Why so downcast oh my soul?

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.

O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
Who orderest all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
And teach us in her ways to go.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory over the grave.

O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

O come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.

O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Team

Top 10 frequently asked questions

1. Did you graduate yet?

No. I wore a cap and gown and walked across a stage this summer in good faith that the work I complete this semester will be satisfactory to finish with a Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages by Christmas. Twice monthly until then I will submit chapters of a final language program design project. It’s a good way for me to articulate what I’m actually designing and teaching, and at the same time provide a workable product for the school to continue to modify and change in the future. Azusa Pacific University was something that I did in addition to my ESI contract, so even though my studies will be coming to an end in December, I will still continue to teach under ESI at my school.

2. Do you still raise $ support?

Yes. With my returning teacher discount for this year plus the remaining balance from last year, I need to raise a total of $3100 plus airfares (which are usually in the $1200-$1500 range for round trips). You can help me stay here by giving at http://teachoverseas.org/contribute.php . One time gifts are greatly appreciated, as are commitments to give $20 or $50 monthly for 10 months, or until June 2009.

3. Are you going to live in Slovakia forever?

Maybe. But right now I’m just committing to serve my school for one year at a time. Exciting news: as of this month, I have a work visa that’s good until the summer of 2010! Pray for me as I think about the future.

4. What does your ministry look like?

This summer someone commented that I was “not a real missionary” in the classic sense of the word. I would agree in that I call myself a teacher first. However, some of my best conversations with students have come out of class discussions. Teaching Literature and Writing is a great way to get teenagers to really think, form and support opinions about meaningful themes. For example, once, after reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart, students moved to different parts of the room based on how strongly they felt about statements about having a conscience, committing crimes, and experiencing guilt, grace, and forgiveness. One girl stayed afterwards to find out what I really felt, and I was able to share about Jesus in my own life! This year I’m excited to strengthen relationships with students, some of whom I’ve interacted with on an almost daily basis for 2 years now. Pray for us.

One way to do this is to continue the “coffee-time chats” that my former teammate Katie and I tried a few times last year. We announce the time and place in advance, and see who shows up for English conversation in a more informal, non-school setting. My goal is to organize one at least once a month, maybe even weekly as everybody gets into a regular schedule. Pray for us.

Also, most of my students are my “friends” on Facebook, which is a great way for me to be transparent about my life and faith as well as keep conversations going. Once I updated my status in Slovak and was surprised by the number of comments I got from students. So I know they’re watching me and will read whatever I write or look at whatever picture I post. Pray for me.

5. What do you actually teach?

This year I’m teaching freshmen General Literature and Writing, sophomore American Literature, junior British Literature, senior Elective Academic Writing, and super senior Advanced Literature for English Maturita and State Exams. The last two classes have never been taught before, as this is the first year that the school will be functioning as a complete 5-year bilingual program. So it’s still kind of crazy, but I get to be creative, and I like it. I have the coolest job. Pray for me.

6. How can we pray for you?

More and more I’m recognizing a theme among my friends and colleagues, in my students, and in the people I see in my neighborhood and around town. It’s simply this: they have no idea that they are known and loved by God, and they try to fill up their lives with beautiful clothes, thermal spas and perfect holidays, alcohol, a great education, a boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. Living here, it’s easy for me to get sucked into the same mindset, even when I know better. Pray that my life would reflect the truth and freedom I know in Christ, and that I would open my mouth to tell about it.

7. What's your ESI team like this year?

This will be my third year teaching in Slovakia with Educational Services International(or anywhere). I still live with my two original roommates - Karin and Jenni - my good friends, closest encouragers, and accountability partners. The larger Slovakia team includes Vic, Darla, Anna and Dominik D’Ettorre, plus an additional team of three new women (Katie, Kate, and Kim) who arrived two weeks ago. Pray for us.

8. Did you go home this summer?

I WAS home (meaning western NY) for a quick few days at the beginning of July before heading out to CA for 2 ½ weeks to study. Then I was home again for 2 ½ weeks before flying back here in mid-August. Pray for my family.

9. How's your Slovak?

Pretty good! I’m at the fun stage where I can piece together meaning during sermons and staff meetings when I know the context. I can eavesdrop on buses and students, and I can read signs and children’s books. I can carry on simple conversations with my friends and the old lady whose house we stayed at this past weekend. Slovaks are very complimenting and encouraging when they see that an American is trying to speak their heart language, which makes it very motivating for me to try. And today I ordered postage stamps to the US in the plural form with the correct grammatical declensions at the ends of 4 different words(with the help of my friend, but still, now I know how to do it). Great success!

10. Were there any Slovaks in the Beijing Olympics?

Yes, and they won 3 medals in canoeing/kayaking, 1 medal in shooting, and 1 medal in wrestling. Woohoo!

Abraham, vision, & new vocabulary

I feel like I have unpacked a deeper set of bags since January. It’s like the difference between living out of a suitcase or deciding to take my things out and hang them up on hangers and put them in drawers.

Since January, I’ve gotten into the habit of sitting in my canvas Ikea chair with my coffee, reading through the book of Romans again, and looking out my window. I can see over 200 windows across the street from where I sit, depending on which way I turn my head. Somehow watching the rest of my neighborhood wake up and open their shades to the east, or come out on their balconies to smoke and watch traffic, or shake out blankets...all brings a sense of reality and time and place to what I’m reading. If what God says is true, then it’s true for my neighbors; it's true for all those people waking up across the street.

Tonight my Slovak textbook reading ended with the phrase: "Ale čo nie je, môže byť. A tak sa učim." (But what is not, can be. And so I study.) This ran into what has been sticking in my head from Easter and from the book of Romans chapter 4, about “…the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were. Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed…being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.”

As I was preparing to come to Slovakia for the first time I had been studying the life of Abraham with my InterVarsity group at college. What stuck out to me at the time was how God told him to “Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.” So I jumped into the Abraham adventure and now here I am a year and a half into…an indefinite amount of time here. Abraham had to wait a long time to see the fulfillment of what God promised to do. What does God call the things around me now? What are the things that are not that could be? How does he speak of my students? My friends? My passions and visions for my life and the city surrounding me?

It’s easy to get near-sighted in grading, lesson plans, APU papers, Slovak flashcards, and having a respectable social life for a 24 year old. Pray for me to have long-term, far-sighted vision to see beyond my own living room of the routine I have grown accustomed to, and look out at the reality of the 200 windows across the street from me. What is God's language about these people and this place?

hound dogs, my innermost being, and swimming pools

An image I took home from my ESI spiritual retreat in March was to be like a hound dog sniffing out what God is doing and follow that track with my nose on the scent and my tail up in the air to announce what’s happening. Here’s what God is doing in Bratislava: churches of different denominations have been united in 24-7 prayer for over half a year now. There’s a thriving group of young and old Christians at my church and others around the city that are excited about being filled with the Spirit and making an impact on their city. I wake up excited to go each weekend.

Now, previously, something said in me, “They’ve got it altogether, (which is true) there’s enough of them that have the right idea, (which is true) so why do they need me around? I am useless here. I just grade the papers.” What a ridiculous lie! The right perspective says, “Hey! Look at all this cool stuff happening around town! I am not the beginning of the work God is doing in Bratislava, and I am not the end of it! But God set me down here to participate fully in it! It’s a coming to terms with saying that the fact that I am living on the "other" side of the world is evidence that God is living and active- here! And in me!

Other scents: I have more longstanding relationships with students who are willing to be open and honest about their lives with me. One of my Slovak colleagues expressed it this way, “I didn’t want to get to know anybody really well just to have to go through seeing them leave again.” Knowing that I’ll be around for another year and a half has amplified my own desire to get more plugged in. Relationships that I've been praying for have been deepening and new ones are sprouting up in my colleagues and students alike.

My Father knows every desire of my heart: One Sunday afternoon I was sitting in a coffee shop killing an hour before going swimming for the first time with three other teachers from school. I was making a list of how I could most efficiently fill the following needs that I had: to be social and have friends outside of school, to practice speaking Slovak, and to get some physical exercise. It was only later that I realized by going swimming with these people, I was able to do all those things at once. There I was scheming when God had already laid it out in front of me.

It's like being shown this beautiful 50 meter pool in the shell of an ugly old communist building in the middle of a block I have been shopping on and busing around for a year now, just 200 meters from where I had sat and had my coffee an hour before. It's been there all along. And God has been working here all along. I just need to open my eyes to see what he's up to.

Below are some albums of things I've been up to with people I love...click on the pictures to read the captions

birthday surprises

Vysoké Tatry

people surrounding me

salt potatoes

I thought everyone ate salt potatoes and beef on weck, but as it turns out, such delicacies belong to my very own corner of the world. So I did a little research. And while Wikipedia is probably not the most anthropologically sound source, it's a good start for looking at myself as a foreigner. (And so that my students see I cite all my sources, all quotes come from Wikipedia as of March 18th, 2008). This is what I've learned about my own hometown culture by living far away from it:

SALT POTATOES:

"Salt potatoes are bite-size "young" white potatoes scrubbed and boiled in their jackets. Salt is added to the water to the point of saturation, giving them their name, and unique flavor and texture. After cooking, salt potatoes are served with melted butter."

"Salt potatoes are a regional dish of Central New York, typically served in the summer when the young potatoes are first harvested. Salt springs located around Onondaga lake were used to create consumable salt that was distributed through out the north-east via the Erie Canal. Salinated water was laid out to dry on large trays. The salt residue was then scraped up, ground, and packaged. Salt potatoes were created in the nineteenth century by Irish immigrants working the springs who cooked their potatoes in the salty brine."

And my my roommates and their mothers balked at the thought of boiling potatoes in salt water. Ha! I'm not crazy! Of course, I had to pick out the smallest of the old winter potatoes instead of new baby ones, and even though I used every grain of salt in the house, there wasn't enough for that delicious crusty skin. There they are in my pie pan above.

BEEF ON WECK:

I've been told that Slovaks don't eat a lot of beef because of Mad Cow Disease. (I thought that had blown over). But needless to say I haven't hosted any big family dinners or graduation parties which would call for beef on weck, or prepared any beef, for that matter, since I've been here. But oh how I miss it; it has become part of my gilded picture of home.

So, for my non-New Yorker friends: a "kummelweck, or sometimes kimmelweck or even kümmelweck, is a salty roll that is popular in Western New York. It is similar to a Kaiser roll but topped with pretzel salt and caraway seeds. Kummelweck is commonly shortened to “weck," and often served in the Buffalo metropolitan area with roast beef and horseradish to form a sandwich known colloquially as "beef on weck."

"A typical style of beef on weck sandwich is made from slow-roasted rare roast beef hand carved to provide about 1/2 inch (2 cm) of meat on the bottom half of the roll. The cut face of the top half of the roll may be dipped in the juices from the roast. Prepared horseradish is usually provided for the diner to spread on the top half of the roll to taste. In the Buffalo area, it is common to see jars of horseradish on eatery tables that serve the sandwich, much as you might see ketchup bottles available in other restaurants. The sandwich was featured on the PBS special Sandwiches That You Will Like."

LAMB CAKE:

Here's a final Buffalo connection: Last Easter when my roommates and I were in Krakow I kept
seeing shop windows decorated with lamb cakes like the one Mom always made me for my birthday from the mold that we inherited from Grandma Hamm. As it turns out, the lamb cake is a traditional Polish Easter food. Poland and Slovakia are neighbors, so the Polish Easter Lamb, or Baranek Wielkanocny is very similar to the Slovak Veľkonočný baránok. This year Karin surprised me with the real thing which I've enjoyed, piece by piece, for the past few mornings with my coffee:

Back in Slovakia

Photos from Thailand

FAQ: Why Thailand?

I’ve just returned from my 2^nd winter session studying for my Master of Arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Why Thailand? Because everybody in the Azusa Pacific University TESOL program already lives and teaches English in Asia except for me and two other women who are also part of Educational Services International in Europe. Thailand is the closest, freest, and cheapest place to stay, and the time and place coincides with several other conferences for other sending organizations and Asian school holidays. For me, it makes a nice escape from my cloudy, snowless city winter in Slovakia. But imagine trying to explain to the passport controller in Frankfurt, Germany why you’re coming in from Vienna, Austria but you work in Bratislava, but you’re going to Thailand to study English, but you’re really from the New York. (Obviously they let me through).

The first week’s course was one of my capstone classes called Action Research in Teaching English as a Second Language. So I’ll be researching the effects of different kinds of peer and teacher feedback on written assignments in my writing classes and how they affect error correction and writer confidence. (I actually think this is interesting.) Then the second course was called Second Language Assessment- another really practical immediate application to my teaching.

It was so refreshing to be a student again and soak up wisdom from professors I think really highly of…and have some time to think…and soak up some heat and sun…and eat spicy food with spoons and chopsticks…and lots of fruit…and have my own room for a week until my new roommates arrived…and drive up to the Thai/Myanmar/Laos border on the weekend…and be encouraged by my cohort mates with similar stories about teaching, working, studying, and being a foreigner.

It was all great fun, but like all holidays should do, it made me appreciate being back ‘home’ in my own European city again. Throughout the spring I’ll finish the work for these two classes, and then in July I’ll travel to APU's campus in Azusa, CA to present my research and take two final classes- Teaching Pronunciation and a second capstone called Language Curriculum Design. I’ll finish the work for those two classes during the fall semester and receive my M.A. in TESOL in December of this year. That was quick!

To cease from striving

Before last Saturday I had never been in a place I would call God-forsaken. But somehow drinking the "welcome to Laos" snake whiskey felt equivalent to internalizing the sin that separates me from God, like eating the fruit in the garden of Eden, and then getting kicked out. This garden was flat reflecting pools in rice paddies which gave way to dusty villages, banana trees in fields burnt out of hillsides, and valleys that dropped off below the road as we wound our way up into the mountains into the late afternoon.

For hours as we drove I watched the scenery go by and thought about how Adam walked with God in this same cool of the day when everything is gilded, and how I was far far away from such a place. Doubts settled deeply in me and stuck like layers of dust and sweat and truck exhaust as we finally all piled out and stepped into the village. It was beautiful but heartbreaking. I didn’t want to be a tourist anymore; I wanted to run out of there and get away from God and my thoughts on a hillside somewhere, like Adam and Eve when they became ashamed and tried to hide from God in the heaviness of sin. Why is it that evil in the country seems to settle down like cool air into hollows? My little god-box was broken and I wondered: Where is the God I know here? Who is he really? Does his hand reach even this far? Can he see me even here? Does he apply at all here? And I was afraid.

But O Glory! Sunday morning back in the city I heard a message preached on grace which was really nothing that I had never heard before, but somehow this time I GOT IT! (Maybe the different translation of my little pocket-sized Bible that I packed to save space allowed me to pay more attention to the words and not just skim over them like another old memory verse: yadda yadda yadda.) What I knew before is still valid, but now I have this deeper understanding, and it is essentially this: that grace is a gift, that in striving to earn it I loose it, that by faith alone I am a child of God’s, and by clothing myself with the righteousness of Christ I CAN walk again with God, just like Adam did in the cool of the day, every day.

And so everything ties together back to the word which resounded with me at home over Christmas: I can “cease from striving” and fall back into grace. Hallelujah! This must be what it means to go farther up and further in to God. And who I am continues to be stretched.

Discernment

One day after class a friend and I decided to walk instead of taking a red taxi truck to the city center. More than once we turned one way but had the gut feeling we really should have gone the other way. Still, it was kind of fun get a deeper a sense for Chiang Mai: dust in my nose and on my bare feet, couples whizzing by on scooters and motorbikes, exhaust and dirty air except for the occasional heavenly whiff of jasmine, and then the gagging vomit smell of overripe papaya. Scents and traffic pulsed at us in waves like alternating pockets of warm and cool air.

Then turning down a trafficless street, I felt my whole self observing, soaking in information, aware of the play of sun and shadow, every face looking down from a window, and every crack in the sidewalk. And then suddenly my stomach clenched and I looked up from the ground to take in the street we had just walked into. Temple compounds rose up on either side of us, and monks in orange were kneeling and chanting up ahead. It was as if we had walked into another pocket of air or another wave of scent where the spiritual realm was as tangible as the smell of incense or the sensation of air moving the hairs on my arm or the back of my neck. We were all very aware of each other but pretended not to watch as we kept walking by.

It made me wonder about all of us foreigners traveling to Thailand. We Westerners are all either humanitarian-missionary types, or hemp wearing, faux-Buddhist backpackers, or eye-contact avoiding middle aged men on the prowl for girls, free from the home constrains of conscious. All tourists here are running from something; all expats are hiding away.

What do they think of us all when we come here? How does our God apply here? And what do they think of us all when they come to Europe to see our cold, drab, empty, stone cathedrals? Do they know better than us that God does not live there, alone by himself, available to the public only on Sundays and according to the schedule? How will they know that God lives among us, not in temples of stone? How will they know that the Holy Spirit teaches my own spirit and prompts me even to turn to the left or right on a street, if I choose to go the wrong way?

My Mind's Eye Sees Blessing

Old Testament fathers’
old tanned faces in the evening
and ancient eyes covered over with cataracts,
still see and prophesy as
their sun-spotty hands shake
and reach out and rest heavy
on the heads
and shoulders of their children
and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren,
standing still and pronouncing
blessing words,
and blessing
over them.

And I see my own Grandpa
not so ancient, who
got up from reading his newspaper
in the living room one evening
with a “Well Beckeeee!” and
wrapped his arm around
my shoulder saying “The Lord
bless you and
keep you”
and other good things
I don’t remember
because I was trying not
to cry.
And the next morning
with our tight tight hug
which could almost break
your ribs he was
standing still and pronouncing
blessing words
and blessing
over me.

New Vocabulary

John le Carre says, "Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." So, theoretically I knew there would be reverse culture shock. But to say I experienced it seems like a pre-bottled cliché cover-up to slather over the various indistinguishable symptoms I felt when I came home for Christmas. Oh source of angst! What supplies the aquifer from whence cometh this melodrama and this silly silly mood? Ahem!

There’s another term called culture fatigue which better describes the way I felt- my arms were tired from pulling at the little black barge of responsibility of looming grades and assignments, like trying to walk through waist deep water without knowing which shore to head towards, burdened down, striving, fatigued. And yet my heart was full from just being there, at HOME, soaking up my people, and the comfort of my food, and the regular everyday sights of my country, and as much physical touch as possible. And then I was whisked away and deposited back on the other side of the ocean, with plenty of time on the plane to think. I used to always look up at planes streaking across the sky and wish I was on them. Now I just want to stay put for a while.