Still life, with I-pod 

Kavos ir Arbatos Namai

Finally, I have fully arrived in Klaipeda.

I can never quite feel settled in a new place or city until I have found my own coffee shop where I can just move in and occupy a table for hours. Such a place must have good natural light, preferably a big window that I can justify letting myself gaze out of when I'm tired of grading or reading or planning. It should be conducive to poetry, and melancholy, and wistfulness. It should have warm colored wood and good aromas, and the little ordinary sounds of coffee shop life - a clinking of spoons, a whirring of steam, a clatter of porcelain dishes.

Like Hemingway and his Deux Magots in Paris, every writer needs a cafe to call home. And so, here's a glimpse at my new favorite spot, right off a central walking street in Klaipeda, just a ways down from the sculpture park and across from the big grocery store. It's just called Kavos ir Arbatos Namai - Coffee and Tea House.

Poems from old notebooks

It takes faith
and the lead in this pencil
to write my way into
faith

What my heart cannot feel
I must spell out
in cursive loops across this line:

What you have chosen
only your marrow can know
only the deep can hold.

What you are living
you've chosen - that burnished
stone, that polished core

hold it up to the probing light,
tuck it close
in your threadbare coat,

You have lost all that you owned,
lost it all
but this pebble pearl.

Let it be your answer.


(I've been re-reading some of my old writings and have decided to post some of them. For a further taste, check out the Expatriot Letters link, for some shamelessly personal poetry written by Annie and myself.)

Vessels for Breaking

“We are called out
We are ransomed
We are not of the world we’re in.
We are chosen,
We are blessed
To give light to the lives of men.
So Father sow your seed
Give us life and community.
Awake us from our sleep
This is your time,
This is your place.
We are vessels for breaking
Under your grace.
We are led by your Spirit.
You have redeemed us
By the blood of Your Son.
Send down your word,
We are eager to hear it.
Ready our hearts
To carry Your love.”

“We are vessels for breaking under Your grace.”
Do I really know what it means to pray this? To desire it?

For a long time, I have loved the image of the vessel, the jar of clay, that object which carries God’s light into the world. It is a feminine image to me. Mary was a vessel – there was nothing about her that made her worthy to be the bearer of Christ. And of course with the privilege of bringing God into the world, she also endured the pain of His death. Her love broke her. There is an Annie Dillard poem that goes something like, “love nails us to the things of this world.” I think I am beginning to learn what these lines mean, that being a vessel of God’s love means being willing to be broken by Him, willing to be shaped and reshaped until you are able to carry what He’s called you to carry.

This past week, people have asked me, "How are you? Really?"

I'm not sure how to answer this right now. And, in some ways, it doesn't matter how I am so much as who I am: God's daughter. It’s probably evident from my last post that the last few weeks of being here have been simultaneously gut-wrenchingly intense and suffused with joyfulness. I write poems; I pray a lot; I get grumpy and tired; I laugh with friends over meals; I get melancholy in an instant; I procrastinate on lessons; I look up at the sky with wonder in my eyes; I raise my hands in worship; I berate myself for failing to live up to my calling; I’m insecure; I’m falling-over-myself happy; I am an instant from despair, or an instant from ecstasy, every moment of every day.

I am learning how to be a vessel, or at least learning to desire to be a vessel. This could be culture “shock” (such a useless term) or the result of the work God is doing in me. Or, it could just be the fact that life overseas inevitably heightens and intensifies every normal emotion. This is why I love it – and also why I have to learn so much more about letting the Lord rule over my heart. And in the midst of it all, I have friendships that carry me. Kelli wrote me an email with the lyrics to the song above – the same lyrics I have been carrying around and clinging to for a week now. God laid them on her heart even as those same words were ringing in my ears. Astonishing. A friend calls me on Monday afternoon and prays for me – praying for needs and hopes and fears that I haven’t even vocalized to her, but that the Spirit of God has shown her. There is so much confirmation of God’s leading and strengthening of me for His work here, and yet it is not fun to be the vessel God is trying to break! The vessel argues and cries, and still thoughts come to her, “love is pain – don’t hold back.” We are made to be like Christ, to let His love break us on behalf of those around us, that His light might flow through those cracks out into the dark world.

Bloody Honesty

And now for some gut-wrenchingly bloody honesty.

(I hesitate to type any of this, but knowing that so many of you, dear sisters, are battling these same things, I feel I should).

God is doing a painful work in me. The kind of work that Aslan does to Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In that story, Eustace has stolen some treasure, been turned into a dragon, and is suffering as the treasures he has stolen are beginning to suffocate him. Aslan brings Eustace to a pool in the wilderness, where Aslan bathes him and begins to peel the dragon scales off him one excruciatingly painful layer at a time.

I am a dragon thick with scales, and the Lion paws are digging deep.

So much of what I am uncovering emotionally these past weeks has been similar to thought processes I went through in Hungary, but now that I am older and slightly more aware, I am experiencing them earlier. Let me be more specific.

I am terrified, terrified that I will not be able to stay at LCC long term because I truly desire to get married one day. I am afraid that eventually (whether that is in one year or three or whatnot) my heart desires are going to drag me back on a plane, back to the U.S., back to home simply because I have not really let God have EVERYTHING. Every single hopeful selfish desire. This is crushing to consider, especially when, as I said aloud to a fellow teacher the other night, I am more sure about this decision to come to Lithuania than just about anything in my whole life. To allow these desires to dictate my actions will be to grant Satan a victory.

Currently, I feel the Lord challenging me to examine every motive and to question whether my love for His kingdom is paramount in my life. I say that it is, but does my love for others – for students and colleagues – so far outweigh and outrank any other love that the comparison is not worth making? Do I seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness? Do I honestly give up every hope of my own security and temporal happiness for the sake of the Kingdom? Probably not.

And yet, there are so many promises that God makes to those who choose Him. So many that I cling to. One of these is a verse from Isaiah 56:

“Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the Lord say,

‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’

And let not any eunuch complain,

‘I am only a dry tree’…

To them I will give within my temple and its walls

A memorial and a name

Better than sons and daughters;

I will give them an everlasting name

That will not be cut off.”

The parallel may not be immediately evident, but to a 27-year-old single woman who hasn’t been kissed in recent memory, the metaphor of a “dry tree” seems apt! And when so many of my friends are buying houses and birthing babies, the promise of a memorial and a name “better than sons and daughters” is consoling. A little. It is just so often hard to hold onto the belief that what God has called you to in your life is different than how He has called those around you.

Over at Anna’s flat tonight, in between a lot of tears, she and I read each other passages of promise from the Old Testament. Anna read from Deuteronomy 8, where the Israelites are commanded to remember all the commands of the Lord, and “remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8: 2 – 3). Anna talked about how much she sometimes feels like she is wandering in the desert. I said that I really don’t want to be the generation that died in the desert and didn’t even get to see the promised land! (Which the rest of the chapter describes so beautifully). I think it is significant, too, that God gave them both the hunger and the food to feed it.

But what am I promised but that God will bring about His kingdom? And I am so honored that He is doing this work in me – stripping away the scaley things I hold onto. He wants ALL of it – everything hiding under the bed, and in the closet, and out back behind the shed. It all has to go into His hands, so I might learn to trust. I wake up many mornings crying like Hannah, “’Lord, remember your maidservant,’ please don’t forget her. She lives here, in Klaipeda, Lithuania, on the edge of the sea. She wants to love you more than anything else. Please don’t forget about her!”

And, as Elkanah said to Hannah, “is not my love better to you than 10 sons?,” God says to me, “is not my love better to you than 10 husbands?”

Remember

The message of the cross is foolishness
to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved
it is the power of God...
For the foolishness of God
is wiser than man's wisdom,
and the weakness of God
is stronger
than man's stregnth...
But God chose the foolish things
of the world to shame the wise;
God chose the weak things
of the world to shame the strong.

I Cor. 1:18,25,28

I posted this verse yesterday, but woke up this morning thinking more about why I had felt the need to post it. Something I am aware of whenever I am in academic circles - and Christian academic circles are not immune - is that there is often a continual sense that one needs to show off one's intelligence. A sort of intellectual one-upmanship begins to creep into conversations, as name-dropping and thesis topics get off-handedly mentioned. My natural inclination is to jump into these games, and parade around the half-formed bits of knowledge that populate my brain. I am trying to learn to be silent. And to find my worth in the foolishness of Christ's cross.

These verses remind me that the wisdom I may think I have, the degrees that I think mean something, are rubbish in light of the "wisdom of heaven which is first of all pure." Reading these words, I think of Annie Dillard's passage in Holy the Firm, where she talks about the highest level of seraphim that circle the throne of God. They burn up in a torrent of praise, full not of the knowledge of God, but full of His love. It is possible to "love completely without complete understanding."

And Dillard says: "So love is greater than knowledge. How could I have forgotten?"

Lake Platelai in Zematija National Park 

The military exposition sign - fortunately in Lithuanian and some hilariously badly translated English 

Entering the underground missile base 

Zematija and Lake Platelai

Highlight of Jen’s weekend: listening to the singing deep-bass voices of large Lithuanian men reverberate off the metal walls of a former-Soviet nuclear missile silo!

Let me back up a moment.

One thing I am beginning to discover about life in Klaipeda, and in teaching in general, is that there will always be more work to be done. There will always be another opportunity to go out with students, to have dinner with friends, or to make a lesson plan better. But, in order to do any of these things well, I need to take a mental break now and then! Saturday I was able to take a short road trip around “Lower Lithuania” with four other teachers from LCC (Jerilyn, Kate, Thor and Jared).

It was inexpressibly wonderful to get out and see the countryside of Lithuania, the little villages and churchyards (my fingers are resisting the urge to type the word, “quaint.” I’ll go with “lovely” instead). I have always felt that you can’t really know, or feel at home in, a country until you have walked in the woods and fields, over its little rivers with their foreign names.

Thor arranged to rent a car and he drove us to a number of places that can’t be gotten to by bus or train. The first was Orvydas Garden, one of the strangest, most mystical and wonderful places I have ever been. It is basically a rambling and ramshackle sculpture garden, with little pools and paths leading through plum trees and woods. Strewn around everywhere are statues, wood carvings, pieces of architecture, iron and wooden crosses, relics of the Soviet era and earlier pagan times. All these things were collected by a monk named Orvydas who was forced to leave his order during the Soviet occupation and took up wood-carving as an occupation. This garden represents his life’s work. The psychic effect of all these strange and unintelligible objects juxtaposed in one location gave me shivers. It is something like a physical representation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” when he says, “These fragments have I shored against my ruin.” It is like a collection of the wisdom and follies and beliefs of so many past centuries, all being slowly weathered into the ground. It is like watching the wisdom of the world dissolving before your eyes, as God’s creation preempts and covers over all that we humans think we understand. Walking around, you can’t help but feel a spiritual presence – especially in some of the stone carvings that mix passages from the Bible with astronomical charts, and poems to our Creator chiseled into shiny slabs of rock.

After the garden, we had time for lunch in a village (blyenai – potato pancakes – for me. Quite filling for only 4 lt) before heading into Zematija National Park to go boating on Lake Platelai. The boating was quite a hilarious excursion, four of us in one flat-bottomed rowboat, with the one guy, Thor, trying to row us straight into the wind! We eventually switched around, with Jerilyn and I rowing together. She is quite a bit more experienced (okay, and more fit) than I, so it was pretty hilarious as I had to row two stokes for every one of hers! After successfully navigating around one of the islands, we returned wet and exhausted (well, not all of us. I got booted from rowing duty pretty quickly!). Even though it was windy and cold, we took a quick swim at the beach and jumped off the diving tower, just to say we’d done it.

From the beach, we had time to go to the “Militarizmo Ekspozicija” - which is an abandoned Soviet missile base that housed nuclear warheads until 1978 (it was closed after the signing of the Helsinki Accords). It had been built this far west in Lithuania because this was a sparsely populated area and the woods surrounding the area made it easy to hide (not to mention that it made it easier for Russia to target places in Western Europe). Providentially, as we were walking up to the rusting domes and concrete walls that are all that’s left of the place, a Lithuanian tour guide arrived with a group and offered to let us tag along on the tour inside the base, for a very small fee. We took her up on the offer, and found ourselves being led down into the mine-like installation with a group of inquisitive Lithuanian tourists.

Most of the rooms were barren metal caves – stripped of their artifacts by the Soviet army when it left, but we got to see some of the old generators and operations rooms. Then the guide took us down a long hallway toward one of the four missile silos. At the end of the hallway, everyone had to climb up through a door into a bowl-shaped area. We crawled up and suddenly the entire group was circled around the missile shaft opening, staring more than 300 feet down into an abyss of air, the bottom of which has been slowly filling with water for the past 20 years. This was the point at which the Lithuanian guys started singing, their deep voices echoing in the hollow space. This made people laugh, and others started drumming on the rusty railing that surrounded the platform we stood on. It reminded some of us of the scene in “Lord of the Rings” with the characters in Moria, and the “drums in the deep” start thrumming, sending them all rushing away from the fiery Balrog demon!

As we stood peering over the edges of the barrier, I could not help but think what a mercy, what a miracle it is that this place – designed to bring about terror and death – was echoing with laughter (nervous, timid laughter, yes) and singing. It made me momentarily happy to think that in the time that I have been alive, even just this one evil has been undone, unmade.

In an abrupt change of tone, after our visit to the army base, we drove to Zemaiciu Kalvarija, which is a tiny village famous for its “Stations of the Cross” chapels that are scattered around the windy streets of the town. Unfortunately, most of the chapels were padlocked and closed, but we climbed a few hills, drank water out of a bucket from an old Lithuanian well, and took some pictures, so not all was lost! It was probably the fourth or fifth church we had stopped at that day, not to mention all the cemeteries we’d walked through. Probably the nicest thing about the entire afternoon was the freedom to just walk through the headstones and crosses and dirt paths and experience a consuming sense of peace. Walking in those places, I find my life taking on a sense of order and meaning. Because I have only so long before laying down in a churchyard somewhere, it makes me want to breathe more deeply now, to live with more conviction now, and to worry less about what others think or don’t think of me!

After Zemaiciu Kalvarija, dusk was starting to settle over everything and many of the farmers were driving out to milk their cows in the fields. In Lithuania, the dairy cows are staked out in the field and the farmer goes to them for milking. This way, the cow eats grass at different places each day and isn’t penned up in a dairy barn eating hay. Lithuanians are often touting the fact that their food is all-natural, organic – which I can testify as being true since my milk tends to go bad in two or three days! In a country this small (aprox. 4 mil), they are finding a way to hold onto some of the qualities that have been lost in American agriculture, it seems.

Dinner after our long and enjoyable day was a cooperatively constructed meal of pasta and vegetables at my apartment back in Klaipeda. I am always thrilled to have guests over, and we finally tired ourselves out with cooking, talking and a little wine. More important than even the fun of the day is that I actually feel energized to tackle the work of the upcoming week – and such energy is always a blessing!

Typical wooden church architecture  

Carving outside a church in Kretinga 

“Infinitely beyond what we could ever ask or think”

There are only a few times in my life that I can point to and say, “I know for sure that this is the Spirit of God working.” This week, I have found myself saying that more than once. I am caught up in the web of your prayers for me, and I am filled with joy at the things I have to share!

First, many of you have been praying for my aunt Carol in her recovery from a bike accident in which she broke her neck and has been partially paralyzed. This week has brought about some amazing progress, and through a “mistake” in the way one of her trach tubes was inserted, she is now able to talk and communicate. Prior to this, she hadn’t been able to talk because of the way she is being fed and ventilated. When the physical therapist came to see her and found her talking, he said he had never seen anything like it in his whole working experience. As my uncle put it in his hospital journal, “Miracle? You decide.” What is most evident from this accident, and the enormous amount of prayer for their family, is that they are being carried on the wings of God’s mercy and the prayers of the Body of Christ. This is what God created for us to be – a family that carries one another through the pain of this world. It is a beautiful thing to see.

Secondly, I have to share what a feeling of unworthiness and humility I feel when God honors me with the chance to share about Jesus and His Kingdom. I don’t know if I even remember the last time I sat with someone and really laid out the ideas of the gospel in an authentic and “non-hokey” way – I mean, really listening to the Holy Spirit guiding my tongue and me actually OBEYING its voice. I had an opportunity on Friday afternoon to talk with one of the girls from my first year seminar. She was one I went to the beach with last Saturday, and I have had a lot of chances to talk with her throughout the week.

One of the first writing assignments for the first-years is to interview someone and write about paper about them. This student chose to interview me, and she asked some really great questions that allowed me to talk a lot about my faith and about why I am at LCC. (It’s funny how rejuvenating it can be to vocalize things that are so important to me but that I sometimes forget to meditate on!) After she had finished interviewing me, I asked if I could ask her some of the questions she had asked me. I could tell she was open to talking deeply, and we were able to really delve into her beliefs about God and heaven and what happens to people when they die. I found myself really connecting with her, and hearing the Spirit telling me how to touch upon what is important to her.

I am astounded by this encounter, so EARLY in my time here – my expectations of my God are clearly too low! I have imagined many months of relationship building and interaction to be allowed the chance at such a conversation, and instead, God orchestrated it already. I gave this student a hug and told her I would be praying for her friend (and for her as well). I would ask your prayers as well as I continue to talk with her and invest in her life.

This episode has reminded me and encouraged me to stay true to my reasons for coming to LCC, which is – as a fellow teacher vocalized so simply this week - “I want to spend my life on things that have eternal value.” How easily I forget this and get caught up in the temporal, the trite, the small.

The prayer of my heart

"Lord, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known"

Habakkuk 3:2

God brought this verse to mind twice yesterday. First was during prayer and worship time at the Karklu dormitory. The students gather on Thursday evenings to pray and sing together, led by the student worship leaders. There were a couple of us teachers and staff there (10 p.m. is pretty late for a school night!), and it was wonderful to pray together with students from so many countries and languages. The Spirit of the Lord was very present, and as we prayed for the school, their classmates, an outpouring of the Spirit over this year, I heard this verse in my head. This is the longing I have for the upcoming year(s) - that the awesome deeds of God, which we have heard of and seen from afar, will be made known in this place, in this city, between the walls of this school through the praises of God's people.

Before I went to bed (much, much too late for someone teaching at 8:30 a.m.!), I opened my Bible, and it literally fell open to Habakkuk 3 and the words I had prayed during that night's worship. I want these words to be true in my generation, that in OUR time, God will renew His might deeds and we might see the miraculous working of His Spirit everywhere.

Tip of the Iceberg

It has been a full week - though I'm getting the feeling that all my weeks will be full ones! I love the feeling, though, of going to bed at night, knowing that I don't have energy left and that I have given as much as I can. Highlights of the week include the Klaipeda International Film festival - which takes place in an old tobacco factory that looks like a tin airplane hanger; dinner and coffee with Anna, my good friend who works in administration at LCC and who is awesome at heart-to-heart chats; sitting with students during chapel and spending time with them in the dorm; walking around Klaipeda in the sunshine, trying to soak it up before the inevitable fall rains; talking with Dasha and Masha, two first years from Moldova and Kalingrad, on our way to watch Danish and German films together!

It is approaching a month since I've arrived in Lithuania, and in some ways it seems like I've been here for years. I am so blessed to be adjusting fairly easily, though I'm sure I'm still a bit more stressed with school work than I should be. I am grateful for friends here - so many! I did not anticipate all the social opportunties I have - from students to fellow teachers to staff, there is always somewhere to go, another relationship to invest in, and another conversation to be seasoned with salt and light.

One thing I have begun to notice, though, and have seen in other overseas ministry groups, is that all of us working together feel like we know one another intimately, despite the short amount of time we've been here. In reality, what we know of each other is like a tip of an iceberg - 90% remains below the surface, waiting to be discovered. This is both pleasing and ominous! It is nice to be known so easily, it is not so nice when people think they have already figured you out. :) None of us can be known in less than a month, no matter how much time or how close we feel. I am glad that there is always more to know about people - there is always a level of depth and insight you did not anticipate - even in yourself.

The REAL first day of school

Ah, the first day of class – not the first day, but the first real day. The day after the easy syllabus review and introductions. You know, the one where the copy machine jams when you try to make overheads 10 minutes before class, making you late. The day the computer lab inexplicably closes for random hours, its printers on the fritz, leaving panicked first-years in its wake. The one where a nervous line of students hovers around your office door, trying to print papers from your own computer so they can have something to work on during class. The day you forget to wipe off your overheads after the first section, requiring you to use spit and fingers to clean them off during the next hour. Which, of course, results in red-stained fingertips that leave marks on your nice blue sweater. The day when the heretofore cloudy sky breaks forth in sunlight – that streams in the classroom at an inopportune moment as you’re reading from the overhead, forcing you to halt the lesson and move the projector away from the now-bright and unreadable wall. Ah yes, welcome to my Monday.

Walking to Smiltyne beach, a short ferry ride from Klaipeda. 

I spent Saturday with what LCC likes to call "an international learning community." I just like to think of us as a bunch of cool girls enjoying a day at the beach! 

Kate, Ermiona and Jane getting ready to board the ferry back to Klaipeda 

Life doesn't get much better than cotton candy! 

On the ferry 

Clockwise: Donata, Sima, Jekaterina (Kate), me and Ermione at the opening day picnic on Wednesday. Donata, Sima and Kate are new first-years from Lithuania. 

The first day of school

Greetings from Lithuania on the first day of school! Like most teachers, I have a pleasant little buzzing of butterflies in my stomach, knowing that the tone I set and impressions I make this first day can have consquences for good or ill the rest of the semester. Fortunately, today I only have one class, that of my First Year Seminar students, who I have been meeting with regularly during orientation. I am curious to see how the transition from buddy to teacher will take place since I've been laughing and talking with them as friends the past couple days. Now, all of a sudden, I'm in charge of giving out grades! It is a strange dichotomy, but one that most teachers have to find a way to navigate, and I pray for guidance on how to be a loving AND effective teacher.

Meeting and spending time with students has taken up the bulk of my time and energy this week ,but I also seem to be floating on some sort of supernatural energy (all your prayers, no doubt) and even though I'm not getting much sleep and am out late nights, I'm hardly tired. Goodness knows this cannot last forever, but I am grateful for that in these first important days, "the joy of the Lord is my strength."

P.S. Check out Anna's travel journal site for some great pictures of Community Day "Muge" and opening ceremonies.