Desert Survival Kit.

After a flight from Costa Rica, where in the first 30 minutes of flying I spilled the entire glass of orange juice that I was served, directly on my lap, and therefore had to put up with another 3 hours of flying with soaking wet pants (I changed in the customs area in Houston), I arrived at Thunderbird. There were 6 of us from CR on that flight, and so I began getting to know my most immediate classmates. So far, I think we will get along well, which is good since we're going to spend two years just seven of us (the other arrived on a later flight). At Thunderbird, once we got settled all 178 students met for a break the ice sort of session. This is very different from CIU orientation (at least CIU official orientation) since there clearly seems to be an intention by the Thunderbird staff to get you drunk. We were given about as much wine as we wanted (my table of 8 finished 5 bottles and two of us only drank a cup or two). After all the "fun" activities, the real fun would begin when they encouraged us to go to "the pub" on campus to drink all the beer we wanted. I haven't proven this, but apparently, sticking to the global idea, the pub has over 100 choices of beer from all over the World.

We had a few sessions on Saturday, but mostly orientation stuff, as well as Sunday. Saturday night was another night of "games" with all you can drink beer as well. Of course, the pub was next on the agenda for most of the students after the all you can drink beer. Although we had a couple preamble sessions, it was mostly teaching us how to use some of the tools available for us as students, including our credit card with which we would be charged for the rest of our studies.

On Monday we began our formal studies. I am taking a course on Global Leadership (everything is global here), which has to do with the three economic structures of Economic Nationalism, Liberalism and Structurulism, and how they affect what we see and foresee in the International Political Economy (IPE). There are two good things about this, which make the classes interesting despite their subject. First, the professors are highly qualified (ie. BA Stanford. MA Yale. PhD Cornell), but they are also good communicators. They are interesting to listen to. Second, unlike my undergraduate, people actually want to participate and ask questions, or make comments that are actually very intelligent and very interesting. After class we are all a bunch of geeks talking about the class and what we think about what they are saying. People are experts in their particular fields, so it's really neat to get their input.

On Monday night we did a desert survival exercise. This was an interesting experience, because although we are in the desert of Arizona, we were in a cool classroom, pretending we were dying in the desert. I could tell you all the details, but the outcome was funnier. The excercise was intended to prove to us that as a team we would think better than as individuals. We did this by rating 15 items in order of importance individually and then as a team. As a team we had to vote. After fancy shamcy math we ended up with an individual score and a team score, and although it would be normal for one or two individuals to have a better score than the team, the team should have been the best option for almost all. In my team's case, we were the only team where every individual did better than the team. After the appropriate amount of laughter by the whole class when it was mentioned to the professor, we had to try to understand what went so wrong. One of the Costa Ricans on my team was the one who scored the best, and he was very critical and I believe concerned about me. He said all the appropriate nice things, but then he added... "but because you're smart, and you're loud, and you argue well, you dominate the conversation and don't listen to other people. The other people, myself included, therefore choose not to compete." In a way, he told me that I killed the entire team. I thought about this, and I know he's right in general. I like people who argue back, but I don't realize that I intimidate many people, and they choose not even to enter into an argument with me, when I want them to do that.

Of course, today's readings were all about how to encourage argument and discussion in the workplace where it would not be intimidating or insulting to people.

Who do you say that I am?

So I had to take this test called a COI Report (Country of Origin Information Service). This basically gives me a profile of my personality. This is the COI wheel, which describes some of my traits, and is supposed to help me learn how to deal with, negotiate, understand, talk to people from other countries and cultures. Also it tells me what to avoid in my style vs. theirs. It's actually a facinating tool, and can give me a stron upper hand in international business and relations.

The wheel is too general, and broad. It is accompanied by a very detailed report that would be too long to add here. Like any one of these tests, there are some things I don't agree with (and I don't think others would either), but there are some times when their description of me is somewhat eerie because of it's exactness.

This reminds me to ask for prayer. I am at Thunderbird. The last couple of days have been quite overwhelming because of the amount of information we have received regarding all the work we're going to have to do. I'm not scared of work, except when you're given 50 pages of assignments. Continue to pray (if you have been doing so) that God will continue to give me guidance and direction.

Bill Gates speech to high school class.

I read this today, and liked it. I don't know how legit it is. I'm sure it's been around the blgosphere forever, but it's new to me.

BILL GATES SPEECH TO A HIGH SCHOOL CLASS
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping-they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now.They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give
you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Chapter 1: Final Draft

Perhaps every day and every moment builds upon a previous day or moment to take you to where you stand in the present. Perhaps life has particular moments that really transform your future. Perhaps we remember moments that stand out, as if they were life defining moments, when in reality, were it not for the continuous building of life’s previous moments, they would have been insignificant. Perhaps I have too many friends who philosophize on life and I need to get out more. Then again, I don’t like getting out much, so I’ll continue philosophizing on life.

When I was a kid, I went to a Christian school that had a library. For the most part I liked reading adventure books about five brothers and sisters who somehow were always able to save the World. I’ve always wanted to save the World in some sort of way. When I was a freshman, I wanted to kill myself. I think a lot of freshmen have thoughts about killing themselves. Since I was a Christian kid, and I knew that killing myself would be a sin, and I didn’t want to sin, I decided that the best way to die was to die while saving the World. I would have thoughts of some guy running into my classroom and threatening all my classmates. At that point, I would jump up, beat the snot out of the guy, and somehow in the process take a shot to the heart. Everybody would gather around me and mourn my death. But instead of getting to do that, kids in school started making fun of me for reading books about these five kids who would always save the World.

One day I changed books, and stories. I picked up a book about some guy called Bruce Olson, who wanted to save the World in his own way. Against all odds, the guy went as a missionary to some tribe in South America to speak to them about Jesus. I don’t remember that much about the book, except that one night he woke up because a huge tapeworm was coming out of his mouth. For some reason, at that point, I decided that I wanted to be a missionary. Missionaries got to do cool things, like fight demons, and defeat cannibals, and have awesome tapeworms coming out of their mouths.

But then I grew up, and I realized that the only people who become missionaries are people who can’t really do anything useful in life, and therefore have to go live with some unknown tribe in South America and talk to them about Jesus. I, on the other hand, was a smart kid. I told my mom once that I was pretty sure I was a genius. She laughed out loud. That may sound normal as you read it, but you would need to know my mom’s laugh to know what I mean. My mom has a really loud laugh. I could always tell where my mom was because of her laugh. If she was anywhere within a three-mile radius, and she heard something funny, I could hear her. Apparently she thought it was really funny when I told her I was a genius. But the truth is, most of us geniuses are highly misunderstood.

Look at Einstein; people never really understood why his hair was such a disaster. If you’re smart enough to discover gravity, or whatever the heck he discovered, you should be smart enough to get a haircut. But we geniuses don’t do what other people want us to do, because we live in a whole different dimension. I cut my hair fairly often, though.

Since I used to be a genius, I figured my dreams of saving the World as a missionary were over. I needed to find some other form of saving the World.

Initially, I thought I should be a doctor. Doctors are cool. They all have the same first name, but are allowed to keep their last name. I wanted to be known as Doctor Perez. I’ve always been known as Marquito, which is like little Marco, since my dad is big Marco. We weigh the same now, though, so I think I should be able to redeem the big Marco name, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Anyways, doctors save the World, one person at a time. The only thing is that sometimes you have to study for a really long time to become a doctor. You can’t just go to the national registry and change your name. You actually have to prove that you’ve studied, before they give you the name Doctor. Some doctors continue studying and get what is called a “specialty”. This doesn’t make sense, because it means that they study for like a hundred years, in order to give people glasses, or tell them to take Prozac. Nowadays, with the advances of Modern Technology (thanks to freak-haired geniuses like Einstein), machines tell the doctor what the persons’ eye prescription is. They still pretend they’re the ones who are helping you figure out the best prescription. They put one lens into a machine and ask you “now do you see better with this lens, or…” switch, switch, “this lens?” I’ve caught on now. It’s the same freaking lens. They just want you to think that they’re giving you the service that only they can give you because they’ve studied for a hundred years, and have the first name Doctor.

After realizing that doctors have to study so long to give you prescription glasses I decided I didn’t want to be a doctor. You can buy those glasses now at Walmart. I switched to engineering. This was a very depressing switch, since engineers don’t often save the World. Honestly, how has going to the moon ever helped anyone? It might be cool, and the Americans may have put a fancy shmancy flag up there, but I can’t even see it from earth. So who cares? Even if I did see it, I’m not sure it would make a difference in my life. I chose engineering because, genius that I am, I was good at Math and Science. People who are good at Math and Science can either teach Math and Science, to people who will teach Math and Science, to other people who are good at Math and Science, or they can be engineers. Math and Science teachers don’t get paid much, but engineers get to go to the moon. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out which of the two career choices you need to pick. That’s when I decided I no longer needed to think of myself as a genius. I could just be a regular guy.

After a while of studying Mechanical Engineering, which is what you study so that you can make those contraptions that you see in the movies so that when the alarm clock goes off in the morning, it hits a little ball that roles on a ruler, down to a little spring board, that shoots a little dart, to a bulls eye that triggers a little domino that falls on the surface of your coffee maker, so that by the time the snooze button goes off, you can have freshly brewed coffee. But then I realized that somebody whose name is Mister Coffee invented coffee makers with preset alarms that just brew the coffee when you need it. Although, I would have to argue that I do believe coffee has helped save the World, I was too late in studying Mechanical Engineering to invent the coffee maker and couldn’t think of anything else that would be useful.

This frustration with life brought one of those life-changing events. There was a man whom I will call Mr. Ian for the sake of this book, whom I met a few years before my life-changing event. He was a fairly old man. He had dedicated his entire life to saving the World in the Bruce Olson way, but not in the doctor or engineer way. He was a major during the World War… you know… the really bad one and as such also was useful in saving the World. But that’s another story. Mr. Ian was in Costa Rica which, by the way, is where I’m from. Because I was frustrated with life and still lived with my parents, my mom told me to sit down with Ian and talk to him about my life. I’ve always been told that we don’t take enough advantage of the wisdom of older men in our Western society and therefore it was time that I showed our society how some of us young people know how to appreciate old men. So I talked to Mr. Ian.

I didn’t mention to him anything about my dreams of saving the World, and how people would really come to like me and appreciate me because of it, since Mr. Ian was kind of a mean guy if you said something he didn’t like. He was very particular about things, like when people asked God to be with them. You would always feel sorry for the guy that said that because Mr. Ian would say things like “Why are you asking Him to be with you? Don’t you know that He is always with you? He has promised to never leave you nor forsake you.” To which the poor guy would never know how to respond, and would leave the room crying. We were only blessing the food for crying out loud. But when you’ve saved the World in a war, you have earned the right to say things like that. Plus, Mr. Ian was British, and British people are all strange anyways.

When I shared with Mr. Ian my thoughts about my future and how I didn’t know what to do with my life, he suggested I spend a year at Bible School. Mr. Ian had started a group of these institutions around the World, and the one he was suggesting was located in England. He started it with his wife Mrs. Ian. Mrs. Ian is really nice and I’m not sure if she would get angry at you if you asked God to be with you. She makes me tea every once in a while and we talk about nice things. They started this school to attract young people from all over the World and teach them about Jesus. It’s kind of like going to speak to the people in South America, but instead of going to them, the people in South America come to you.

I knew about this particular place because, years back, my parents had met there. My mom was from California, and my dad was from Costa Rica. My dad had met Mr. Ian, who was probably old even then and Mr. Ian had invited him to go to the same place, kind of like he was doing with me. When my dad went there as a skinny, big-nosed Costa Rican, he fell in love with an American blonde girl and one week later asked her to marry him.

All Costa Ricans think that American girls are the most beautiful women in the World, and as soon as they encounter one, they ask her to marry them. I did the same, and that’s how I got my American girl… but I’ll save that story for later. To his uttermost surprise, she said yes. Apparently, England doesn’t allow for two foreigners to get married there. At least that’s the story my dad told me. Therefore they had to wait a whole five months before they got married in California.

My grandpa on my mom’s side was a very rich man and let my dad know that he would never get any help from him. Once, my brothers and I got three SeaWorld raincoats as a gift from my Grandpa and Grandma when they were in Costa Rica, which is kind of like getting help, because it rains a lot in Costa Rica. Now, he also gave us many other things, and flew us to the US for family reunions, so I'm not sure he kept his promise.

My mom and dad married. He worked as a custodian for about a year, then packed up all their belongings and drove down to Costa Rica. There they had three boys. Their third boy came a little bit as a surprise, and they wanted him to be a girl. It didn’t quite happen that way, so since they didn’t have any boy names planned, they gave him his dad’s name… except that since he was little, everybody called him little Marco, or Marquito.

Mr. Ian would call me Mosquito, because he didn’t know what my parents were saying. When he mentioned to me the possibility of going to Bible school, I thought of a good answer. The truth was that I didn’t want to go because I had grown up in a Christian home and was a good Christian kid. I had even tried to read the Bible as a kid except that it’s usually so boring that you can’t read too much of it at once. Some parts are interesting, but really if you put it together, the interesting parts would fill a book about the size of Philemon. Some who have never read the Bible probably don’t have a clue what Philemon is about. Philemon is the book where Paul, who was formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, which was a Greek city, writes Onesimus to ask him to be kind to Philemon upon his return because Philemon was his former slave that ran away but came to know Jesus through the ministry of Paul. Therefore Onesimus should receive him as a brother and no longer as a slave. Now, this is a really short book, and as you can probably tell, even the short books seem really boring… so imagine the whole Bible.

Who wants to spend a year of their life studying a book that is composed of sixty-six books, which are almost all longer than Philemon? But, how do I tell this man, who gets a little angry when you say things he doesn’t like to hear, that the institutions that he started back when he was young is probably too boring for someone like me to go to. Instead, I used up all my genius brain power and came up with an answer that I knew he would clearly favor.

“Mr. Ian. How thankful I am for you to have provisioned me with such deep and profound wisdom. O that the depths of your wisdom may reach to the uttermost parts of the World. Nonetheless, as deep as your wisdom may be, I know of an even deeper wisdom…”

I then proceeded to explain to him the Costa Rican culture, and how, because Costa Rica is a third-World nation, we are brought up to be very different than most Americans. You see, all Americans are rich and very few Costa Ricans are. But Costa Ricans want to be rich like Americans, in order to have automatic dishwashers engineered by Mister Coffee, and to drive big Suburbans that consume more gas to get to the closest Walmart to buy prescription glasses, than a Space Shuttle uses to go to the moon.

In essence, I said this to the man:

“So you see Mr. Ian… Society is different here. Most Americans who go to your Bible Schools, can waste a year of their life, just in case they meet a Costa Rican to marry. But in Costa Rica, society expects more from us. What’s the point of marrying an American if her dad isn’t going to give us his riches? Instead, we need to study, and work hard, and give back to society so that we can help this country become rich and big like the US. Therefore, I will have to pass on your very kind offer to help me study the Bible in England, and do that which society expects me to do.”

He was dutifully impressed. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a little tear in his eye. His hands seemed to get ready to give me a standing ovation, and request some kind of encore. And when he spoke, this is what he said.

“That’s great.” Yes… Yes… I know. “If society is your God, you go ahead and keep worshiping at its feet. “ Society, my God? No, I think you misunderstood.” “Or you can worship the one true God, and do what He is asking you to do. Which will it be?”
He wasn’t at all implying that God was telling me to go to Bible school. I don’t think even Mr. Ian would presume to know God’s will in my life. I say “even” because I don’t doubt that Mr. Ian was a lot closer to God than I have ever been. I have a lot of trouble “hearing” God, but there are some men out there who seem to hear Him very clearly. I believe Mr. Ian was one of those men. Yet, in my experience, these men tend to be very careful to inform a person about what they think God is telling them to do.

What in essence I was being told was very true in my life and I believe it to be true in many people’s lives that I know. I was choosing my course of action based on what society (whoever that is) was expecting of me, and not what I was at all believing that God desired for me. I was going to be a doctor or an engineer because in people’s eyes someone with my grades and “abilities” should be a doctor or engineer. Somebody like me shouldn’t waste their life going to learn about God. Somebody like me should be doing something useful with my life.

Many of our actions and life decisions stem from social pressure. Because it’s very difficult to define who “society” actually is (it’s like the communal “they”, in “They say that if you swim right after you eat you’re going to cramp up and die.”). The reality is that some of the pressure is self-inflicted. This isn’t only true about people who choose to be engineers or doctors, but it can be equally true of people who choose to be missionaries and save the World along with Bruce Olson. We often are pressured or guilted into choosing a certain career path, and we don’t take the time to stop and ask God what His desire is for our life. This isn’t only true for young people out of high school, but can be true for older adults with a wife and three children (speaking hypothetically of course.)

Perhaps this is why Jesus said that if we wanted to be His disciples we actually had to hate the people around us (Luke 14:26). It’s a very strong word and all of us who teach from this passage feel the obligation of trying to explain the use of the word away by saying that Jesus is just creating an extreme. In essence, we say that our love and devotion to God should be so much greater than that which we hold toward society, that it would be considered as hatred toward those close to us. Maybe this is right, but he could have chosen a different expression. He chose hate.

God hates other gods. He’s always been a little picky about this. In the Old Testament, He makes quite a statement about this to His people. He also didn’t want images or shapes to be made of Him. His people had a tendency to have other gods, because everybody around them had other gods. In other words, there was a little bit of a social pressure. Since God didn’t want images made of Him, and other people didn’t understand how you could even worship a God without an image, God’s people would worship the images of the other gods. Once, when Moses was on a mountain talking to God, His people even went so far as to make a big huge golden cow to worship. This made God really mad.

Nowadays, in our western society we tend to have less visual images. That doesn’t mean at all that we don’t have other gods. It just means that the gods we have placed first have themselves learned to be little more subtle. Anything that wields more power over us than God’s will and desire is our one and true god.

Society (family, peers, pastors, and even ourselves) wield great power over us. I would even suggest that often they wield even greater power than God. Unless we take up our cross (Jesus’ following comment in the passage) and follow Him, we can’t be one with Him. Crosses were where people died. Society may have a lot of power over the living, but they have no power over the dead. Only God has power over the dead. If we have taken up our cross and died to ourselves, only God will wield power over us. Then, and only then, will we be free to serve Christ.

Mr. Ian was letting me know that I needed to make a choice in my life. Either I was going to seek, serve and obey God, or I was going to be stuck trying to please everybody else for the rest of my life. He wasn’t telling me that I had to go to England. He was telling me that I needed to ask God what I should do.

A few months later, I was on my way to England… and that story changed my life.

Chapter 2: Final draft

I hate flying. I used to have dreams as a kid that I could fly. I would climb to the roof of our house and jump off, and somehow continue flying. That flying, though, was cool in my dream, but the actual one where you get on an airplane and fly… that’s totally different.

There are a few reasons I hate flying. One of them has to do with the actual reality that we humans weren’t meant to fly… other than in our dreams of course, where it is clearly God’s intention that we move freely in the air. I keep hearing that flying is safer than driving a car, but that only makes me hate driving a car even more. What I really like is sitting in the safety of my house, eating chips and salsa, and watching TV. That seems to be a lot safer than flying or driving a car.

Another reason I hate flying is because I hate crowds. I know I should love people
and all that jazz, and I usually like people as individuals. It’s only when they’re all together in a crowd that I hate them. Flying, for the most part, includes crowds.

I did get on an airplane once that had the last few rows empty, which I thought was great since I hate crowds. I asked the flight attendant why they were empty, when the crowd seemed to be huge outside the airport and they were even offering “vouchers” for anybody who was willing to get off the plane. “That’s because of the wind direction. When the wind blows from east to west, it can affect the take off of the airplane. If we were full, we wouldn’t make it past the mountains. This would cause us to crash into them.” For some odd reason, that didn’t make me feel more at ease about flying, but it did help me understand why I hate crowds. Crowds make you crash into big, huge mountains.

Finally, one more reason for which I hate flying and I hate crowds is because if the plane is full and somebody sits next to me, I am expected to speak to them. I was taught as a little kid not to talk to strangers. That’s actually one of those rules that I appreciated. I’m very uncomfortable talking to strangers. I have to do that a lot, because my job makes me have to be very friendly to a bunch of strangers. I can do that when I get paid to, but when there is no money involved I would prefer to keep to myself.

So I was very excited when I got on the airplane from Costa Rica to England, via the Netherlands, otherwise known as Holland, and nobody was sitting next to me. Holland is not to be confused with Deutschland, even though for some strange reason we call the people in that country the Dutch. The flight was a twelve-hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and although the time in the air, and the lack of refueling islands made it more probable that the plane would crash, it meant that I didn’t have to share any last words with some stranger on an airplane. I wasn’t aware that the airplane made one stop on a little island called St. Marteen after only one hour of taking off. I noticed that what was previously an empty airplane began to fill up at this little island. Yet, it seemed that all the seats around me were filling up, except for mine. God’s face was really shining on me now.

After it appeared that all the people had found a place to sit, I looked out the window and saw a mother with her young child walking on the tarmac toward the airplane. I knew what was going to happen. Sure enough, a flight attendant (not the same one who told me we could crash into the mountains) approached me and asked me if I would be willing to move to another seat.

“Absolutely not!” I wanted to scream. “I paid for my seat, and I don’t really care if that lady has to go sit away from her daughter. As a matter of fact, I don’t care if she has to leave her daughter behind, risking being separated from her for life. I don’t care if the daughter grows up wondering whatever happened to her mother, and ruins her life in order to overcome her loneliness and sense of abandonment.” Instead, I said… “Um… yeah… I guess.”

At this point I got bumped to another seat. I kind of wish I had been bumped up to first class, but that didn’t happen. I would have even talked to strangers then, if I needed to. Instead, I had to sit in that one seat that some engineer decided could still be fit in the airplane, against all doctors’ suggestions. This seat happened to be right up against one of the main cabin doors. The cabin door took up a huge space inside the airplane, right up to half of the space on my seat. This left me with only half a seat to sit in, and no real room to stretch my legs except for the leg space that the stranger next to me had. The problem was that the stranger had legs longer than a giraffe’s, and therefore allowed me for no place to stretch my legs. Additionally, the movie screen was a big screen on the wall in front of the five center seats immediately to my right, which forced me to turn my head at a ninety-degree angle in order to attempt to catch a glimpse of the movie. And if I did catch a glimpse, the movie they were playing was the real live version of the Flintstones, which, I must add, has been one of the worst movies ever made in human history. I didn’t have to talk to the stranger because he only knew Dutch, or perhaps pretended to because he hates talking to strangers on airplanes.

Twelve hours later, my airplane landed, and one flight later, I made it to England.

My purpose in going to Bible school was to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t really looking forward to the Bible classes, because, as you are very well aware, the Bible is a very boring book. I had three ideas about what I could do with my life. I could go back home and become a doctor. Doctors get paid a lot of money, even when all they do is give prescription glasses. I could be an engineer, because although they don’t often get paid as much as doctors, they do get to go to the moon. Even though going to the moon is useless, it is pretty cool because you get to float upside down. Or I could be a businessman. Business is what people study when they don’t have a clue what they want to be when they grow up. If they want to make you think that they have a better idea, they study something called “International Business.” That only means that they don’t have a clue what to do with their life, but want to travel while they figure it out. I have a friend who doesn’t have a clue what to do with his life so he is studying philosophy. I think they should create an “International Philosophy” path so that he could travel while he studies.

There’s a lot I could say about my time there, but for the sake of getting to the point of my book, it will suffice to say that it was full of surprises.
This particular institution had 180 students from close to 25 countries in the World. This was a great place to learn about different cultures. A lot of people end up traveling to a different places as tourists in the hope of understanding a different culture. I don’t think tourists ever get a real feel for what a culture is really like. They get the tourist presentation of that culture. If you want to understand a culture, you need to live among the people for an extended amount of time. Enough time for the people to stop treating you like a tourist and just treat you like a regular foreigner. The other way is to go to a place where different cultures live together for an extended period of time. There are many interesting things you learn by doing this.

In some cultures, for instance, men hold hands, and don’t have to be gay to do so. There was a guy from Kenya called David. He had killed a lion to prove his manhood, and yet would still hold a man’s hand while walking down the street. Since he had killed a lion, none of us made fun of him for holding guys’ hands. I wish I could kill a lion, or do something cool like that. I’d be lucky if I just ran over somebody’s cat with a Mack truck. I don’t think I’m even man enough to drive a Mack truck.

There was also a guy from Korea. I don’t remember his name, because Koreans have strange names. I’ve always wondered why Korean parents don’t give their kids normal names like ours. I had to wash potatoes with this guy. He found my culture odd. He would laugh because I thought it was sad that he ate dogs. I’ve owned a lot of dogs in my life, and I’ve never been tempted to eat one. But this guy apparently ate them for the simple reason that he was hungry. I do wonder what the best tasting breed of dog was. I had a French Poodle once that would always get packed with fleas. When we would bathe her, about once a year, her white hair would turn red because of all the flea droppings. I wonder if that meant that she tasted very good if you cooked her.

There were many other things that I learned and great experiences that I had, but I will leave those for later or maybe for another book. Maybe I'll write lots of books, kind of like Stephen King, except that mine won't be horror stories. They will just be stories about myself. That means I have to be careful not to tell all my stories, because if I do, then I will run out of stories to tell.

One more important lesson I was surprised by was that the Bible wasn’t as boring as I had thought my whole life. There were some really interesting teachers at Bible School. There was this guy called Billy. Billy seemed to really dislike Christians, even though he was one. Maybe he disliked Christians, like I dislike crowds. Individually they’re alright, it’s just when they’re together that they are a problem. Billy also seemed to have had a really tough life, which to me was cool, because I like to think that I, too, have had a tough life. Except that I really haven’t. One day Billy walked past me and asked me how I was doing, to which I responded, “Good, and how about you, Billy?” “I’m as rotten as always, Mr. Perez.” I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I said… “Oh! Well I hope you are doing a little less rotten.”

I think when people ask you how you’re doing you’re just supposed to say “Fine!” or “Good.” This is true even if your cat, Tinkles, just got run over by a big Mack Truck, and immediately was torn to shreds and eaten by a coyote. You’re still supposed to say “Fine!” or “Good.” That’s the rule. But that was also what made Billy cool. He didn’t really stick to the rules.

There was also Charles. He seemed to like Christians a lot more than Billy. He also was one of the ones who made the Bible really interesting. There are people who make the Bible interesting by telling a lot of stories that in reality don’t have anything to do with the Bible. I’ve kind of come to conclude that what is really interesting is their stories and not the Bible. Others seem to find lessons in the Bible that are really interesting, and they might add some of their own stories to spice it up. I’d like to think Charles was one of those, but I can’t really remember anymore. All I remember is that I really enjoyed listening to him teach. Now he’s a big pastor in Canada, and I hear he even has a radio and TV talk show.

Then there was Graham. He was a little different just because he wasn't as classy as the other teachers. He wasn't angry at Christians, like Billy. He also wasn't as eloquent as Charles. Anybody who has heard of Graham actually makes fun of the way he says Judges. It had something to do with the part of England he was from, but it sounded kind of like Jood-Jess. The reason he said Judges so much was because he taught that book. Judges is kind of a depressing book of the Bible, because the people of Israel, who are God's people, keep doing all the wrong things. God then gives them over to their enemies to punish them, but also so that they turn to him. When they realize the mess that they’re in, which is mostly their fault, they cry out to God. He then delivers them, by sending a judge.

Graham taught near the end of my time at Bible school, and I have to admit that I don't remember much about his teaching. All I remember is that I was soon going to have to go to back to Costa Rica, and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I also remember that I was impressed by the fact that God would raise judges to lead his people. Somewhere in the middle of class, when I was supposed to be listening, and not thinking about my future, I cried out to God. It went something like this.

“Dear God. I came all the way to England to figure out what to do with my life. I'm not complaining, because I've had a really great, life-changing experience. But, as good as all that is, I'm kind of bummed because you haven't really told me what I'm supposed to do. I don't think it's a horrible request to ask you what I'm supposed to do. I mean... it's for your glory, and all that. But, time's running out, and you've kind of kept that little bit of information to yourself. I would really appreciate it if you could let me in on the big cosmic secret. Oh yeah, by the way, I don't care anymore. I don't care if you want me to be a doctor, and even deal with people's feet. Those are called Podiatrists, by the way. I don't care if you want me to be an engineer and design coffee makers. (I'd learned to drink coffee in England, because the only other choice was tea, and I'm not really wild about tea). I don't care if you want me to be a businessman, and even study international business so that I can travel around the World. As a matter of fact, I don't care if you want me to be a missionary and live in the Jungles of Papua New Guinea, even though I don't have a clue where that is. I don't care if I have a huge tapeworm coming out of my throat. I don't care if you want me to be single, or to be married. I don't care if you want me to marry an American girl, or you want me to marry a Papua New Guinean, even though I don't know what they look like. I don't care if you want me to rich, or to be poor. (I had forgotten about the fact that there's also the possibility of being in what they call, “the middle class”.) I DON'T CARE. I just want to do what you want me to do.”

There's a similar verse to the one I mentioned in the last chapter where Jesus tells his disciples that if anybody wants to get to know Jesus he or she must deny his or herself, take up his or her cross and follow Him (Mark 8:34). I like that verse and use it a lot to teach. I have to admit that I think this prayer kind of describes what denying oneself means. It means telling God that we don't care what we do, as long as it's what he wants us to do. So this is what I did.

I’ll never claim to be one of the greatest Christians out there. Granted, I’m sure I can find some terrible hypocrites who far surpass me in their disregard for Christ’s model of living, but I have also met my fair share of wonderful Christ-like believers. Even so, one of my greatest frustrations with the general Christian population that I know is that often they only come to God with regards to their plans and decisions when things aren’t going their way, or when they want some particular blessing. Although I think hearing God’s voice is on average very difficult to do, I still think for all of life’s big decisions He should be the one calling the shots. I say the big decisions, because if we go about asking God what restaurant we should have lunch at we’ll never get around to having lunch. There are lots of things that we do every day, and for those we can just trust that God is directing our path. It’s just that at times there are decisions that seem to be a major step in our life where we often seem to neglect God’s will and simply pray for His blessing. Top on my list are the decisions regarding marriage (even dating) and career choice. It’s often in the midst of these significant choices that God only comes into the picture when our preference ends up being the wrong one.

Assuming that hearing God’s voice and knowing His will is often difficult (at least for some of us, since others claim to hear God’s voice all the time), even if it were really easy, I still think denying oneself is incredibly difficult. There is a natural tendency to believe we could handle things better if we were left in charge. Also, there is a fear that God is out to get us. We are terrified that if we actually leave matters into God’s hands, God will give us everything that we don’t want. In our minds and hearts, though we sing His praises about Him being good and all that, He’s kind of a mean God when it comes to His choice for our future. I heard someone once give the illustration that we think that God waits for us to say something stupid like “Your will be done,” just so that He can throw some miserable future our way. “Oh, yeah? Let’s see. How about you go live in some remote jungle in Africa? What if I ask you to marry Roberta? Remember her? She’s the one with the toothless grin and the screechy voice that sounds like an airplane at takeoff.”
Yet Jesus says that God surpasses even earthly fathers. Even though I am all grown up, and with children of my own, if I were to ask my dad for a piece of bread because I have no food at home, it’s highly probable he would take me out shopping and get me a cart full of groceries. And that’s a sinful, human father. God would probably go and buy me the whole supermarket if that’s what I needed.

But I don’t want to fall into vain promises that God will make your life all a bed of roses. There are countless examples in Scripture of men and women who suffered more because of living a life of absolute surrender to God’s will. Moses spent multiple years walking in a desert. Many of the prophets and apostles died torturous deaths at the hands of God’s enemies. Even his own Son was crucified. In other words, there might be suffering and anguish if we follow God’s will. Dying to ourselves means that we don’t only choose to follow God’s will if He promises us a Mercedes SLR McLaren valued at $455,000. Dying to ourselves means that we follow God even if all He promises us is sandals that will not wear out during forty years in the desert.

Obviously it’s easier for those who get the Mercedes, or so it seems. Either way, we need to surrender to His will and not to our own. I believe as young, weak and feeble as I was, that’s what I did that day while listening to Graham teach on the book of Jood-Jess.

Immediately, the World around me seemed to vanish. I'm not sure what was happening, but all of a sudden, I was in front of a huge valley. That valley was full of dry bones, and a voice from heaven said to me, “Marco, do you think these bones can live?” “Only you know, Lord.” Suddenly a wind blew, and flesh grew on the bones, and the bodies stood firm on the ground. Then the Spirit of God entered those bones and they became walking, talking people. I knew it was a sign to me and from then on I was sure of what I was supposed to do.

I kind of wish I had cool stories like that to tell. Things like that don't ever really happen to me. Nonetheless, God was just as clear with me. I remembered my childhood fantasy of wanting to save the World in the Bruce Olson kind of way. I also remember looking at Graham and thinking, “I want to do what this guy does.” I even remembered how I wanted to be like Michael W. Smith and sing Christian songs. I realized that since I was a child I was called to serve God in some special way.

I wish I could say that it was all great after that. It really wasn't. I didn't know where to start in order to do this. I didn't know how Bible teachers supported themselves financially, much less their families. I didn't know how this would play out in my life. But I would have some things happen in my life that would help me figure it out.

I hate flying. Sure enough, on the flight back to Costa Rica, I sat down next to a stranger. As is expected, I began talking to him. “What do you do for a living?” I asked. “I work for the UN, writing international treaties.” I'm trying to write my story out on paper, but I'll be the first to admit that it's not near as cool as a guy who writes international treaties. That's kind of like saving the World, but in the Superman sort of way. I think guys who write international treaties should have to wear capes. But this guy was dressed normally. At least that’s what he wanted me to believe.
“What do you want to do with your life?” he asked. I really wanted to answer, “I want to write international treaties,” but for some reason, it sounded unoriginal. “I want to be a Bible teacher,” I told him.

“Why would you want to be a Bible teacher?”

That question scared me. Not because I didn't know the answer, but on the contrary, because I did. I didn't know what a guy who saved the World by writing international treaties would think about me trying to save the World by being a Bible teacher. But I told him.

“I believe that God created the World. I believe that His desire is to be in a relationship with the people He created in the World. I believe that that relationship was broken because of man's sin. I believe God sent Jesus, his Son, who is also God (it's hard to explain), so that he could take man's punishment for sin. I believe that Jesus died on the cross, and rose from the dead (you thought the last comment was hard to explain), and today offers to restore us to that relationship with God, if we believe in Him. I think that if what I believe is true, is really true, there is no message more important for me to tell people than this one. That's why I want to be a Bible teacher.”

I kind of braced myself waiting for him to attack each of my arguments. I kind of expected this from an international treaty writer. I don't know why I expected this, since I've never met any other international treaty writers. Instead, this is what he told me.

“I have traveled the World. I've met all sorts of people. I've dealt with the wealthy, and with the poor, with the highly educated, and with the uneducated. I've talked to powerful men. Among all the people I've talked to there are some who claim to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and I can't dismiss it as foolishness. The truth is, I want to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, like these people and you have.”

I have to admit, I didn't hate flying that day. I was also very thankful that I sat next to a stranger that I could talk to.

My time in England was an important step that changed my life. Yet, I want to be clear. In my case I went from engineering to Bible teaching, but that wasn’t what changed my life. About a year ago, I was asked if I would be willing to go from being a Bible teacher to being a manager of a company in Costa Rica. My answer reflects how my life changed at that point.

“It’s different with me, than with the other guys you hired. In their case, most of them are just looking for a job that will pay more and improve their resume. In my case, there is no doubt that what you offer me will pay more, and being a general manager of a company will look better on a resume than a Bible teacher. But in my case, there is only one thing I have to answer. Is this what God wants me to do? If it is, then I will be glad to join your company. If it’s not, there is no amount of money you could offer me that would make me leave.”

Dying to oneself implies that there is only one question we have to ask ourselves in every decision we make in life. Is this what God wants from me?

Chapter 3: Edit 1: Update 1

Chapter 3: On Santa Claus and the Resurrection of Jesus.

I've never been crazy about music. I know this makes me a freak, and suddenly extremely uncool, but it's true. I never buy music for myself, because I don't care much for music. This makes me a very moral person, because I don't illegally download any music. It's not really related to my ethics, though, but just to my lack of musical desire. The irony of this is the fact that I wish I had the opportunity to be a professional singer.

The other day, somebody asked me what kind of music I liked, and I sat for an uncomfortable period of time thinking about how to respond to this person. Finally, after a period of searching deep within my soul, I had an answer. “CHRISTMAS MUSIC!”

I love Christmas. Not just in the typical “I love Christmas” sort of way. I must admit that Christmas is more of an addiction to me. I have drunk my coffee every day in the same Christmas mug for about 6 years now. This year I switched to a different Christmas mug, because the truth is it's better than the previous Christmas mug. Every once in a while I return to the original simply because I don't want that mug to feel neglected and abandoned.

Coffee tastes great in a good Christmas mug. I have a friend who believes he can taste the filter in Mr. Coffee. If this is in any way true, I think some engineer somewhere failed in a major way. He only drinks his coffee in a French press. I don't believe him, but I think it's cool that he really believes this. I, on the other hand, am absolutely convinced that coffee tastes better in a good Christmas mug.

As for music, I start listening to Christmas music in June. This is due to the fact that I'm married, and my wife has this thing against Christmas. She believes that Christmas music ought only to be played after Thanksgiving. She's wrong, but I don't tell her that, because I love her. I pretend that she's right. I do this with a lot of other things too... but that's another story.

I know that Jesus is the reason for the season, but that's not all I like about Christmas. I like all the other things too. I like the trees, and the lights and the gifts. I know that I'm supposed to like giving more than receiving, but I think I actually like receiving more. Giving is not that fun, since I don't get anything in return. Maybe giving would be a lot more fun if every time I gave, I could get something... like a brand new car.

I'm also a natural Christmas tree guy. I know it kills the ozone, or something like that, but it makes my house smell nice. I like putting all different colors of lights on the Christmas tree. This also drives my wife crazy, because she thinks that you should choose either white lights or colored lights. I tell her that it's just that she doesn't like Christmas. If she really liked Christmas, she would like all the lights. I also like garland, but she thinks it's tacky. Again, I tell her she's right.

Even though I've always liked Christmas, I've never really believed in Santa Claus. Maybe it's because as a kid I thought I was a genius. Geniuses see through the flaws of the Santa Claus story. Who can believe that a big fat man flies around the World in less than 24 hours and delivers presents through people's fireplaces. We don't have fireplaces in Costa Rica, so there was nowhere for him to come in. It may have also been due to the fact that my parents always put the gifts under the tree weeks in advance.

My brothers and I used to look at all the gifts and try to figure out what they were. This was fairly difficult to do, because we could never get the wrapping to look exactly the same after we opened and closed them while my parents were gone. In order to avoid that distress, we started looking for the hiding place before they wrapped the gifts. One time we discovered that they were in a locked suitcase. We found the key to the suitcase and opened it. When we closed it, for some reason it locked. After looking for the key to return it to its proper location, we realized we had left it inside the suitcase prior to locking it. When my mom asked about it, my brother was able to pretend like he didn’t know anything about it and made her think that it had been her own mistake.

One thing that made my experience at Bible school really tough was that one day I began to question everything that I had ever been taught. I wondered if the Christian story was kind of like the Santa Claus story, except that instead of a jolly old man breaking into your house in the middle of the night, you had a little baby born in a manger, to whom the angels sang.

If you think about it, the Christian story is a little ridiculous. If you believe the Christian story, then you believe that a young virgin got pregnant by God. You believe that her baby was somehow God and Man. You believe that this God-Man person chose to keep that secret to himself for thirty years. You believe that when he decided to tell people the secret he revealed it basically to twelve losers. You believe that he and these losers walked around an insignificant country for about three years doing miracles. You believe that he died, because he was doing these cool miracles. You believe that because of his death all sin that you committed against God has been forgiven (his death kind of paid for your actions even though you didn’t come around until a few thousand years later.) You believe that three days later, he came back from the dead. You believe he flew to heaven. You believe that just like he flew up, he is going to fly down one day. You believe that he simply has been waiting to fly back down for close to two thousand years.

Now if you can believe all that, you might as well believe in a jolly old elf, who lives in the North Pole, making Christmas gifts to deliver to all the children in the World, by riding in a sleigh on Christmas Eve, pulled by reindeer, and sliding down people’s chimneys.

I know that to some people that might sound sacrilegious or perhaps even blasphemous. Nonetheless, I think that when we as Christians try to pretend that the story completely makes sense, we might just be trying to fool ourselves. Maybe the whole point is that it doesn't make perfect sense. If it made perfect sense, we wouldn't need any faith, and without faith it is impossible to please God.

When I started questioning all this at Bible school, it became like a catalyst to another million questions. Does God exist? Did God create the Universe and everything in it? Was there ever a flood? Did the walls really ever come down at Jericho? Is Christianity true? What if Muslims are right? Is anyone right? Is anyone wrong? Is there really a Hell? How could a loving God send people to Hell? How could a loving God bring down the walls of Jericho, causing the death of everyone in that city? And of course, all those questions about Jesus. Did he really perform miracles? Did he rise from the dead? Is he ever coming back? How can I really know that he is alive? What if he was nothing more than a good person?

This was a very difficult time. When you have a belief system, and find it faulty, you realize that you are left with nothing to believe in. This is a terrifying prospect. Everybody needs something to believe in, even if that something is nothing. Sounds like a Poison song, I know. But it’s not just a cheap knockoff.
But you can't just choose to believe in nothing. You need to prove that nothing is the truth. Nothing has to bear the weight of the same scrutiny that your previous something had to bear. The problem is that nothing is often more impossible to prove than something, because in order to prove that nothing is true, you need to test all the different somethings. Who has the time to do that? What people usually do, is that they begin to believe in nothing, because, it's either easier to believe in, it justifies their lifestyle, or somebody gave them a really good explanation as to how nothing is true. But, I wonder if they ever question whether that somebody did the full test of all the somethings in order to prove that nothing is true.

How you believe often defines how you live. If you choose to believe in nothing, then you are left with no way to establish your life ethic. It becomes a matter of choice. I'm no sociologists, but I don't think we humans have a great track record for how we live our lives if we are left to no defining system of belief. Now, of course, someone could argue that it's the different systems of belief that have led to some of the atrocities committed by people over the centuries and they would be absolutely correct. But if there truly is nothing, that means that those systems have been men's attempts to create something out of nothing, and therefore, human nature has led people to invent systems that are terribly destructive forces in humanity. In the end, everybody has a system of beliefs, and that system will define many aspects of how they live their lives.

Some people have called this “worldview”, but when I think of worldview, I prefer to think of the astronauts out in space, looking on the world through a little window. I guess you could say that a worldview is the window in our private spaceship through which we look, to get a glimpse of Earth.

This is all very confusing and is giving me a headache, so I will continue with my story. We were required to read our Bible at this particular Bible school, and I was a very faithful student. While reading my Bible, I ran into a verse that ironically told me that it was O.K. to stop believing in Jesus if my belief in Jesus wasn't true. I don't know why this made me feel better, but it really did. This verse comes from the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.

Paul seems to be a little bit of a radical man. He also dedicated himself to saving the World in the Bruce Olson sort of way, and suffered much more than a tapeworm in his stomach. As a matter of fact, he gives a whole list of things that he had to suffer in 2 Corinthians 11. I haven't ever really suffered much for Jesus. I did kind of get laughed at once for not drinking when my friends were. But they stopped laughing at me when I started making fun of them for thinking they were going to pressure me into doing what I didn't feel like doing at the moment.

In this passage, Paul gave up a lot for Jesus. He says at in the book of Philippians that he counts all that he was like crap in comparison to gaining Christ. I’ve already deleted the word crap from my book multiple times, so as to not offend people’s olfactory sensibilities. Yet, I can’t really go deleting the word from this instance, because it is my understanding that Paul’s choice of words is best translated as crap, or even stronger. But of course, I’m no Greek scholar and you’ll need to ask them if this is true. In the same letter he says that for him to die is better than to live, because he can be with Jesus.
You’ll understand my amazement when I read this same Paul giving me permission to abandon my faith and walk away from Christianity. It doesn’t seem to make sense. You would think he would be defending the reasons for following Christ to the death, not telling me to go ahead and leave.
Read the words. “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (1 Cor. 15:14) Now, if my faith is useless, you can pretty much say that I should abandon my faith. Otherwise, my faith would be very useful. But Paul doesn’t just tell me to go ahead and walk away. He says that if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, my faith is useless. The only thing I realized was that I needed to look at the question of whether or not Christ had risen from the dead.

There is a man called Pascal. He was this French guy, who figured out a lot about science. Apparently he was a very smart man, because they named a computer language after him. I don't think he ever had a computer, since he lived in the 1600's. If he did, it must have been like an Apple IIC. That was my first computer and it was really old. Although he was a scientist, Pascal was also known for his beliefs in God. Pascal presented an argument once that, in summary, said this. Either there is a God, or there isn't. If there is a God and you don't believe in Him, you are going to Hell. If there is a God and you believe in Him you are saved. If there isn't a God and you don't believe in Him, you’re fine. If there isn't a God, and you do believe in Him you are fine. Since going to Hell is the worst of the cases your best bet is to believe in God.

This sounds pretty reasonable, except that I have a few problems with it. First and I think very importantly, it brushes aside the element of truth. Basically it tells us that following the truth is unimportant. Pick the best of all the options and go for it. If it's not true, then you'll live a happy life being wrong. I know that knowing for a fact that what we believe to be true is really true is really difficult. Nowadays it seems that you’re being all out arrogant to even claim that you may have been let in on the cosmic secret about what is true. We’re kind of expected by society to let everybody figure out what they think is true and not question anybody’s understanding. If I may use the word once more, I think this is crap. It sounds cute and cuddly and everything, but it really isn’t functional in the real World. If I walk up to the cashier at the grocery store and she tells me that I need to pay $40, I don’t turn to her and say that I believe it in my heart that I only need to pay $20. Or worse yet, I give her a $20 bill and tell her I truly believe that it is worth $40. I know what you’re thinking. “This guy fell asleep during his apologetics class, if the $20 bill is the best argument he could come up with.” You’re not far from the truth (but whose truth?) But my point is simple, there are some facts that we live by in life that are completely objective and have no subjectivity to them. There are some facts that we bet on, and can’t see at all. We can’t quite see gravity, but we pretty much bet on the fact that if an airplane is overloaded, and the wind direction is wrong, we’re pretty much dead. I’m not raising my hand to be the guinea pig to prove that right or wrong. I think that spiritual matters do not fit into the “whatever you think is true” category, because if there is truth to the teachings of Jesus or Mohammed for that matter, and we are following the wrong guy, we’re pretty much dead. I’m not at all implying that the truth is easy to get to, but as Fox Mulder would say, “The Truth is Out There.” (I’m full of cultural innuendos. This makes me so relevant, I should start my own Church.)

A second reason I have a problem with Pascal’s wager is that it sounds reasonable for us in the western hemisphere where believing in God does not imply having to say goodbye to our family and friends. Perhaps being disowned. Perhaps being killed. But if there is no truth to Jesus’ claims and a Muslim, for instance, would suffer death for becoming a Christian, I would say that he's better off not believing in Jesus. In other words in the nice comfort of our reclining Lazy-boy, eating chips and salsa, while drinking a beer (or not depending on your Christian persuasion), it’s easy to assume that being a Christian is a good choice whether its true or not. But for the missionary who has abandoned it all to follow after Christ, if that Christ isn’t real, then it’s about the stupidest thing he could do. I expressed this to a friend of mine who claims to be an atheist. When I let people know that I was leaving a career in engineering to pursue a future as a Bible teacher, he told me that he thought it was good that I was following my heart. I told him that if he really felt this way he could no longer be my friend. A little bewildered he asked “Why?” I responded, “Because I just told you that I’m leaving a career that has a future, for something completely unknown, on the basis that I believe God is calling me in that direction. If God exists, that’s a wonderful decision. But if he doesn’t, I would be making the worst mistake of my life. If you claim to be my friend, and you truly believe that God doesn’t exist, you would be doing everything to convince me I was making a huge mistake.”

The final problem I have with Pascal’s wager is that it seems to go against what Paul is saying. If Jesus isn't really who He said He is, then we better find a better way to spend our lives than talking about Him, or living for Him, or making decisions like going to England, or becoming Bible teachers, because He is directing us. Paul states it in even stronger terms than this. If such an affirmation about Christ's resurrection is false we should just “eat and drink, for tomorrow we will die.” This famous apostle and missionary was telling me that I could abandon my faith and pursue my own hopes and dreams. Finally I could be my own God. I could seek pleasure as the ultimate gain. I could give myself to my own lusts. From then on I would have sex with all the women that I wanted to (or as would let me). I would get drunk as often as I could. I could try to become as rich as I possibly could and use my money however I wanted. I would eat fatty food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and gain like 600 pounds. I could finally do whatever I wanted to do with my life.

There is only one condition. I just needed to prove one thing, and then I would be free. I needed to answer the ultimate question. Did Jesus rise from the dead, or not?

I no longer needed to ask all those other questions that I had. I just needed to ask that one question. Really, when you think about it, that question answers a lot of other questions. I'm no Blaise Pascal, but I know a few things. I know that people don't usually go around rising from the dead. If a friend of mine died today. I went to his funeral. I saw his body. I saw the casket being lowered into the ground. Then, three days later, I run into him while he’s having a frozen cappuccino at some coffee shop. And he gets all excited to see me, and says, “Hey Marco, I came back from the dead. I now know what's on the other side. I was there for more than an ‘out of body experience’ time. I was actually there for three days and talked to a whole bunch of dead people. Oh yeah, and I saw God, and I spoke to Him.” I would actually really listen to what he had to say. I figure that he would have a lot more knowledge about the here and after than I do, seeing as how I've never really risen from the dead. As a matter of fact, I've never really died either.

My philosopher friend says that there are two types of knowledge. There is that knowledge that you gain from reading a book, and the knowledge that you gain from experiencing something. I could read all about snowboarding. I could even look at pictures. I could tell you how you need to lean, or what moves you should do. But I went snowboarding once, and had I read much about it, it probably wouldn't have helped me. My experience knowledge tells me that snowboarding is a lot like eating snow. It's not really that fun, unless you're into eating snow.

In the same way, you could read a lot about God. You could read a lot about Heaven or Hell. You could read a lot about eternity. You might even come to know a lot. Still though, if a guy comes back from the dead and tells you that he knows what's truly out there, you should really pay attention to his words. If, before he died, he let you know it was going to happen, and then it happened, I think you could trust much of what he said prior to dying. If this same guy told you he was going to die and come back from the dead, and then he died, but didn't come back... you could pretty much throw away all that he said.

So if Jesus came back from the dead, after three days; if this really happened, I think we can pretty much trust what He had to say, and we can trust what he trusted. I don't know how the flood came about, and whether it has to be universal to be true. I can't figure out where dinosaurs fit into the whole thing. I don't have a clue how old the universe is, and whether we have to believe in six creation days in order for the Bible to be accurate. I don't know how a little rock, could kill the jolly green giant. I don't understand why good people have to suffer. I don't know why criminals get away with murder while laughing at the victims families. There are a lot of things that don't make sense to me if God exists. But if Jesus did rise from the dead, and he assures me that the God of the Old Testament is the same God today. If he tells me that He Himself is God, and that He was born of a virgin. If He tells me that God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life. If He lets me know that He is going to fix me up a nice house in heaven, and it will have a 42” plasma TV so that I can watch TBN all day, with the people and the funny hair, for the rest of eternity. If He says that the Holy Spirit is going to come into my life. I can believe him because He rose from the dead. He knows a lot more than I do, even if He hasn't read the same books.

So I went on a pursuit of that question. I read a few books here and there. I liked C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, for instance. There he makes the point that Jesus would have had to be a liar, a lunatic, or really the Son of God. I spent hours asking myself questions. But where I finally came to an answer was from the simplest source.

The story started when I read the book of 1 John. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched.” I know people question who the authors of the Bible are, but I am not going to get into that here. Believing that John, the disciple, was the author of this book, something hit me for the first time of my life. Whether or not the disciples, and later apostles, were right, they really believed what they said they believed. They believed it so much that they were willing to die for their belief. They believed it so much that they left loved ones behind to share this belief with others. They believed it so much that they were willing to cross, as never before, racial, cultural, academic, gender, financial barriers so that others could know about Jesus. They didn't have the scholarly knowledge of Jesus. They had that experiential knowledge. They had seen a man die on a cross, a very slow and agonizing death. Then, three days later they had seen him in person. This is why they were willing to go to great lengths for him. This is why they considered everything they had, and all their credentials and titles like crap in light of the knowledge of Jesus.

But were they simply wrong? So I set out to read the Gospels again. For the first time, I read them not as Sunday School stories. I read them as eye-witness accounts. It made all the difference. Maybe there is a huge lesson behind every one of Jesus' miracles. Maybe we can learn about faith. Maybe we can learn about mercy. Maybe we can see principles that can tell us how to treat our neighbor, and how to treat our neighbor's cat. Maybe. But maybe, they are just awesome in themselves. Maybe, the only thing the authors want us to know about the five loaves and two fish is that there was no food, and then Jesus prayed, and then there was lots of food. Maybe, when Jesus approached them on the boat, while walking on water, they just want us to know that it was amazing that Jesus could walk on water. Maybe when he hushed the winds and the storm, we should say, “Cool. He can stop the storms.” Maybe.

Maybe, when they saw him taken before the authorities, they got really scared. Maybe, when they saw him beaten, they knew it was over. Maybe, when they saw him die on the cross, they were heartbroken because their hope was gone. Maybe, they had to run for their lives, even while leaving their clothes behind, because they knew they were next. Maybe, when the women went to anoint his body with perfumes, they were really expecting to find him dead... and awfully smelly. Maybe when Peter ran into the tomb, and saw the clothes lying there...

What? Why were the clothes lying there? Why does the Bible mention this?

Something really interesting happened to me when I got to that part. In Luke 24:12, it tells us that Peter found the linen lying there. For some strange reason, this simple, small verse troubled me for days. I kept reading the gospels, but I couldn't let go of the thought. It kept pestering me. Day after day after day after day after day, I kept thinking about this short comment. Finally one day I decided to seek the reason behind why this verse was bothering me so much.

I wish I could say that my moment of understanding came after reading one of the World's greatest apologists, or even better, one of the World's most renowned skeptics. Or I wish I could say that I had an incredible Spiritual experience. The heavens opened up, and a voice spoke to me. Or that I saw a great miracle. Some kid got killed before my eyes, and I prayed for him and immediately he was healed. I wish I could have something really big and important to base the most decisive moment of my life. Nonetheless, maybe to those of us who think ourselves too big, we need to come to Jesus because of something really small. Luke 24:12 did it for me.

It was this simple. If he were still dead, either his body was stolen, or we would know where he was. Since his body had to have been stolen, and moved, nobody in their right mind would have bothered to unwrap his body. They would have simply stolen him. If the author of Luke was dumb enough to believe those miracles, he wouldn't have been smart enough to include such a small detail that would have otherwise seemed insignificant. If Jesus rose from the dead, he and the angels that ministered to him would have probably unwrapped his garments and put on new ones. Where did they come from? I don't know, but He's Jesus. If he could walk on water, and calm the storms, and rise from the dead... just maybe, He can make new clothes out of nothing.

I still believe that this was the most defining moment of my life. This simple, meaningless verse, is the reason why I can't just eat and drink, because tomorrow I will die. It's because of this verse, and what God showed me about the resurrected Jesus, that I now have to live my life in order to please Him.

As I write this, Christmas is approaching. Lights are being put up. Trees are being loaded on cars. There are poinsettias in all the stores. Christmas music is in the air. I love it. But beyond the music, and beyond the lights, and beyond the gifts, there is the Truth of the living, indwelling Savior, who came into the World to seek and save that which was lost. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Chapter 2: Edit 1: Update 1

Chapter 2: On Flying and Dying to Self

I hate flying. I used to have dreams as a kid that I could fly. I would climb to the roof of our house and jump off, and somehow continue flying. That flying, though, was cool in my dream, but the actual one where you get on an airplane and fly… that’s totally different.

There are a few reasons I hate flying. One of them has to do with the actual reality that we humans weren’t meant to fly… other than in our dreams of course, where it is clearly God’s intention that we move freely in the air. I keep hearing that flying is safer than driving a car, but that only makes me hate driving a car even more. What I really like is sitting in the safety of my house, eating chips and salsa, and watching TV. That seems to be a lot safer than flying or driving a car.

Another reason I hate flying is because I hate crowds. I know I should love people
and all that jazz, and I usually like people as individuals. It’s only when they’re all together in a crowd that I hate them. Flying, for the most part, includes crowds.

I did get on an airplane once that had the last few rows empty, which I thought was great since I hate crowds. I asked the flight attendant why they were empty, when the crowd seemed to be huge outside the airport and they were even offering “vouchers” for anybody who was willing to get off the plane. “That’s because of the wind direction. When the wind blows from east to west, it can affect the take off of the airplane. If we were full, we wouldn’t make it past the mountains. This would cause us to crash into them.” For some odd reason, that didn’t make me feel more at ease about flying, but it did help me understand why I hate crowds. Crowds make you crash into big, huge mountains.

Finally, one more reason for which I hate flying and I hate crowds is because if the plane is full and somebody sits next to me, I am expected to speak to them. I was taught as a little kid not to talk to strangers. That’s actually one of those rules that I appreciated. I’m very uncomfortable talking to strangers. I have to do that a lot, because my job makes me have to be very friendly to a bunch of strangers. I can do that when I get paid to, but when there is no money involved I would prefer to keep to myself.

So I was very excited when I got on the airplane from Costa Rica to England, via the Netherlands, otherwise known as Holland, and nobody was sitting next to me. Holland is not to be confused with Deutschland, even though for some strange reason we call the people in that country the Dutch. The flight was a twelve-hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and although the time in the air, and the lack of refueling islands made it more probable that the plane would crash, it meant that I didn’t have to share any last words with some stranger on an airplane. I wasn’t aware that the airplane made one stop in a little island called St. Marteen after only one hour of taking off. I noticed that what was previously an empty airplane began to fill up at this little island. Yet, it seemed that all the seats around me were filling up, except for mine. God’s face was really shining on me now.

After it appeared that all the people had found a place to sit, I looked out the window and saw a mother with her young child walking on the tarmac toward the airplane. I knew what was going to happen. Sure enough, a flight attendant (not the same one who told me we could crash into the mountains) approached me and asked me if I would be willing to move to another seat.

“Absolutely not!” I wanted to scream. “I paid for my seat, and I don’t really care if that lady has to go sit away from her daughter. As a matter of fact I don’t care if she has to leave her daughter behind risking being separated from her for life. I don’t care if the daughter grows up wondering whatever happened to her mother, and ruins her life in order to overcome her loneliness and sense of abandonment.” Instead, I said… “Um… yeah… I guess.”

At this point I got bumped to another seat. I kind of wish I had been bumped up to first class, but that didn’t happen. I would have even talked to strangers then, if I needed to. Instead, I had to sit in that one seat that some engineer decided could still be fit in the airplane, against all doctors’ suggestions. This seat happened to be right up against one of the main cabin doors. The cabin door took up a huge space inside the airplane, right up to half of the space on my seat. This left me with only half a seat to sit in, and no real room to stretch my legs except for the leg space that the stranger next to me had. The problem was that the stranger had legs longer than a giraffes, and therefore allowed me for no place to stretch my legs. Additionally, the movie screen was a big screen on the wall in front of the five center seats immediately to my right, which forced me to turn my head at a ninety-degree angle in order to attempt to catch a glimpse of the movie. And if I did catch a glimpse, the movie they were playing was the real live version of the Flintstones, which I must add has been one of the worst movies ever made in human history. I didn’t have to talk to the stranger because he only knew Dutch, or perhaps pretended to because he hates talking to strangers on airplanes.

Twelve hours later, my airplane landed, and one flight later, I made it to England.

My purpose in going to Bible school was to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t really looking forward to the Bible classes, because, as you are very well aware, the Bible is a very boring book. I had three ideas about what I could do with my life. I could go back home and become a doctor. Doctors get paid a lot of money, even when all they do is give prescription glasses. I could be an engineer, because although they don’t often get paid as much as doctors, they do get to go to the moon. Even though going to the moon is useless, it is pretty cool because you get to float upside down. Or I could be a businessman. Business is what people study when they don’t have a clue what they want to be when they grow up. If they want to make you think that they have a better idea, they study something called “International Business.” That only means that they don’t have a clue what to do with their life, but want to travel while they figure it out. I have a friend who doesn’t have a clue what to do with his life so he is studying philosophy. I think they should create an “International Philosophy” path so that he could travel while he studies.

There’s a lot I could say about my time at Bible school, but for the sake of getting to the point of my book, it will suffice to say that it was full of surprises.

This particular Bible school had 180 students from close to 25 countries in the World. This was a great place to learn about different cultures. A lot of people end up traveling to a different places as tourists in the hope of understanding a different culture. I don’t think tourists ever get a real feel for what a culture is really like. They get the tourist presentation of that culture. If you want to understand a culture, you need to live among the people for an extended amount of time. Enough time for the people to stop treating you like a tourist and just treat you like a regular foreigner. The other way is to go to a place where different cultures live together for an extended period of time. There are many interesting things you learn by doing this.

In some cultures, for instance, men hold hands, and don’t have to be gay to do so. There was a guy from Kenya called David. He had killed a lion to prove his manhood, and yet would still hold a man’s hand while walking down the street. Since he had killed a lion, none of us made fun of him for holding guys’ hands. I wish I could kill a lion, or do something cool like that. I’d be lucky if I just ran over somebody’s cat with a Mack truck. I don’t think I’m even man enough to drive a Mack truck.

There was also a guy from Korea. I don’t remember his name, because Koreans have strange names. I’ve always wondered why Korean parents don’t give their kids normal names like ours. I had to wash potatoes with this guy. He found my culture odd. He would laugh because I thought it was sad that he ate dogs. I’ve owned a lot of dogs in my life, and I’ve never been tempted to eat one. But this guy apparently ate them for the simple reason that he was hungry. I do wonder what the best tasting breed of dog was. I had a French Poodle once that would always get packed with fleas. When we would bathe her, about once a year, her white hair would turn red because of all the flea droppings. I wonder if that meant that she tasted very good if you cooked her.

There were many other things that I learned at Bible school and great experiences that I had, but I will leave those for later or maybe for another book. Maybe I'll write lots of books, kind of like Stephen King, except that mine won't be horror stories. They will just be stories about myself. That means I have to be careful not to tell all my stories, because if I do, then I will run out of stories to tell.

Another thing I was surprised by at Bible school was that the Bible wasn’t as boring as I had thought my whole life. There were some really interesting teachers at Bible School. There was this guy called Billy. Billy seemed to really dislike Christians, even though he was one. Maybe he disliked Christians, like I dislike crowds. Individually they’re alright, it’s just when they’re together that they are a problem. Billy also seemed to have had a really tough life, which to me was cool, because I like to think that I, too, have had a tough life. Except that I really haven’t. One day Billy walked past me and asked me how I was doing, to which I responded “Good, and how about you, Billy?” “I’m as rotten as always, Mr. Perez.” I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I said… “Oh! Well I hope you are doing a little less rotten.”

I think when people ask you how you’re doing you’re just supposed to say “Fine!” or “Good.” This is true even if your cat, Tinkles just got run over by a big Mack Truck, and immediately was torn to shreds and eaten by a coyote. You’re still supposed to say “Fine!” or “Good.” That’s the rule. But that was also what made Billy cool. He didn’t really stick to the rules.

There was also Charles. He seemed to like Christians a lot more than Billy. He also was one of the ones who made the Bible really interesting. There are people who make the Bible interesting by telling a lot of stories that in reality don’t have anything to do with the Bible. I’ve kind of come to conclude that what is really interesting is their stories and not the Bible. Others seem to find lessons in the Bible that are really interesting, and they might add some of their own stories to spice it up. I’d like to think Charles was one of those, but I can’t really remember anymore. All I remember is that I really enjoyed listening to him teach. Now he’s a big pastor in Canada, and I hear he even has a radio and TV talk show.

Then there was Graham. He was a little different just because he wasn't as classy as the other teachers. He wasn't angry at Christians, like Billy. He also wasn't as eloquent as Charles. Anybody who has heard of Graham actually makes fun of the way he says Judges. It had something to do with the part of England he was from, but it sounded kind of like Jood-Jess. The reason he said Judges so much was because he taught that book. Judges is kind of a depressing book of the Bible, because the people of Israel, who are God's people, keep doing all the wrong things. God then gives them over to their enemies to punish them, but also so that they turn to him. When they realize the mess that they’re in, which is mostly their fault, they cry out to God. He then delivers them, by sending a judge.

Graham taught near the end of my time at Bible school, and I have to admit that I don't remember much about his teaching. All I remember is that I was soon going to have to go to back to Costa Rica, and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I also remember that I was impressed by the fact that God would raise judges to lead his people. Somewhere in the middle of class, when I was supposed to be listening, and not thinking about my future, I, myself, cried out to God. It went something like this.

“Dear God. I came all the way to England to figure out what to do with my life. I'm not complaining, because I've had a really great, life-changing experience. But, as good as all that is, I'm kind of bummed because you haven't really told me what I'm supposed to do. I don't think it's a horrible request to ask you what I'm supposed to do. I mean... it's for your glory, and all that. But, time's running out, and you've kind of kept that little bit of information to yourself. I would really appreciate it if you could let me in on the big cosmic secret. Oh yeah, by the way, I don't care anymore. I don't care if you want me to be a doctor, and even deal with people's feet. Those are called Podiatrist, by the way. I don't care if you want me to be an engineer and design coffee makers. (I'd learned to drink coffee in England, because the only other choice was tea, and I'm not really wild about tea). I don't care if you want me to be a businessman, and even study international business so that I can travel around the World. As a matter of fact, I don't care if you want me to be a missionary and live in the Jungles of Papau New Guinea, even though I don't have a clue where that is. I don't care if I have a huge tapeworm coming out of my throat. I don't care if you want me to be single, or to be married. I don't care if you want me to marry an American girl, or you want me to marry a Papau New Guinean, even though I don't know what they look like. I don't care if you want me to rich, or to be poor. (I had forgotten about the fact that there's also the possibility of being in what they call, “the middle class”.) I DON'T CARE. I just want to do what you want me to do.”

There's a similar verse to the one in the last chapter where Jesus tells his disciples that if anybody wants to come after him, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow him (Mark 8:34). I like that verse and use it a lot to teach. I have to admit that I think this prayer kind of describes what denying oneself means. It means telling God that we don't care what we should do, as long as it's what he wants us to do. So this is what I did.

I’ll never claim to be one of the greatest Christians out there. Granted, I’m sure I can find some terrible hypocrites who far surpass me in their disregard for Christ’s model of living, but I have also met quite my fair share of wonderful Christ-like believers. Even so, one of my greatest frustrations with the general Christian population that I know is that often they only come to God with regards to their plans and decisions when things aren’t going their way, or when they want some particular blessing. Although I think hearing God’s voice is on average very difficult to do, I still think for all of life’s big decisions He should be the one calling the shots. I say the big decisions, because if we go about asking God what restaurant we should have lunch at we’ll never get around to having lunch. There are lots of things that we do every day, but for those we can just trust that God is directing our path. It’s just that at times there are decisions that seem to be a major step in our life where we often seem to neglect God’s will and simply pray for His blessing. Top on my list are the decisions regarding marriage (even dating) and career choice. It’s often in the midst of these significant choices that God only comes into the picture when our preference ends up being the wrong one.

Assuming that hearing God’s voice and knowing His will is often difficult (at least for some of us, since others claim to having heard God’s voice all the time), even if it were really easy, I still think denying oneself is incredibly difficult. There is a natural tendency to believe we could handle things better if we were left in charge. Also, there is a fear that God is out to get us. We are terrified that if we actually leave matters into God’s hands God will give us everything that we don’t want. In our minds and hearts, though we sing His praises about Him being good and all that, He’s kind of a mean God when it comes to His choice of our future. I heard someone once give the illustration that we think that God waits for us to say something stupid like “You’re will be done,” just so that He can throw some miserable future our way. “Oh, yeah? Let’s see. How about you go live in some remote jungle in Africa? What if I ask you to marry Roberta? Remember her? She’s the one with the toothless grin and the screechy voice that sounds like an airplane at takeoff.”

Yet Jesus says that God surpasses even earthly fathers. Even though I am all grown up, and with children of my own, if I were to ask my dad for a piece of bread because I have no food at home, it’s highly probable he would take me out shopping and get me a cart full of groceries. And that’s a sinful, human father. God would probably go and buy me the whole supermarket if that’s what I needed.

But I don’t want to fall into vain promises that God will make your life all a bed of roses. There are countless examples in Scripture of men and women who suffered more because of living a life of absolute surrender to God’s will. Moses spent multiple years walking in a desert. Many of the prophets and apostles died torturous deaths at the hands of God’s enemies. Even his own Son was crucified. In other words, there might be suffering and anguish if we follow God’s will. Dying to ourselves means that we don’t only choose to follow God’s will if He promises us a Mercedes SLR McLaren valued at $455,000. Dying to ourselves means that we follow God even if all He promises us is sandals that will not wear out during forty years in the desert.

Obviously it’s easier for those who get the Mercedes, or so it seems. Either way, we need to surrender to His will and not to our own. I believe as young, weak and feeble as I was, that’s what I did that day while listening to Graham teach on the book of Jood-Jess.

Immediately, the World around me seemed to vanish. I'm not sure what was happening, but all of a sudden, I was in front of a huge valley. That valley was full of dry bones, and a voice from heaven said to me, “Marco, do you think these bones can live?” “Only you know, Lord.” Suddenly a wind blew, and flesh grew on the bones, and the bodies stood firm on the ground. Then the Spirit of God entered those bones and they became walking, talking people. I knew it was a sign to me and from then on I was sure of what I was supposed to do.

I kind of wish I had cool stories like that to tell. Things like that don't ever really happen to me. Nonetheless, God was just as clear with me. I remembered my childhood fantasy of wanting to save the World in the Bruce Olson kind of way. I also remember looking at Graham and thinking, “I want to do what this guy does.” I even remembered how I wanted to be like Michael W. Smith and sing Christian songs. I realized that since I was a child I was called to serve God in some special way.

I wish I could say that it was all great after that. It really wasn't. I didn't know where to start in order to do this. I didn't know how Bible teachers supported themselves financially; much less their families. I didn't know how this would play out in my life. But I would have some things happen in my life that would help me figure it out.

I hate flying. Sure enough, on the flight back to Costa Rica, I sat down next to a stranger. As is expected, I began talking to him. “What do you do for a living?” I asked. “I work for the UN, writing international treaties.” I'm trying to write my story out on paper, but I'll be the first to admit that it's not near as cool as a guy who writes international treaties. That's kind of like saving the World, but in the Superman sort of way. I think guys who write international treaties should have to wear capes. But this guy was dressed normally. At least that’s what he wanted me to believe.

“What do you want to do with your life?” he asked. I really wanted to answer, “I want to write international treaties,” but for some reason, it sounded unori