Archive for January, 2010

Malta is great… meeting great people like David Jones of www.stewardship.org.uk.  Felix and Miriam are supreme hosts.

Well, I have a radio interview in 20 minutes at http://www.faithfm.org/listen.shtml and Darlene is 7 time zones away with http://www.raisetheroofforhaiti.webs.com

Tonight’s gonna be a good night; and we’re just getting started!

Here’s Luke and Nate in January ‘08, surfing the waves of Gozo Island, part of Malta. The look on their faces captures our three weeks there; huge adventures.

Well, today I fly to Malta. I start the day in business meetings with Terry Woodthorpe, looking to raise funds with a group of investors. Then I fly into the London, Gatwick to meet up with Joe and Nancy who will  treat me to lunch and drive me to Luton. From there I fly to Malta, to be met at the airport by Miriam, Enya, and Leon – as Felix is in some meetings until the evening.

Dar just drew this Google Earth line between Canmore, Alberta and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Tomorrow, at our kids school assembly, Dar is sharing a power point presentation about Haiti, set to the music of a beautiful song called Lift Your Voice by our friend Crystal (on iTunes)

Compassion and World Vision take note; this song deserves a Dove Award!

The lyrics as I hear them:

The road’s been long, more than anyone should bear; you’ve soldiered on, to fight injustice and despair; and though the pain was overwhelming, you found a way to stand again

Yesterday afternoon at the office, Terry and I rediscovered this picture as we were in between handing each other phone conversations, rewriting legal contracts with potential team members, and prepping for investor presentations for two parties highly interested in the current needs and future direction of our company.

This picture is all about documentation; someone in our company is snapping a picture of me while I’m snapping a picture inside a generator building; contingency and redundancy.

I am sitting by the fireplace. Over the past two days, friends and I have been in the back country cutting, stacking, hauling, and carving tall trees down into firewood.

As the chainsaw thundered trees to earth, I imagined workers cutting through cement and steel searching for survivors. As I hoisted eight foot logs onto my shoulders, I imagined carrying the living and the dead.

Jesus is on the island of Haiti. His hands are burying the dead, caring for the sick and wounded, holding the children, distributing water and provisions, clearing the rubble, and restoring every broken wall and devastated thing.

In Sept. ‘07, before purchasing natural gas wells, a water disposal well, and various facilities, Terry Woodthorpe knew his team needed to get on the ground and check things out. From the sky, then on the ground, I snapped hundreds of pictures, every serial number and vessel, no detail missed.

In this picture, Terry is standing in the orange coveralls (during a helicopter safety briefing) moments before we flew deep into the marshes of the Chinchauga River (I’ve crossed that river numerous times with him in a small boat, trekking the pipelined miles between wells, heavy equipment slung over our shoulders).

When Terry Woodthorpe and I launched an oil and gas company together (stories found in the second half of Clairvaux Manifesto), I drove past the Springbank airfield every work-day morning praying about when we’d board a plane there. Eventually, as you can see, we did it!

After two years of building the company together, Terry and the company worked tirelessly through some issues, while I worked tirelessly crafting this book for readers like Michael Warden the sojourner, who blogged earlier today,

On New Year’s Eve, a business friend sent me this image of the USS J.F.K aircraft carrier docking on the island of Malta (while I was writing him an email about, among other things, Malta).

Just now, as I was sitting down to blog this post I thought to myself, “Wait a second here, doesn’t the 2012 movie trailer show the USS J.F.K. riding a catastrophic tsunami wave into the White House!?”

These metaphorical coincidences are part of the reason I wrote this paragraph on page 208 of Clairvaux Manifesto,