One thing I love about Lithuania...

There are a lot of things I really enjoy about life in Klaipeda (and quite a few more now that I'm no longer wearing my wool coat 24/7!). But one thing special thing I noticed this weekend is:

I love sitting on people's kitchen floors, having conversations, really late at night.

That's a pretty simple thing, yes, but it was a common theme of the weekend, during which there were group gatherings Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday lunch and a birthday celebration over Sunday dinner. All this means that I basically ate, and shopped, and cooked, and cleaned, and worshiped, and took walks, and sat around sending emails, all in the presence of other people. The way things often play out is, someone sends out a text message or an email, inviting everyone to bring a snack or something to drink to someone's house. Then we eat and talk and play cards until it's way past our bedtimes, at which point we walk each other home.

There is rarely much of an agenda. Sometimes we watch movies or play cards, but most of the time we just end up talking. There are never enough chairs in any one person's apartment to seat everyone, so inevitably a group of us will end up huddled on the kitchen floor space nearest the coffee pot or kettle, waiting for water to boil and talking about indefinite vs. definite articles; what is the real nature of gender relationships in the Baltic States?; where are people traveling next and what are the best, most out-of-the-way places to visit there?; who did we catch plagiarizing this week?; what are the tallest mountains we've climbed?; and so on, and so on...

What I love about this is that we're just talking. Life here is stressful, but rarely so much so that we don't have time to slow down and be together. I don't often experience this in the States - at least not to the level that I do here. I wish I could live more like this wherever I am.

There is definitely a palpable sense that here, in Lithuania, we need each other. We know that we must be community for each other because we aren't around families that might normally support us. You may remember a few blogs earlier I was whining about being lonely? I'm such a dork. Just when I think I'm forgotten, God reels me back in, opens my eyes and points out the blessings I've forgotten I have.

I stole this from Annie's blog. It's highly appropriate for these confusing times of transition, when home is always the place you're not, a word that is much, much too complicated to use lightly:

"These longings keep a sharp edge to our lives, keep them from a flaccid shapelessness that is comfortable but damned. ... The ache for Home is a mercy, our unease absolutely necessary. Homesickness is a kind of reminder, faithful to the end, that without guarding, even a pilgrim might set up permanent camp here beside dry wells and drink from broken cisterns."
- Jean Fleming

New Pictures

Lots of new pictures from recent activities and adventures are up at my Flickr site!

Last Day of School

Well, I finished teaching Friday - at least the in-classroom part. I could now commence musing about how it doesn't seem possible that the year has gone so fast (it doesn't), and how unprepared I am to transition back to the States so soon (I am), and how difficult it is to navigate the wistfulness that grabs and threatens to suck me downward when I come to the end of things (it is).

But this is always how things are - especially as a teacher. We live in an artifical world of repeated beginnings and endings, liftoffs and landings. And I really do prefer this to a job where time stretches out without any recognizable marking points. It's just that I so often find myself getting melancholy (thanks for that personality trait, Dad) and have to find new things to look forward to.

Thankfully, this week has also contained some blessings, some reminders of why I am here in the first place. This past Wednesday at chapel, a first-year student shared his testimony. I won't go into too many details other than to say that it is a powerful one - one in which it is SO evident that God has persued this kid, brought him to LCC and is continuing to grow and guide him. It is, and I'm not saying this lightly, a MIRACLE that this student was standing before a large number of his classmates, telling the story of his truely rough past life and how God has changed him. In short, God showed up in chapel in a big way, and there was much evidence of the Holy Spirit at work.

Toward the end of his talk the student took out a knife that he has carried around, and used, for years. To him, it symbolizes the last connection he has to his past life. In a very dramatic and heartfelt motion, he dropped it to the stage and walked off.

As he did that, all I could think was, "this kid just got baptized." In a multi-tradition setting, where baptism means different things not only to different Protestant believers, but also to Catholic and Orthodox, it can be tricky to think about how to recognize an individual's conversion. But, if baptism is a point at which a person acknowledges before the community his or her identification with other believers, the point at which he or she symbolically crosses from the old life into the new creation, then that is what all of us in chapel witnessed on Wednesday. And it was really beautiful.

Another beautiful moment of the week was at the school closing ceremony Friday afternoon. Each class of students selected one member of the class to speak briefly about the past year. One girl I spend a lot of time with spoke on behalf of the freshman. Even though she only had a few minutes, she talked about how LCC is like the ocean - meaning that, when you look at it, on one hand you see only the surface of things, but in reality there is a lot going on underneath. She spoke about how much she has changed this year, how much has happened in her life in 8 short months. It was amazing to watch her speaking in front the entire student body when I remember talking with her, just a soft-spoken girl who didn't make much eye contact, back on the opening day ceremony in August.

These are just two lives that have been impacted by the community at LCC over the past year, but it gives me a lot of joy to see evidence of God working, knowing that He is always drawing us toward Himself and toward each other.

Congratulations to my dad!

This month my dad had a life-long dream come true. His model railroad was featured as the cover story in Model Railroader magazine. That's his layout above - the same A&O (Appalachian and Ohio) line that has indwelt the basement of every house my family has lived in!

Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead here into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards
and will make the Valley of Trouble
a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth
as in the day she came up
out of Egypt.
"In that day," declares the Lord,
"You will call me 'my husband';
you will no longer call me 'my master'...
I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.
I will betroth you in faithfulness
and you will acknowledge the Lord."

Hosea 2:14 - 16, 19 - 20

In the Wilderness

So all week I have had a sticky note stuck to my computer, reminding me to blog about Easter. I'm not sure what it is I originally wanted to write because so many ideas have run through my head this week... so many precious verses and hymns swirl around this time of year. ("Where the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my heart, my all").

I think I have wanted, in some small way, to mark this season with more deliberate action than I usually do. I come from the low-church Protestants; we don't really do the Lenten thing. I know that Jesus told us not to do our works of righteousness before men, and when we fast not to go around moaning and deprived, but rather to put on oil and bright clothes. Nevertheless, I am finding that fasting in some mental and physical ways this week has woken me up to things in a different way than I expected.

For one, I have learned that I'm really bad at fasting! I make a lot of exceptions. I bend "rules" (even if I'm the one who arbitrarily set them!). My intention to spend Maunday Thursday fasting and praying resulted in a day in which I was far less than gracious with people around me, in which I actually locked students OUT of my office because they were driving me nuts, in which I aired my opinions rather forwardly on more than one occasion, and in which I didn't get down to actually praying until minutes before sleep.

The effect of going without food is that that lack is accutely noticeable at all times. I had to have a meeting over lunch during which I sipped tea and watched the others lather sour cream on their blynai. This was the day the staff kitchen was full of delicious smells of baking for most of the afternoon. In short, I spent a lot more time noticing food because I couldn't have it.

This is probably not an uncommon experience. And I know that the goal is to take those hungers we have and practice submitting them to God, practice the crucifixtion in the flesh that we are called to as disciples. But the keener sense I felt in this process was just how much I fail, just how much I am incapable of following through on my committments, just how much my most basic human hungers preoccupy me.

Just as there is physical hunger, I also battle emotional hunger. And when I am around people who seem to be "feasting" on foods I can't have, those same pangs of need are ferocious. Those smells and tastes seem all that much more desireable because I am cut off from them.

This week a friend gave me a book by Elisabeth Elliot, which I have not been able to put down. It's her book, The Path of Loneliness: Finding Your Way through the Wilderness to God. I snatched it up because early in it she quotes the hymn, "O Love that Will Not Let Me Go," which I posted here last week and have been meditating on a lot lately. Loneliness feels like emotional fasting, like going without things the human spirit needs for survival. When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he was both alone and hungry. To be like Jesus is to walk through these places.

And I guess that's what I have been thinking about this week - that discipleship will call us to be crucified in the flesh. It will eventually require me to say, "Yes, Lord I will serve You no matter what You give me or do not give me. I do not serve You because I desire blessing, or because of what you promise, but because You are You." Satan would want me to question God's worthiness - to question whether He deserves my life so entirely when there seems to be only pain and learning, pain and learning, pain and learning. And Satan would have us forget Christ's sacrifice which is the daily evidence of God's love. This is what we have been given.

And still I cry for something more when I have been given all this forgiveness, and the honor of serving Him, and the breath of His Spirit indwelling the world, the treasure of being His vessel, of being kept in His hands like a broken-winged bird.

There must be one truth I exclaim 'til my chest cracks with its force - God is worthy, worthy, worthy of my last best breath, my fullest heart, my weakest prayer. He is all that I can trust, the source and reason for joy.

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, at night. I was able to spend some time here before heading to Narva last weekend, and then came back through before flying back to Lithuania on Monday, April 3. It was a fun trip, with a suitable amount of academic intent to justify my traipsing around gold-lit old cities with a friend, eating strange Estonian dishes and trying to pronounce the somewhat familiar Finno-Ugric vowels. Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian, and it was a pleasure to see the long-syllabled words and hear the trilling cadence of the language. 

If it MUST be snowy and cold on April 2nd (Sheesh!), at least the city can look like this... 

Sunday of the conference we were able to leave slightly early in order to have more time in Tallinn, which included a stop at Olde Hansa - THE required tourist destination of Estonia! The entire resturant is lit by candles, the food is all based on medival recipies, and the waitress speak at least five languages to cater to the wide variety of nationalities you'll see sitting at the tables next to you! 

I was enthralled with the way they paint doors in Tallinn. This is just one of the many I took pictures of! 

It's a good thing Tallinn is so lovely 'cause this is Narva, looking across into Russia. It was maddening to be so close and not be able to cross the border (it's mega-expensive for visas for Americans). Most of our days here were wet, muddy and oppressively grey. Not the world's most scenic conference destination! 

THIS is why I teach, and why I teach here.

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

Details soon...

I'm back from an almost-five-day excursion to Narva and Tallinn, Estonia. I'll give more details soon, but wanted to let ya'll know I'm back safe and have lots of stories to tell. It was a good first conference experience, as these things go, but the fun of travel and visiting more countries and cities I haven't seen was probably the more rewarding aspect of the trip!

(I've posted a few paragraphs from my journal on Expat Letters, albiet in slightly more florid and introspective language than what ususally gets posted here!)

Tallinn, Estonia, looking north toward the sea on March 31