Tom's Northwest Passages

A few years ago the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities held a conference on Whidbey Island, Washington for its campus ministers. Part of the discussion centered around what kind of relationship the campus pastors would, ideally, like to have with the faculty and what they hoped for in their relationship with faculty. They developed the following wish-list. Campus Ministers’ Twenty Wishes for Faculty: That faculty would fully realize how much they influence students. That someone would help prepare faculty for their spiritual formation role on campus. That faculty would not see spiritual formation as the responsibility of campus ministry alone. That faculty would have more confidence in their spiritual formation role with students. That faculty would recognize their pastoral role and be more open to being coached in it. That faculty had more time for mentoring students. That faculty would seek to reach students at more than just an intellectual level. That facu...

May 12-13 (Sunday-Monday). All travel. Michele and I picked up Dick and Arnelle Hall (friends from our church) and drove to their friends’ house on 200th St. in Des Moines, WA, near the airport. They are keeping our car for the two weeks. Alki’s (that’s the tour company) van picked us up there at 3:40 pm. We met Sandy and Gail who were also going on the tour. Turns out Sandy grew up in Detroit and is a Tiger fan. We arrived at SeaTac and met the rest of our group of 30, led by Tyson Verse. We had gone to Vietnam with him in November of 2011. We were about 30 minutes late leaving Seattle on KLM, about 7:00pm. It was a 9+ hour flight to Amsterdam. I got a little sleep, not much. There was a long 7-hour layover in Amsterdam. We decided not to go in for the day as some of the group did. We toured the airport, ate lunch, and slept in lounge chairs. The next flight was 3.5 hours to Istanbul. We got in after midnight and got to bed at 2:30 am local time on May 14th at the Avant Garde Hotel. (...