A Delightful Day Trip

My houseguests came to Italy from Czech Republic to attend a prophetic prayer conference, but they made use of their free time to do a bit of tourism.  I generally help guests get oriented and figure out how to find what they’re looking for, but mostly I leave them to go visit the castle, the cathedral and other tourist sites without me.  However, my friends Rose and Piotr invited me to come with them to visit Como.  I hadn’t been to Como for several years, and it is a very nice place to visit, so we packed a picnic lunch and I went with them.

We arrived at Como’s San Giovanni station.  Como has 4 or 5 train stations.  I picked San Giovanni because it is above the city, and from it you enter the city through a nice park.  From there we walked to the lakeside park where the monument to Alexander Volta stands, looking very much like a giant Duracell battery.  Ducks approached us quacking for a handout, but we had come empty-handed.

We walked back toward the marina under a canopy of trees so thick that it was like walking in the shade of an arcade gallery.  As we passed the marina, I pointed out that it is possible to take a boat tour of Lake Como.  They decided that it was going to take too much of our time, and so declined—much to my relief.  If they had wanted to do the boat tour, I would have waited for them on solid ground in a coffee shop.  It’s true, I’m not a big fan of boats.  I will ride boats when necessary, but it’s really not my idea of a fun time.  I know that lots of people love sailing, love boating, kayaking, canoeing, but they can have it.

From there we walked to the cathedral where we enjoyed the naturally cool interior, and then we went for a coffee.  The waiter spoke English and entertained us with his shtick for foreign visitors.

Then we went up the funicular railway to the top of the hill overlooking the lake and the city of Como.  The view going up was spectacular.  At the top we found a shady bench and ate our picnic lunch, enjoying the beautiful view and the lovely day.  Piotr pointed across the lake and asked me if the city in the valley was Chiasso, Switzerland.  I said, “I don’t know.  It could be.”  When we found a detailed satellite map, we discovered that it was, indeed Chiasso.  I asked him how he could possibly have known that that was Chiasso.  He shrugged and said, “It was a train to Chiasso, and that looked like it must be the next stop for the train.”

We walked along the narrow street to the scenic overlook at Fonte Pissarottino, which means fountain of Pissarottino.  The fountain did not have drinkable water, and had a marble sign reading “Porta fortuna,” meaning that the water brings good luck.  I translated the sign for them and said, “Of course, we’re blessed, so we don’t need luck.”  The views over Lake Como are all stunning, and this was certainly beautiful.  Then Rose and Piotr wanted to climb even farther up the hill to the lighthouse, Faro Voltiano.  I decided that they could do the climb in the full sun of the afternoon without my help.  So I waited for them at the coffee shop by the Funicular and did one of my favorite activities, people watching.  A tortoise-shell cat came to me, looking for some love.  Since I can’t resist cats, I naturally complied.  With a satisfied meow, he sauntered off to look for a good spot to nap.  Soon after that a big puppy that had slipped off his leash came wagging over to me.  I petted him with one hand and grabbed his collar with the other.  When a girl about 9-10 years old came running up, I handed him over to her.  She was very relieved to have him back.  The rest of the family came running, and made a big fuss over the dog, putting him back onto the leash.  The puppy just continued to wag, enjoying the chaos he had caused.

When Rose and Piotr found me in the shade of the café umbrella they confirmed what I had suspected: that it was a hard climb to the lighthouse in the full sun for very little payoff.  I smiled, thinking that with age (experience) comes wisdom.

We took the train back to Milan from the Como Nord station, which is not far from the bottom of the funicular.  It had been a beautiful day, and a pleasant day trip.  I called it an early night (about 9:30), and we all slept very well.  God is good!

The Scars of Communism

Greetings from southern Hungary!

I came here at the suggestion of a friend who is a pastor in Romania.  I am here to help with a children’s summer camp program, so I was prepared to rough it, maybe sleep in a barracks with lots of giggling girls.  Instead I’ve found myself welcomed into their home, and tucked into a very cozy room with my own private bathroom, and a door to the beautiful courtyard garden.  And in the garden I saw three kittens.  As many of you know, my kitty, Boo-Boo died in January, so the sight of kittens in the garden was especially welcoming.

The summer camp is sort of a vacation Bible school day camp at the church.  There are probably about 75 children involved and about 30 adults and teens.  I was asked to speak to the entire group about who I am and what I do (with translation).  So I put together a slide show presentation of simple words and pictures to introduce myself and my ministry.  I also brought Prayer Bear, my traveling companion/pillow, and let the children play with him while I spoke.

This is Me

Just before leaving Milan, I had just finished the book I was reading, and wanted to bring something to read on the plane to Budapest.  So I grabbed the book that was at the top of the box marked “books” that I had finally gotten out of storage after a year.  It was a book I’ve been meaning to read for a couple of years, but simply never had the time.  But, as I’ve noted before, God has a way of putting just the right book in your hand at just the right time.  This book is “Tortured for Christ” by Richard Wurmbrand.  He wrote it in 1967 about being imprisoned and tortured for 14 years because of his Christian belief—in Communist Romania.

I think I had avoided it before because I didn’t really want to read details about torture.  But the book actually has very few details about torture because Pastor Wurmbrand wrote:

The tortures were sometimes horrible.  I prefer not to speak too much about those through which I have passed; it is too painful.  When I do, I cannot sleep at night.

So what is the book about, if not torture?  It’s about the Underground Church behind the Iron Curtain, when atheism was forced upon the population.  The Underground Church actually thrived on some of the very tactics used to quench the Christian faith, which makes this a very good read, indeed.

And as I spend these days with the precious Hungarian children, I find myself thanking God over and over again that they are allowed to learn about Jesus.  Their grandparents were not allowed to “infect” their children with Christianity, though their own faith was sometimes tolerated.  At age nine, Pastor Wurmbrand’s son was essentially “orphaned” by his parents’ imprisonment.  He was homeless and alone.  The people who dared to help him or take him in were eventually found out and thrown into prison, too.

I think the knowledge that his son was on his own in the world at such a young age probably was as bad as any physical torture he suffered at the time.  His son eventually became the first director of Voice of the Martyrs.  You can find out more about the organization, and how you can help persecuted Christians around the world at: www.persecution.com.

Talk about non-conformists!

A Cat with Fleas

Northern Italy has had a couple of serious earthquakes recently.  I don’t bring it up because this is necessarily new or surprising, but only because I felt them—and that is new and surprising.  I grew up practically on top of the famous San Andreas Fault in California, but I never felt an earthquake the whole time I lived there.  It’s true that there weren’t any big, devastating quakes while I lived there, but the earth shook from time to time.  Others noticed it and commented on it, but I noticed nothing.  I think the reason I didn’t notice the earth shifting and shaking is because, being a kid, I was always in motion, myself:  riding my bike, climbing trees, tumbling, dancing, having adventures in the Hoover Hills (the wooded area behind Herbert Hoover Elementary School in Burlingame).

My family moved back to Texas in 1971, but I often dreamed of returning to the Bay Area.  My first opportunity to return came in 1989.  I made plans to travel from New York, where I was living at the time, but finances and the logistics of finding care for my children (the youngest was just a year old) canceled that trip.  It wasn’t until days later that I realized that the date I was planning to go, October 17, was when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, and my flight would have been landing just about that time.  I suspect that I would have felt that one.

A year later, I was finally able to return to California.  That was when I felt my first earthquake.  I was in bed watching the news on TV in my hotel room on the 8^th floor.  What it felt like was a wave, as if I were on a raft on a lake—kind of a rolling, rather than shaking, motion.

On May 20 at about 3:45AM I was awake and it felt like the bed was dancing.  It seemed to have lasted a long time, though it was probably only 20-30 seconds.  I looked up at the shelf of books over my head and wondered if I should get out from under it.  In the morning I was shocked to learn of the devastation in San Felice sul Panaro, about 140 miles away.

Since then there have been many aftershocks, and I’ve become aware of even the subtlest motion in the earth.  There’s nothing like finally feeling a real and devastating earthquake to make you hyper-aware of any sensation of movement.

It may seem like in writing about my personal experiences of these earthquakes, I am taking them lightly.  I intend no such thing.  I am aware of the very real toll on people’s lives.  Last summer I took a daytrip to L’Aquila with a missionary friend.  We prayer walked through the city, which may never recover from the damage of the 2009 earthquake.  There was graffiti all around the city center, saying things like:  L’Aquila è morta, (L’Aquila is dead).  I tried to take pictures of the devastation there, but there was simply too much.  Around every corner was a new sign of destruction, until finally it was just overwhelming. 

One of the saddest things we saw in L’Aquila was a barrier fence with hundreds of keys—keys to houses that are now just piles of rubble.  Another thing that gave me pause was seeing a church in the city center that had a bas relief of skeleton over the door.  It made me wonder how many of the city’s people had gone through that “death door” who were now dead because of the earthquake.  It made me want to somehow erase that sculpture or to put a big X across it to cancel death’s grip on the city.  In fact I did exactly that through prayer.

In discussing earthquakes with a friend who recently moved to California, she told me that she often says, “The Earth shakes because she feels like a cat with fleas.”  Where can we find a flea collar big enough for the Earth?