May 27th, 2006. My brother Joel's graduation marks the end of 10 years of continuous enrollment of Stewarts at Bethel College! 

Joel, Kristi, bro-in-law Dave, me 

Me and the sibs with my Aunt Carol and her shiny new scooter 

All creation groans

Somehow, it’s almost June, and I’m sitting at my aunt and uncle’s White Bear Lake house, gazing out their wall-size picture windows at a thousand shades of Minnesota green. I love this house. My aunt has often called it their “tree house” because the neighborhood is so wooded with tall trees, and the house has so many windows, you feel like you’re tucked up among all the branches.

I lived here for a semester back in 2001, just before I started my first (and to date, only) real paying job. I had my college graduation party here. I’ve helped lug in a countless number of Christmas trees through the small front door, and squished with boatloads of relatives on the sectional sofa in the family room. In this house, I’ve watched my cousin paint, helped my sister pack for her honeymoon, stayed up all night with my aunt watching “Pride and Prejudice,” and stood around in the kitchen, talking and eating cereal, ‘til all hours of the night.

If there is anywhere on earth that might hold some of the peace of heaven, I would vote for this house as one of those places.

These past two days, though, being here with my Grandpa to celebrate my little brother’s college graduation this weekend, there is a different feeling here. Their house is scattered with what can only be described as the aftermath of a catastrophe. There are new handrails on all the staircases, the loveseat in the living room is raised up for easier access, new seats on the toilets do the same. The entire basement is frozen, mid-project, as if Vesuvius had erupted and buried all this activity underneath.

The catastrophe, for those who haven’t followed the saga, was my aunt’s accident last August. She slipped off her bike, over a ledge of the driveway, and hit her head on a tree in their yard, breaking her neck and injuring her spinal cord at the 5^th & 6^th vertebrae. Life as the Hansen’s knew it, stopped.

The sadness that hangs over the house now is almost more about what almost was than what actually is. What hangs over the house, spoken and unspoken, is the sense that things are not going to be the same again. But Carol is a walking miracle, seriously. She shouldn’t have feeling below her waist, or use of her arms. Instead, she can get around with a cane, can write (in what we all half-jokingly say is better handwriting than she had prior to the accident!), is, most importantly, still Carol. Even so, every day is a battle for Carol (and all of us) to both accept the way life is now and continue fervently praying and working toward a future in which things will be as they were before. Somehow, every day is about learning how to properly grieve what is gone, without wallowing, without wishing too much for the past, and at the same time, how to hold on tightly to promises that things will someday be right again. It’s a complicated terrain to navigate.

My grandfather is navigating it too, as my grandma sits at home in the Greeley nursing home, far gone with Alzheimer’s. My cousin, the painter, is also living in grief for not only his mom’s condition, but the loss of two friends (both 29 years old) in the past year – one girl to a car accident, and that girl’s fiancé, my cousin’s close friend, to death in his sleep three weeks ago.

There’s a sense as we all talk to each other that each of us is breathing very deliberately, picking words carefully, trying to understand how the God we serve and love allows such wrenching tests of faith. I don’t, we don’t, believe He causes these griefs, but we know He uses them to test and refine us. But Carol is tired of being an inspirational story. My cousin has every right to say to the Lord, “enough already!”

The only thing I can think to express is that however intensely we feel grief at death, at injury, at the wrongness of how things seem to go in our lives, to that same extent we are experiencing the fallenness of the world. Grief itself is an argument against the existence of grief. This is NOT how God created the world. This is NOT how things are supposed to be. That’s why our hearts rebel against accepting pain as reality – they were not made for it. We were not made for it.

So we live in the hope that one day, things will be right. Our grief now can turn our heads to the unimaginable beauty of that day, stir our hearts for it, and create in us a longing to be with a Creator who truly desires to see us made perfect in both body and spirit.

Noveau Ruski

So I started my Russian class at the community college on Tuesday. It will be four short weeks for me to spend two nights a week practicing my Cyrillic script writing, minute conversational skills, and hopefully improving my reading before my trip to Ukraine in July. During the first 3-hour class session, all of us got to know each other a bit, spent a lot of time practicing our writing, and watched a couple “cultural” videos about Russian history.

The teacher, an Russian who came to the States 11 years ago, wanted to have the class get a taste not only of official cultural history, but also see some contemporary culture, so she brought a video of a couple Russian pop stars performing on Russian MTV. As we sat there watching and marveling at these energetic Russian boy bands, all I could think was, “this is the soundtrack to every taxi and marshtutka in Klaipeda!” So, stuck in a little florescent-lit classroom, in the middle of a dry American prarie, I got the faintest waft of unfiltered cigarettes, dusty old upholstery, and stuffy taxi air…

Oh, Litva, I miss you!

For the girls at Coopersmith's - remember...

"I know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifing the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one's thought. It is easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence - easier sometimes than to wait patiently."

Elisabeth Elliot

My sister Kristi, my 91 year-old grandpa, cousin Hollie and her boyfriend Brandon and I swealtered through 90 degrees and intense sun to watch the Rocks lose to the Dodgers, 3 -2. 

Inaugural summer hike with Mandy. Also site of inaugural sunburn! 

"I have loved O Lord, the beauty of Your house, the place where your glory dwells" 

To Do, To Be

I get the question, “how’s your transition going?” quite often these days. To answer that, I submit the following story:

Saturday evening, my mom sent me to the grocery store with $50 and a list of things to buy for our Mother’s Day barbeque. In the past it has been pretty common for US grocery stores to elicit moments of cultural crisis in me, so I thought I had steeled myself pretty well for the excursion! But, after successfully navigating the two enormous dairy cases of specialty cheese looking for feta, I found myself standing in front of the vast ocean of prepackaged chicken parts. And I could not begin to make a decision about what to buy to save my life. More than the choices, I found I was baffled by the prices – is $18.61 for 4 large boneless skinless chicken breasts too much? Is that a good deal? What about hamburger? Is $3.99 a pound a lot? Since I’m now used to shopping with litas, (1 Lt = .30 US), everything in the store seemed too expensive. In the end, I had to call my mom from the store and ask her what was a good price for chicken. And even after all that, I got to the checkout counter with $63 worth of groceries and only $50 in cash. Then came the humiliating process of putting items back until I got the bill down to $49.75!

When I finally loaded everything into the car, I stopped for a moment, put my head down on the steering wheel and cried!

Re-entry “shock” is simply this: the ordinary tasks of life – the things you need to know how to do to feed, shelter and dress yourself, and get yourself from place to place – have to be relearned and adjusted to. The cues you use to make sense of everyday life (what language to speak, how polite to be, what things cost) have shifted. Even the most basic aspects of daily life (what to eat, what to wear) can be confusing, and lead to frustration. I’ve spent the last two weeks being constantly over-dressed everywhere I go, and unsure of what/how to cook for myself – which has meant a lot of macaroni and cheese, and eating out!

Even so, I have done this transition thing a lot now so I tend to think that I am immune from its stresses, as if I alone can swim through differing cultures like some sort of new species of globalized fish! My standard approach to times of transition is to shield myself from frustration through an elaborate and detailed system of to-do lists. As long as I can maintain an illusion of purposeful accomplishment, I can stay afloat.

The problem here is that I sense in my spirit that I have become like Martha in Luke 10, finding my security in what I am doing to serve the Lord rather than in sitting and quietly listening to Him. It is SO easy in my home culture to feel like I have to accomplish something every day or I’m just being lazy. The past couple days though, I have been thinking about what it means to have Mary’s heart, to sit and listen to my Lord, just to BE with Him.

For me, being with Jesus probably means a lot of time sitting in coffee shops, reading the Bible and staring out the window; car drives that go nowhere, when I can pray out-loud and sing praise songs. It means resting, thinking, talking with sisters in the Lord, and generally not accomplishing much that can be crossed off a to-do list. But this is what I really, really need to do in these weeks at home. These times of transition, when I feel like a fish-out-of-water, when I feel truly lost and insecure, are when Jesus wants to come in and remind me that my security is not in my routines or my cultural wherewithal, in my to-do lists or my human relationships. My security is in Him. Only. Always.

I wish I could say it well enough, tell you how beautiful this day is -
the 75 degree dry air, the taut cloudlessness of the sky, driving the car 50 mph on 30 mph roads whose curves I could turn in my sleep, the way the road runs along the spring streams swollen with snowmelt, how the aspens are budding in young green, and how with one bend of the highway you're thrust into the open space of the Park, walled in by snowy ridges and towering rocks. Wish I could tell you how it smells, the clean-ness of the air, the spruces, the sage. How my feet are sock-less and happy in their sandles, suddenly aware there is such a thing as summer! And everywhere, mountains.

Les Miserables

I've been hesitating to post about this, but since this morning's edition of my hometown newspaper featured another "festival of bigotry" (as I've taken to calling the community opinion pages), I find I can't quite keep my mouth shut. Please forgive the following indulgence, it's just the musings of someone looking at her home with newly-foreign eyes.

I got back to the US last Monday - a day when illegal immigrants/undocumented workers (pick your term) held marches and rallies to protest impending legislation dealing with immigration issues. I confess my ignorance of the exact implications of said legislation, and so my comments my be summarily discounted if you wish. Yet...

After a week of reading editorials in which "they" are accused of "taking over America," and "they" are said to be "too lazy to learn English", and "they" are generally discussed with a tone of contempt that's uglier than I thought possible, I CANNOT help but wonder, truthfully, what Jesus thinks about all of this. Having now lived a considerable amount of my adult life outside of the US, I strive more and more to find my identity as a member of a bigger Kingdom, as a global Christian. For me, this means that my primary allegiance must be to my brothers and sisters in the Lord - what is best for them? How are their lives influenced by any small political decision I might make? How can political situations enable or disable the spread of the gospel? This is more important to me than protecting any set of national interests.

These thoughts have been accentuated by fact that I got to see Les Miserables in Denver this past Saturday, courtesy of my friend Kristen and her insistent need to set me up on dates! It had been years since I'd seen it, and I was blown away by the real Christian theological depth of such a blockbuster musical. It has so much to say about the law and grace, and how only grace truely transforms people, how it upends everything we believe about fairness and justice. But that's a topic for another blog. What struck me even more than the theological content was the contrast between the lives portrayed in the play and those who were enjoying their expensive seats watching them.

Sitting there, I could not help but think, who are les miserables today? Who are the people at the bottom of the economic ladder? Those forced to make the kinds of ethical decisions that those of us with sufficient incomes will never have to face? The ones willing to do just about anything, even die, to change their way of living?

Do I need to connect the dots for you?

It just struck me as supremely ironic, as the well-heeled of Denver were moved by the romanticized story of 19th century French peasants rising up against the bourgeiouse, many of the same would probably not be so moved by a more local revolution! But, the music is beautiful, the actors are white, and people die so photogenically, what's not to like? At the end, we stood in our lovely dresses and fancy suits, applauding the idea of a people's revolution, and then headed off to lovely resturants employing immigrant dishwashers and minimum wage janitors.

Funny, I do hear the people singing... they're singing the Star Spangled Banner. In Spanish.

I so want to be in sixth grade again

Okay, so I have found my new calling... sixth grade geography and art teacher! I've been substitute teaching at my old school in Greeley the past two days, and I have to say, sixth grade is awesome. What do they get to do? They get to create coloring books of the islands of Oceania, which means a class hour looking up pictures of Fiji and Kiribati and the Northern Mariana Islands. They get half an hour of SSR (silent sustained reading). They get to draw grid pictures, and play aound with those great smudgy oil pastels in art class. They have to learn the capitals of the Australian provinces and learn how to read map keys.

Dude, education is so wasted on the young. I think I've probably enjoyed the lessons way more than the kids, and have been refreshing my knowledge of world capitals and geographic features so that I will be KILLER at the next (sc)categories playoffs in Klaipeda.

In honor of sixth graders everywhere, the first person who can tell me what three nations share the island of Borneo shall recieve, courtesy of the US postal service, a piece of real mail in the form of a Colorado postcard. :) (Assuming I have your address, of course).

Statistics on Klaipeda Umbrella Usage

1 - blue & green polka-dotted, broke in wind upon first use
1 - burgundy, purchased at Maxima, done in by December storm
1 - black, purchased in Dublin, left the next day on bus to Glendalough, Ireland
1 - cream with black spots, left at my house by someone, thereafter lost by me at school
1 - black, crook-handled, came with apartment, currently unaccounted for

6 - Total umbrellas lost in Klaipeda, year one

Lilac time

Dispatches from my parent’s basement

It’s five thirty in the morning, and I’m awake. My throat is sore from the dry air, and even though I’m lying down, my pulse rate is higher than usual from the altitude.

Yep. I’m back.

Of course there were early the signals - like the Virgin Mary painted on the back of a mini-van I saw on the way back from the airport, the gigantic taco salad I could barely eat ¼ of at the steakhouse we stopped at for dinner, and the fact that Tuesday I both walked around in sandals and a T-shirt AND dodged cold rain rolling in.

I could rhapsodize about the beautiful sky, the sun going down over the mountains in the West, the fact that lilacs are peaking and the smell of them drifts everywhere. But what has been most beautiful in my first couple days back has been being welcomed back into a community, not just my temporal family, but God’s extended family. And knowing, once again, that God is directing the times and ways of my comings and goings.

I got home Monday night. My friend Kelli had been planning to come with my parents to meet me. Instead, she was sitting at a coffee shop in Greeley, getting her beautiful tender heart broken by an amazing Christian brother she had been dating. (Don’t worry, I asked her if I could write about this!). So, Tuesday morning I woke up, called Kel, and we spent the entire day walking around Greeley, talking, praying, crying and reading the Bible together. That evening, she invited me to come to the women’s Bible study group from my childhood church that meets at her house, and so I got to meet four great women and spend time praying with them.

I marvel at the way God brought me home the day that He did, full of “the comfort [I] have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:4), and able to hold up, and be held by in return, a dear friend who has held me up in so many ways over the 18 years of our friendship.

Digging through the boxes of my books that are stacked in the corner of my basement room for something to read last night, I found Dietrich Bonhoffer’s “Life Together.” In the first chapter he says something I have found to be profoundly true in recent months:

“God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother [or sister], in the mouth of man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”

And not only do we need brothers and sisters to speak truth to us when we are discouraged, but we also need them in the struggles against our own sins. I’ve been thinking lately about just how self-destructive the human heart is. When we are caught in habits and sins and thought patterns that are deadly to our souls, I think that many times we are willing to hurt ourselves in ways that we would never hurt another person. We might continue in a sin that is maiming us because secretly we believe that it is okay because we’re only hurting ourselves. But, once we enter into genuine community, we can no longer believe that our sin hurts us alone. Sometimes this community may even just be the love of one other person, but their love becomes the “check” that can hold us back from sin. This is why secrecy in our sins is so terrible – we think that we can’t approach others to be loved until “I get myself cleaned up.” But in actuality, we won’t ever move toward healing until we invite others into our struggles, because then our love for them, and their love for us, can enable us to overcome the weakness and selfishness that is at the root of most sins.

And so I’m thankful. That this time at home has already been full of prayer and sweetness and pain and reunion. And that this morning, somehow, I find myself on the corner of 11^th and 16^th, at Margie’s Java Joint, since High School the hippest coffee place in town and the only one that serves Allegro beans. In an hour I head to my old school to make a few dollars substitute teaching for the day. I’m back to the place my heart was first lit up by God’s grace and the excitement of His kingdom.

The traveler in her natural habitat... 

Trafalgar Square always makes me feel like I'm at the center of the universe in some way... 

But this was the best part of London! 

Returning

By now, I’ve set a precedent for lengthy accounts of my trans-Atlantic travel. There is just so much time to think and write while sitting in airports, on trains, in in-between-flight guesthouses! And because I’m so often traveling alone, I have to imagine I’m talking to someone and sharing my observations, making random side comments in my head – which now get their outlet on the blog. Lucky you.

First of all, I reiterate my earlier statement that Gatwick Airport is a hole. A blight. Whoever designed it should be severely tortured… or at least made to transit through it at peak hours. Arriving Sunday afternoon on my Lithuanian Airlines flight, I decided to time how long it took to get from my gate to the baggage claim. Now, I was walking at a swift clip, faster than most everyone, and it still took almost 20 minutes of power walking to get from the gate to baggage – counting moving walkways. At one point the hallway turns right (follow the signs), then left (more signs), then left again (signs), basically forcing you to walk in a U rather than straight ahead. I have more sympathy for mice every day.

Once I finally got my bags (monsters, which by all rights I should have had to pay extra for, had I not played the “this flight originated before the weight limit change” card, ha ha!), I had the good fortune to get a broken luggage cart that seemed determined to list starboard no matter how straight I wanted it to go. This is with an estimated 53 kilos (120 lbs!) of book-laden luggage on board.

Monday, transiting back through, I gained new distain for the place – maddeningly crowded check-in areas, with no seating ANYWHERE to redistribute luggage, security guards who guarantee there are shorter security lines upstairs, which turn out to be four sluggish attendants running ONE conveyer (this is on a Monday holiday in one of the busiest airports in the world), toilets that don’t flush, and which are tucked off in far-away corners that require more maze-like navigation to find, seating areas that clog traffic flow, no electrical outlets situated near a table or chair, but rather on support poles that would require one to trip half of Britain if wanting to use the outlet, and so on and so on…

Oh how I now revere DIA, its wide aisles, its logical layout, its simple linear design. Its perfect Zen state of polished marble and chrome and open space. Ahh…

But not all my travels were frustrating, really. I got the unexpected pleasure of an overnight in London at a, dare I say it, quaint guesthouse in Horley. England is green, lush, blooming, dewy and warm, and so I spent Sunday night wandering the neighborhood near my B&B, smelling the flowers, until I unintentionally stumbled across the local train station. Who can resist the chance for an evening wandering around London? I hopped on the 5:30 train (words cannot express my love of those moments on the train, watching England pass smoothly past my eyes) and spent the evening on a whirlwind tour of the city, looking in vain for an Evensong service. Using the remaining mental map from my semester study abroad in the UK, I took the Tube from Victoria station to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and arrived an hour after a service/lecture on Gerard Manly Hopkins (my favorite poet), aagh! From there I walked to Trafalgar, hoping St. Martin’s would have a later service, but apparently the English like their church before 7 p.m. on Sundays! Instead I worshiped at the sacred altar of American cuisine and enjoyed a Diet Coke, a pile of fries and cheeseburger. Beautiful.

One thing I’m learning I need to be careful of when traveling is tuning out people around me instead of listening to ways the Holy Spirit might be prompting me to interact with people. It’s hard for me because I’m not a naturally social person with those I don’t know. But, at a friend’s urging, “don’t be afraid to get into conversations,” I decided not to hook into my beloved I-pod on my 8 hour flight from London to the Twin Cities. Instead, I spent almost the entire time talking with my seatmate, Charlotte Luter of Surrey, England. She’s a girl about my age with beautiful natural red hair, who was traveling with her parents to visit her older brother in Las Vegas. She lives in a small town south west of London and for the last nine years has lived at home and works in a pet shop. I’m sure it’s just normal life to her, but to me it sounds like an upcoming film starring Kiera Knightly and Hugh Grant! Throughout the flight, I kept looking for ways to turn the conversation to spiritual matters, or at least to look for ways to be an encouragement to her. I am not good at this – I am learning how to listen to the Spirit. I need to be so much more sensitive to promptings! But it was lovely to get to know someone even just a little bit, and when we landed in MSP, I met up with her and her family after customs and walked with them to their gate.

Rechecking luggage after customs in Minneapolis, I noticed a blond girl with a Lithuanian flag pasted on the side of her suitcase. I hung back from the security lines a bit so I would end up next to her, and could ask her, “Is Lietuvos?” (From Lithuania?). “Taip,” she replied, “ir tau?” (Yes, and are you?). “Taip, as irgi” (yes, me too), was my answer, “as gyvenu Klaipedoje,” (I live in Klaipeda). “But you have an American passport,” was her next comment (in a Lithuanian sentence I won’t attempt to spell!). At that point we switched into a mixture of my hesitant Lithuanian and her excellent English. I cannot explain the excitement I felt at having a Lithuanian conversation in the middle of the Minneapolis airport – the airport I’ve probably traveled through more than any other! We chatted our way through the security line, and then I gave her a card with my Klaipeda phone number on it and an invitation to contact me the next time she and her American husband (they live part time in Duluth) want to go to the beach in Lithuania! It’s a very American thing to be so friendly and open, but I didn’t care at that moment, sensing that just maybe it isn’t an accident that I would bump into a Lithuanian in Minnesota, and that God is always working in mysterious ways!

Throughout my travels, I am learning to sense one profound truth. God is with me, He is in the seat next to me on the train, squished onto airplanes, lying beside me in my hotel rooms, holding my hand on the buses and metros that carry me all these ridiculous places across the planet. I am feeling and knowing in my gut that He is Immanuel – my lover and my friend and my Father. “I walk with grace my feet, and faith my eyes,” and for days now I’m singing in my head:

”Sventa Viespats Jis Visagalis
(hmm, hmm, hmm hmmm) visa zeme”
“Holy is the Lord God Almighty
The whole earth is filled with His glory”

(I wish I could remember the first words of the second line in Lithuanian! Jus Lietuvoje, Padek!)