From the Pueblo to the Ciudad Grande

Michelle, Eva, and Loida at a Bodega after the last camp was over. Good times. Oh, and thanks to Michelle for gicing me the pictures. My camera is recharging right now.
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So finally I made it out of Toral.  I know you all were probably tired of hearing about me in a summer camp for the 50th consecutive day.  Me too.  It was a difficult pleasure serving there.  I think in total I was at the camp 54 consecutive days, with 1 night sleeping outside of the camp.  Snaps.

From the camp I made it to Madrid by car.  Alex, a guy Michelle and I met at the camps, invited us to crash at his place a couple days.  He's a British born Spaniard who speaks English and Spanish flawlessly, is a sports guy, and also rocks out in a Christian Celtic rock group that's pretty good.  In case you're wondering, the northern part of Spain has a Celtic heritage, and all the stuff you associate with Scotish music(minus the kilt) happens there too.

Our first performance of the Classical music camp in the castle/fort of Toral, the Pueblo where the camp was.
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While we were there we managed to go to the Prado and the Thyssan, 2 of Madrid's 3 main museums with extensive picture collections.  The Prado was especially cool because it had a great Picasso exhibit going on.  Picasso was the head curator of the Prado for many years, so they placed his works alongside his inspiration for them.  Very interesting.  I still don't like Picasso's work, but I understand him a lot better.  You can see some of them in pictures that Michelle discretely took while the attendents weren't watching.

The famous Meninas by Velazquez. Picasso did 58 pieces based on this painting.
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The Thyssan has a great collection of paintings, and I particularly enjoyed the Dutch and American paintings in its collection.

We also got to wander around the city quite a bit.  It's a beuatiful city, even if it was colder, cloudy, and rained some of the time we were there.  We also saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (in Spanish), went out with some of Alex's friends, and generally had a pretty laid back time.  I like Madrid, but the pictures might show you more about it.  We flew out on the 18th at different times, and I'll pick back up on things when we get to Brussles.  Now something different.

One of Madrid's palaces next to a church.
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So here's me finally making it out alive.  What did I learn?  Well a couple things strike me as the important stuff.

(This section is dedicated to Ed Price who both always makes me laugh and always encourages me to live a better life.  Thanks Ed.)

1.  Take every opportunity to get what you need.  At the start of Toral, people asked me if I wanted to take a nap during the night games, or if I needed to sleep away from the camp for a night, and I would say no because I was alright then.  But after a couple camps, I realized that was really dumb.  So during the last 4 if anyone said "hey do you want to get some rest now?" I would always say yes, even if I wasn't too tired.  The same with the internet, eating, or using the bathroom.  Take every chance you get, especially when you're traveling, because you never know when you the next time will be that you can get it.

The other direction from the previous picture.
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2.  C.S. Lewis was right: my desires are not too strong, but too weak.  I am in some ways a coward.  No, this didn't come from me running away from people attacking me (or people around me) or me not wanting to try new food, or being afraid of using the bathroom in Madrid's metro system.  It's because I started reading this book, Abiding in Christ, that Michelle (my friend from back home who's my traveling buddy) gave me and it talks a lot about the things that God promises humans.  He says that we'll do greater things than Jesus did; that we'll love each other with the same love the Father has for the Son; that God himself listens to us, interceeds for us, acts on our behalf, and lives inside of us.  That we are Sons of God and His friend, and that he really does love us.  And what if it really is true?  That we're all on the edge of living an epic life, but crippled wills and dim eyes hold us back from seeing what we could be.  I am a coward, and C.S. Lewis was right in saying that in our age, our weakness is that we lack men of real courage.  I'll end with what G.K. Chesterton, another amazing author said on the subject.

Probably my favorite picture of Alex. This is us at a hookah bar. In case you're wondering, Hookah is an Arabic form of tobacco with fruit flavoring. It is much less potent than cigarettes or cigars, though it's sort of fun to smoke. I've only had it a couple times.
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"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide -- or a drill-book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry the Christian courage which is a disdain of death."

A view from where I ate lunch when I got to Spain. This is the Plaza De Toros where you can still see bullfighting.
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3.  Finally, I can't do much on my own.  I know this is something that many people have said, but I have to agree with them.  The second important thing that Abiding in Christ taught me was that God has already committed to providing all the His strength to give me the ability to do what he has promised.  He'll see it through.  I can't do it on my own strength, and if I try I'll just end up feeling worthless, stupid, and impotent.

Anyway, that's it.  Thanks for reading all of this, if anybody made it this far.  Here's to throwing yourself out there, full throttle, flying out into the unknown because you trust impossible promises of an epic God.  I hope during this trip I can learn that courage.

Another picture of Madrid.
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I'm having a great time over here, but I still miss you all.