Decisiveness

Just to let you know where I reckon the Holy Spirit and I are up to with this whole Kolontar thing. The bare bones of it are:

I've booked a flight out to Budapest for this coming half-term. And I much prefer Wizzair's cool purple planes to those tangerine Easyjet things. As for helping me overcome my plane iffyness, I'll mostly be standing on all those biblical truths about not fearing stuff.

I'm still trying to make contact with some English-speaking Christians on the ground (well, those in Budapest who've been out to Kolontar since it happened), so do pray for the right things to fall into place beforehand if they need to, but I'm also not trying to over-engineer this thing. I know I want that deliberate space for God to move and provide and be at work, and for my reliance on Him alone, so I don't want an itinerary all stitched up in advance. If all I do is go there and pray for three days, maybe I'll discover that's what He wants of me and I'll be obedient to that.

It's like I heard Bill Johnson say a few weeks back, some things from God are deposited in a moment that take months to unravel. And that's how it feels to me. It still seems on the face of it a daft and irrational thing to do, but I'm choosing to listen to and see by Faith and thereby access all of my Father's resources, all the invisible, supernatural, eternal, above-and-beyond, Kingdom stuff. It's like Jesus putting mud in the eye of the blind - nuts on the face of it, but since it was what He heard and saw His Father do...

Five random things about me and Hungary

1. I was watching this amazing Stomp! DVD that I got from my sister for Christmas. We've all been getting into it in a big way, and plenty of household objects and paintwork now have dents in them because of our non-stop percussion around the place. We watch little sections here and there, and tonight, before bedtime, I noticed that part of the scenery was a battered old road sign that said: BUDAPEST.

2. The last time I was in Hungary was in the Summer of 1990. It was a University-holidays-Inter-railing four week thing. I guess Rachel Canning didn't really know what she was letting herself in for, but those were my dark, intense and melodramatic collegiate days and there were galleries to see and culture to be had. [Just for the record, my many years of watching the Gary Shandling Show had trained me in how to be a platonic friend and travelling partner, and besides, Rachel already had a boyfriend, so rest assured, there was no hanky-panky.] Anyway, our last stop, our furthest point east, was Lake Balaton. I think we rented a cottage in Balatonfured for two nights, and it was all rocking-seats-in-the-garden and reading EM Forster and Aldous Huxley (me) and Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac (Rachel) and the sun setting on the Lake and the thoughts of thousands of Ukrainian copper miners holidaying there for a week. And then we got the train back, from Balatonfured to Reading, and it took over a day to retrace our steps through Europe, and I slept the longest, deepest sleep I can remember (and still crave), the kind of sleep Frodo gets when he's recovering from his injuries in the golden rays of Rivendell or something.

3. World Cup 1982. I'm 11, and collecting the Panini stickers. And it strikes me that lots of their players are called Laszlo. Fast forward to visiting in 1990, and it still strikes me that there are a whole lot of Laszlos around.

4. 1990 again. And I think to myself "Budapest already has an IKEA with a blue ball pool for kids? Boy, perestroika's happening before my very (juvenile) eyes."

5. I managed to play in the Cambridge vs Oxford Varsity American Football Game in 1990. But don't get over-excited, it was just flag football, no helmets or concussions, and I only played the last two minutes. One of the team captains was Andre Czegledy-Nagy, and I remember naively asking for his address in Budapest in case I could stay there during the summer (I really was reading a lot of books and watching a lot of world cinema at the time, I thought of myself as a bit of a Huck Finn in a road movie). Actually, I asked lots of them for their addresses at the after-match meal at some Garfunkels place in Oxford, passing round my American Architects Association address book to these Ivy League post-grad wide receivers. Honestly, I used to get so star-struck with real life Americans, they must have been thinking why is this nineteen year old twerp asking for my home address? But weirdly enough, it's that out-on-a-limb, anything-is-possible, pick-up-a-train-timetable-and-go attitude that I miss, and therefore there's an element of trying to recapture a flicker of it this time around.

[Ok, actually 6 random things.]

6. There was this Chemistry teacher called Mr Imre Nagy at Loughborough Grammar School, and although he never taught me, he did run the astronomy club in the lunchtimes, and he leant me some videos of the Voyager missions and I used to show them to my sister and it used to blow our minds. Actually, he also asked some deep philosophical questions too, like do we change the things we're observing by observing them, and if the universe has an end then what's stopping it, which was pretty heavy for a lunch hour unwind with NASA).

latest thoughts

I didn't feel the timing was right to fly out to Hungary this Christmas, so February half term seems more likely now.

I had a good chat with a guy who has the same heart for doing something for the victims of trauma in Eastern Europe, (the first of many I hope), someone who's walked the walk for years and who I feel has a lot of wisdom about this, so that all goes into the pot too. And I'm waiting to hear back from people who sent teams in the immediate aftermath, along with the odd Hungarian photojournalist.

I read an article that said that the 1 year old girl and the three year old boy who died were from the same family.