Re-entry

Having a laugh in a ferry in Venice with our friends from Canada and South Africa



On bridge in Venice, Italy

Well, we are back and doing our best to adjust back into life, responsibility and relationships. After being gone for 3 and half months, experiencing about 15 different countries, cultures and endless perspectives on life, the transition is not an easy one. Landing in San Francisco at SFO and walking outside to the HUGE highway's, HUGE cars and EXTREMELY fast pace of life was a bit overwhelming. It is interesting to begin to get back into life rhythm's that we have lived out for so long and now step back and take an objective look at those ways of life. Many are affirming and many are convicting. Each step is slower, but each step is filled with rich insight and perspective that has been gained along the way.

It has been great to slowly re-connect with family and friends. They have been SO supportive, encouraging and excited to hear our stories and we have really enjoyed hearing theirs. There is a wave of freshness and added value placed on each relationship that can so easily be taken for granted.

Most of all, we are able to wrestle and begin to live out some new ways in which to partner with God in bringing hope to the world through everything from our consumption to they way we show His love to those around us to our daily awareness of His presence in all of the world around us. We are anxious and excited to have the opportunity to bring and share some of the many insights God has offered to each of us through the formative conversations and rich experiences of the past few months.

Thanks for following along and partnering in our travels and experiences. We hope each of you are able to have a taste(whether it be eating a pigeon quesadilla or having an ape on your shoulder!) of God's creation and share it with us along the way!!

jon and jan

QUICK update...

left to right: street cafe in Florence and in front of Temple of Jupiter in Pompeii

Hello from Croatia!!

We would say in the native language, but our minds our swimming with languages and can't remember the basics for more than 5 minutes. Yesterday we were in Albania which has it's own language of Albanian...crazy.

Anyway, we are coming the end of travels and it feels REALLY wierd. It all seemed to go so fast now that it is almost over! We knew it would be this way, but now reality is coming too fast! Over the last week we have made stops in Rome, Sorrento(we trained out to Pompeii to see the ruins), Albania and now in Croatia. It was great to be back in Rome as Jon could be there for months at a time like a giddy school boy walking through all the ancient history. We actually went INTO the prison where Paul and Peter were held. It was really mindblowing and sacred. Pompeii was pretty incredible too seeing such a whole picture of Roman life, although our tour guide would get upset if we asked a basic question...Each of us got lectured a couple of times and felt like kicked puppies...Albania was very 3rd worldish, which we actually really enjoy. Croatia today is beautiful with a crazy number of islands, huge coastline and a ton of history within it's old city walls. They were heavily bombed in 1991 and our local tour guide was 13 at the time. Amazing story and many the buildings still have shrappnel marks. We are only about 10 miles from Bosnia. We were planning on going into Bosnia, but ran out of time...bummer.

We have met alot of friends and seems that everyday we have an insightful conversation with someone on land or on the ship. Looking forward to sharing some of the stories.

Talk soon!!

Jon and Jan

The latest...

Ciao!!

We are a bit behind in the blogging. Internet hasn't been real easy to track down for a decent price since we left our friends place in London over a week ago.

In the past few days we have been able to go to Lisbon, Gibralter(U.K. territory), Barcelona and St. Tropez(France). Today we are in Florence, Italy and the sun just peeked out from behind the clouds a few minutes ago. It is really beautiful here and we are doing our best to run around the city as fast as we can with only one day to do it!

We are getting a bit tuckered out of traveling at this point. Don't get us wrong...We are REALLY grateful to still be on the road and doing our best to soak it all in, but a taste of normalcy doesn't sound too bad at this point either. Being a tourist is alot of work!!

Over the next week will be going back to Rome, then to Naples, Croatia, Albania and get off the cruise in Venice, where we will be for a couple of days.

We have met some really nice people on the cruise ship and have had many encouraging and intellectual conversations. Honestly, having been tourist for so long, we live for the occasional stimulating conversation. With only a couple weeks left in our travels we are doing our best to soak in some relaxation, exercise alot and spend plenty of time in spiritual meditation. It has been a great mentality for us both so far.

We continue to be very grateful for the ways God has revealed Himself to us in new ways on this trip. Amazing all the different ways that He has been seen and experienced. Many of those experiences have come through dialog with you all and the people we have run into along the way...

Hope you are well and love you very much!!

jon and jan

p.s. these are some pics from Gibralter at the wild monkey reserve...we are far more terrified than we look!

The City of Lights

Well, on Tuesday we jumped on our cruise ship in Southampton, England. The travel to the port was actually very smooth...it is REALLY nice not to have to carry our huge packs around for awhile. This is the first time we have been able to actually unpack our bags for almost a month.

As we stood in line to get on, we realized that once again we were going to be about 55 years younger than the average aged cruiser on our ship. Really funny, but we dont mind it at all. Everyone is really nice to us and we do our best to connect with other and hear about their kids and grandkids and great grandkids...

We got some sleep the first night and got up early to explore Paris! Jan has been dreaming of coming to this city for years, so we were both very excited. We were able to catch a train on take about a 2 hour ride to the city center. We connected with a few other folks from the cruise and split a cab to the Eiffel Tower. It was amazing standing right next to such a famous icon of Europe. After a bunch of pictures, we walked down the Champs Elysees towards the Louvre. The walk was beautiful...tons of shops and incredible gardens, fountains and ponds. We stops at a local stand and got a crepe with Nutella and each had an espresso. It was pretty crazy sitting on a bench eating authentic crepes looking over all the famous sites.

At the end of the Champs Elysees we ended up at the richest art museum in the world, the Louvre. It is home to the Mona Lisa and the Water Lillies by Monet. It was WAY bigger than we expected. The picture doesnt to it justice...apparently it was oringally a royal palace.

We then wandered down to Notre Dame. It is their famous Gothic looking cathedral. Pretty cool. All that to say, it was ALOT to take in in only one day! Although we were really grateful to be able to see everything.

With the navigational genious of Jan we took some underground metro rides back to the train station and caught our train back to the port.

We have been able to have a couple days to catch up on journals and labeling all of our pictures, along with some rest, reading and laundry. Jan even won a game of bingo and won some art!! She is pretty giddy...

We are in Lisbon, Portugal today and head to Gibralter tomorrow.

We love you all and look forward to talking soon!! jon and jan

London in Two Days!

Wow...things have been a bit hectic as we have in our opinion "done" London in 48 hours. We are staying with our friends Darren and Pam Prince(two kids named Lucy and Jesse) who live in the East part of London. It has been REALLY great to be with people who we can have some intellectual and honest conversation with. Over our time running around cities, most of our conversation has been with tour guides, so this was actually a big answer to prayer. Definitely has been fun to share and listen to each others stories.

So, we felt like we sold out to the ways of the average tourist a bit here in England when we bought a 24 hour open air tour bus ticket. Basically it allows you to jump on and off a bus, along with a few other perks, for 24 hours with a guide. You stick out like a sore, almost pulsating thumb, but it was actually a great call. We are a bit tuckered out of being the two lost tourists in a big city, so this allowed us to see: Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the London Bridge, Tower Bridge, London Tower, London Eye, John Lennon's house, Sean Connery's house, etc...The last two were part of the cheesy, mega "touristy" part of the ride...fit Jon well. We actually even got to fulfill one of Jan's dreams of going to Le Miserables at the Queen's Theater tonight. It was incredible.

We try to find a train to Southampton tomorrow and jump on another extreme bargain cruise for the next 16 days. We will be in Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, France, Italy, Croatia and Albania. Should be a blast...

This is a short one because it is almost 2am over here and we leave in the morning, but we may try to add a little something before we get on the train tomorrow.

Much love from Jon and Jan...

pictures: top pic is at Buckingham Palace after the changing of the guard. bottom pic is on river boat with Big Ben and Westminster Abbey in background

We should have done this 3 months ago!!

So, due to a number of reasons, procrastination being the primary, we have just now set up a blog for our current trip that has taken us across the globe. We have done our best to keep in contact through email and have loved hearing back from so many of you! It is fun sharing such an eye opening and forming experience with you all.

Anyway, we will do our best to keep this blog updated every few days and add a picture or two when we can. We also added the mass emails we have sent out over the past couple months if for some reason you stubble onto this and don't have any idea what the heck we are talking about...

Today is our last day in Amsterdam and we have really enjoyed our time here. We are staying with friends(parents of Adam and Allison Buzard) and they have been EXTREMELY hospitable. We even have a sauna in the downstairs apartment they are allowing us to stay in!! The city is really diverse, in fact it just recently became the most diverse city in the world, and we have been able to walk everywhere. The 120 something miles of canals that run through the city are beautiful and we have been able to check out the Van Gogh Museum along with a few others. Because of the diversity, we are able to find any type of food we could have imagined. Yesterday we had falafel's(spelling?) and today we will eat some Chinese fried rice that we picked up at the market.

Because we have had an extended stay here(5 days), we have been able to take it pretty easy and spend plenty of time reading, catching up on email, taking long walks, playing cribbage and having some good conversation. Amazingly we still aren't sick of each other after 3 months straight!! Yesterday we actually downloaded the same Rob Bell teaching onto our Ipods and went for a walk in a local park(which has a Picasso sculpture in the middle of it!) while listening. We followed that by having some coffee and discussing some of the nuggets we were able to take from his talk. Really good for us to do...

We take a 6 hour ferry ride tomorrow to London and are staying with the Prince family, who we got in contact with through some close friends. They recently moved to London from San Francisco and have started a missional church community and non-profit. We are really excited to share and learn from each others experiences.

Hope you each are doing well and having some shaping experiences of your own! We are beginning to miss everyone more every day. Looking forward to being back in a few weeks...Jon and Jan

From Sweden, April 14th

Hello Family and Friends!

Hope you are all doing well and having some fresh experiences and quality relationships...

As we write this, we are realizing that our last "mass" email went out to about 5 people...sorry about that(not that anyone was anxiously awaiting our news anyway:)), maybe we will attach that one to the end of this if you care to read.

Things have been a whirlwind, but REALLY incredible as we have now been in Europe for about a month. We have been to about 15 cities and are now experiencing our 8th language...we start to get the basics(hi, yes, no, how much!!) down and we are off to our next destination. We are so grateful for this opportunity and know that we have been very blessed to have the chance to experience something like this.

We are currently in Amsterdam with Adam and Allison Buzard's folks (who are MORE than taking care of us), we spent the last 5 days in Jon's families' homeland of Sweden(also with friends), 9 days in Italy and 18 days on a cruise that stopped at about 11 Mediterranean and North African countries. Thank goodness for a REALLY cheap cruise fare and very hospitable friends we are getting along great on more than our expected bread and water diet!

It is hard to write a brief email on the vast experiences we have had since coming over here, but here are few highlights:

• Rome: We spent 3 days in Rome in a very basic bedroom in a Monastery about 20 minutes from the main part of town...let's just say it wasn't the area of greatest affluence, which probably fit us well. Our time their was highlighted by a very spiritual, historically insightful and to some degree haunting trip to the Vatican, Colosseum and ancient Roman Forum. Walking through such profoundly influential and history packed areas where breathtaking. Knowing of the violent and oppressive actions of the Roman Empire at the Colosseum and in the Forum, it was hard to know whether to smile or be somber in our pictures. Standing inside the remains of the palace of Nero, Julies Caesar, Domitian, Constantine, etc...was definitely Jon's highlight with all the study and teaching he has done on those characters. Jan was blown away by the art of the Vatican. She loved the Michaelangelo and Rafael art that filled St. Peter's Basilica.
  
• Cinque Terre: These are the "five cities" on the northwest coast of Italy. They are much more villages than cities(pop: 500 - 1000 people) and we really got hooked up my a local lady who found us wandering the street with our huge backpacks looking for a place to stay...it is off season, so she put us up in a two bedroom villa overlooking the main street, Via Roma, in one of the cities called Monterosso. We LOVED our time there...very relaxing times of the beach, beautiful hikes up in the hills between the villages and loved soaking up the very local Italian culture. We would go the local bakery, coffee shops and grocery stores about everyday.
  
• Barcelona: This was our favorite big city. Lots of energy and atmosphere. While we were there we ran into 3 local parades and 1 local dance in front of the cathedral that involved all the locals grabbing hands and dancing in circles. Jon also got his hair chopped off in a small hole in the wall barber shop.
• Stockholm, Sweden: Beautiful city made up of islands. We went to about EVERY museum and took a great boat tour of the area as we did our best to soak up the culture and setting of Jon's family heritage. It was freezing cold, but well worth the experience.

We are still looking forward to another few weeks of traveling packed with new experiences, perspectives and conversations. This has been a fertile time of individual growth for both of us as well as a beautiful opportunity for us to grow closer in our relationship with each other(We just tell each other when we need a break and go for a long walk!!). It seems that everyday we are challenged to evaluate our inherited norms and lifestyles, while being open to all the different and creative ways that Jesus message is being played out across the world...Good stuff.

Thanks for all the support and willingness to read this monster of an email! We love each of you very much and would love to hear the latest in each of your lives...we will have email for the next 3 days.

Jon and Jan

p.s. We attached a few pics of Pisa and Morocco