Report: 2 weeks back

Ah friends…

First, let me say that I will never cease to be amazed by how much wholeness I feel simply from washing my dishes and gazing at my clean counters.

I’ve been back two weeks already and no doubt you faithful readers will have noticed the dramatic uptick in my frequency of blog posts! This may have something to do with my amazing open teaching schedule this semester, which I’m afraid has given way to somewhat obsessive blog-surfing, linking and general rabbit-trail-following that I’ll probably need to curb here soon (no doubt sometime around when I collect the first set of essays!). I do take refuge in the fact that, as my friend Karen put it yesterday, “if you were doing the same reading in book form, would you feel as guilty?” Thank you, Karen.

A feeling passed over me last night as I wrestled to put my brain to sleep, and I think it felt like hope.

There have been scores of blessings this first week and a half, all of which remind me that God has not forgotten me over here in this windy Baltic land! I am blessed by my new colleague Karen in the office next to mine, for walking home from school with, with whom I have a standing weekly date to sit down and write on Tuesday afternoons. I am blessed by laughter over lunch with Janis and Charlotte and Karen after church on Sunday. And by the deliberate, honest reading of Psalms with Maja and Keith beforehand. (And that I actually went to church for the first time since September.) Blessed especially by the prayer that I'm praying every morning and night, by the fact that my teaching load is precisely HALF what it was in the fall, and that I get to teach creative writing again.

Yesterday, I was sitting at my kitchen table (hence, all my kitchen table posts!) looking around my apartment, thinking, “this is the life you want.” Oh how I rush and grumble toward some imagined future when all my social, intellectual, physical and emotional needs will be poised in perfect balance. But now, I have work to do, enough of it, but time to sit and drink tea and talk with friends. Time to bake bread, to make dinner and set a full table. I even have enough time to plan travel in March, and friends to go with.

Even beyond this present well-being, I feel the metaphorical dark clouds over my future back in the States beginning to part a bit. I am invited to teach in Turkey again this July and August, which is not only adventure but the hope of a modest paycheck after 3 years of volunteering. I’m excited and heartened by the engagement of yet another close friend this past weekend, continuing the life-game of Red Rover we all seem to be playing. This brings my May/June wedding slate to five, yes five, and I can be home for all of them! (Applications to be my date will be posted soon. !)

As I think about work I might do next year, a process that was giving me anxiety episodes back at home, I realize that what I end up doing is so much less important than who I continue becoming. Part of me thinks that sounds like a cheesy Hallmark statement, but more deeply I think this is the essence of being a disciple. Faith seems to have resolved itself to a very simple, simple core – to be faithful in trusting that what God says about the world is true, and to actively rest in His mercy.

No matter what the calendar says of my age this year (“let us not speak of it,” I’ve been saying!), I somehow feel like I’m about to graduate from college again. The options are open. I can do anything or everything.

What I realize from my vantage point here is that I have to go home with as much intentionality as I came to Lithuania. I need to choose deliberately and thoughtfully where I will live, what I will drive, where I’ll go to church, how I will spend whatever little money I might make – otherwise the cultural default settings will do the choosing for me.

So as I look ahead…

I want to hold still.
I want to stay put somewhere and dig in, and for the time being, stand still when my heart gets hungry for new horizons, more stamps in the passport, more languages.
I want time to read.
A small house with a small kitchen.
Not riches, richness.
Simplicity and quiet.
A very ordered, contemplative life, with time to sit with cups of coffee in my hands, listening to friends.
Time for taking walks, for writing things in notebooks.
My grandparents’ old piano.
Hospitality.
Growth.
Commitment and patience.
Contribution to my neighbor's good as well as my own.
Contribution to my city’s good as well as my own.
Civility.

Good grief, I am so old fashioned! Does anybody actually lead lives like this anymore?

Thanks for letting me ramble on, friends – I am happy to have this outlet for all the processing I know I need to do to meaningfully close this chapter of my life over the next few months. Those of you who have been emotionally tagging along from the beginning of this thing are amazing in your faithfulness to me, even with all my doubts and restlessness! (I feel like I should shout out, “who’s still with me!?”) And when the time comes, thank you for giving me something to come home to.