The Big Story

How many times do you get to teach a class that involves showing excerpts from the Tolkien documentaries on the Lord of the Rings extended edition DVDs? If you're me this semester... lots! I want to post more about this later, but wanted to share that this week in the 20th Century Myth class I've gotten to share some of my personal ideas about myth, story and Christian perspectives/ uses of literature. It is beyond rewarding - especially when nearly every day our conversations spill out the door of the classroom, and I find myself walking down the hall talking about why I think Jesus so often used parables, how we learn and live by stories, and the necessity of incarnative experience in Christian faith (okay, haven't quite voiced that last one yet, but am getting there!).

Stay tuned, maybe you'll get a taste of my own manifesto on faith and literature, and why it's such a driving force in my life. It's so fun to be able to formulate and synthesize the ideas that have been pooling in my head from a (short) lifetime of study and reading, and to actually see those connecting with the lives of students.

It's coming

I saw it, the dreaded sign. The omen...

Mittens and scarves are for sale at Iki.

Thoughts from my morning reading

"The degree to which I am willing to enter into the suffering of another person reveals the level of my committment and love for them. If I am not interested in your hurts, I am not really interested in you. Neither am I willing to suffer to know you nor to be known by you. Jesus' example makes these truths come alive in our hearts."
- Michael Card, A Sacred Sorrow

Ordinary Life

It's 11 p.m. on Saturday night, the students who were here for movie night just left, and Sarah and I are cozied up with our laptops. Tonight 10 students came over and I introduced them to the joy of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Watching it, I realize I should have publicized it as a vocabulary enrichment evening! I had forgotten how thick and British (and luscious to the native English-speaking ear) the dialouge can be. As the girls were leaving, I found myself telling the story of the Thanksgiving weekend when my dear aunt Carol kept telling ourselves, "we'll just watch one more episode. Just one more episode...", until we found ourselves still huddled on their sectional couch finishing the movie at 3 in the morning! It is good just to be women together, and relish the time to relax and just be....

Today Sarah, Iris (another English teacher) and I went to Kretinga, a town slightly north of Klaipeda, which I really love. It has beautiful little churches, a lot of parkland and paths for walking, and a lovely indoor "Winter Garden," which I'll definitely have to go back to visit in the winter. The weather was unimaginably gorgeous, and I was blessed to discover, in the teahouse bookshop, a printed copy of the Lithuanian poem I posted here a month or so ago. ("Tu esi Dievas, as tvarinys..."). I'm thrilled to have a complete copy of it!

A good day, an ordinary day.

Rustavi

This evening I experienced one of the coolest things of my year in Lithuania. My Kyrgzs friend/student Altynai had told me about a the Rustavi Georgian men's choir (that's Republic of Georgia, in the Caucasas) coming to Klaipeda, and how much she wanted to go. I honestly didn't know much about the type of music, other than that Georgia is home to some of the most ancient monasteries in the world. In my imagination, a men's choir from there must sound like those solemn Bendictine chants that were so popular on the radio in the 90s! I wanted to spend time with her, and am always up for hearing unusual regional music, so I had her get me a ticket.

I cannot even begin to describe what an amazing sound this chior has, and so unlike what I imagined. Imagine 9 barrel-chested guys BELTING out perfectly harmonized, golden-toned acapella folk songs, in a language you can't even begin to understand. I could not help but think that my dad would have loved it (being the fan of such acapella men's groups as The King's Singers), and that there is no way a recording can compare to hearing the atoms of a concert hall vibrate while sitting in the front row! Their harmonies snake around each other and blend and modulate, and grow... It is seriously not like anything I've heard before. Altynai and I both said how much we could hear mountains in between the notes - it's a kind of music that sounds like it must have been invented while tending sheep on high hills, for the purpose of singing messages from one mountain village to another!

Distraction of the Day

A little piece of pirate humor, courtesy of my friend Elyssa. I especially like the bit where they analyze what part of speech is signified by "AARRR!"

An afternoon along the sea 

Sabbath Rest

So many of you have warned me not to take on too much and to be sure to get some time to relax, so I thought I should report on my restful weekend. :) The weather has gotten fallish here suddenly, which means a slight chill, but endlessly blue skies, and occasional breezes. It is far too nice to sit indoors any longer than necessary, so Friday evening I got home from work and promptly headed back out to the sea. It was a wonderful hour and a half walk by myself, and I enjoyed playing around with my camera. I think I'd forgotten I HAVE a camera!

Saturday morning was a kick-off pancake breakfast with about 15 girls and women leaders from LCC. We're hoping to put together some women's groups, focusing on different studies and formats, for the coming year. It was nice just to relax with a house full of interesting and energetic young women! After my house finally cleared out from breakfast (at 2:30 p.m.!), I borrowed a friend's bike and rode by myself to Karkle, a small town up the coast from Klaipeda. It's not a long ride, but I was happy to remember how easy it is to get out of the city here so quickly. The air was perfect and a golden-autumn feel, with the smell of burning leaf piles wafting through the forest. Once at Karkle, I walked the bike back down the shore and looked for amber, drug my toes through the sand, and took lots of pictures. Back at home last night, I cuddled under my comforter on the couch, drank tea, watched a movie with my roommate and knitted a few more rows on my scarf.

Spending so much time by myself and in the outdoors this weekend has been very centering for me, and I am grateful for the change of pace from week one. And for the weather, which we're all soaking up earnestly, knowing that snow is coming soon!

Saturday morning Women's Fellowship pancake breakfast... we had exactly as many people as chairs. :) 

"no or more less than anyone else has"

I know they say that smell is the strongest sense tied to memory, but I think music must be at least as powerful.

Tonight I'm washing dishes, listening to "Over the Rhine," a band a friend introduced me to last fall. I must have listened to their album over and over again most of last November. So now tonight, I close my eyes and can see the snow piling up in the fields outside of Klaipeda, the fields I used to be able to see out the window from my fourth floor apartment. I can hear my own voice echoing off the tiny kitchen walls in my old place, practicing to sing at the mid-semester talent show.... the sensation of time having stopped is palpable.

Do any of you, dear readers, have songs or albums that conjure a specific memory or era of your life? Melancholy or otherwise. :)

Shifting Gears

As teachers around the world know, the first week of school is always insane. And no matter what you do beforehand to prepare, no matter how many lessons you have planned and ready to go... that first week is always going to feel like getting run through a high-speed maze! For some reason, though, this past week was even crazier than a usual first week, and after it was all over I woke up on Sunday morning with a scratchy throat and achy head. I guess I can't just expect my body to shift into high gear so quickly!

That whining aside, things are off to a good start. There have been a lot of emotional highs and lows for me this week. I find that I still enjoy teaching the writing class, and I love that most of my students are first-years. They have a lot of energy and still look around at LCC with eyes full of wonder (and confusion, yes, because most of them are still getting used to processing all their lectures in English!). I also have a first-year seminar group this year, as I did last year, although the feel of the group is different. I have 7 guys and 4 girls, and a much lower percentage of international students than before. I am extremely thankful for the student helper who helps me teach that class, she is a student I got to know really well on the Ukraine mission trip this past summer, and we have fun together.

Another major blessing for me is the literature class I'm teaching. I was asked to teach an independent study class for 2 fourth-year students who needed another literature credit and had no other options. We decided to morph that class into a full one, and now I have a whopping 4 students! We're studying C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and other Christian fantasy writers. It is wonderful because they're authors and ideas that I could talk about in my sleep (in fact, I think I have!), and the girls are all really engaged and interested in approaching literature from a perspective of faith. I could not ask for more in a teaching experience!

After surviving the teaching week, our department had a day-long retreat (i.e. meetings) to discuss such exciting things as behavioural course objectives and standardized rubric use in writing classes, and etc.... I was asked to talk a little bit about writing assessment and how to improve LCC's writing instruction. Obviously, this has a lot to do with my graduate work, and I'm excited to have a role to play in developing new things here. I have to admit still feeling slightly out-of-my-league in sharing at dept. meetings and whatnot, but I am learning how to trust what I've learned and to be more confident in sharing my ideas.

I keep joking that if all I had to do was teach, I would be just fine, but since this is LCC, oftentimes we teachers feel like we're the student life department too. And actually, I wouldn't have it any other way - the freedom of interacting with students on a personal level is WHY I'm here, right? This week with student relationships was blessed - with a first dorm worship night on Friday that I was able to participate in, a reunion party with my Ukraine mission team on Saturday evening, and then a fantastic lunch conversation after church with some students and study abroads from North America at a nearby resturant. I am getting the sense that my social life this year may be even more student connected than last year was, which is great. This coming Saturday I'm hosting a women's brunch (okay, just pancakes) at my apartment. From the number of girls who've said they'll come, my place could be bursting at the seams! I pray that it will be. The purpose of the brunch is to present the opportunity for women's fellowship groups and Bible studies this year, and there seems to be a lot of interest. I am especially encouraged to see many of the students who went on mission trips this summer continuing to be involved in spiritual life activities and coming to chapel.

Tomorrow I am supposed to speak in chapel, on the topic of "Who is Jesus?" I know, only an amatuer non-theologian would be crazy enough to tackle the topic in a 20 minute talk! I'm not sure yet what I'm going to say, but I want to speak honestly and compelling-ly. I need to remember that the simple, unadorned gospel is more beautiful than anything we might want to embellish it with. I would appreciate your prayers as I prepare and speak.

So, in terms of my outward "service" life, things this week have been really good. It's funny, though, how when you stop and begin to look deeper into your heart, there can be such a disconnect between what your outward life looks like and how your inner life feels. I know that I am exactly where God wants me to be. I believe that there is no safer place than in the center of His will, but in recent days I have been battling a real sense of emptiness and lack of hope. I feel like it would be easy to keep right on serving and investing in relationships and doing everything I know I should do, but meanwhile my heart feels far away from God. I don't know if I can explain it other than to say that I feel lonely, even with so many people around. I think all of us feel "unknown" at times, and I'm feeling that. This Sunday at church was a children's dedication Sunday, and all the families gathered up on the stage for their new babies to be blessed. Sitting in the midst of a row of students, I just felt like I didn't have a family, that it was just me, and this is all I can ever hope or expect for my life.

As usual, God is taking me through exercises in trusting Him to provide for all of my needs - especially my heart needs. I seem to want to keep telling Him that He isn't enough, but that only means that I haven't drawn close to Him, I haven't discovered the BOUNDLESSNESS of His love and let it fill me.

Say it isn't so!

Please pause with me in a moment of silence for Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin, who died today. In my mind, he will always be remembered for the immortal words, "whaat a lil' beau-tee!"