susannemarie1

Dan and I just arrived in London this afternoon. We’re resting a bit before going out to dinner at a Bangladeshi restaurant. Dan is staying at his old bachelor pad with a pastor and two other young bachelors. I’m about a 10 minute bus ride away staying at the Arab World Ministries community center where Dan used to volunteer. It’s a neat place and London is interesting as well. So far I haven’t seen the touristy bits- we’ll get to that tomorrow- but the rest of London is a bit different than I’d imagined. But the weather is chilly and wet! No surprises there! I think in our next few days we’ll go to the British Museum and some gardens and some other places- Dan’s got it all figured out. I showed him Budapest and Romania, and now it’s his turn to show me London. It’s nice to have a tour guide.

I leave out of Paris on Tuesday (so I fly from here to Paris) and Dan leaves on Wednesday. After having spent almost every day either living with him at L’Abri or travelling with him for the last four months, I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for the shock of being apart from him after we leave here. Granted, it probably won’t be for more than 10 to 12, at which point I’ll fly up to meet his family in Rochester and my mom will join us a few days later at which point the three of us will road trip to Albany where I’ll look for apartments. I’ll also be looking for a job, of course! None of this is official, but Dan and I think that if we want to get to know each other more we need to live by each other and since he has one more year of school in Albany, we decided it’d be great for me to move there. He’ll be in Rochester for the summer taking some classes and I’ll hopefully be settling in to Albany and then in the fall he’ll come back to Albany. Like I said, all of this is not official and I do need a good job there! But it’s our hope, anyway.

As for the last three-ish weeks since leaving L’Abri, we’ve been in Florence, Rome, Budapest and Romania. Our two weeks in Romania were great getting to see the children again. How they’ve grown and how much they like to talk and sing and how much discipline they need! Good grief. And the boys could not get enough of Dan’s attention and he even picked up some useful Romanian phrases like “No!”, “Come!”, “Be good”, “I’m sorry” and “Yes”. It’s pretty funny to hear him trying to communicate with the kids. But singing is always good and they LOVE the Itsy Bitsy Spider. And I got to see my goddaughter, Gabi, for whom Laverna has been waiting 3 years. She is such a precious and strong-willed girl and very compassionate and quite a negotiator. And she has a stuffed grey cat that she carries with her everywhere, whom she simply calls “Cat”.

Unfortunately, on Sunday night I started to get sick and by Monday morning both of us were. We were out of commission and confined to my apartment all day Monday and Tuesday and half of Wednesday with headaches, sore throats and fevers. It was awful missing two and a half days with the kids, but we had worked six days straight and probably burned our selves out. (Of course it was me that said we have to Go Go Go all the time!). But on the first day of sickness when Dan was feeling better than me, he read me the enter Voyage of the Dawn Treader from the Chronicles of Narnia outloud (271 pages). We’ve read 4 of the 7 now outloud. It’s really fun to do together.

So, still a bit sick, here we are in London. It’s funny to be here. Today in the Passport Control line at the airport the official asked us what city we were coming from and both of us sat there blankly thinking really hard for a few moments until we each mumbled out “Bu, Bu, Budapest?” I think we were a bit tired and so confused from constantly being in a different place that we couldn’t remember where we came from. I think the Passport guy thought we were a bit funny (as in stupid).

But there were lots of funny moments on this trip, like going through a city in Hungary spelled something like Puspkopoladny or something like that. After many failed attempts at pronunciation, Dan started calling it matter-of-factly “PupiSkupi”. I can’t tell you how hard we laughed over that city, and later when we ran into a Brit bumbling his way around Hungary like us, he failed at pronouncing it, too, and we shared with him our helpful hint of PupiSkupi and in the next breath he had adopted it and it became our own secret English-speakers’ idiots-guide to Hungarian city names. It just was classic having a 40-something Brit start calling something PupiSkupi. I’m laughing now. I guess you had to be there.

That’s all for now.

The response to Michelina above was actually posted by me, but since I am technologically challenged, I show up as anonymous. So the person who loves Michelina a lot is me!

I'm now sitting in Budapest, Hungary, getting ready to go out for a day of exploring. On Monday, I'll leave for Romania until May 5, and then to London until May 9. The last couple days since leaving L'Abri have been spent in Florence and Rome.

You might be asking yourself, "Since when was Susanne going to those places?" Well, since my plans changed again, and another time, and yet again. But here I am.

I've also typed up a ton of updates from a week ago but just now finally have wireless and I'll decide later if they have any relevance to post.

As for who I'm travelling with... as some of you may already know, I became really good friends with a particular fellow here who after some time informed me that we were not just friends any more and of course, I was extremely reluctant to enter into any sort of relationship at the present time. But he said, "Well, you're worth waiting for, so I'll just keep waiting until you're ready." So, after a time of resistance, I realized I'd be a fool to pass by being with the person who had become my best friend. So, it's been two and a half months now. His name is Dan and he's from Rochester, NY. Before L'Abri, he had been living in London for 6 months, hence our visit to London. And I'm really excited for him to see Romania.

So, that's the update for now. He's waiting for me to get ready so we can go eat breakfast, so I'm going to hurry along now...

Only one week left here as of tomorrow. Lots has been happening here... the grandparents came and went in March, I released Gary to the wild, spring has sprung and then quickly retreated into a hole as winter has reasserted its presence. There are flowers- atleast 11 different types to my counting- everywhere. The grass is getting green and the lizards are out sunning. Who would think there were lizards in Switzerland? And our cat is in full predatory swing. I rescued an European robin from her mouth last week. In the same day, she beheaded a mouse, killed a mole, and took the tail from a lizard, which I also rescued. Another robin fell prey the day before yesterday in the same place I rescued the other. Fully intact- just used and killed as a play toy for the cat. Creation groans for restoration from all that was broken with the Fall. Yes, I know that's how nature works, but one day the lion will lie next to the lamb, as Isaiah says. People say it's the circle of life- and I accept that it's not the greatest tragedy that a bird died- but it was never intended that death be a part of life. God has been, is, and will restore things and eliminate all death and evil.

At any rate, I feel a bit of pressure as the term winds down. I read back through my journal and it's funny to look at my original thoughts about coming and my original goals, and then to see what I've actually gotten from my time here. And it's difficult to say goodbye.

But one of the key things I've gotten from my time here was what I wrote about earlier, about the renewed New Heaven and New Earth- about God making His dwelling permanently among us here on earth. I've been reading a GREAT book called "Heaven is a Place On Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God". I highly recommend it. It's a good nighttime read.

A not good nighttime read because of its density, but very well worth the read because of its content, is "Mission and Meaninglessness" by Peter Cotterell. It explores a lot of issues about exclusivism, general revelation, the lostness of humanity and the means of God for restoring it, as well as how we as Christians factor in to and should be sharing about Him, though it is ultimately the Holy Spirit that works in people's hearts. It makes a really good case for why striving to share and improve people's lives through development has a huge role in God's plan. He talks at great length about how everything does appear meaningless, and brings it around to show how only meaning can be found through an understanding of what God is at work doing.

That's a convoluted description, but if you're interested in missions or development work, it's a good book. And I suggest to all "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Michael E. Wittmer.

At any rate, after the term ends on April 17, I head probably to Lausanne here in Switzerland for a few days, and then fly on the 19 to London where I'll spend a week. After that, it looks like I'll head to Romania for an all too brief week. Then I'll head back to TN on May 2, and back up to DC shortly thereafter.

Still trying to figure out what comes after that... But I'm excited to see everyone again. And I'll be a much better cook for being here, as well as a bathroom cleaner, and a faster reader, if nothing else when I return. But I think I've gained more than that, which I think I'll understand more as I step out of this place and into another.

I just arrived in Vienna and am sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for my grandparents. I am here from Thurs-Mon. with them, then I return to L’Abri and then they’ll come to Switzerland next Thursday. But we’ll spend a couple days here in Vienna and then we’ll go to Graz to meet up with a former Iranian exchange student of my grandmother’s sister (this is how my family works) who married another one of their exchange students who died tragically last year. But the woman, Vida, has a son who is performing this Sunday night in a choir in Graz. I don’t think it’s the Vienna Boys Choir, but I bet it will be good.

Before I left, a friend at L’Abri said that when she visited Vienna, she thought of it as a city that has forgotten how beautiful it is. I thought that an intriguing description, and in my few minutes here, I can see a bit of why. The buildings are old and magnificent and my taxi driver pointed out the Parliament, one of the big museums, a beautiful cathedral, Sigmund Freud’s house, the university, etc. But everything is covered with a thin layer of dirt, as if the whole city lived briefly under a grey cloud that has since passed but left behind its grey. I want to take a sponge to the buildings- it’s that type of dirt that could just be wiped off but covers everything, including the beautiful cathedral I saw that looks like it was transplanted from Gary, IN, for all the dirt on it. Perhaps the wet snow today doesn’t help the image. But nonetheless, it’s beautiful in a sad way, as if the prevalence of sex kink shops and the dirt reveal just how much the city has forgotten the glory that it once was.

At the Vienna train station, I was bending down once more to rummage through my bag for a lost paper and stood up to see a marble plaque. It described (this is my translation from my rough reading of the German, which by that I mean picking out the English looking words) how this train station bears the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust, as in April 1938, it was taken over by the Nazis and from then started shipping people to the Dachau concentration camp. As my train passed snowy field after field, it reminded me of images of the Holocaust, and you can almost feels its ghost here. It is so weird to be present in a place where once the evil of sin overwhelmed almost all men’s minds, as they forgot who they were as Children of God, and began playing God, determining who had the worth to live or not. When the enemy manages to get us to forget our true worth, who we really are, then destruction and genocide begins, destroying God’s good creation.

Passing silently past fields spotted with patches of trees and an occasional home, all covered in a thick blanket of snow, I can not imagine what it was like to live and die in the camps in this dank, grey, snowy cold. The plaque in the station furiously decries the horrors of the holocaust and calls for an end to war and genocide (I think in my translation) and calls for remembrance. How strange. A plaque so vehement and tragically beautiful, but only small on the walls. Perhaps there is a greater memorial in the station. But the makers of the plaque are determined to remind us of the horror, and as we walk gaily through the station, to remember those whose feet once stood where we walk, passing through on their way to die. The glory of Vienna was adulterated to be the way station to death. And then I remember all the genocide occurring right now, even as I write.

I’ve been studying how God as a Redeemer is going to redeem ALL things, not destroy them and start over. Just as He desires to redeem us, whom He declared good, so He desires to redeem all Creation (also declared “very good”) that suffered as a result of man’s sin and fall, including nature and cultures. We forget this in today’s Christianity because we’ve been so influenced by Gnostism (the spiritual is good and the physical is evil) which has no part in the Biblical description of God’s good creation. Before sin entered the world, He made us as physical beings. He intended for us to be that way. It is not the body that is sinful, but what sin is determined by what is in man’s heart, as Jesus continually pointed out to the Pharisees. How we dismiss nature and our physical world instead of seeing it as another realm through which God manifests His glory and which He entirely plans to redeem. I’ve gotten really passionate about correcting this misunderstanding in modern American Christianity at least, that has only been fed by things such as the Left Behind series. I believe the implications of a Biblical understanding of God as Redeemer renewing the heavens and earth to be as He intended it to be- to free it from the bonds of sin and suffering- are tremendous. The implications are not only for the way in which we live our lives and for the eternal destiny we hope for, but also for our understanding of the character of God. He does not cast off what is broken- He redeems it. He is not willing to give sin and evil the final victory. This gives me great hope when I see the brokenness of this world, knowing that this is not how it is meant to be, nor is God going to leave it this way. I am so grateful for His loving, gracious, redeeming heart. He will redeem all things that have lost their true glory, perhaps Vienna among them.

Wim Riekerk, the international director of L’Abri wrote a great book called The Future Great Planet Earth that discussed the Biblical concept of a Renewed Earth as our final destiny. To quote from his book:

“Therefore we could call Jesus Christ the ‘recreator’. The savior will not create a brand new world out of a vacuum. This is not a biblical picture. The biblical picture is: ‘We believe in a God (Psalm 121, 138) who is faithful to that which his hand began; who is faithful to the earth and his creation. The whole of the Old Testament emphasizes that God’s work, his redeeming power, is meant to renew this world, to cleanse it from sin, to take away all brokenness, to remove death, and to glorify it into a renewed world. This world will not just perish; it will be transformed. Let us not speak of the destruction of this world, but of its transformation as a result of God’s judgment, (cf. 1 Cor. 15).” Pp. 22-23

“We have narrowed the messaged of the Gospel. In the first place it is good news for man, because he has received a message of life in the midst of death: ‘My son here was dead, but now he is alive.’ But the power of the work of Christ is much wider than only the redemption of man. The whole creation will receive life out of death (Romans 8.22) and all the nations will be revived (Romans 11.25). This is what Paul had in mind when he said consciously, “in Christ we are a new creation.” Man redeemed through Christ draws a completely renewed world behind him… In the same way that the Fall of man led to the fall of creation, so the redemption of man will lead to the redemption of nature.” Pp. 27-28

I will be writing more about this hopefully in the coming weeks, including how recognizing the Biblical idea of continuity between this earth and the New Earth as our eternal destiny gives greater meaning to what we do here and now. Additionally, I hope to write on how incredible it is that God is going to dwell among His children- make His home among us- in this renewed Earth. I find that incredible! How gracious He is to His children that He will live among them and wipe every tear from their eyes, making all things new and beautiful!

On another note, I am planning on meeting up with Sarah Plyler tomorrow for lunch, for all of you Georgetown people. Since I’d graduated and she was abroad, who knows how long it would’ve been before I saw her again, but alas, we meet in Europe.

Only six weeks left here.

I tried but this stupid computer just erased it all. So, yeah, more thoughts later, as I've said for the eight hundredth time.

PS... My address IS on my very first entry if you just scroll down. So far, just my dear Aunt Deb, my dear mother and Jen and Marcus have sent me anything. Ahem....

I received a request from my dear former house-father, Bill, from the great city of Washington.

"Well I was just wondering when we would see more ruminations, and lo and behold you have a snail!

Yes, Matt is still having late night parties and I may need you to FedEx yourself back here to quiet him down. You can bring Gary in your pocket. You can pack him a little snack lunch of lettuce, which apparently he likes. Speaking of "he" I would be interested to know how you determined the snail needed a boys name versus a girls name! Consider that a request for your next blog entry."

To answer his question, as far as I know, snails are unisex, possessing both male and female capabilities. I once had lots of snails in my fish tank and tracked the gestation period of snail babies, which are laid in a transparent sack, like on "Finding Nemo". And so as not to leave you all in great suspense, the gestation period of the common fish tank snail is 9 days. Someone here suggested "Gary" and I thought it fitting, so Gary he is. Snails just seem like boys, I think. Just like cats are girls.

Again, I'm sitting in a restaurant with free wi-fi with Laverna, Rachel and my dear friend, Dan. Laverna has been an incredible blessing here, really reaching out to those who feel left out. Sometimes just an outside person saying the same thing as those from the inside can reach people in a much greater way. And she gives good foot massages and pedicures.

More quotes later... I forgot my journal. But a girl here getting her masters in Romanian history happened to meet my friend, Tom, whom I met in Romania, a few years ago randomly on a train. Small world.

I'm in Geneva today with my dear friend, Laverna, who just arrived for a six day visit. Rachel, a friend of Laverna's, also came along. I am so glad they're here!

This past week has been eventful, including a wonderful Valentine's Day, a new pet named Gary who happens to be a snail I found in the lettuce I was washing, and a haircut. I know there was something else, but I don't remember. More later! We're going to head back up to L'Abri soon.

Again sitting in Montreux in a smoky internet cafe overlooking Lake Geneva with a few friends. And Laverna is coming Feb. 15-22!!!! And my grandparents are coming a few weeks later! Yay!

Here are the reflections and quotes I promised long ago to demonstrate that there is more going on here than games of Cranium, Catch Phrase and washing insane amounts of dishes.

My thoughts on the meaning of life from January 16:

We were created to live in perfect union with Him- that was our meaning. But then the fall came, and death, sin and pain emerged. This is our unnatural condition until Christ returns. Our meaning now, in this broken reality, is to constantly hearken forward to the restoration of what once was, not losing sight of that, nor getting mired in the meaninglessness of a reality such as it is. We should live within this reality, but always be seeking to transcend it, move it towards what it should be, to make reminders of the Infinite God from whom earth has been parted- and always to be drawing others out of the fallenness and into the light of the awareness of God, and of infinite reality. Of coming restoration- our job is to be lights and rivers of that reminder- which we see in glimpses and at times overwhelmingly all around us in Creation. To focus on the good He has made and the contrast He is to the fallenness and brokenness we find in the departure from Him. We are in an interim- but one to be lived fully in, in the arms of Christ, embracing the hurting around us, drawing them out of the darkness of death into the light. This broken world is not all there is meant to be. For now, we should live under His gaze, His guidance and love.

Before I saw futility- what’s the purpose of easing people’s pain and suffering when all will end in death? Now I see it is to draw closer to, hearken to, what is meant to be, and to call others into this reality- that this is not all there is, nor is it what its meant to be. To join with me in being bearers of Christ on this earth and the wholeness with Him that is coming. To journey away from the dearth that can seem all there is and to have the victory Christ has given us of seeing/knowing that there is another side! I am a living reminder of that reality. He is coming. And all will be made whole and well.

Perhaps the seasons are some of God’s many reminders of this. Death will give way to life, and indeed, it already has in many ways on this earth. We live to demonstrate His life. And of the joy of drawing near to Him, knowing He is, will and can, make all things new.

“We’re to be trusted soldiers in the battlefield that is given to us. God is saying, ‘Go ahead, My image-bearing child. Show love and patience and make some order out of the chaos.’ Even if I die tonight, I’ve done the beginnings of something good for Him. To make beauty out of it, you don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to demand that the situation be better in order to create beauty in it.” Prisca Sandri, F.S.'s daughter and my mentor.

And though we will quickly be forgotten on this earth, the reality, Prisca reminded me, is that we don’t die. What Christ began in us, what steps we made toward beauty and growth, continue on with us as we live with Him. What we do now is not meaningless but very relevant for our life continued on after this earth.
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Some quotes:

[Reconciliation] consists in spirited actions, often very ordinary everyday ones, against the anti-creational forces that violate creation’s integrity and degrade and destroy…It means freeing [all of creation] from whatever oppresses or victimizes. It reaches from inner spirit to sociopolitical and economic spheres to cosmic realms. It means realizing the life potential of all things... Redemption is to free people and the rest of nature to become what all was created to be.” Larry Rasmussen as quoted in Bruce Bradshaw’s Change Across Cultures, page 46.

“It seems inconceivable to most of us that relief can be found in facing our failure. In seeing what is in our heart, we might be further compelled to flee from our presumption of self-sufficiency and embrace the hope of relationships built on God’s initiative and not on our performance. However, this kind of dependence requires a broken heart that has given up the demands of pride. Many are simply not ready for such loss of face.” Bold Love by Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III.