Last week we took a quick trip to Lugo, a city just over an hour away. While exploring the Roman wall, the cathedral, and the old city, we stumbled upon the Evangelical Church! It is so encouraging to see another gospel witness in Spain.
There is a phrase some Spanish children hear all the time in school, “¿Estás en Babia?” It is our equivalent of, “Are you daydreaming?”
“To be in Babia” became an easy way to describe someone who was someplace else mentally. The phrase goes back to the kings and queens of Spain when they would leave their castles and political responsibilities and head for the mountains. They would disconnect in the silence of nature. Babia is a comarca (larger than our counties, but smaller than our states) in the northern mountains of Spain, about an hour and a half north of us.
We visited for a few days, wanting to escape and “estar en Babia.”
Last month we were able to visit Montserrat, in northern Spain. The sites were impressive…and so was the tram ride to the top!
Every year in April we take a trip up to one of our favorite picnic spots in the mountains. It is about a 35 minute drive from our home to this overlook.
Here are some photos of our valley in the fog and frost which move in during the winter.
See more photos here.
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. His “how much more” is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of nonresistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.
Chesterton, Orthodoxy
A few photos from our valley over the past week.
Any committed Christian is capable of initiating a good conversation on a biblical text. In reality, your fears in this area of personal work betray two Screwtape-like lies that every Christian must resist. First, that gospel growth depends on us and on our abilities. This is simply not the case. Our proficiency in the Bible is not the final arbiter in seeing spiritual growth occur. The Holy Spirit can and does use timid people just like us. The second lie we fight against is disbelief—disbelief in the potency of God’s word. We need to be reminded that God does his work in his way, and it is his word that accomplishes whatever he desires in the world.
Helm, David. One-to-One Bible Reading (Kindle Locations 176-181). Matthias Media. Kindle Edition.
More photos from this incredible area of Spain, about 4 hours from our home.
