Tomorrow begins a new chapter, baby! Abilene, Texas, meet Cary McCall.

As many of you know, I like photos. I enjoy having a visual record of my experiences, if for nothing more than being able to look back and remember the details of the people, places, and events of my life. My hard drive is packed with digital photos that date back to the very moment I first owned a digital camera, and my latest camera is rather small so that it can travel with me easily. And, if I happen to not get any pics of what is happening, I have a convenient thumb drive hanging on my keychain so I can easily get copies of others. However, I have always been disappointed that I have a huge hole in my archive - I have almost no visual documentation of the summer of 2002 when I lived and worked in the heart of the Eastern bloc of Europe: Kiev, Ukraine.

Resting in some unknown, dark storage room, or perhaps floating around the underhanded black street market, is a 256 MB compact flash card that contains about 650 photographs showing the adventures of six OU student missionaries. Wherever that Kodak digital camera and its card full of memories ended up, it certainly wasn't on that KLM Royal Dutch airplane when we left.

So, what do I have? Nothing but a head full of experiences that totally changed my life. Experiences that are almost unreal. Experiences of the Holy Spirit working in physical, tangible ways. Experiences of a people learning a story they never heard before, of faces straining to understand, and of Ah-Ha moments when something suddenly made sense. Mental pictures of standing atop an old, run-down, tall communist apartment building and looking across a sea of grey sameness that shrouded the horizon. Experiences of crouching through an underground cave, looking over the preserved bodies of ancient Orthodox monks, lit by the thin wax candle I hold in front of me. Experiences of trying to organize a small apartment full of eager Ukrainians who have traveled for hours for the chance of getting onto our reading list, and the disapointment of turning away all those who have lined up down the hall, having just been able to ride the rickety elevator up from the ground floor where they had patiently waited their turn.

What I have realized, in the absence of the visual moments that I captured of all of these things, exist a hole that is waiting to be filled with stories that paint even more vivid portraits of what God did during those seven weeks. And out of this realization comes the obvious fact that these kinds of stories can be told of everything, not just Ukraine.

So, with that in mind, I want to start using this blog to recount the power of some of these experiences, both in and out of Ukraine. Consider it a "special series" that will have installments as I feel motivated. I won't write the first one tonight, but as a preview I will tell you it will be about a special young sweet-faced Ukrainian girl named Lena who taught me a lesson I will not soon forget.

I'm becoming more and more astounded at the rate in which time passes. It has now been almost a full eight months since I moved back to Tulsa, just two months short of the entire time I was in Alabama. The general wisdom is that time seems to pass more quickly when you are occupied and enjoying yourself. I would say this is not always the case, because when I look back on my time in Alabama, it almost seems as if I was there for a lifetime. I have so many experiences crammed into my mind from those ten months that it seems as if I was there for years. Being back in Tulsa, however, has not been nearly as exciting. On the whole, I do the same thing almost every day. I get up, do a mundane task repeatedly for nine hours, and go home. Therefore, it's almost like a continuum, where an entire month really doesn't hold anything much different than two days. As a result, in my mind I can think back several months and there not be much in between to get in the way. But my solace in this is that it is just a temporary situation - the roller coaster is about to take off again and make every day unpredictable - just like my life was up until the morning of October 31 when I spun out of control in a Chevy Silverado. That, for the most part, was the last really unpredictable thing that has happened to me. That also was the capper to the end of my Alabama life.

But now, after experiencing what God has wanted me to during my Tulsa stay, it is almost time (T-minus 16 days) to head off to the world of Abilene. Suddenly, my days and my time will be mine again, left up to the total management of me. I feel like the cartoon character who is pushing himself back in the giant rubber slingshot, pushing harder and harder and anticipating that right moment to let go and be flung into the unknown. What all is going to happen? I have no stinking clue! But that's what is great about it, and probably why God has allowed time to pass so quickly up until now. It's time to start closing this chapter and turn the page to the next.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:1-3

This piece of Godly advice has, unfortunately, become somewhat cliche in the Christian world, but what a profound idea it really is. How much do we really break away from what the world thinks? How transformed are we?

In the past twelve hours I have faced two very difficult mindsets that challenge how much my worldview is transformed by the nature of God. The first one being an American nationalistic philosophy that says the rest of the world be damned so long as America is able to stay on top of the economic pyramid. This person, who I am very close to, states unabashedly that what he cares about first and foremost is himself, all other things radiating out from there. Feeding into that is the quality of life he is able to enjoy as a product of the success of the American economic system. One very serious threat he identified to this was the work of a group of people who are collecting funds to help build playgrounds for impoverished Chinese children. To him, this contributes to the exportation of American jobs overeas and the increasing deficit in the balance of payments between our two nations. To him, the Chinese don't care about America, and would not do that kind of thing for us, therefore we have no business doing that for them. Furthermore, he states that it is actually best that the Chinese continue under a system of economic and social oppression, because if true capitalism were to reign, it would weaken the American system to the point of total collapse. As an American, he views it as advantage that the Chinese live under oppression.

Now, after working on that philosophy, I come to work this morning and hear the emotional story of how my coworker's live-in boyfriend of several years has packed his things and moved out of her house. She's angry and her two young children are confused. She has coddled to his every whine for years, and now doesn't understand why he is being so selfish. Adding to that, my other coworker's boyfriend, whom she has an openly sexually dependent relationship, decided to break up with her via text message.

God has revealed to us a whole new way of viewing humanity. He has revealed to us a motivation to actually love humanity. All of this in the middle of the fact that humanity certainly did nothing for him. This unusual love also revealed something very different in how we are to love each other. The whole point of everything God has done has been to protect us and cherish us. Is this how we go about our relationships with each other? When you say you love someone, is that out of the depth of your commitment to them and the overwhelming desire to protect and cherish them at all costs? Or are they a throwaway commodity that can be tossed because they aren't gratifying you anymore? Are those the people we are choosing to bind ourselves to? God says there is something much better.

I want to be transformed away from these philosophies of the world, because the nature of God does not match them at all. The main difference? Death to self.

...His good pleasing, and perfect will.

Awesome.

It's official boys and girls, July 1st I hit the road to Abilene, Texas, with Oklahoma in my rear view mirror. What's funny is that there was a day that I would have given anything to say that. However, God has matured me just a little bit over a few months so that now that occaision is a little more bittersweet.

Two of the beneficial things about having an eight month (already??) hiatus in Tulsa have been 1) I've gotten a little closer to my family, and 2) God has given me an amazing spiritual family at the Memorial Drive church and the Holy Grounds ministry. Several of the guys in the group laugh at me now because I told them initially that I just wanted to "glance" off Tulsa and into Abilene, but these people have become very important to me. I'm excited to get into things at in Abilene, but leaving here is going to be much harder than I originally thought. Praise God for putting me in the right place to heal after having the spritual wind knocked out of me.

Since you last joined me on this blog, I took another road adventure to the west Texas town of Abilene. What this did was complete my immersion into the last of four different worlds, all within one week. Starting with my Tuscaloosa trip, I spent four days in Alabama, four days in Tulsa, one day in Norman, and three days in Abilene. Intense experiences in past, present, and future worlds all within an eight day span -- this is quite a mental exercise. (It also included a night in Memphis, but that is just a quasi-world for me.) Each past world carries with it a powerful set of memories, enough that if I forgot the others, I would have enough memories for a lifetime. And that is just three former worlds! I'm just 24 years old! What makes me laugh about that is that God is already plugging me into Abilene life in a big way - and I don't even live there yet! At least I went into Norman and Tuscaloosa not knowing anyone (and came back to Tulsa that way). If this is any indication, God has some major adventures brewing ahead.

Now, on a more melancholy note, I can already tell that I am going to have to go through culture shock when I move to Abilene. But, unlike having to adjust to a totally different societal culture where everything I know and do is debased, this will be a much more subtle kind, and in some ways more insidious to me. I am now going to have to deal with the Christian school mindset, which I have found through the years to be, in many ways, a total affront to the whole idea of the Christian mission. I don't want this to turn into an essay about Christian schools -- maybe I'll write that later -- but I know that I am going to have to face many challenges. This mainly comes through the fact that I am going to be, in one way or another, working closely with the campus ministry of the Southern Hills church, which has about 400 college students on the rolls. Woah, you say. That's a lot - especially for all you state schoolers who know real life campus ministry. But how many are committed, active participants in the ministry? About 40. That's about the same core group as your grass-roots, independent, self-led state school campus ministry, you say? How is that the case at a Christian college with thousands of professed Christians and a weekly college-level attendance at church of hundreds at just one of the churches?? What I am discovering in a big way is that Christian community is a much different animal at Christian school than at state school. What I considered to by my life-blood, sink or swim, all-consuming, do or die Christian family at state school is something that barely gets a glance by most Chrisitan school students. So many go in as good Christians, leave as good Christians, but never know the powerful, tight, life changing, accountability-inspiring, passion inducing nature of real, purposeful Christian community. So, even though I don't have the answers to this, I have already been asked to bring in a measure of the state school campus ministry view of community. I'm praying hard about how we can all work together to bring more of this to a great place like ACU. Once again, I'm going to need a lot more from God that I've been asking of him.