Live Fire with Chuck Holton

Today’s Washington Post has an Editorial which discusses how many men are choosing to live with their parents much longer than they used to. The subhead says “Young Women These Days Are Driven — but Guys Lack Direction”.

I’m sorry, but if your son is still living with you at age 26, and there’s not a really compelling reason for him to do so, I’d say that’s an indication more of the parents lacking conviction than anything else.

Seriously, though, passivity is a problem with men in our country. Regardless of the cause, I like collecting solutions. My good friend Mike McFarland teaches his boys from the “Raising a Modern Day Night” playbook:

1. Reject Passivity
2. Accept Responsibility
3. Lead Courageously
4. Expect the Greater Reward

Another friend, Kevin Riggs, shared with me on our recent Adventure that he teaches his boys to be Tough, Flexible and Optimistic.

I also like the elements of manhood detailed by Douglas Wilson in his book, “Future Men.”

“Men are created to exercise dominion over the earth; they are fitted to be husbandmen, tilling the earth; they are equipped to be saviors, delivering from evil; they are expected to grow up into wisdom, becoming sages; and they are designed to reflect the image and glory of God.”

We live in a world which is full of wimps and pansies. Consider the two purse snatchings which happened at our local Walmart here in Beckley this week. What kind of cowards steal purses from old ladies? Unbelievable.

Let’s hope that the next time someone tries something like that on an elderly woman around here, they get a little of the treatment this guy witnessed when a man ran a red light and hit a carload of old women – then got belligerent about it.

On a totally unrelated note: I found a cool website today for folks who like to travel on the cheap – or prefer to really experience the culture wherever they go. Sign up at couchsurfing.com and see who shows up on your front door. Now there’s an adventure for which you don’t even have to leave home!

Last year, I uploaded about 10,000 photos to flickr. I try to remember to post a link here from time to time.

Click here to check out my latest pics from Panama, and a few others.

While in Panama, we had the priviledge of meeting Giovanni Greco, a world-renowned bodyboarder who got his start in Santa Catalina. We met him there and spent a couple of days filming his story and getting him to teach me how to bodysurf. Good news: the only injuries I sustained were sunburned shoulders. Better news: Giovanni’s story aired today worldwide on CBN.

On a side note, this piece was shot at the Oasis – a surf camp just outside of Santa Catalina run by a very friendly italian dude. These cabanas go for about $30 a night and the views are unbeatable. A word of caution, though, you probably want an SUV to get there, as you must drive across a stream and a beach to get there. But it’s well worth it. No reservations, as they don’t have a website or phone.

One other place to stay in Santa Catalina is the Punta Brava Lodge. About $20 per night. Carlos, the manager, is very friendly and accomodating.

When we returned from our recent expedition to Coiba, we spent the night in Santa Catalina, which I used to describe as a “sleepy fishing village,” but the more I think about it, it’s now more aptly described as a nascent resort town on Panama’s pacific coast. It has grown so rapidly that now large, fancy homes are springing up amid the quaint and rustic thatched huts that the locals have occupied for decades. A guy could do a big business in bulk concrete in Santa Catalina today.

One of the newest places to stay in Santa Catalina is The Blue Zone, a surfer hostel that is owned by absentee Americans, but currently run by a couple of very friendly German surfers, Mick and Hedi.

The interior of the hostel is clean and pretty, with four bedrooms sharing two bathrooms and an open courtyard and kitchen. There’s also a communal dining room and laundry room. Actually, it’s kind of like a nice four-bedroom house, and since the rooms rent for around $15 a night, a family like mine (7 people) could have the whole thing for less than a mid-rate hotel room in the states.

There is still only one phone in Santa Catalina, a payphone in the center of town. There is an internet cafe, but the wait is often longer there than that for the phone. The bottom line is that making reservations for anyplace in Santa Catalina is an exercise in frustration. Not to worry, though, you can normally find a place to stay without too much trouble. Mick and Hedi have email (hedimuc at web dot de, and mucmick at freenet dot de) which they check when they can, but say that they are rarely full, so email if you must, but come visit regardless.

Job 31
1 “I made a covenant with my eyes
not to look lustfully at a girl.

If you, like me, share the commitment above with Job, you know how difficult that can be whenever you spend time on the web. Well, here’s a new tool to help you stay accountable. It’s called “Covenant Eyes,” and it monitors all the websites you visit, and emails a report of your activity to the accountability partner of your choice.

With the devastation caused by the occasional minister or member of a church staff that is caught using pornography, the 7 bucks a month fee for this service is what I would call cheap insurance. Another software program, which is tiny and free, is called Time Snapper. It takes a picture of your screen every five seconds and then plays it back as a movie on command to anyone with the permissions to access it. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, it never hurts to “trust, but verify.”

Look, as men, we need all the help we can get to stay faithful to our good intentions in a world where the enemy is hell-bent on destroying them, and us. There should never be shame in a man asking for accountability for himself and for his brothers-at-arms. After all, if you go off the deep end and destroy your family in a bout of selfishness or moral weakness, all of us pay the price and are affected by the shrapnel of bad decisions. So accountability is just another way that we help each other be not just good, but better.

As Randy Alcorn writes, “A true friend doesn’t help you feel good, he helps you BE good.”

Speaking of which, have you counted the cost of sexual sin lately? It wouldn’t hurt to make a list, and look at it often. Another quote from this article:

If only we would rehearse in advance the ugly and overwhelming consequences of immorality, we would be far more prone to avoid it.

Latasha McCoy was horribly abused by her parents, but God turned her tragedy into triumph.

I met Latasha while doing a story on Noah’s ark, a farm for foster children in Laneville, Georgia. After hearing Latasha’s heart-wrenching story, I knew she was the real reason we’d been sent to Noah’s ark.

We told her story last week on the 700 club. That day, over 500 people called our hotline and prayed to give their lives to Christ.

And THAT is what it’s all about.

Well, since my favorite time sink is down, I’ll take this time to wrap up the trip to Panama.

Three weeks is a long time to be gone. Much longer than I prefer. That said, spending three weeks in Panama went by pretty quickly. It was a busy trip, productive on several fronts.

First, the CBN shoot. In the first two weeks, we shot four stories: A news feature about the Panama Ports Administration, a feature about Ruiz Coffee, An interview with German missionary Charlotte Teubner, and a salvation story from champion bodyboarder Giovanni Greco.

Once the CBN crew left, my expedition team showed up, and we spent a grueling, yet rewarding three days exploring the Playa Hermosa region of Isla Coiba. Our original plans were to cross the island from south to north, but as we got closer to D-day, our intel improved, and we adjusted, then readjusted our plans. The objective of the expedition was to gather information for a book I plan to write about the island, and from that standpoint we were fabulously successful. More about that later. For a fantastic day-by-day look at our expedition, check out Trevor Williams’ blog.

One last ancillary objective during my time in Panama – do some research that will help us when my family and I move to Panama, as planned for 2007. My hope is to do book research there and write my book on Coiba, and let the kids experience a different culture and learn Spanish. I checked out several options for real estate in Panama, and was surprised at how many Americans are moving there. Panama’s low cost of living, lack of punitive regulations, and nice climate are making it a real haven for expats. In some places, such as Boquete and El Valle de Anton, it seems that Americans nearly outnumber Panamanians. The fishing village of Santa Catalina, which was almost unheard of two years ago, is now experiencing a boom of growth that is leaving the locals a bit bewildered.

I guess it’s true, change is the only constant in life.

Christian Peace Activists rescued by the U.S. Military – the very men they vilify. You gotta love the irony in that.

…”A trek or adventure facing unforeseen circumstances.”

I’d say that definition perfectly describes our trip to Coiba, to say nothing of my life in general.

We’re back. We’re alive. We’re half eaten by bugs.

We were not successful in accomplishing what we hoped to do – to cross the entire island from south to north. But we all agree that the trip itself was a great success. As it turned out, our progress was so hampered by the incredibly thick jungle that we were only making about two miles a day, which was always a possibility in the back of my mind while the trip was in the planning stages. When I backpack in the states, I can normally make ten miles a day with ease, even off-trail. I knew the jungles of Coiba would make that kind of distance impossible, but I still hoped to be able to make five miles a day at least. Even four would have been acceptable.

Then we lost a day due to permitting issues. Which gave us just three and a half days to cross the island. So we modified our plans and decided to try and cross from east to west – about ten miles instead of twenty. But when we got dropped off on Playa Hermosa, it wasn’t long before we realized that even this was too ambitious (another theme that pops up from time to time in my life!)

Day one, we hit the beach at playa Hermosa around eleven am, and by 5pm had only made two miles and four hundred vertical feet up a mountain that was as steep as any hill in West Virginia. The temperature hovered around ninety five in the shade, and the humidity was more than ninety percent. We were exhausted. The vote was to retrace our steps to a creek we had crossed, make camp near the fresh water, and regroup for day two.

Day 2 – We struck off trying to go AROUND the mountain that we had tried to go over the day before. Thick grass towered twelve feet high, giving one the feeling of being an ant lost in someone’s lawn. After two hours of hacking our way through the incredibly dense foliage, we hit swamp.

At this point, it was clear that while crossing the island would not be impossible, it would certainly take more time than we had to devote to the project. So after talking it over at length, we made the decision to return to the beach and focus our research on day tripping from there.

We had a great time. Camping in a hammock on the beach on a deserted tropical island is one of the most pleasurable activities I can imagine. We swam in the surf, explored an abandoned encampment about which I shall write more later, and spent time writing, reflecting, and looking for water. On one of these water runs, we tried to wade up the river that met the beach near our camp in hopes that the brackish water would eventually run sweet. Wading through salt-marsh in knee-deep water, we noticed very obvious tracks of a large salt-water crocodile in the sand on the bank, heading into the water where we stood. That ended that plan, and we headed for dry ground. I imagine it is probably impolite to intrude on the feeding grounds of a giant salt-water croc.

The next morning, we saw not one, but FIVE of the elusive Guacamaya – a real treat indeed. We also saw a Neque, a type of Agouti which is endemic to Coiba, and which is basically a mouse the size of a watermelon.

After a day of this, we were able to get a message to our boat captain in Santa Catalina that we would need to change our place of pickup, and he came right away to fetch us. We were just starting up the stove for dinner when we heard the sound of his motor. Even though we had called for him, there was an unexpected feeling of supreme joy in the knowledge that he was there to get us, and we whooped and hollered like we had been stranded for a year. Thinking about this, I realize that I am much more accustomed to having control over my environment, and that losing even a little of that control was a stress point for me. So maybe the real reason God put me on a deserted tropical island, even for only three days, was to point out to me (again!) that I need to trust that HE is in control, and that when I try to do his job for him, stress and fear enters my life.

As we crossed the open ocean between Coiba and Santa Catalina just after sunset, I had another realization. I was racing through the darkness in the company of brothers with whom I had shared risk, uncertainty and hardship. I was returning to my loving family from a daring expedition to a mysterious, uninhabited island, having survived an experience that few people on the planet will ever share. And I thought, THIS is what I want my life to look like.

For more information about our trip, check out Trevor Williams’ blog. He’s been writing about the trip from the perspective of a wide-eyed college student.

More to come…

Well, we had some difficulty this weekend finding our guide for the expedition, and so even though all of us are here, and we are packed and ready, we are kind of in a holding pattern until we can connect with Mali Mali. I fully expect to be able to find him Monday morning, however, and so we are moving ahead with plans to leave for Isla Coiba on Tuesday.

I will most certainly be out of the loop for about a week, and so the blog will probably be dormant until then. But check back after the 19th, as I hope to have a dynamite trip report on our Expedition.