some spare time

today i have a bit of spare time on my hands, actually pretty much everyday i have spare time on my hands. david starts his exams next week, and in spain the exams determine everything with your schooling, so he has been studying 10 hours everyday...pretty intense. somedays i go and meet him at the school and do some reading or writing in the library while he and lidia are studying.

this weekend i went to the real madrid game, and whoa! it was an incredible game. real madrid are to european soccer like the yankees are to american baseball. except, that the former encompases 20+ countries across europe, and the latter is more like 1 country, maybe two. and the former is a sport that is essentially a way of life in europe, while the latter competes in popularity with the nfl and the nba. what im saying is that real madrid is kinda a big deal, people (outside of the usa) know about them, so to get to go to a game may be a once in a lifetime opportunity. and i was lucky enough for the game to be a great one. the stadium holds some 85,000 fans, and it was pretty much a packed house as they took on the number 3 team in league. the streets were completely full of people as we walked to the stadium blocking traffic hundreds of meters away from the stadium. it really was a good time, and the best part was that it was free because david's dad, emilio has season tickets.

monday i pretty much walked the entire day, all the way across town. i really enjoyed the walk and it gives a good perspective for the city. my intention was to walk to the prado (one of the most famous art collections in the world) but when i got there i found out that it isn't open on mondays; on the bright side, i also found out that you can go for free any other night from 6-8.

tuesday was the best day i've had since being here. david's mom, rema, invited me over for comida. in spain the main meal of the day is at 2 or 3pm... there isn't a name for it except comida (spanish for "food"). if someone asks you: quieres comer (literally translated: "do you want to eat") they are actually asking you if you want to have lunch together and spend an hour or more eating, chatting, drinking wine, and so on. beings that i really don't have anything better to do during the day i obliged. there are some girls about my age from argentina that have been staying at rema's house. they have been living here since late december, working in madrid, and they have some plans to travel next month around europe. anyway after comida one of the girls, jasmin, had to go to work, but the other, flor (pronounced: floor) said she had the day off, so she was going to meet a friend down town and asked if i wanted to go. flor was incredibly interested that i studied the Bible and theology in college. she had never heard of such a thing except for someone who wants to become a priest or something. for some reason i felt really comfortable around her. you know how when you first meet someone there is always that period of testing the waters. you think of the polite things to say, and make an effort not to offend them by what you believe. you ask all the right questions about where they are from, and what they do for a job, and blah, and blah, and... so it was as though we just skipped over all of that; like we had been friends for a while, but we had never talked about deep issues, so today those issues came up, they came up over and over. i know this kind of thing has happened to me before with a few people, but it always such a pleasant surprise each time it does.

i couldn't possibly recall all of our conversations, but the gist of the conversations was her trying understand what i believe. one of the first things we talked about was how i can truly feel the love of God. she said she had never felt that before, that she was a christian, and she says the catholic prayers, but she had never really, truly, tangibly felt that love. i said that if i had never felt that love, i probably wouldn't believe in Jesus at all. we talked about catholics and protestants, about the Bible, about God, Jesus, love, dreams, philosophy, humility. i told her how i am entirely reliant upon Jesus, she didn't like that idea. she preferred to think that we need to do good things to attain to heaven (pretty catholic), that God is love, and by doing good things, acts of love, we can get peace, and be at one with our spirits and with God. i just told her that i know for certain that i can do no good thing without Him... i'm dependent, im humbled before Him.

we met her friend and walked down the road a bit to a place to have some coffee and donuts while we talked. afterward we headed to the prado (that is the art museum i mentioned earlier). we wandered around the massive museum for a while and ended up in a hallway with paintings of biblical scenes. we took a seat in front of a painting by jose de ribera of isaac blessing jacob. the girls asked what was going on in the picture. so i told them the story of jacob buying the blessing from esau for a bowl of stew, and how in the picture jacob tricked his father into giving him the blessing by putting the goat hide on his arm. flor asked me what happened to jacob? and i told her that he was the father of the 12 tribes, that he received the whole blessing and inheritance from isaac, and from God. she was shocked because in her mind jacob should have been punished for being deceitful and tricking his brother. everytime i told a story she would ask what the lesson is from that story. i told not every story has to have a lesson, but she insisted that if the story is in the bible then it must have a lesson. so i said the lesson is that we shouldn't consider the immediate as of more importance than future (i stole that from the book of hebrews). that esau was foolish to sell his blessing only to fill his stomach for one meal. as i thought about it more the next day the lesson is even more clear. jacob understood the importance of the blessing, it was the inheritance, and it was a great inheritance because it involved more than just land and sheep and cattle. it was the inheritance of the promise of the Lord made to his grandfather abraham. it was everything. and i think jacob understood this, and he traded, deceived, and even physically wrestled for that blessing. i want to understand my inheritance better, i want to desire the blessing like the man called israel desired it.

later, after going back to rema's house, flor said she had never known anyone her age with such strong beliefs. i said there weren't many things that i believed really strongly in. so she rephrased it to say she hadn't known someone who religion was so important, and i told her that religion wasn't important to me at all... that Jesus was important to me, above all things...most important. she thinks Jesus founded the religion, i said man founded it in order to try and understand Jesus, in order to try and capture Jesus and know how to encounter Him within their own mold. we sat down in the living room. she asked what i thought of her god, her god is love and all that is love is god, and god is all that is love. i said he sounded appealing, but i wasn't interested. that i think God certainly is love, but not just love. i told her about jericho, and how God told the israelites to destroy everything in the city: man, woman, child, animal, gold... everything. she was disgusted. she said that she didn't think she believed in my God if that really happened, because her god is only love. i wasn't really surprised that she didn't take to it. i asked if she had ever read revelations, because that would probably give her a shock about the picture she has of Jesus. Jesus certainly was love. but to only say that, is to deny that He is also fully truth, fully just, fully righteous, and fully powerful. in fact the utmost of any quality must be found in God or it cannot be real. that's heavy for me to understand.

we were blunt, we were honest, and i really enjoyed feeling okay to be that way with her. in the end she said that she didn't think she was christian after all. she said that maybe she would start her own religion. with a grin and a chuckle i wished her best of luck.