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?