Can you guess what this is? Every adult in our household got one of these in the mail recently. It's a fancier-looking document than our Iowa marriage licence. But it isn't for anything nearly as permanent. It's a stempas. Still puzzled?

Pas = pass.
That's not so mysterious.
But the word stem is a "false friend." It has nothing to do with flower stalks or origins. It means "voice" and also "vote." We each received a pass to vote in local elections. The pass indicated which elections we could vote in and included a letter explaining these. I could only vote for members of the local water management board. (Water management is a big thing in the Netherlands.) Ellen, who has Dutch citizenship, could also vote for members of the provincial parliament.

Since I was not really up-to-date on the election for the water management board, I went to the Stemwijzer (wijzer = pointer or index) online. The stemwijzer listed the major issues in the election. I could indicate my standpoint on those issues. Then the stemwijzer program compared my point of view with that of the parties running in the election. This helped me make an informed choice.

The parliamentary system is different from the system we have in the U.S.A.  Here, representatives and board members are democratically elected, but the seats in parliament (or on the board) are divided up by the number of votes each party receives. If there were 100 seats up for re-election, and the Party for the Preservation of Purple Hats in Gelderland (yes, I'm making this up) got 2% of the total votes, then they would send two representatives to the provincial parliament in Gelderland. 

The parties list candidates for office. A voter can vote for candidates within the party. So if candidate #5 on the list of the Party for the Preservation of Purple Hats got more votes than candidate #1 or #2, then #5 would be one of the two Purple Hats going to the provincial parliament instead of #2. Otherwise, the top two on the Purple Hats' list would go.

Think about the implications of this system. Parties tend to focus on their point of view for the major issues rather than the personalities of the candidates. Because only a small percentage of the total vote is needed to win a seat, new parties or fringe parties can actually get someone. So there are a lot of different parties. The stemwijzer for Gelderland lists 15 parties that participate in the stemwijzer. These include  "Party for the Animals," "50+," and "Jesus Lives." Another result of this system is that to get a majority in parliament--and get anything done--parties usually need to make coalitions with each other. Sometimes this results in very strange bedfellows such as the Christian Union and the party whose leader is so rabidly and publicly racist that Britain will no longer allow him to visit.

On March 20, Ellen and I each took our fancy stem pas and our Dutch ID's to the closest polling place. We marked our paper ballots with the red pencils in the voting booths and dropped them into the locked ballot boxes. The results for the provincial parliament were not known until yesterday, March 26. The water board didn't take that long to sort out. Their results are already available, maybe because only 11 parties ran in that election. How did I vote? According to my Kingdom-based principles, as I always do.

This Bud's For You!

There are many ways to be the hands and feet of Christ. For example, a few years ago a Romany church in Moldova did something special on March 8, International Women's Day. They bought enough flowers for each woman in the village. Then they went around and personally delivered them. One elderly woman cried. It was the first time anyone had ever done something like that for her. May it not be the last!

Mardis Gras/Carnaval

Last Sunday on our way to church we saw a guy in lederhosen  walking down the street. Keith looked at me with raised eyebrows. "Carnaval," I said.
That one word explained it all. From our region in the Netherlands south to the Belgian border children have their school spring break because Carnaval falls on this week. Towns like ours will have Carnaval clubs who elected princes and princess on November 11. For reasons which I cannot explain, the men will wear these elaborate peaked hats with long pheasant feathers streaming out the back. (You can see examples from the club on our town.)
Carnaval has a lot in common with Mardis Gras. They both fall on the "fat Tuesday" before Ash Wednesday. Keith and I met in Louisiana, where people know how to celebrate Mardis Gras. We've  walked through the teaming streets of an all-out, hedonistic New Orleans Mardis Gras. And we've gone to a small-town Mardis Gras parade in Cajun country. Our daughters brought back Mardis Gras beads to put on the Christmas tree.
There's some irony in that. That Christmas tree has its roots in pre-Christian pagan ritual. And Ash Wednesday aside, it would be hard to find anything as pagan as Carnaval or Mardis Gras.
Fellow Christians, remember this when you see people walking down the street in lederhosen: hedonists have nothing on us. We're Christians. We can party like the Bridegroom's with us.