This Morning

Stillness.

No wind

Under my heels, the ribbit, ribbit of rubber on snow, pressing me backward in a shift. The arms of trees lilting up and fluid, as aenenomes under water, in perfect synchrony, but frozen still, and laced with snow. Tops of pines unmoving and quiet with a blush of white, sun slow-fingering it’s way up trunks in shadows.

Stillness,

In the bushes the thrush of sparrows

(“you are worth much more than”)

Sparrows in fluttering dance in the spare branches, laced in by snow

Deep drifts, to the knees, fine-er than sugar, than sand, than powder, than cottonwood seeds at bloom

Snow on the iron gates of the cemetery, curling with the curve of a curved bench there by the path, the shadow of the scrolling iron on the smooth palate of snow

And everywhere, stillness. Not a memory of wind.

Mist rising up off the lake, cut by the thin grey reeds

Nothing but footsteps, the squeaking turn of ankles in the acres and acres of white

On the path, a bower of branches, snake-ribboned by snow soft.

Head up and eyes moistening, hat slipping off the head in a daze of glory, and sun.

Psalm 27/January 27

Egy dolgot kérek az Úrtol,
azért esedezem:
hogy az Úr házában lakhassam,
egész élétemben;
lathassam milyen josagos az Úr
és gyönyörködhessem templomában.

(Psalm 27:4 - in Hungarian/Magyar nyelv)

One thing I ask of the LORD
This is what I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
To gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
And to seek Him in His temple.

Since getting back to Lithuania after Christmas, God has been blessing me with the time every morning to be with Him, to pray, and to eat from His word. Yesterday, my reading took me back to this verse in Psalm 27 - a verse that has been a touchstone for me in recent years. According to my grandmother's book about her life, it's also the verse that she had taped on a card over her Howard City, MI kitchen sink during the years she and my grandfather minstered there. It's also the one verse I still remember in Hungarian, one I memorized 4 years ago.

Boil down all the teaching and learning and doing that characterizes discipleship, and for me, it comes down to this: ONE thing I ask of God and seek unendingly - to dwell with Him, to BE with Him, and to let His beauty be the image that corrects my own small vision.

There is a lot of ugliness in this world. In THIS world, this Klaipeda world. Yesterday, my morning began by being run into by a drunk man stumbling past me in the grocery store, stealing beer by tucking it under his coat. Coming out of a resturant with friends at 11 p.m., two agressive drunk young men yelled angrily in Russian about us foreigners; they stopped and hassled our group before we were able to sneak away. Then, sometime around 4 a.m. this morning, I woke up alone in my apartment to the angry sound of the main building door clanging, voices yelling, and feet stamping up and down the stairs, car doors slamming and voices raised in argument.

Vieno teprašau iš VIEŠPATIES,
tik vieno tenoriu -
gyventi VIEŠPATIES Namuose
per visas savo gyvenimo dienas,
gėrėtis VIEŠPATIES žavumu
ir lankyti jojo Šventyklą.

(Psalm 27:4 - Lithuanian/Lietuviu kalbos)

If my eyes are attuned only to the things I can physically see, there is a lot of reason to be hopeless. A lot of reason to give up and despair.

Choosing instead to gaze upon the LORD's beauty does not mean a passive acceptance of evil, does not mean my eyes will not see the ugliness and sin in front of me. But it does mean that I am able to look at the world and see the beauty beneath the fallenness, the beauty of God that this world was meant, once upon a time, to display. I may not see or experience His beauty now, but there is a promise that if I seek Him, I will one day see His goodness, as the last verses of the Psalm say:

I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
Be strong and take heart
And wait for the Lord -

Through the forest on Tuesday

Snow at last!

So, just where is this "mission field" you speak of?

Oh my goodness, this article is fabulous! If you want to intake a huge chunk of the Urbana teaching in a nutshell, check it out.

Another one bites the dust

Today I am mourning a loss.

As I have mentioned before, Klaipeda life can be an unhappy existence for the average umbrella. And what I have lost was not an average umbrella - it was a pretty blue one, with a cushy black ball handle, and nice nylon slipcover. It was an expensive one, which I bought in hopes that it would last longer than the cheap ones that failed me last year. And it did last longer - about six months. For a Klaipeda-dwelling umbrella, that's a ripe old age.

But, while walking over the railroad footbridge yesterday, the wind blew so hard that the previously-weakened metal handle BENT, CRACKED and BROKE, startling me into losing my balance, slipping on the wet stairs and landing on my butt on the steps. Ironically, the actually nylon covering part of the umbrella is intact - despite numerous inside-out flip ups. Now it is decorating the corner of my room where I've tied it to the curtain rod.

Score: Klaipeda - 7, Umbrellas - 0.

Rest in peace, old blue. :)

Week one roundup

I really should kill my computer.

If not for having internet at home, I am convinced I would be quite a bit more productive than I currently am. But then again, who says productivity is the ultimate measure of human life anyway!

So yes, I am back in Klaipeda for the spring semester, having arrived about a week ago now, on a late Saturday evening, fortunate enough to have caught a minibus from Vilnius with my friend & roommate Sarah, who arrived about an hour before I did. I will spare you the long version of my adventures getting out of Denver (they involve waking up to six inches of snow, frantically shoveling the driveway, being put in the wrong lines by uninformed United employees, missing a flight, a rebooking line, a run through security, all culminating in an hour-long deicing procedure on the DIA runway and my solemn vow never to fly United again. Unless they’re the cheapest option. ), but now I feel like I’ve been back for, oh, at least a month and am getting the hang of my new schedule and courses.

In keeping with LCC tradition, in addition to the Rhetoric & Communication course I taught last spring, I am yet again teaching a new course that I’ve never taught before (as I have every semester), but one that I lobbied hard for – Creative Writing. I’m hoping to keep myself motivated to write alongside the students, which could mean more frequent updates to the blog – yay for you, dear readers.

For those of you who have been diligently and lovingly praying for me, I wanted to give just a couple of highlights of week one. First was the student worship night on Thursday evening – in which the dormitory prayer room was filled up with students eager to begin the semester in worship together. It just seriously ministered to my heart to see so many students there – I think I have (I KNOW I have) felt quite discouraged this past fall by all the students and friends who have been struggling to hold whole-heartedly to their faith. I have felt serious spiritual oppression at LCC and in Lithuania, and it gave me hope to see others who are committed to worshipping God together. Moreover, God gave me a really powerful sense that it is not up to ME to revive people! I know that sounds pretty presumptuous, but when I spend so much of my time talking and praying with people who are struggling, it has begun to feel like I have to be the one to be strong, to help pull them up out of whatever pit they’re in, etc. God just really reminded me that what we always need is HIS Spirit and HIS power to do the reviving and renewing. We can’t conjure it or fake it or do it in our own strength. We can only go to Him in prayer, and ask for Him to move. It gave me a lot of peace to feel that truth.

Secondly, I was also really encouraged by the TWENTY (20) girls who came to Women’s Fellowship on Friday night. Ironically, having that many people together for Bible study is almost not ideal, but it was fun. I am hoping that other “older” women at LCC will also be open to hosting groups or opening their homes in ways that will allow this kind of community to be built and strengthened.

So many thoughts from Urbana are still bubbling around in my head – a lot about church and how we do missions and how I can transfer what I’ve experienced to the lives of my friends and students here. I have a chance to share in chapel here at LCC on Jan 24^th, and hope to be able to challenge with what I say then.

On a lighter note – I should mention that the weather’s been a little bizarre. No snow, and mild temperatures. I’ve been riding my bike a lot this week, and even took a jaunt through the woods with a friend last Sunday afternoon! Today and this weekend it’s been almost shockingly windy, enough to blow roof tiles off and onto defenseless car windshields below (as happened moments ago behind our building). I guess its been an oddly warm winter all over Europe, but after my “3 Blizzards in 3 Weeks” extravaganza in Colorado, I’m missing snow a little bit!

One prayer from Urbana

Wanted to share just this quick thought from a prayer I prayed at Urbana:

This coming year of 2007, I am asking God to do things that I don't expect - things I have not asked for, anticipated, thought of myself, planned for, desired or forecast! Too often, if not always, my prayers center around asking God to do what I want to see done in my life and in the lives of those around me.

But I want to be surprised, astounded, drop-jawed, joy-filled, and expectant to see the Lord, by His power, do things that I cannot imagine or predict. Then I will know that it is He who works in us and through us, so that "we know that this power is from God and not from us."

Ecclesia

There are a few times when I am convinced that the English language would be greatly improved if we had a plural “you.” And I mean something better accepted than the southern “y’all.”

This was one of the thoughts I had at Urbana this past week… and because I get on a plane to head back to Lithuania tomorrow morning, I want to do my best to give at least a few of my impressions and thoughts from the conference before I lose thoughts in the rush of a new semester. Probably the most accurate thing to say was said by one of the seminar speakers – “the Urbana experience is like trying to get a drink of water from a firehose.” It’s an onslaught of information that might easily drown you, but it’s also the stuff of life!

So, I had my thoughts about the need for an English plural “you” as we went through the daily expositions of the book of Ephesians. So much of that book talks about “living worthy of the calling you have received.” (The Urbana theme this year) However, it was clear from our discussions and from the context of the passages, that the calling YOU have received is a calling to a group, to a plural unity, in short, to the church.

If I had to give you my summary of Urbana, it is that it became abundantly clear to me that it is the church - and my individual life within, not distinct from it – that is meant to give glory to God by participating in the redemption of the world. At the end of Ephesians, Paul uses the phrase, “now to Him be glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus.” God’s glory is seen in the church.

Maybe this is obvious to you, but it was refreshing to me to hear so much teaching about the beautiful, diverse, GLOBAL body of Christ. And moreover, to experience it with 22,000 others of all imaginable races, ethnicities and nationalities. It was refreshing to me to see and hear the gospel presented as something more than an individual set of beliefs that can be carried out alone, but rather as an all-encompassing lifestyle that requires connection to a larger body.

This isn’t to say I didn’t have some resistant moments throughout the week, and things that struck me as problematic within the Christian subculture at the conference, some of which I’ll try to share here (don’t even GET me started on Rick Warren!), but overall, I enjoyed the week of simply sinking down into the life of the larger body of Christ, and knowing I am connected to others who are also passionately seeking His ways.