Toivonlinna

I used to work at a school in Finland, of which the name meant "Castle of Hope." They have now changed the name of the school, but the place will probably never lose its moniker. I love it.

The school began with a large farmhouse (above), and grew from there. During my time there I believe it served about 120 students, had a small seminary on the campus, and ran a summer wellness and rejuvenation program (the sauna house is pictured just below).It was really good to be back. Husband and I walked down to the seaside in front of the school on our first morning there. You look in one direction, and you see the glassy sea--there are many islands there, so it seems more like a lake--upon which I cross-country skiied on an icy cold sunny afternoon or two during the winter I lived here. In the other direction you look toward the crossing to the island just across from the school. There is now a bridge where a little two-car ferry used to cross when I lived there.

Walking back up from the seaside, you see all three major buildings on the campus: from left to right they're the boys' dorm, the girls' dorm (which also includes swimming pool and cafeteria on the ground floor), and the administration/classroom/gymnasium building.

The campus is dotted with apple trees and wildflowers. It's quiet in the summer; they no longer run the summer health program. It was really good to be back, to reminisce about the hugely significant year in my life when I worked in this place, and all the people who were so good to me when I was a long, long ways from home.

Helsinki, Mostly the Churches

Finland is the home of the composer Sibelius, as well as other good things including innovative architecture and design, saunas, Nokia phones, ice hockey and delicious food. During our brief time in Helsinki, we hit all the famous landmarks, the monument to Sibelius (above) being just one of them. The Helsinki cathedral is a lovely one without the clutter that some cathedrals collect inside. The organ is particularly lovely; in the all the times I've visited this place (which is quite a few), I have never heard this particular instrument played.

The other major cathedral in the capital city is the Uspenski cathedral, a Russian orthodox edifice that stands proudly over the central harbor.The interior is just as beautiful, with the blue dome, more light than reaches the interior of most Russian orthodox churches, and a altar screen (I don't know what else to call it) that just sparkles. Our string quartet played in the afternoon at Temppeliaukio, which is a famous Lutheran church built into the rock. No picture can do the church justice, but here's the best one I could get of the group performing.

Tallinn

Let me take you along on our trip to Estonia, Finland, and Russia with the university's string quartet. Any of these pictures can be clicked on for a larger view.After church in Tallinn, Estonia last weekend, the church members took our group out to the ruins of a monastery at Padise for a picnic. The scale of the place was huge! We explored the cellars, the chapel, the rooms, the staircases in the walls, the attic, and the top of the tower. This monastery eventually was made into a fortification, then a residence for nobility, and finally became a ruins after fire.

Oh, and here's the picnic spread. Pretty attractive, yes?
The next day we went with the string quartet to two prisons. They were really grim places, with faces more hardened and scarred than I'd expected to see. I don't think they fix broken noses after fights in there. The men had those kind of sad eyes that you see in concentration camp pictures (and the prisons did remind us of concentration camps), and many had complete defeat in their postures. But there were a few happy ones, as well. In particular was the young man below, who was baptized the day we were there.

His story is a sad one, and all too familiar, from what we heard. He was drunk at the age of 17 and killed a person, leading to his incarceration here. After a series of Bible studies recently, he chose to follow Jesus and asked to be baptized. The chaplain, a soft-hearted guy who has the most sympathetic expressions and absolutely focused listening posture I've ever seen, was thrilled to baptize his young friend in this tiny 8x8 foot room near the prison chapel. I was taking the picture through the doorway. While in Estonia, we got to explore the old Hanseatic league town of Tallinn. This town on the Baltic Sea is a charming one, more reminiscent of Germany, Austria and Czech Republic than of Scandanavia. The crowning building on the hill of old Tallinn, in my opinion, is the Russian Orthodox church, with its beautiful onion domes and icons on the inside. But the adventurous part was taking a guided tour through what the locals call "the catacombs" a system of tunnels in the hill that were built for both shelter and fortifying the hill so that troops could more safely fight off attack. Interestingly, the tunnels were never actually used except by homeless people in more recent times, looking for a sheltered place to sleep at night.

Finally, we walked out through the picturesque old gate, and headed "home" for one more night at our host family's home (the one with the watchdogs who don't bark and the fresh produce from the garden straight to the breakfast table) before boarding the ferry for Finland the next morning.

Healing Stripes

Farming in the Palouse country of southeastern Washington state, July 2007It's got to be an artistic farmer, don't you think?

About a Fresh Start

It occurred to me recently that I never had a chance to start fresh, on my own terms.

That thought came to me recently when I was listening to an evangelist talk to church leaders about "hastening the coming of Christ" by getting every church member actively involved spreading the gospel to the world.

"Hastening the coming of Christ?" I thought. "Do we really presume to have that kind of control over God's timeline?"

Then I realized that I've heard that phrase before in my life, quite frequently when I was a child. Only now, after not hearing it for some time, did it sound new enough in my ears to question it. And I couldn't remember if it was biblical, or if it came from somewhere else in my religious education.

As I listened to the evangelist continue pounding his point home, I thought of a young man I interviewed when I was doing my dissertation research on third culture kids. He had spent his childhood as the son of Wycliffe Bible translators in the Galapagos Islands. A seemingly well-balanced young man with a cheery personality over the phone, he told me that at one point he drew away from the endless religious services and spiritual vocabulary of his parents. "I just got saturated," he said. "I hadn't chosen this for myself. I was full to overflowing, and I needed a chance to dry out." As a committed Christian adult, he's not unhappy about his upbringing; he just recognizes that he needed to back away, then make his beliefs his own.

I'm not concerned about my beliefs being my own. To some degree I have the freedom to do that, within limits which which I'm comfortable. But I have found myself wishing I could erase all the past religious learning from parents, teachers and pastors and just start fresh.

I'd like to be able to read the Bible for the first time and have those first impressions uninfluenced by anyone else's set of beliefs. I'd like to know what it's like to go in as a "blank slate" and experience the discovery of spiritual things without a context already set up. I'd like to see the things of God for the first time with only Him and me in the equation.

I'll never get that chance, but I wonder: if I'd had a chance to discover God in that way, would I hear His voice better, without a thousand other lifelong voices of God-talk chattering in the background?

Moca's Rocks

Arizona rocks, sitting on the white stripe in a roadway south of Tucson.Husband recently returned from Arizona bringing rocks for our cat. Weird, but true.

It all began back in 2002, when we drove down to Arizona to visit Husband's mom and stepdad. Husband enjoys the desert, enjoys running, and enjoys the color of green copper. He also enjoys bringing home roadkill.

Not real roadkill, silly. But he finds and collects interesting [to him] things while out running, which he refers to as "roadkill." The most recent roadkill prior to the pictured rocks was a backless rolling chair. I kid you not. It's stashed under our grand piano at this very moment.

I'm sure you'll understand why I consider the hauling home of "roadkill" to be a worrisome habit. And, to be honest, entertaining.

So, back to the history. While running through the desert south of Tucson five summers ago, Husband spotted the coppery green on the rocks beside the road and brought them back to his mom's house. We drove the rocks home in the car, setting them out on the Pakistani mini-carpet, given to me by my Finnish missionary friends, sitting atop our American Southwest-style dresser from Pier 1 Imports. (No one can fault us for being monocultural in decor.)

It wasn't much later that we noticed Moca had fallen in love with the rocks. She jumped up on the dresser and meowed and purred and rubbed on the edges of the rocks, scratching her cheeks and gums against the granite. It's a daily habit, several times a day, encouraged by our rewarding her with pats and lovey pet talk.

So, when Husband arrived home from his most recent trip to the Tucson area, he brought in the equivalent of two bucketsful of copper-hued rocks. And he got up at 4 a.m. to wash them off and set them out to dry before placing the choicest ones on the dresser carpet.

Husband is happy. Moca is happy.

And I give you yet another piece of data proving that I share this household with two unique and quirky beings.

Yellowstone Wildlife

Yellowstone FallsHere's a pictorial tour of the wildlife we've seen in Yellowstone this weekend. It was our sixth wedding anniversary on Sunday, and we spent the day in the park. What a treat!This coyote didn't look all that healthy. She was hanging out by the side of the road nibbling on something, with several cars pulled into the turnout around her. I suspect someone had thrown her something to eat. Our friend the crow sat near the sulphurous fumes of a bubbling pond. Crows don't impress me as being "wildlife," but since I set out to show you all the wildlife we photographed in the park, here he is. He was huge, by the way.The nesting bald eagles caused quite a traffic jam on the road to the west entrance. We saw a number of bald eagles this weekend. They're now off the endangered list, I hear, but not off the protected list.The elk were pretty visible this weekend. This guy's rack was impressive. Just as impressive for their stupidity were the people just outside the frame of this picture, getting way too close as they snapped photos. Get a zoom lens, folks!The pelicans were having a marvelous time fishing the rapids just below Yellowstone Lake--which is a VERY large lake, by the way. It would take you several hours just to drive around it, if you could.These guys are a bit scary. They're HUGE, and look none too cheery. I took this particular picture. We got caught in a bison-induced traffic jam on the east side of the park, with these animals grazing right next to the road and crossing between the cars. There were hundreds of them. However, Husband got the best pictures, because I was busy driving--or shall we say, sitting behind the steering wheel in a line of cars that wasn't moving.
From the road we could gaze out over the meadows by the river and see the huge herd of bison. There's no way we could photograph the entire panorama with layers of mountains and valleys in the background, and have the bison show up as more than black dots. The scenery gave us a little taste of what this land looked like to the people who lived here long ago. Breathtakingly beautiful! Click on any of the pictures to see them larger.

When the Thunderheads Loom

Clouds this afternoon over Big Sky, MontanaA person's true character is only revealed at the point at which they do not receive what they sincerely believe is rightfully theirs. --My colleague Jere

The Observer

My granddaughter is such a funny little sprite. At seventeen months her unique personality is already peeking out.

She's a drama queen with the mute button pressed.

Slow to warm up, she has a way of crawling into your heart and nestling into a corner.

She's apparently tried out her various faces in the mirror, and the one that intrigues her right now is the pouty look. She wore it most of the weekend. "People react to it back at home," her Auntie Brandy says, "so she thinks it's cute." Almost as cute as her apricot face.

I find it fascinating to watch her little hands. She is attentive to the small things. She picks up a piece of lint on the floor and examines it. Or a little rock from the millions in the gravel of the driveway. Or a piece of a sunflower seed shell that some relative has dropped. Little things get observed, rolled around, felt, and then offered to someone nearby.

She looks, and looks and looks. She watches the pond, the fish, the frog, the people around her, a bug on the floor, and inanimate objects. They all get visually examined. It's all going into that pretty little head and getting processed.

She's a girl on a journey.

I sit and watch her, in turn, and wonder what she'll be like as she gets older and her personality is shaped by her observations, her thoughts, the reactions of people around her, and her experiences. And I wish I could watch the strengthening of spirit from day to day, rather than these snapshots several times a year.

Saint Christophers

Allow me to introduce my new pair of Saint Christophers.

Our childhood playmates were Australians who had gone to Great Britain for study leave. The island where we lived off the coast of Malaysia was a veritable treasure box of fun and exciting adventures to invent. In part, it's because the island offered such variety. One of these bits of diversity available was the variety of school systems available: the local Malay system, the Chinese schools, the British schools left over from the colonial days, the Australian school across the strait on the mainland, and our little one-room American school on the mission hospital compound.

One of the three boys we played with nearly every day, Jamie, was trotted off to British preschool by his mother, who was an elegant Australian woman. Jamie's school seemed rather exotic to me; they had to wear uniforms with shoes that were more substantial than the flip-flops or bare feet we traveled to school in every day.

Jamie got to wear Saint Christophers.

Well, that wasn't really the name of the shoes, I guess, but I call them that because Jamie went to St. Christopher's School, and I associated his style of shoe with their uniforms. And uniforms, may I add, were very cool. They meant that you were special. They meant that you belonged to a group of people instead of sticking out like I did in a country where most people didn't look like me.

You know how there are sights or smells that bring back strong memories to you from your past? As soon as I saw these Saint Christophers for sale in Wal-mart last week for just $22, I had to try them on. And joy of all joys, they were so very comfortable, they could not be resisted!

I delight in putting them on. I delight in walking around in them. I delight in the slightly British feel that comes over me when I'm wearing Saint Christophers. I delight in the sense that they make me feel special, like I belong in them, like I'm part of a secret society with access to lovely places and books and ideas and a civilization that is neat and tidy and stalwart and dignified.

Saint Christophers. Because the shoes we wear are oh-so-important to our well-being.

Stand firm then, with ... your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. Eph. 6:14, 15