life theology and mess

It Saturday morning. The clock is yet to click onto the 8 mark and I'm up drinking tea and chatting with the movement of people in the flat. I felt so blessed yesterday by the activities and encounters, the invitations that ranged from insult to apology, familiar faces I've seen only days ago to ones I've not seen for months, from meal to street-side hug, from frivolous to constructive planning. Sadly my master-plan of writing got enveloped and then sidelined somewhere amongst the ticking minutes. Our plans are futile things often. And it's the plans that have started to unnerve me, to what will I do, of where will I be of 2010, that dance through my head as the night pushes me to dream. My time working with the Korab kindergarten over the end of last week and the beginning of this was a beautiful encounter that I thoroughly enjoyed and felt honoured to have been so welcomed and invited into such a loving community. My time this week since has been full of time spent with people I am quite attached to, but my mind also calls me to recognise that mission is about empowering the community, and I was never supposed to settle here. Then I find myself talking about so many possibilities, admitting to myself my love for this land and people (and certain person) and again I am confused. My weekends are numbered and full from this point onwards. My time during the week is by no means empty either. And so I throw myself back on my scripture, I make the time to be quiet and hope that in this time of advent and waiting I will discover the birth of an answer to the question I seek....

This is what the LORD says:
       "Stand at the crossroads and look;
       ask for the ancient paths,
       ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
       and you will find rest for your souls.
       But you said, 'We will not walk in it.'
 Jeremiah 6:16

This past week i've spent in Pivnice with the Korab preschool and the methodist community there. it's been a joyful trip getting to know these children and the warm and welcoming grpups that attend the church. I do aplogise for the lateness of thsi post, and subsquently it's briefness. but some stories shall be saved for when you next meet me in person!
Suffice to say, i have been challanged to keep moving forward, fallen in love with the concept of continuing to serve in these comminities i feel I've discovered, and been left with the feeling that january and it's decisions will be one of the hardest things i am to go through.

Somewhere in this week daydreams got confirmed and started to bleed into reality, I started to wonder to which home the father will lead me before I run into his arms and something started to scare me. There is a temporariness about mission trips such as mine, a reassurance that a time will come when you return to where you were sent from and though never the same will live again in a sense of normal. My heart longs to be in England and standing in worship amongst faces and words I can connect to. My mind turns to an English tune, but my spirit has felt the kick of the unborn child and my eyes see the subtle pregnancy signs of a new thing arriving in this land, of an advent sound being sung before God shows his hand. Now I am caught. And as my daydreams started to run strange things started to happen, I met people with the same daydreams, heard worship songs play on random internet soundtracks, and started to think in less dream and more concrete. Probably I shall return to England and all these whispering shall slide under the carpet, but if these whisperings are mine to fulfil then the prospect is indeed daunting.

This week has sparkled like a snow-globe, and truly from the windows of the flat it looked just like that on Tuesday. Thankfully the snow stayed away for the weekends wedding, which I found surprisingly alien. There was no church service which was a bit of a disappointment, but the ceremony happened at the reception and the groom and bride were surrounded by a great crowd of friends as they promised and completed the various traditions. What amazed me the most was the amount of money that kept changing hands, the individual quantities were not huge but many of the traditions involved paying, musicians get money placed into their instruments of stuck on their forehead, things you receive you place token amounts as thanks back, the most lucrative is when the bride circles the crowd with a sweet alcohol and a big basket in her hands for the cash. Probably the most bizarre for me was the buying of the bride, the pantomime performance of offering money and the offering of an unsuitable alternative until an amount is given. There is something within me that smiles at this tradition, but something in me that recoils from anything that puts a price on a human life. And yet that is exactly what we have done throughout human history, our religions effectively do that, they put a price to be paid for our salvation, whether than be paid in prayer, or works, or conversions, or finance, or the blood of another.

The thought came home to me last night as I shared the tradition of Guy Faulks night with friends (yesterday being the 5th of November). We brought fireworks and sparklers and stood canal-side as they lit up the sky. Telling the story of Guy and his fellow conspirators and the end they had to their lives. It was at the kings discretion what would happen to their battered bodies and I realised just how much history has traded human lives. On Wednesday the English crowds will be sprinkled with poppy's as a recognition of this, a moment of silence will be held. Yet the practice of purchasing life is far from absent from this world today, a mere 27 million souls know that. From a purchased soul, set free, I thank my master and I shine with whatever light I can reflect because of you today.

I can feel a chill in the air today, a whisper in the wind telling me that the cold will return and the Indian summer is not going to last. The beautiful shades of autumn saw a brief firework of display and left me aching for the 5th of November and the absentee event that will dawn on me in the coming week. Meanwhile my timetable has bosomed and bloomed like spring. Each evening of the week seems to hold different occasions and this working week has seen me at meetings each night (apart from Monday which I skipped as I felt decidedly the wrong colour). Tomorrow I will witness the wedding, the selling of the bride, the church service and the dancing of the wedding party. Yesterday I saw the start of the Fokus events and this week has been planning and preparing for the new Fokus venture that will begin Tuesday. Last Friday I sat surrounded by the group I have come to call 'the girls' and we sat having those conversations which really mean so very little and yet bond the ties that bind us together. It's been a week of conversation. The frustrating search for meaning and the dawning of hope undeniable. For the last two days I feel like I've turned agony aunt. I've listened to stories as old as time and heard people plan with steps of hesitation. Today I have tried in vain to write, to place the words I have planned in my mind upon the screen and produce something. Though plans were laid, every venture I made outside the flat I have discovered people who needed the service of an agony aunt, a person to accompany them upon this moment of their journey, a sympathetic ear. I met a guy from England in a moment of discovery, a babe in a moment of hunger, a worker in a moment of receiving, a frustrated volunteer in a moment of despair, a friend in a moment of joy and the blessing to witness the bloom and death of these moments is a blessing indeed. And so with the day so much gone I finally sit and write this blog, perhaps this is my moment, my moment of self indulgence, my moment to be recognised in the world today. And so I go and the evening will complete and I will finally get chance to write.

What can I begin to write about the past week, for words can be so deceptive. The trip to Temerin was beautiful, like the newly decorated room, with smiles of reunion and the hum of the familiar that comes with family and friends living out the everyday. Long conversations and beautiful reunions has been but one of the mark of this week. Meeting Dejan again who I got to know well during the detaching project was a blessing, to see how he has changed and how his story continues to be written, and chance meetings of people who had disappeared from radar and are now hugging you greeting... that warm buzzing feeling. So the week has progressed, meeting with friends for drinks or the indulgence of a meal out, talking late into the night and turning into bed before the dead of night arrives. I've also met a new face who told a well worn story which resonate with my soul as the latest in the line of foreign volunteers turns up at Eho and faces the joys and struggles that the potholed landscape of the organisation offers. My heart froze and broke and ached for this individual, and wondered what compromises and conquests she would achieve.

The sun has returned to the land and the temperature one again risen to the late adolescence allowing for long wanderings of the city, camera in hand. The chairs that only a few days ago were stacked ready for winter storage are being shaken out and placed into the sunshine outside café and bar alike. The feeble throws of autumn are straining at the seams to be heard before winter swallows them and with the passing of the first third of my time here the plans for the remaining have finally emerged out of the foundations and thrown off the air of slumber the city cloaked them in for so long. Bring on the ice and snow, for the sun makes us sleepy and the whiteness cleanses and challenges us to paint a new picture.

Some-days I feel sad at how much there is to do, others I feel sad at how little I have achieved. Other days shine like stars as time flies past in activities I barely noticed I was agreeing to take part in. Planned days twist and turn in the wind leaving me closer to fulfilment and yet unsure if I am headed to the right goal, until it hits me that the goal is my construct and a fall back into his step and worry not where it is headed. The days of the past weeks have been interesting and beautiful, humdrum and tentatively adventurous, as innocent as a child's kiss and as loaded as politics.

I am excited about my Novi Sad days where I will once again find Christian fellowship 'focus' on the students of the city (fokus is a part of a worldwide Christian outreach program). I will again return to MNRO as I did on Monday to spend time with those who are mentally challenged, to be infected by their laughter, and I will continue to return to the smiles of the Roma children as they study and create on Saturdays in a school nearby (pictured). The conversation group I attend on Monday has offered to show me some of the monasteries and Željko has offered to show me across the border to Bosnia. The slow creep of autumn is absent, Saturday was basking sunshine and today it coats, hats, scarves and gloves weather. People are huddled inside their shelter giving me opportunity to continue to get to know my room-mate, to paint my words upon the screen and fix my diary for the coming days. Requests for things to do and people to see, ways to fill time and ways to use time as a blessing. Tuesday I made a cake, Wednesday I got the opportunity to dive back into the pages of 'the ordinary radical' and be inspired afresh, make glue from flour and paper-mache, Thursday I dreamt a dream of heaven and talked of life and love and placing my foot in god's footprints one at a time. Later today I will travel back to a family in Temerin, and tomorrow I am invited to explore the hidden underground passages of the fortress with friends. Before this month ends I will attend a wedding, the same day my friends at MNRO will celebrate Halloween with masks I helped create. There is nothing radical, but nothing ordinary about this life, for even on the days I feel life pass me by I know there is more. I met an English woman at church on Sunday, she and her husband live in England and translate Christian resources to Serbian. She described me as 'brave', and though it sounds cliché, in that moment I realised that it's those moments when something amazing isn't happening that we really live the life most extraordinary. I felt a little coy about the term brave, much more at ease with the term foolish, but though around a quarter of my trip has past and I'm still to do so many things I feel so blessed to be allowed to be brave, to be foolish, to stop looking for the goal and simply step in the footprints already laid out before me.

Do I dare to take the liberty to stare at you? I have slipped back into listening to Nichole Nordeman. The line played out of the speakers as I started to type this and so it appeared back upon the screen in black typeface. I have taken the liberty to stare at this world, to expect things to come and speak back to me but how foolish I have been to stare and not to speak. To expect, when the lessons learnt from my first three months here should have taught me so acutely that I must ask. I have been staring at the mountain, wondering if I dare scale it's heights while He has been behind me in the valley. It's like I've awoken afresh to the foliage and the flora of the foothills, the hum of the insects and the stirring of the wind. And this divine orchestra has allowed me and my feeble triangle it's place upon the seats of withered branches and the conductor has tapped his baton, for the recital must now begin. Face down on the ground I have lifted my head and taken the liberty to stare at that light radiating with the swirls and strokes as all creation responds.

Here the temperature still nestles in the low twenties and the people smile with welcome as you pass them on the street, the infection of the young Christian drifts around the room when you meet them as if they have somehow attached themselves to the baton waves. The social groups meet and transform themselves with the ease and pain of every relationships growth and death, some see the symphony, others are oblivious. There is so much more to discover but the life has begun to feel settled again, the music is flowing beautifully around me and though I have not needed to add a sound to the choir yet I know that my part is needed as much as every soft beat of bird wing or cry of child playing on the playground beneath the flat's window.

What are we waiting for? I'm sitting reading the advent readings, the anticipation and trepidation of this event that for centuries was waited for, that prophets foretold and kings sang of. I'm looking around for the messiah and knowing that one day he will walk through that door, brush past me on the street, cry out of an infants mouth, trip me up on my nice neat understanding of the world and pull me up. But what are we waiting for, he's come already, he's here already, I've seen his eyes in every iris I've ever seen, I've felt the air that once blew through his hair, I've read the stories of the words he spoke and held hands that held hands that held hands that held hands that his hands once pulled from the dirt. That dirt, that mix of soil and dust that once was on his hands and ours, how we sterilised it. Now we look in CD covers and soft leather bound books of commentary and notes to find him. We wait but we wait while the dust still swirls in the wind, while the people still walk through doors and brush past us on the street, while we try and re-sculpt our world without tripping ourselves up. What am I waiting for, some person to swoop in and tell me what to do? who to serve? No! For almost 2 weeks of sand has dribbled through the hourglass, and my list of achievements is by no means long. But still I wait, for in the waiting comes the revelation, and in this land of slowness it's in the waiting that one discards the sand as poor and finds the diamond. I've started to see something glimmering in the sand dunes....

Some things come with the status of mission trip. Firstly you have to find a long and impressive list of things you intend to do but fully accept that many may lay unfulfilled, secondly you have to find christianeese sounding reasons why you are going to do them, and thirdly you have to expect everyone back home to know what you are doing, as they are the wonderful people hopefully funding this little exploration of life and love and god's big old world. However having your blog read at part of the Sunday sermon is a little more than I had expected! I love my tata very much! Also falling for the locals causes some interesting conundrums, but I diverged for my point. I've been here a week, a full week, but I still feel like I've achieved so little and so much lays like a broken jigsaw puzzle waiting to be organised, completed and finally used to do something I can't seem to stretch this metaphor to. Three months may seem like a huge swathe of time to some but I'm well aware of how prone to procrastination and dawdling life can be here and three months is really such a short stretch. I feel the need to make decisions. To take things in hand and to talk to so many people who coloured my last stretch here but whose faces I have not yet seen. To start to tick off the todo list and program the timetable. But actually it's the things you stumble across, the pathways that somehow meet, there we find sparks that bond, there we find the whispers of divine intervention. And it's these whispers that I can't seem to find. If I heard a whisper, if I could discern a spark amongst the multicoloured flames of life. There I would find the confirmation that I'm not simply filling the hours with things that I could do, but with the things I'm called to do. I saw the spark before I left, it glowed bright amongst the ashes and called out to be fanned, it called me to return and so I booked flights and came to once again seek that spark, to fuel it with the oxygen that it so craved. I wonder somehow if the spark though is the mountain-top experience for the missionary, the view suddenly spectacular and obvious, before the valley walls push you into moving letters on paper and long coffee meetings where nothing more than laughter is brought to life. If so then this pilgrimage of faith, this journey of discovery, this list of todo's and gentle prayers need no whisper because it's already there, needs no signs of sparks for the fire burns irrespective, and it can not be quenched. Even if we can't see it there is no need to cry 'my god my god why have you forsaken me' for every sound speaks 'my child, my child, I will never forsake you'.