Home (?) Again

I'm back, and safe. As laiminga buti cia - I am happy to be here. I will spare you all a similarly detailed account of my epic journey back to Klaipeda. Perhaps a simple mention of the 12-hour bus excursion through the Baltics (Riga to Vilnius to Klaipeda) will suffice. Ever been woken up at 3:30 a.m. by angry Latvian women speaking Russian, trying to get you to lug your backpacks and things out of "their" seats? And then, once they realize they're in the wrong, lugging them all back into place? I then mistakenly took the "slow" bus from Vilnius to Klaipeda, and got the very long scenic tour of Lithuania. It began to feel like Narnia - always winter, and never Klaipeda!

But I'm back. Friday evening was spent with friends, a great dinner of chili, and prayer for the upcoming semester. Saturday I met with my fellow writing teachers to plan our new course, and I finally got myself to the theater with a friend to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, so now all my Christmas wishes are complete. :) This morning at church was a fun time of reunion with church friends, communion, and singing in Lithuanian (I MISSED that).

I will not gloss over the fact that these past couple days have been emotionally hard. I knew they would be. It's a combination of jet lag, an altitude change, no sunlight, stress over the beginning of school, changing routines, shifting relationships, and an intense desire for God to renew His Spirit in me for the semester ahead of me. I feel at home here, but not completely. I felt at home in the States, but not completely. Changing and travel always exposes me to the temporality of my connections to this earth, the tentative nature of all my relationships. Except for one.

Once again, I am struggling with all my stregnth to hold onto the hope of my Home in Our God. He is the one unmovable foundation, the relationship that will never change, the "only one," as the Caedmon's Call song goes, "who will never leave me." In the dark January night, on the bus between Riga and Vilnius, I was listening to some piano arrangements of old hymns, and "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" suddenly piped through my ears. I clung onto its words - "there is no shadow of turning with thee, thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not, as thou hast been, thou forever wilt be." What I need now is another promise, that "morning by morning, new mercies I'll see." I definitely need some new mercies. Definitely.