Week Three

My third week back in Czech. Hard to believe it's only been three weeks. It's always amazed me how time can fly and crawl at the same time. There is this strange thing that happens when you live multiple lives. In a sense, it is like time traveling. Not in any sort of supernatural sense, but in the sense that there are these different dimensions that don't fully correlate. When I was home for the summer, I quickly slipped back into the groove of who I've always been at home. It was this safe comfortable ready-made mold that I fit into like bike shorts, a second skin. And while I was there I spent two busy months, flitting about from place to place as if my life in Czech did not really exist. Everything there had it's old sense of being, it's own permanent fixture sort of feel.
And then suddenly all that was, wasn't. I was lifted again from that state of being back into the world in which I am a teacher in a foreign land. A person who is never quite fully a part. But here, too, I have this sense of self and situation. Or at least, I did. Now, it seems, that things are a bit different. And the difference makes the time fly faster, but also makes every moment a bit more profound. It makes me feel I could spend hours in my journal and never be satisfied that I've captured it all. At the same time, there is no time to disappear into my journal in such a dissolving sort of way. Because there are new people to get to know, and old friends to visit. There are classes to be taught, and lessons to plan. And there is still a flat that needs cleaning, and laundry, and cooking. Not to mention the internet that beckons me to come and pour out my soul to those that chose to read what I have opened.
There was a barbecue at a cottage this weekend. Old students and friends assembled, with a handful of newcomers as well. I had to fight the part of me that could scarcely believe Karina, a total freshy in this world, was having her first cottage experience with in the first month, whereas I had to wait nearly two years for my own. It was good to reconnect, to sit around a campfire and let the flickering light mesmerize me, to sing with guitars and drums and insects in the woods.
Life is good you see. There are so many moments to savor, so many experiences to soak up, and so much to be done to be done to be done.
This weekend I'm off for a business meeting in a city I've never been to, and therefore cannot recall the name of. I'm hoping to find it a blessing. Hoping to take the moments, both solitary and in a group, to recollect my thoughts and prepare to better serve and better love. My daily prayer is that I would grow to love the people around me more. To see them through Jesus' eyes. To shuffle off the cloak of selfishness I've long shrouded myself with. It's not always easy to love. Not always easy to sacrifice the comfort of being on my own. But I know it's worth it, because God is love, and whoever lives in love, lives in God and God in Him. And what could be better than that?