Icy beauty
For a high resolution picture click here.
A short impression from our way back from Rochester MN to Saint Louis is shown below. We decided to stay for one extra day in Rochester, due to the very bad weather conditions forcasted for Sunday. But even on Monday the roads were still pretty bad, with lots of blowing and drifting snow, all packed into a thick sheet of ice on the surface of the roads. The area that was hit most hard was the central part of Iowa, around Cedar Rapids and Iowa city, and the roads were very bad here as you can see on the photo’s.
After Iowa city the conditions improved pretty fast, and so we could continue the rest of our trip without any problem.
In the midst of all the forces of nature, there was however also a lot of beauty!
For a bigger picture, click on the photo’s.
leaving Rochester MN, a beautiful sundog (or parhelium) appears…
… and becomes very bright!
Just south of Rochester on highway 63, the conditions are still OK, with a strong wind from the west, lots of snow is drifting over the road…
… but the further south we get, the more snow and the more icy the road gets.
A very icy countryside
The amounts of blowing snow increases as we get further south into Iowa, the road is sometimes barely visible
Conditions get worse and worse… visibility becomes sometimes very bad and whatever they try to clear the roads, it doesn’t really help…
A very icy road, close to Waterloo, Iowa
Blue skies and a beautiful countryside along Interstate 380 in Iowa
A lonely tree
A very ice but beautiful countryside along I-380
Suddenly the conditions get worse again, just south of Cedar Rapids
Messy
More messy
This is supposed to be I-380, a four lane interstate…
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Blizzard
I’ve had two fabulous days at the l’Abri conference in Rochester! Great conversations, very good spreakers and met a lot of nice people. I stayed during those days with a family from the church in Rochester, who invited me to stay with them when they heard about my physics background. He works in the Mayo clinic, one of the best clinics in the country (and possibly the world), and we had a lot of good conversations as you can imagine. Unfortunately though, we’re still in Rochester, since traffic in the eastern part of Iowa is completely shut down due to an intense snowstorm earlier today. In order not to put our own lives in danger (and that of other people) we decided to delay our drive home one day, and I think that’s a pretty wise decision. Hopefully the roads are not too bad anymore tomorrow, as they were today. Anyway, I had to cancel my work, but in exchange got to know one of my professors much better and we had together dinner with a large group of college students from Columbia, MO, which was a lot of fun!
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Common grace
I’m out of town for a couple of days to attend the annual l’Abri conference in Rochester, MN. The theme this year is Common Grace, “God’s goods gifts in all of life”, and it seems to be a very interesting conference. A couple of my professors are speaking and they also brought in some other gifted speakers from all over the world. I promised before already to say something more about l’Abri, and I am going to postpone that to another blog soon, but I can say that I feel very much at home in an environment where there are no easy answers to hard questions about Christianity, or as they say on there website: “where individuals (christians and non-christians) have the opportunity to seek answers to honest questions about God and the significance of human life.” I hope I’ll have the opportunity those days to blog a little bit more about this, but for now I need to go to bed… the travel was long and exhausting.
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Over lezen enzo… II
New York City, 1998
My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“Did you witness some of the fighting?”
“Everyone in the country did.”
“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”
Zo begint “A long way gone” van Ismael Beah…
“Cool…” het blijft als een echo hangen in mijn hoofd… “You should tell us sometime”… ja, misschien, maar liever niet…
Vandaag in het nieuws… onder de rebellen in Tsjaad veel kindsoldaten… nooit greep het me aan, nu wel… kinderen van 10, 12 jaar met een geweer om de nek, klaar om elkaar af te slachten…, nooit meer zullen ze kind zijn…
Gisteren vertelde iemand op het seminarie over verwaarloosde en verstoten kinderen in Saint Louis… nooit greep het me aan, nu wel… hij rende naar een vaas met rozen… greep ze en sloeg een paar keer tegen het katheder… kapot, nooit meer zullen ze roos zijn… ik kon wel janken, zulke mooie bloemen sla je toch niet kapot, de schoonheid ervan in één klap weg…
… maar wie strekt z’n armen uit naar de kindsoldaten in Tsjaad, Sierra Leone en al die andere landen, wereldwijd 250.000 in totaal… wie jankt om hun, de schoonheid van een kind, in één klap weg…
… oorlog is nooit cool… ik schaam me voor mijn vroegere naieviteit, de tijd van “oorlogje spelen, zonder gevaar, niks kan ons gebeuren…” zoals een nederlandse zanger het eens bezong, of de eerste golfoorlog die ik op de voet volgde, de computerspelletjes die ik speelde…
… in het land waar ik nu woon worden soldaten binnengehaald als heroische helden die hun vaderland verdedigen tegen gewetenloze terroristen… luister naar de verkiezingsretoriek van de kandidaten op Super Tuesday: oorlog is cool en soms lijkt het alsof levens niet tellen… maar oorlog is nooit cool…
“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little…
“ik denk erover om pacifist te worden” zei ik zondagochtend na de kerkdienst tegen vrienden van mij… ik bedoelde het als een grapje, maar er zat zeker een serieuze ondertoon in… Zei Jezus niet zoiets als: “Gelukkig de vredestichters, want zij zullen kinderen van God genoemd worden” … Maar hoeveel mensen hebben dat écht begrepen?!
