Three years ago I took a ten day trip into the Mongolian country side to take pictures for JCS. We visited project sites and talked to beneficiaries, stopped at famous landmarks and camped near lakes or spent the night with herders. We travelled a couple of thousand kilometres just to take pictures, to try and capture the beauty of the Mongolian people, culture and landscape.

This week as news bites slowly grow into an overwhelming story of human suffering in Burma, I have once again had to struggle with the desire to go where the need is the greatest, the opportunities that might be waiting in Burma in the aftermath of this cyclone could be the best opening for the Gospel for a long time. One million people homeless. That’s half of the population of Mongolia.

Refugees in Darfur sit in tents waiting, starving, sick, hopeless. According to some sources two and a half million people have been displaced in Sudan because of the civil war. That’s almost the whole population of Mongolia.

I took a picture of an old man who had set up his ger on top of a mountain somewhere in the middle of Bayankhongor province. We came upon his ger, old and dirty, by accident. Actually, because we were lost. He came up to the car after we greeted him and asked us into his ger. He offered me fresh curds that were drying in the sun on top of his ger, they were still soft, warm, tasting of sour milk. He kissed me on both cheeks and asked me to sit down for a cup of tea. It was hot out, stifling inside, the ger smelled of raw meat and warm dairy. Sizzling yoghurt stood sweating next to the door while buzzing flies seemed to be everywhere.

One man. Alone. Wrinkled and bent by time, weather and lifestyle.

We were lost and needed help, he showed us the way. He was lost and alone, hopefully we’ve showed him the Way.

One million people washed out of their homes. One man on top of a mountain. Two million people in refugee tents. One man in a ger. The needs of the many. The needs of the one.

The picture of this wizened Mongolian nomad has become something of a reminder for me. A reminder that the needs of the many always start with the needs of the one. No matter how many people are displaced or sit in refugee camps, each one of them is one. One man. One woman. One child. There are needs everywhere in the world. As food prices go up and the rich-poor divide becomes bigger, as earthquakes and floods destroy homes and fields, as people are turned out of their houses by the banks, needs are everywhere.

So how do I choose where to go, what to do and who to help?

I can think of only one answer, one word: obedience.

so it’s not a daily event, for sure, but the biggest problem about blogging is the amount of spam that is sent to my blog posts, unbelievable, and what do they offer, well I’ll let you guess,
i’m sick and tired of spam, someone out there needs to do something about spammers!

Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi is an incredible read, thanks off course to Mr. Perry for giving us a great translation into English, if only my Japaneses was good enough to read it in the original.

If you’ve read anything about Myamoto Musashi on the web you’ll know how the story ends, but Eiji does a great job weaving fact and fiction into a wonderful story of determination, hard work and the good guy winning over the bad guy and getting the girl. There are some great quotes in the book and i should have had the book with me to write them down here, but by tomorrow I should be able to write at least one down…
I won’t give away too many details because this is really a great book to read for yourself, and this is one book that will be added to my ‘will read it again’ list together with Lord of the Ring and Brothers Karamazov among others. The book does have a lot of names in it and some of them are more important to the story than others, Mr Yoshikawa tries hard to put some Japanese History in the book and in doing so has to throw around a lot of names of earlier Shoguns and Samurai and why some Samurai are ronin etc etc, some of that will get clearer on a second or maybe third read (i hope).

It took me a while to finish the book but not because it was hard to get through, I think that given the time this would be an easy 1000 pages, just had too many distractions in the last couple of months

reading about Musashi’s devotion to the Way of the Samurai, his temptations, his resolve, his struggles, his humanity, his determination, there are many lessons here for sure…you’ll have to read it yourself to see how this book may impact you

if i must criticize, and naturally i must, one thing that bothered me a little about the end of the story was that almost all the main characters end up on good terms, end up bettering their lives, the happy ending was maybe a little too happy for me, but that probably reflects more of who I am than anything else…

if you see Yoshikawa’s Musashi lying around somewhere, pick it up, read it, let me know what you thought, it’s one I highly recommend spending time on!

For those who’re a bit like me and start googling to see what I’m talking about, any search on Google for Musashi will give you plenty websites to browse, but maybe hard to choose from, for an introduction go to this Wikipedia page and start your journey on the Way of the Samurai!

My last post was March 21st, now we’re looking the mid of June coming up and if anyone is out there looking at these posts you’re probably wondering what happened.

There was a two week trip to take pictures the beginning of April, came back with about 2000 pictures to sift, edit and work on, so that’s been taking some time, they will be added to the different galleries once I’m happy to show them to you. Here’s one picture of me taken by my friend who drove all the long kilometers (about 2800) on this last trip.

Once back from the trip I’ve been trying to catch up with work, homeschooling and all the other little bits of activity that i try to squeeze into my existence, not been reading very much for a while, but now that I’ve started Musashi, I won’t be able to stop until I’ve finished it. Will let you know more on that one as I go through.

JCS site is up and running, check it out at the JCS Home page.

I will try to blog more, but that’s not a promise

six days to cook
one day to taste
six days to taste
one day to eat
six days to eat
one day to digest
six days to digest
one day to expel
six days to expel
one day to take in
six days to take in
one day to take out
six days to take out
one day to cook

I figured the other day that people reading the blog (except those that know me) will probably have not picked up that I’m a Graphic Designer and Photographer, since all I seem to be talking about here is books and sometimes something else, the book pages do seem to be a somewhat large part of my site, but that’s off course mainly because I’m just beginning to put things up.

I finished ‘Simply Christian’ last night and wrote something of a review here…
The JCS website is, as I had hoped, almost ready for uploading so check back here to find the newest on that as it develops.

I hadn’t mentioned this before, but studio classroom has used one of my pictures (lady riding a camel) for the front cover of their magazine, the March issue, you can see it here…

Go look at some of my pictures, there might be something there to lift your spirit. JM.

On a dial-up connection no less, thought I’d just check a few things from home and then, well one thing leads to another, the last few days I have been reading N.T.Wright’s ‘Simply Christian’, I’m very impressed with it so far, I’m almost done and I already feel like I should highly recommend it to everyone, so far the funniest quote, certainly not the best or deepest, mus be:

Helen of Troy may have had a face that, in her day, launched a thousand ships, but most of us now wouldn’t rate her as worth a single rowboat

well, a book is worth it’s weight in gold for a quote like that, best thing being off course that there’s much more and much better stuff in the book, I’ll try to put my thoughts into words a bit better once I’ve finished reading the whole book (on page 164/240). An yes this means, Thomas Cahill has had to wait, but I promise it will be ‘Mystery of the Middle Ages’ after I’m done with Mr. Wright!

never make promises on a blog

I said I would give some thoughts on the verses I posted a week ago, then got busy with the JCS website (almost done) and off course we had Thursday and Friday off, so didn’t come in for four days and now, yesterday and today been trouble shooting more IT/Network related stuff in the offices, so I’m blogging to say, be patient

I did get to write more content up for the JM’s Books section, uploading as we speak!

EduRelief will be using my pictures for a Presentation they’re going to use in their Spring Campaign, check out their website and updates, they’re all into a worthy cause.

Hopefully, the rest of the site will come together soon as well. JM

Found this Web site for links to missions and missionaries who are blogging or connecting through the web, interesting place to browse around, have a look at these pages, maybe submit your own blog (if you’re into missions that is) and read on

on a different note, received Thomas Cahill’s latest Mysteries of the Middle Ages today, so this coming long weekend I will hope to read through and later report on it! JM

I wrote this blog entry several years ago on a blog that almost no one has visited, I was reading it again the other day and thought it still has something, something different, so here I’m reposting and oldy, hope you enjoy it.

the sun is shining in Ulaanbaatar, the sky is its eternal blue,
the temperatures have dropped once again, wind is chilly,
but it has rained and water does wonders to the dry ground,
after the grey winter the green seems to bring so much beauty
to a dull landscape of ugly communist architecture,
the ultimate in functionality,
aesthetically abysmal,

spaces we inhabit for the sake of protection from heat, cold, dust and water,
spaces we decorate and renovate,
spaces we customize and change, invite others into, share thoughts,
spaces that are havens, harbors, habitats, homes,
far from family,
far from friends,
far from perfect,
those concrete slabs,
the crying hinges,
the rusted locks,
creaking floors and peeling paint,

crawl space, private room, buffer zone,
love shack, gym, hospital, spa, restroom,
rest room, cafeteria, bar, cinema, concert hall,
functional space, the wallpaper stays the same, the doors don’t move,
the functions transition into each other, fading like movie frames,
blurring at the edges of actions, feathery from form to form,
morphing movement into movement, unedited, uncensored, unrehearsed,

we fill the spaces with our experiences,
leaving the rooms dripping with memories,
loaded, like the familiar smells of childhood,
aromas that float into our lives at the whim of the wind,
transporting our thoughts back to those walls with the camel in the grain,
the eye in the crumbling cement,
the grape clusters in the stains from the leaking roof,
the face in the torn paper,
the fear,
the familiarity,

the spaces we move from,
to,
in,
out