Jamie Fehr

I wasn’t really waiting for 2008 because I knew that when it came I would feel guilty about how little I accomplished in the last year (I’ve only really worked four non-consecutive weeks since last April) and yet, now that it’s here I really do feel proud of all that’s happened.

I journeyed to the depths of the Grande Canyon, explored the intricate side-streets of Prague, ate fresh coconut with chili powder in Mexico, and fell in love with the city of Paris. A lot of people ask me how it works to have a job for less than half the year and to adventure the rest, but in all honesty I don’t really now how things have managed to work out for me. It starts with never having savings and being very scrupulous about one’s spending (which for me usually meant not eating) but as to draw out an actual plan that others could follow, no such thing could ever exist.

Most importantly however, I have been working on returning to the Malaga Media Center as long term staff. A decision I formally made on September 30th, and is nearly come to fruition which is the main reason why I write.

It has been a long three months of making preparations and this time, I plan on going with all the necessary papers in hand to be permitted to reside in the foreign country of Spain. So last Saturday I was genuinely elated to that I finally received the last and most important piece of the visa application, my letter of invitation. Which means that tomorrow I can send out my application and within 1-3 months it will be processed and I will either be permitted or denied entry.

Currently it would appear as though a Mid-February departure is about the earliest that I could be gone.

Also I would just like to extend a big thank-you to all those who are supporting me financially, I currently have 92% of the $2,578/month that I need to be out there and the last 8% I really don’t think will be a problem.

I just wanted to say that my home town, La Crete, just got it’s very first set of traffic lights this week. I anticipate that there are a lot of people who won’t know what to do and that they may cause more accidents than they’ll prevent.

Fortnight noun

A period of two weeks.

• informal used after the name of a day to indicate that something will take place two weeks after that day.

I first learned this word in high school english when we were studying a Shakespeare and while we don’t use this word that often here in North America, the english will nearly always use it when referring to a period of two weeks.

I remember watching the matrix and thinking, WOW, what IF you could just download kung-fu fighting or piloting into your brain? Well you can.

With the ubiquitous availability of a google search and the wealth of knowledge found therein it’s possible to learn whatever suits your fancy in a heart beat. I find that many times when I talk on the phone I do a quick search on the subject at hand with my laptop so I can be better informed as to what’s going on.
Wired.com did a story called Your Outboard Brain That sums up my thoughts perfectly. My dad can’t remember my phone number or even his own birthday without consulting his PALM Treo.

So, will learning become obsolete? Are schools going to have classes on how to effectively search the internet? Mobile devices are starting to function as a second brain for many people and a major shift in how we remember things is inevitable.

I just hope that when this is all said and done we still have soul.

I am not shy about the fact that I have been pulled over by the boys in blue countless times and I won’t deny that I have received more than my fair share of written and verbal warnings. I usually toss out the number 14 when I talk about it and I want you to know that 14 is an entirely arbitrary number that sounds about right. In comparison, however, to date I have received only three tickets for traffic violations since I’ve had a license.

1. Speeding
2. Failure to Stop
3. Not wearing my seat belt

I really have deserved to have a lot more for things like speeding, towing a trailer that didn’t have lights, speeding, and speeding yet somehow I can’t seem to be punished. I don’t know what to attribute this phenomenon to, my brother, who has similar driving habits seems to be a ticket magnet, maybe there’s some sort of conspiracy going on.

Anyway, the highway was empty and I was in the zone, I was doing 14km/h (so I was later told) over the posted limit when all of a sudden I saw a police cruiser on my tail. “No lights” I observed to myself and I decided that I should carry on normally. “He already has all the right he needs to pull me over” I thought.

The cruiser slowly but surely starts to overtake me, but still no lights. I am eventually forced to slow down as the result of being boxed in by a mini-van and the cruiser but eventually me and the cruiser work our way around, he continues edging ahead of me in the fast lane and I maintain my speed in the slow lane.

I am getting a deserved ticket I thought to myself. The cruiser had begun to slow in the fast lane and I begin to overtake him. He’s most definitely going to pull me over when I pass him I reasoned yet I felt it would be hypocritical of me to slow down now. I deserve a speeding ticket and I have for a long time I muttered under my breath, I pushed forward.

Sure enough, the red and blue lights started flashing in my rear-view as soon as I could see the cruiser in them. I pull onto the shoulder and slow to a stop. A lone cop gets out of the cruiser and walks towards me. I pass him my license and registration.

He tells me that the 10k/h over speed that he was doing in the fast lane should be plenty, I tell him I don’t want to be a hypocrite. He asks me probing questions about my business on the road. I answer with as little detail as possible.

He then passes me back my papers and says that everything checks out. I am a little stunned. He tells me not to be so cheeky next time and gets back in his cruiser. I am speechless.

I got back into my car and proceeded to speed the whole way to my destination.

A rundown of whats happened and what’s happening

• I shared in my Church two Sundays ago on October 28th. It wasn’t flashy, I just talked, but it was well recieved and I am know more than half way through raising the support that I need to return to Spain. I do, however, anticipate that the second half won’t go as quick as the first,

• I moved out of my parents house and in with an old friend, Rodney Teichroeb. I never thought I would pay to live somewhere in my hometown when my parents have always offered accommodations for free but the time came to break loose and be my own man, even in my hometown.

• I am going to Calgary on Friday and to Edmonton the following Monday where I intend to stay until the weekend.

• I have started to sell a lot of unnecessary possesions as preparation for my imminent departure and there is a lot that I have yet to get rid of. If you see me with somthing you like just make me an offer.

Deputation noun

1. the act of appointing a person or persons to represent or act for another or others.
2. the person or body of persons so appointed or authorized.

In missions circles this word is also used to define the period of time after your appointment to service by a sending organization in which the necessary funds are raised for one to begin their objective and while this is the stage in which I find myself, this defintion really makes no sense to me and for that reason I prefer to use the term support raising, or the more vague term development.

I have been re-appointed by Avant Ministries to the Malaga Media Center and while I cannot say exactly when I will be back working in Europe, I am going to do everything in my power to make it happen in January. That said, I’ve only been at it for a week and I already have over half the support that I will be needing. With patience and perservervance the depuation process will go quite quickly.

Sometimes, usually at night, I catch myself pondering how I’ve traversed the great physical, emotional and spiritual distance between now and the last time I was awestruck by the beauty and uniqueness, or the incredible absurdness of the last situation that brought me to reflect on life.

Most of the time these brief moments of revelation occur as the result of taking the time to observe something both timeless and beautiful, like a meteor shower from a spectacular mountain vantage point, the milky way on the clearest of desert nights, or the sun as it dips below the horizon on a still sea. Yet even something so simple as the not-as-varied-as-you-might think customs of people groups from around the world beg me to question how big of a splash I can make in the ocean of eternity.

The grand scale of the beauty in creation is humbling to all who take the time to truly observe it and I consider myself privileged to have had as much opportunity to as I’ve had to enjoy the daily comfort of a sun rise and the beauty of the stars hanging in place in the crisp night sky.

I have a few things to report. The first is that while Avant has not yet officially re-appointed me to full missionary status, I have received permission to begin support raising. Which brings me to the biggest announcement that I have to make this morning: I am returning to Spain to work in more or less the same capacity as before.

I put the big news in the first paragraph not because I wanted to dwarf anything that I was doing but mostly because I just needed to get it out.

That being said, I am not leaving tomorrow, raising the money and acquiring required visa papers (Last time I went on an easily acquired tourist visa, residency papers are a lot harder to come by) could be a long and arduous process. So to put life back in reality:

1. I am currently employed in the construction of my dad’s new hangar facility, pouring cement, pounding stakes and general blue-collar fun.

2. In my free time, I am working on a new web page for our church

3. And when deemed appropriate by me, I blog and sort pictures.

In the future I will be sharing this news at my church during a Sunday morning service. I won’t say the date but it will be soon and it will be good and from that moment on, most all my effort will be put to realizing this goal.

Also worth noting, I want to do a trip to the big city of Edmonton soon (as in in November).

I did the jobs that I mentioned in my last update, I worked at the Spirit of the North Trade Show in High Level, representing my dad’s organization, Nor-Alta Aviation and I worked for exactly one week at Peace Farm Power as their shipper/receiver. At the end of both jobs I had been given opportunity for more work, both of which I turned downed. A wise decision? Time will tell.

I wish I could say that it’s been very busy since the last time that I wrote any sort of update but the truth is that I have mostly just been lazy. Lazy and distracted by a wonderful time wasting invention called television. I have been downloading episodes of Heroes and Top Gear from the internet and watching them in my more than abundant free
time.

Also with that free time I have been sorting some of the thousands of pictures that I took during my two months of travels that I had this summer and writing a day by day journal. As soon as the journal is ready I will post it and the pictures will be added to my online collection as I get to them.

These days there is only one thing that is keeping me ever so slightly busy and motivated and that is a new website for my home church. What they currently have at lacretefellowship.com is really outdated and hard to manage so I am in the process of creating a new design and implementing Wordpress to power the site. If all goes well it should be live by next weekend.

And the last topic to cover would be the future. It is still uncertain. I have been in talks with former employers, Avant Ministries but there is nothing official enough to put on my blog yet. Just know that I plan on living overseas again by January.

With all that being said I just want to add that I am writing this update in the not so recently released Google Doc’s For those of you who aren’t aware, Google is possibly trying to edge in on the Microsoft Office market with a suite of free, web-based, collaborative software. It’s pretty awesome. You should check it out.