down from Indianapolis, and Tom was going to drive up the next morning with a truckload of stuff for the Indy duplex from Windows Doors and More. We got there after sunset unfortunately, but the headlights from the car were plenty sufficient to see everything we needed to set up the tents. The guys from up North got in at about 1 am.

The campsite we stayed at is about 20 mins from downtown Memphis and is right on the Mississippi River. There were numerous mornings of cowboy coffee and eggs over an open wood fire pit, prayer times in the woods, foraging for wild onions, a three mile hike and a lot of conversation. We had Lord's day on the beach of the Mississippi complete with Kvadrat (a russian four-square game), bonfire and a gorgeous sunset.
On Sunday morning we broke down camp and headed home. Nick, Rus, Wacker, Thomas, Abe and myself headed back to Indy while Nathan went home to Allendale.

We got into Indy just in time for the Sunday evening prayer meeting in the South Side. The meeting wrapped up, and we had a delicious soup made by Hannah for dinner. Shortly after dinner's conclusion Rus, Abe, Jon, Tom and I left to drive the 10 hours to Minneapolis through the night. We were on our way to the Gapp family's property in Walhalla, North Dakota. Jim Gapp owns land up there and lots of his family owns land directly adjacent to his. We were headed up there for a week of deer hunting. We arrived into the Twin Cities at about 8:30AM and had an hour and a half to gather up our hunting equipment from the various People of Praise members that were loaning it all to us. Our next deadline was brunch at the Olson family's house. We got to the Olson's and made up a stellar brunch. I was on bacon and sausage duty, Abe pulled scrambled egg duty, Luke Olson was on pancake duty and others took the rotating duty of keeping a steady flow of White Rock coffee available. After brunch we drove the next 7.5 hours to Walhalla. Walhalla is a total of 8 miles from the Canadian border. North Dakota is very flat and windy, that's about all there is to say about that drive. We got in late and had spaghetti waiting for us.

The hunting trip was awesome, a lot of great guys hanging out, doing target practice with rifles, hunting deer, fixing tree stands, taking walks, sitting absolutely still in 20 degree weather for 4 hours, lots of venison and late nights talking over kerosene lanterns and whatta ya know we even got a few deer. You'll have to look at the pictures on my flickr site to get the rest of the trip details.

We left there after about a week and drove to Minneapolis again and this time had lunch with the Gapp family. We made it to Indy late in the night. We all awoke to have breakfast with the Indy household, and then Tom and I headed back to Shreveport.
We got back two days before the South Bend grad students, a collection of Dinkytown people, and Indianapolis folks came into Shreveport for Thanksgiving.

This last week Jon, Rus, Nick and Abe stayed around to help us do a number of big renovation projects on 1430, one of our houses here on Yale. We finished all that we had to, and everyone else here managed an amazing overhaul of the common office in 1442. We built some custom desks out of doors and shelves out of doors and cinderblocks. Once again, check out my Flickr account for stuff on that soon.

The Indy guys left on Friday morning while Jon and I stayed on to finish the last details on the desks and shelves. We are leaving tomorrow morning for Indy with Hannah Brummer, who is due to get in late tonight from a friend's wedding in Georgia.

Which brings me right up to the present and into the future... I will be moving to Indianapolis for the next indefinite period of time to help with our mission work there. The Lord is really moving and keeping all of us on our toes.

Glory to God

Saturday

2007-10-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning the faint beep of my alarm clock woke me at 6:45 AM. Or at least somewhere near 6:45. The batteries in my alarm clock are getting old and it decides of its own volition to jump forward and backward in time, this also explains why the beep is faint. I made up a Lord's day menu, got together a shopping list and printed it off in all by about 7:05 AM. I then got the LCD projector from the women's house and brought it over to the great room in 1434. We have a Missionary Company conference call every Saturday morning at 8:30 AM central. Yesterday we skyped in the Indianapolis missionary household for the discussion.

At 7:30 the household, Seitz's and five members of the sisterhood got together in
1442 for our weekly Saturday morning breakfast. Ruthanne cooked up some egg bake and coffee cake (that has a nice ring to it...) Coupled with coffee and orange juice it hit the spot. We did dishes at 8:15 and made it over to 1434 for the conference. We fought through some technical issues, including a blue screen of death on one of our laptops. After a software update we were good to go and finished the conference able to see the Indy folks without interruption.

Almost immediately after that conference I had another conference with Nathan, Joan, Genevieve and Nick. That ended at about noon.

I then shot off a few emails and grabbed some coffee. There were two cars that needed oil changed, and last week I broke two scissor jacks and I had no way to drain the oil from them. I ran over to John Thomas' house to borrow a hydraulic jack and two jack stands. John is a retired Air Force and Hertz auto mechanic whom I've become very good friend over the last year and a half.

The oil was changed by about 2:45, which was just enough time to wash my hands and take off my boots to start cooking LD at 3:00PM. I was assisted by Ricky Thomas and Gloria Murphy. We cooked straight up to 7:00PM. The menu was mexican, and included creamy guacamole, bean dip, sopes, empanadas, Oaxacan peanuts and mexican donuts. We had 18 people at dinner, in two houses.

Ricky Thomas and I ran out at about 9PM to pick up the VHS of the ND vs. USC game. We recorded it at the Bendele's who have let us do this a number of times.

At about 10:45 PM I finally called it quits and hit the sack, bushed but happy, having lived out another day in our Lord's service.
Glory

what do I do everyday?

2007-09-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

So I don't really have a job description, I go to school sometimes, do missionary work, work at WDMO, and do other stuff. I was struck today by how blessed I am.

5:30am - take a jog around the neighborhood,get sprayed by Ron watering his plants.

6:30am- Morning prayer

7am - Coffee w/household - brain storm stuff w/Nick, who's in town

8am- Prayer

9am - Plant a bush behind 1426 (to hide the compost)

10am- Run a saw over to Lakeshore WDMO - say whats up to the WDMO crew

10:30- Go to CCC(caddo correctional center) to visit a neighborhood guy whom I've known for a little while. Turns out I forgot my I.D. Had to miss the morning visiting hours, and try back later.

11am - Some more landscaping stuff.

12pm Go back to CCC.

1pm Wait an hour to get in to CCC. Finally get in! It's a huge facility, quite sad.

2pm Pick up Terry &; Mickey drive them to St. Vincent (WDMO warehouse)

3pm Give Terry and Mickey rides home

4pm Weedwack Yale - sweep sidewalks

5pm Dig next to the side walk leading to 42, so we can put a median/barrier between the grass and the mondo("save the dwarf mondo").

6pm Praise the Lord! Toco's are coming up!

7pm- Shower

8pm- play some guitar and get ready for some swing dancing

9pm- swing dance w/the household in 1434 (Kedrick watched, but would not participate)

10pm- yeah.. here I am. Glory

Allendale again

2007-08-29T18:07:00.000-07:00

It's approximately 4:30 PM central time on a nice, humid, sunny Saturday afternoon. There's still a slight salty taste in my mouth and a bit of tenderness in my right upper gum from cracking sunflower seeds for hours on end. My legs are getting antsy from spending a couple too many hours in a seated position. My left forearm is a little more sunburnt than my right from taking the driving shift that coincided with the sun's peak heat. I've just about burnt out my tolerance for listening to classic rock music and post-prime DJ's, so the dial on the radio is now turned to 102.1 K Country. My co-pilot is Thomas Duddy. This isn't the first, second or even third time in the last 4 months that Tom and I have tackled the 12-16 hour drive from Indiana to Louisiana together. On the road we've talked about the coming semester, the crazy things the Lord will do with us in it, ideas for WDMO expansion and the relative merits of Bob Marley and Steve Miller Band. We're in great spirits having left Indy to a wonderful sendoff by the brothers and sisters we've recently become close friends with from a summer of prayer, sweat and missionary work.

There isn't a map or atlas in the car to guide us, only a napkin with a list of highways scribbled down from memory shortly after a 5 AM departure. We've both made the trip so often that the napkin is more of a mental reassurance than a necessity. We make a turn onto a two lane county highway lined with pine trees and orange clay that twists it's way through gentle North Louisiana hills. We take our indicated left off of the highway onto an even smaller road that drops about 50 ft in elevation in about the same amount of road traveled. After passing a number of small, poorly marked driveways on our left we come to the road's dead end. There weren't any mailboxes on the right because we happen to be driving next to a lake, and all of the houses are on our left, as is the lake (as you might have guessed).

We stop just short our destination, which is a brick-colored log cabin. We shut the car doors quietly and use trees as cover while approaching the cabin with boy-ish grins. In the cabin, as you might be wondering, is the Allendale Household taking their end of summer vacation. None of them know that Tom and I are driving down to join them for the last two days of vacation except Nathan and Josh. We make a quick game plan for the best way to startle as many household members as possible. We decide on a pine cone aerial assault due to the abundance of that particular ammunition. We split up and each take an end of the house, our target: the back porch. We go on gut feeling for timing as far as co-ordinating the initial barrage on the unsuspecting folks sipping IPA's in rocking chairs. I let loose a bit earlier than Tom, but he manages to make up for it and we hit them with all we've got (which was just about as many pine cones that one can expect a man to hold while still maintaining use of a firing arm). It turns out our victims are David Zimmel, Gretchen Rolland, and David's sister Jeanette Zimmel. They're delighted to see us, but the "surprise factor" is a bit lower than I might've hoped for, oh well. David and Jeanette have just gotten back from an hour long kayak adventure, and Gretchen is in the middle of a book about the Desert Mothers. We then make our way in the door and the reaction from Joan Pingel, Genevieve DeCelles and Liz Brewer is much more satisfying. Nathan, it turns out, is on his back with a heating pad under him and Josh is reading to him from a fiction novel. Josh gets up to welcome us, but Nathan is glued to the floor. We come to find out that Nathan pulled his back out in a volleyball game within the last two hours and is out of commission (not too surprising if any of you have seen Nathan play a game of volleyball). Liz makes a quick gin and tonic for Tom and I, and I quickly find myself helping Joan with the preparation for twice baked potatoes. Tom pulled salmon grilling duty.

The rest of the evening is filled with an amazing dinner, complete with steak, salmon, twice baked potatoes with homemade raspberry cheescake. We honor David, Gretchen and Liz individually as all three of them are soon moving to South Bend indefinitely. Later after dark, we all head out to the air mattresses and float on the lake for a couple hours just staring at the sky and picking out constellations in between catching up about this summer's happenings.

As I head to bed at about 1 in the morning, I think back about this last week in my life. I can't believe I get to do this! It should be unfair to have so much fun in life. The Lord has blessed me with an amazing life in People of Praise, full of wonderful work and amazing friends to do it with. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Not a single thing in the world. Ever.

This is what I signed up for.

Pictures taken by Cathy of vacation

New House

2007-07-29T08:35:00.001-07:00

This is a short video tour of our new house on the south side of Indy. It's already been host to many men's and women's group along with a neighborhood Lord's day. Praise God!

Indy summer update

2007-07-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Hello folks,

Here's a speed update from the front as I have a few minutes before driving up to south bend for the live internet broadcast from Greenlawn on Citybuilder (look for the "live video" link in the upper left hand of the webpage).

This summer has been blowing by and the pace at which the Lord is moving in the South Side (our new target area just south of downtown Indianapolis) is mind boggling. We have regularly had 30 people attending our sunday afternoon prayer meetings held in the living room of a house belonging to a wonderful lady named Ruth. Of those 30 half are non-POP folks from the South side. We've also been having men's and women's meetings. There are two women's meetings and two men's meetings, both broken down into an older and then a younger meeting. Last night the young men's meeting, which Abe Olson, Jon Gapp and I are helping to lead, walked around a couple of the streets and picked up trash. We had five young men all between the ages of 11 and 15 walking around with us. Along the way I got to have a conversation in poor Spanish with Tomas y Ishmael who are going to teach me better Spanish with the aim at being able to preach the Lord's message to the sizable Hispanic population in the south side. I also met a guy sitting on his front porch who is going to have dinner with us on Friday and wants to put his life in common with us and help us with our work in the neighborhood.

We are hoping to move into a house in the south side very soon. As things are we currently drive there every day from our current location northwest of downtown and spend about 4-5 hrs walking around and return home in the evening. It's a rough count, but we've established at least a functional relationship with about 200+ people in the area which is a wonderful start. There are, as we estimate, around 5,000 people in this area however, so the Lord's work is only getting started.

We've entered into blitz mode now as we only have about 2.5 weeks left until the "missionary summer" is officially over, so I doubt another post with be forthcoming until after that time period. You can however keep up with our life here photographically on the Citybuilder website. I'm naturally more inclined towards pictures as opposed to words, so I do keep the pictures fairly updated. Plus you can see pictures from our work in other places like South Bend and Allendale. Please keep us in your prayers and keep all of the people whom we've begun befriending in the south side in your prayers as well. Lord, let your Kingdom come quickly and powerfully!
Brian

Nick and Rus' birthday celebration

2007-06-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

This last Saturday night we took and evening to celebrate the Lord's day and Nick and Rus' birthdays. Nick turned 27 on June 13th and Rus will turn 22 on June 29th. We had some great spaghetti with Italian sausage, basil and rosemary wheat bread, and a chocolate cake with raspberry cream cheese icing. We had a blast together and it was all topped off by having a group of folks from Dinkytown come in late at night as they were passing through to Buffalo camp.

In other areas of life, the Lord is really moving. we recently had a pig roast BBQ that we invited neighbors from the triangle (our neighborhood) and the South Side of Indy, where the Lord has been having us spend a lot of time and is really blessing our work. We have our second prayer meeting in the living room of a lady we met in the South Side this afternoon. The last meeting we had, two men gave their lives to the Lord and we baptized three people in the Holy Spirit! We have written up budgets, prayed deliverance, baby sat kids, healed bum knees, and delivered people from all sorts of baggage that Satan's has been throwing at them. Come Lord! Keep us in your prayers. We're in the South Side just about every day for at least 3-4 but sometimes up to 6 hours doing the Lord's work on top of scripture study and other household activities (which explains the lack of blog posts as you might imagine).

Check out my flickr account and the pictures on Citybuilder for more pictures of life here.

Glory to God.
Brian

Arrival in Indy

2007-05-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

Praise God! Tom and I are officially moved into 1444 Rembrandt St, Indinanapolis, IN. Gretchen, Liz and Cathy drove us up and stayed for Memorial day weekend, leaving just this morning. We had a great first weekend here. Saturday happened to be Liz's birthday and we arrived just before Lord's day started. We had a great meal and a wonderful time after singing songs and hanging out in our living room. We also had a chance to take a walking tour of IUPUI and downtown Indy.

Today we moved the women out of the smelly side of the recently purchased duplex into the formerly smelly side of the duplex which is much nicer. We also decided to take down the wall between the two front porches. Rus started out with a sawzall, but it was sort of tough going for a while. After he got enough of the wall cut out he took a much more exciting approach to the wall. He roundhouse kicked it to the face. As you can tell I didn't take martial arts like Rus did, but I did kick it hard enough to help him knock it down. There's already a ton of foot traffic back and forth between the duplex and the Rembrandt house reminding me of the three house set up in Dinkytown. I have a feeling it may become a trademark of People of Praise city-starts. Praise God!

Onward!

Roof repair

2007-05-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

At some point within this last year a roof leak proclaimed itself into the world in the side bedroom of 1426 Yale ave, one of our homes built about three years ago. We had spent some time earlier trying to troubleshoot the problem, hoping that it was a simple "buy some tar and fill a hole" problem. We couldn't find it after a couple looks so we decided we just had to tear off the trouble area of the roof and redo it. That was a job that none of us had time for until today.

The college women are in town for their annual beginning of the summer work week. I had the pleasure of being assigned Catherine Bulger for the day to assist me in doing this. We started at about 8:30 am (after having ordered the necessary materials the day before... lesson learned the hard way after two action summers)

We started by cutting out the roof area that we knew was causing trouble. We then had to scab on some 2x4's onto the trusses to assure good support for the new plywood. After that we cut and nailed down the new plywood. Next came the tar paper held down with little green cap nails. Finally we spent the afternoon crusing on shingles. I'll tell ya, that Louisiana sun gets pretty dang hot at around 2pm on hot roof. We finished off exactly at 3:30pm with a wonderful looking final product. I would like to also say that Catherine Bulger worked like a tireless stallion to such an impressive degree that I was at risk of letting her outwork me.

Praise God! This was one job we knew we had to get out of the way before the Action summer started or NO ONE would get to it until next fall.

Onward!

Flickr/ Indy

2007-05-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

I've recently become a huge fan of flickr. After a close call with my external hard-drive losing power while I was working on it and then telling me that nothing was saved to it (YIKES, my entire life of appx 100 or so GB is contained in there, 3/4 of which are pictures) I decided to take advantage of the ridiculous amount of stuff Flickr lets you upload in a month. It also allows for me to share a lot more of life than I can by adding one or two pictures to a blog post. Now you can go on and see something like 150 (and counting) of my pictures. Recently I've uploaded pictures of WDMO, Yale, Allendale, HH activities and pictures from a recent trip to Indianapolis. Flickr is pretty easy to use, I'm not 100% sure if you need a yahoo account to see the pictures (Flickr is a yahoo run website) but if you can't seem to see anyone's pictures, then odds are good you're going to need a Flickr account.

Like I mentioned briefly last post, Tom and I are going to be in Indianapolis for the summer. We're going to be working with a number of other People of Praise missionaries at the IUPUI campus and potentially some surrounding neighborhoods. The list of folks in Indy this summer is quite stellar, it is as follows:

Guys: Nick Holovaty, Rus Lyons, Jon Gapp, Thomas Duddy, Abe Olson, Dan Reinbold, Jim Barrett (Nathan Barrett's brother) & myself.

Gals: Hannah Brummer, Mary Timler, Mary Seale, Naomi Caneff (Josh Caneff's sister) , Ellen Putzier & Melissa Rader.

We just recently purchased a duplex in a neighborhood north of the IUPUI campus, and plan on living in their to some degree while also doing some renovation on parts of it. This is going to be a great summer of training and growth as People of Praise missionaries, and what better group of people to do it with? At the top are pictures of Indy (also found on flickr in addition to more Indy photos). The one guy you might not recognize is Quentin. Quentin came underway this last semester as a result of getting to know Nick, Rus, and Jon through their missionary outreach. He's a great guy and I look forward to being able to get to know him better this summer. Praise God! Pray for us up there (or down there, depending on where you are) this summer!

Onward

Cinco de Mayo Lord's day

2007-05-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

This last Saturday's Lord's day happened to coincide very nicely with Cinco de Mayo. Lord's day is something that we do in the People of Praise to celebrate the end of a week of hard work by gathering for a nice dinner and thanking the Lord for the wonderful things he's given us in that last week (it's based loosely on a Jewish tradition of honoring the Sabaath as well).

Completely independent of the fact that it was going to be Cinco de Mayo I had resolved to make homemade tamales and spicy mexican chocolate cake for Lord's day before I left for the summer. (Have I mentioned that I'm going to be in Indianapolis this summer?) We realized the day of that we just happened to have a Mexican themed meal on the fifth of May... Sometimes things just work out neat eh?

I really enjoy making tamales. They're rather easy once you get over the intimidation of starting from scratch, they just take a while to make. Cathy and I spent most of the day getting them ready along with two types of creamy bean dip, a cucumber/red onion salad, two jugs of Sangria and some home-made red chile sauce. We were aided in the construction of the Tamales by Nick and Liz and of course, everyone helped us in eating them. It was a lot of fun and tasted great! Praise God for Lord's days in the People of Praise!

Spain

2007-05-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

Holy Cow has it been a whirlwind of a month and a half since our last post! As of right now I have not spent more than five consecutive days in Allendale since the first of April. Dave is in Portland for Jeanette's graduation and Josh will be leaving tomorrow be with his sister Naomi as well. Thomas is running WDMO in Dave's absence and I am trying to get the summer's work projects lined up and planned out. Glory to God, life is really busy.

At the beginning of April I had the wonderful opportunity to join my family (all except Mairin due to her young age) in Spain for about a week and a half including Easter Sunday. One wonderful addition to the trip was that Ed Preuss was able to join us for the first 4 days or so from London where he is studying Finance for the semester. I flew into Madrid and arrived Early morning. I got to break out the old Spanish from freshman and sophomore years of high school early in the morning to figure out the public transportation from the airport to the hotel where I was to meet my parents. All went well, mostly due to Madrid's well designed Metro as opposed to my impressive linguistic inclinations.

Madrid was wonderful. We had a hotel right downtown and got to wake up to bustling streets every morning. We walked around the city for a while visiting a few museums and many restaurants and cervecerias on the way. The highlights most definitely be the Palacio Real and a bullfight at Plaza de Toros. The bullfight was a new cultural experience. In place of popcorn and bud light, the vendors walk around selling sunflower seeds and tall shots of whiskey. It took a while to get used to a bull being slowly killed in front of you, but after the sixth bull I was starting to get a feel for the whole sport. Easter Sunday involved going to service about a block and half from our hotel in a neat little church. I also tried to pray over a guy's leg in broken Spainsh after church was over... that's a whole other story in itself.

After Ed had headed back to London we took a 5 hour train ride through the countryside to Barcelona. Barcelona was also wonderful. For those of you not familiar, Barcelona is situated right on the Mediterranean Sea. We also saw a number of neat museums including the Pavillo de Mies van der Rohe, which is a personal favorite that drew out the Architecture student in me. We hiked up Montejuc, which is the mountain where the olympics were held. Of course Barcelona also included LOTS of wonderful food, wine and a really neat market. To cap off the trip, the night before we left we got the opportunity to see a F.C. Barcelona futbol game. Barcelona has some of the most talented soccer players in Europe right now and it was just a TON of fun to watch them play. Praise God for such a wonderful trip and a wonderful family to go with. For those of you who want to see more pictures, I have posted a lot more pictures on My Flickr Page

More posts to come, a lot has been happening down here!

The Big Move

2007-03-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

These last two weeks here in Allendale have been almost entirely dedicated to moving Windows Doors and More Outlet (WDMO) to its new location. WDMO was started a little more than a year ago as a business that could bring in money to the work of the People of Praise and hopefully provide jobs for people in our neighborhood. The basic premise, for those of you not familiar, is that we sell donated 1st and 2nd doors, windows and more (hence the name) at outlet prices.

Our previous location was about a 15 minute drive from our properties on Yale and our new location is about a half a mile (2 minute drive) from our properties. We've had this Lakeshore Drive property for around two years now and Joe, Rus, Jon, Tom, David and I have been working on this thing at different points in time for about five to six months now. I must say it has really undergone some huge changes. And yesterday, Saturday March 24th was our first day open for business at Lakeshore! Praise God.

Huge thanks are in order for the Dinkytown Campus Division. They sent two separate trips of folks on their spring break to help us get this move done. They spent the whole of their trips doing hard, physical labor that got even the more veteran among us wiped out. Extra props go to Thomas Duddy and David Zimmel who managed the whole thing (I unfortunately was only around for about three days of the whole thing due to a trip to South Bend in the middle). Some of the first team also did some wonderful work building handrails for our front porches here too. Thanks to Laura Brummer who headed that project and did a bang-up job.

This move to Lakeshore is a great example of community. Many of us have experienced or participated in a People of Praise move, where community members get together and move a family from one home to another all in one big push. Moving WDMO was a very similar experience for us down here. We had a huge task in front of us and the People of Praise came through, driving 1,000 miles over their spring break to move us. Praise God!

Laying it down

2007-03-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

Our Lakeshore dr. warehouse has been an ongoing project for months now. Jon and Russ put in some good work before they headed to Indianapolis. A lot of the work they did involved the floor. Pulling up carpet, linoleum and replacing sub flooring. We than laid down some ply wood and floor leveler. The final step was to install some grey commercial grade carpet. We set aside 2 days to get all the carpet down. And guess what happened? Glory to God we got it done in the two days. Which was crucial, since we were running out of time before the move. One thing I've learned in doing construction type work is projects often if not always take longer than you think. So laying the carpet in 2 days was alright!
The job involved multiple buckets of glue, and 1500 + square feet of carpet. It's pretty funny, the longer you handle the glue the more it starts to take over. First a little on your hand, than it's on your left knee. Than you start memorizing all the spots not to touch on your body. And than it's the end of the day and the glue is seeping out of your pores and you call it quits.
On a more current note, we sent over 3 trailers to the Lakeshore property today! The move is officially underway and going well. We have a large contingent of the dinkytown campus division down here for their spring break. We also have a group 5 of guys from a college in Indiana who heard about what we were doing and came to volunteer.

-Thomas

Coffee Table

2007-02-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

We've been talking down here about potential ways to get the younger men involved with us and also how we can begin enabling folks by giving them a source of income. One of the front running ideas right now is to begin teaching whoever in the neighborhood wants to learn to build simple furniture or wooden crafts. They could then turn around and sell it somewhere. I decided to give it a shot personally to see what it would take and to see if there was actually money in it given the hours generally required to make good looking products. I spent this weekend and earlier this week working on a coffee table from scraps around the property and a door insert from WDMO. I was literally able to pull old wood out from under our house (some of it even having been used as temporary bracing for the foundations of 1434) and turn it all into this table! I am pretty pleased with it. It's on it's way to the WDMO showroom tomorrow to see if it will actually sell with that demographic. It looks like, given the hours I spent working on it and the price I hope to sell it at, that it could actually be a good use of my/our time for tentmaking. Who knows, maybe we could even get our own People of Praise : Allendale woodshop going. I have to admit that I am going to have trouble parting with it, it would go so well in the great room of 1434. I guess that's a sentiment that I'm going to have to just rid myself of if I'm going to do this on a more regular basis.

Glory to God.

Google search

2007-02-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

I had about 15 mins before we headed out for Friday fun night and decided to see how long it took me to find one of our blogs on Google by searching "People of Praise". TJ has the highest search result as the second entry on Page 15! Kind of interesting to me actually. The first page of results is really meaty with the People of Praise website and stuff by Adrian and whatnot. After that it quickly drops off to a number of unrelated sites that just happen to have "People of Praise" quoted in the site somewhere. It also turns out that there is one other community and two churches called People of Praise between pages 3-14 of Google results.
Onward!

Blog reader and Gmail

2007-02-22T06:46:00.000-08:00

I was researching how to go about keeping up with all of these blogs yesterday. I tried downloading about three different firefox extensions but none of them seemed to work with all of our blogs. I went with Ben Reinhardt's suggestion of Google reader eventually. In the process of searching through the mozilla extensions I came across one called Gmail skins. It's sweet. It lets you customize your gmail with colors and a number of other different options. The best of which is including a column from you google homepage on the right-hand side of your inbox. I was able to put Google reader into my google hompage and then it was imported into my gmail screen. While I was at it I also added a to-do list and google calendar. It's a beautiful streamline for all of the things I need, G-chat, Gmail, calendar, blogs and my tasks for the day/week. Just figured I would share the extension with ya'll. Above is a screenshot of my Gmail.

Gadgetland for Christ!

Death by Chocolate

2007-02-21T20:46:00.000-08:00

This blog was created and will continue to exist as a news blog that keeps ya'll up to date on life here in Allendale. It will hopefully have very few opinion articles but our household Mardi Gras dessert was crying out for an opinion post so I caved in...

So I'm sure that almost everyone has heard of if not partaken in "Death by Chocolate". There aren't a whole lot of stories about this particular dessert due to the lethal effects of ingesting it. I have to admit that I was HIGHLY critical of the name in my own mind while preparing to eat it. I thought it might just be some inside joke that chocolate lovers had about how delicious this particular combination of chocolate was and were using its name to try and get those of us who failed to comprehend the infinite goodness of chocolate to join in. It turns out that they actually gave it the name "Death by Chocolate" so that it could serve as a warning to anyone who was foolish enough to take a heaping cereal bowl of it right after a huge Mardi Gras meal. About 3/4 of the way through this fiesta in my mouth I realized that my stomach needed to stop by and make a deposit at the bank because of how rich this dessert was. (sorry, I won't abuse this privilege of a captive pun audience too often). I was blown away by how this one dish was able to completely immobilize an entire room of people. Josh, David and I had fun shortly after we finally got on our feet comparing Death by Chocolate to the five-point-exploding-heart technique in that five steps after getting up from eating it, you would die.

Pictures of this near death experience can be found on Liz's site. Praise God for Gretchen and her delicious dessert. We really know how to do

dessert right in the People of Praise.

Onward!

marlow's on the fire

2007-02-18T21:04:00.000-08:00

Well this is Thomas Duddy, the other half of this blog. Brian has been prodding my involvement and after all he's done all the work thus far. So I figured my birthday celebration would make a good first entry.
Brian cooked up some Mexican taco's, which were most excellent. Following dinner we started up a fire in our front yard on Yale. Talk about a perfect day, it was sunny all day and in the 50's. It really felt like the 60's with the sun. So it made for a great evening, cool enough to make the fire feel great. We successfully participated in a conference call around the fire. Unfortunarly our technology cannot yet convey heat over long distances. The conference call was part of a conversation those in the missionary company are having. And than we roasted marlow's, and the household honored me, and we enjoyed each others company.
So myself and Brian have been living in Allendale since September. We moved down with Jon Gapp(who is now in Indy) and Joe Gleason (now @Notre Dame). A couple weeks ago Brian and I got invited to join the Allendale household. Which was just great, and we excepted the invitation. It's been great being a part of the household. It is really great to be living in allendale with fellow missionaries moving the kingdom forward. The Lord is really moving here.
This weekend we celebrated David Zimmels birthday, and now mine. I'm often reminded, and was again this wekeend of the statement; "the work is about the friendship, and the friendship is about the work." Glory to God.

A visit from Indy/Life update

2007-02-17T12:12:00.000-08:00

Last week Rus, Jon and Nick were visiting Memphis and decided that they couldn't pass up the opportunity to drive the extra five hours to Shreveport for the weekend. The weather got wonderful for a couple days here and we were able to enjoy outdoor soccer at LSU, volleyball at Columbia park and a Lord's day all in one afternoon/evening. It also turned out to be a wonderful blessing to have Jon and Rus join the work crew here for a couple days. We got hit with a large amount of work that we weren't expecting this last weekend and we couldn't have gotten as much done as we did without them. They were planning on leaving Sunday evening but ended up staying until Wed morning! Praise God we got the three amigos for a brief stay... isn't our life in the People of Praise just awesome.

In other news...

Duddy and I just finished a long-awaited platform/foundation for the backyard shed that Gretchen built about month ago. I have to say it looks pretty nice and it hopefully will serve us well and get some stuff out from underneath our homes and into real storage.

We're celebrating David and Duddy's birthday tonight and tomorrow night respectively. David has ordered salmon and Thomas has ordered burritos and a bonfire. Gretchen's actual birthday is tomorrow and we'll celebrate it next weekend.

Our cars continue to give us opportunities to practice patience (especially Liz who does an amazing job managing all of our cars). We have two in the shop and the rest are pretty much on their way out in one way or another whether it be bald tires or weird engine shaking. Josh and Liz got stranded on HWY 49 on Thursday night and had to call for a tow. Praise God the household got AAA just a few weeks ago... we've already used it to tow two cars.

We finally finished all of the electrical work in 1434 that we can think of. We're calling in for an inspection on Tuesday that will hopefully pass well enough for them to turn on the electricity to the house. The HVAC guys came in and knocked out the last bits of heating and cooling work on Friday. Ken Keahne is coming into town this week and hopefully we can enlist him to do some final plumbing work. The house is slowly but surely coming along!

That's about all the news from the 'Dale I can think to fill in right now.

Come Lord!

Sickness Strikes!

2007-01-23T13:54:00.001-08:00

Well, the inevitable happened last week. The flu struck again in Allendale. It's really been a non-stop cycle that sort of picks people off one by one or in pairs here ever since Mishcon in January. Last week it took out Jon Gapp, Dave Zimmel and myself. Dave was knocked out on Tuesday and Jon and I followed shortly on Wednesday afternoon. It turned out to be both a blessing and a disappointment. Rus and Jon had deliberately delayed departure to Indianapolis so that we could take advantage of their manpower and make a big push to get the WDMO Lakeshore warehouse restored. The flu ended up cutting our work force by more than half and we got less done last week than we would've theoretically gotten done if Jon and Rus had left and no one was sick. The blessing was that Jon got to spend his sick time here in Allendale with two wonderful on hand nurses and their bag of pain-killing goodies instead of in Indy or on the road to Indy.

I've experienced getting really sick with brothers and sisters twice now in Allendale. It obviously hasn't been world's of fun either time but there is definitely something to say for getting sick with the same folks you live and work with. In my defense I would like to quote David Zimmel from earlier this summer: "Except for the whole sick thing, this week has almost been fun!" The week/weekend held lots of sleeping and a season and a half of the TV show MONK, which we have all taken a liking to down here.

Today was my first day back since the sickness and it felt great! Jon and Rus took off for Indy this morning after MP and breakfast, they should arrive this evening at the Porter's. Praise God!

Brian

Car Work

2007-01-11T15:24:00.000-08:00

--Brian--
On the road from South Bend to Shreveport Tom, Jon, Rus and I ran into a little brake noise. It sounded like there was absolutely nothing left to our brake pads right about in Memphis. We took it easy the rest of the way home and resolved to take care of the problem as soon as the week started. On Sunday the four of us borrowed the A'dale household's car to get to the Shreveport branch meeting and it started doing the exact same thing. I was already planning on doing the work on our car myself, so I offered to do the household's car as well.

Undaunted by the fact that I have never changed brake pads or rotors before I set out Monday morning to learn as much as I could from the internet and combine that with confidence in my mechanical intuition to get 'er done. Thankfully the internet is chock full of info on how to change one's brake pads and rotors and it's a relatively easy task all things considered.

Once I actually got rolling on the work it seemed to go pretty well. I spent the afternoon figuring out just what I had in front of me, how everything worked, and mentally noting how everything was assembled to begin with so that I could recreate it at the end of all this. One neat problem I ran into was a pair of phillips head screws that would NOT budge. I was in danger of stripping them and needing to angle grind some stuff off of the car (which isn't a barrel of laughs, turns out). I wanted to consult someone who really knew cars, but Dave Beskar and Brian Gaffney were both at work, and they were the only ones coming to mind. It finally dawned on me that I should ask Jon Thomas, a neighbor of ours, who was a mechanic for approximately 40 years. I caught up with him and he ended up loaning me the right tool to solve the problem, Praise God!

In the interest of pseudo-brevity I'm going to skip to when I've finished the Stratus' (my car) brakes. I took it out to test it and decided to go pick up Jon and Rus from the Lakeshore Warehouse a few blocks away. The brakes were a little shady, but they worked so I just took it easy... figured they had to warm themselves up a bit. The three of us got home fine and I was pulling into the parking pad in front of one of the homes. For those of you not familiar with the parking on Yale, we have a number of asphalt pads that are perpendicular to the street and at somewhat of a downward angle. As we pulled in the brakes completely gave out and I ended up pulling on the emergency brake in an attempt to stop. The car began skidding immediately. We reached the edge of the parking pad (which is a slight drop off to the sloped yard) and we almost I mean ALMOST stopped. I held my breath and we crashed off the pad and picked up speed heading right for the front porch of 1430. At this point Rus, who is in the front passenger seat, opens his door and sticks his foot out in some last ditch attempt to slow us down/get out of the car before impact. At the last second I cranked hard on the wheel and was able to turn the car around 180 degrees and use the hill in the other direction to stop. This all unfolded in front of Josh and Gretchen, much to their amusement.

I'm happy to say now that after some adjustments both cars' brakes work fine and I'm a near crash the wiser. We also saved a couple hundred dollars that we couldn't afford to spend on a mechanic's labor costs.

Onward in Christ's name!

To 200 and beyond!

2007-01-05T11:55:00.000-08:00

Welcome!
This is the first post of a blog that Thomas Duddy and myself (Brian Couch) have started as a way to keep in touch with folks in citybuilding for the People of Praise. It's unclear who all will be posting on this blog once it finally gets up and running, but for now it's just Tom and myself. We hope to use it to update you with stories much like the ones that I shared at the recent Missionary Conference in South Bend; stories that capture what life is like as a living on faith-on leave of absence from college-citybuilding missionary. Hopefully this will be one of many ways that we can begin to dissolve the geographic boundaries that separate us from ya'll and share more in common. Praise God!