Snow Day Reflections

Sometimes I forget how busy life at school can be. After lounging around my house in the mountains for a few weeks after returning to the States, it felt strange to suddenly jump back into classes, commitments, work, church, social life, etc.....hence the not blogging for a little while.
But today is a welcome and exciting pause because of SNOW, snow, snow! A couple of friends and I decided it wou
ld be more fun to get snowed in together for the weekend, so that's what we did as soon as the flakes started falling on Friday. We bundled up that evening and carried steaming mugs of coffee and warm chocolate chip cookies out into the snowy night. We went on a long walk around the neighborhood and
down the nearby highway, receiving some car honks from the few brave drivers who ventured out on the roads (I suppose three girls in pajamas walking in the dark through the pouring snow along the side of the road is a something you don't see everyday)! We slept in quite late the next day and then trekked back through the snow to a nearby grocery store for a late breakfast of homemade biscuits and sausage gravy. Nothin' warms you up faster!

Anyway, it's been an interesting first few weeks of school. It's really strange to be a senior. It didn't really hit me at all in Scotland, but being back here and knowing it's my final semester feels very odd. It was strange to have a last first-day of school, and to know that these classes would be my last for at least a while. I feel weirdly separated from the freshmen and sophomores I meet, knowing that this college experience stretches out ahead of them, but that it's over for me. The nice thing about college is that you always have a template for your life, a pattern and a structure for your days, months, and years. To some extent, you always know what's coming next. Now it feels like a long blank canvas is stretched in front of me with absolutely nothing on it.

I am blessed with some really interesting classes this semester. One of my favorites is "Literary Study of the Bible," because it means I always have some Bible reading to do as homework. Right now we're working our way through the Psalms and I feel continually amazed by their beauty, passion, masterful literary craft, and most of all how human and raw some of them all. There is no neat, happy, bow-on-top conclusion to something as intensely pain-stricken and vengeful as Psalm 137. My professor talked about how all human beings have a limit to the human suffering, complaining, and grief we can handle.....yet God seems to invite endless amounts of it on Himself. One of the strangest things about this semester is that most of my friends have graduated and moved away, so I come home many days after classes to evenings spent alone, which is really new for me. It is so comforting to remember that God can handle my loneliness and my most petty, selfish complaints without growing weary of me.

Another favorite new class is "Global Problems in Health." I'm taking this one just because the subject matter fascinates me. I often walk away from it with an incredibly heavy heart. This weekend as I read over my homework, this sentence hit me like a bullet: "Despite reductions in infant and child mortality, 30,000 children under five die each day from preventable causes." That figure is so staggering and makes me so angry. And all the issues below the health problems run so much deeper: poverty, poor infrastructure, low literacy rates, civil wars and unrest, widespread homelessness, corrupt leaders, and unstable governments. The immense lack of justice in the world is enough to make anyone want to weep. Issues of justice aren't just found in some remote third-world countries, either. In terms of socioeconomic status, the United States is the most unequal among developed societies. We have such extreme wealth and such abject poverty among us.

I've seen some of that poverty over the past couple of weeks as I've gone back to work with refugees. I went to pick up one man for an appointment at Social Services (a building which I am convinced is something akin to hell on earth), and when he opened the door to his small, dimly lit apartment, his family was sitting huddled under piles of blankets because it was so cold. I spent that morning wrangling with multiple Social Services workers on behalf of these two men who barely spoke English, wondering how people could ever do something like this on their own. How do people who cannot speak English ever navigate an insane bureaucratic system which sets up so many barriers to them getting much-needed help, when I could barely deal with it all as a college-educated native speaker? I went straight from doing that to sitting in a lecture on Contemporary Poetry that afternoon, and somehow it made my life seem very disconnected. I know higher education, literature, art, and beauty are all incredibly important, but sometimes they seem so disparate from this world of tangible, crucial problems. Why am I sitting and talking about why a poet chose a particular word in line 5 when I just left a family sitting in a cold, dark apartment on the other side of town?

Looking back, looking forward

Yeah, it's been a while since I've posted. This happened when I returned from Prague, too....after writing about so many adventures and interesting experiences, it suddenly feels like there isn't much worth writing about when you return. Which of course isn't true--it just takes a while to settle into a new rhythm with old friends and familiar places and find what will be adventurous/interesting/noteworthy about that life.

Last night before I went to sleep I closed my eyes and just imagined walking the streets of Glasgow. I thought about my friends laughing beside me, the look of the buildings, the sounds of the city, the sight of taxicabs whizzing past, the bright lights, the sound of Scottish accents buzzing around me, and even the feel of the unceasing rain. I miss the rhythm of that life. Sometimes it seems like a surreal dream. A little over a week ago, I had the great happiness of getting to meet up with my Scottish friend Suzie, who flew over for a visit to the States a few days after I left. Strange as it may sound, getting to see her on American soil reminded me that all of my experiences in Scotland were real, not just a distant dream that is seperated from my daily life here in America. Just like my time in Prague, the experiences and the people shape who I am, even if there's no way to express all of those memories and feelings to my friends and family back home.

I've been at home the past few weeks with my family. It's been great (especially being surrounded by beautiful mountains covered in thick blankets of snow), but now I'm headed back to my last semester of school. Mostly the past few weeks have just been a time of unnecessary mental stress as I keep trying to figure out what to do when I graduate...what to do for this summer, for this upcoming year, for the rest of my life. I know whatever I choose isn't carving out a permanent life path, but that's what my irrationally anxious brain feels like sometimes. It feels like I'm launching onto some trajectory and I'm just going to get stuck there. I am trying so hard to get out of that mindset and take a truly longterm view of my life. Despite the vast trend among my friends to get married and settle down straight out of college (which makes me feel old)-- I keep reminding myself that I am pretty darn young and I have so, so many years ahead of me to figure things out. Sometimes I am so scared of wasting my life that I end up forgetting to really live it.

Part of me wants to be back in Scotland. Part of me wants to go back to Prague to do missions work because I know that my heart is still longing for the city and the Czech people. Part of me knows I have to be practical and just take whatever work I can find here for the time being, because living overseas is a costly commitment.

What I want most of all is to serve God with my life by serving His people. I just don't know quite what that looks like for me yet.