january 11 2024

I work on our blog in fits and starts. I should feel guilty about that, but I just know that life is full and some things don’t happen the way I had hoped.

One thing factoring in, I have realized, is that my hope of conveying here some of what life was like over our year in Kyiv would be a sort of reliving those long, dark, heavy months. When we were there and in it, we were just doing what was next. We were all together, an odd sense of camaraderie in a time of war. I say ‘odd’ because, strangely, in all of the heaviness, all of the darkness, all of the jolts from this or that news, there was a lightness (I cannot think of another word) born of being in it together with so many others. 

It is rare to have such a broad sense of shared experience, at least for me, because I and we live such an odd life relative to the people we are with in any given time. Now that it’s just Mark and I at home, we mostly look to each other in a given moment when we want that sense of, ‘you get this, you were there when…’ – whether it was the funny memory of some travel mishap or the shared anguish of something horrifically hard. In any given place wherever we are in the world, there are huge parts of me that are invisible to the person I’m with – my Ukrainian friend and neighbor really just cannot fathom what my mind sees when I am speaking of my home city Houston. And my Texas people truly cannot fathom the incomprehensibility of living in a high-rise apartment building and using an elevator any time I just want to go out to the car.

But to have experienced, with thousands and tens of thousands of people, the hardships, the crazy, the jokes about the ‘schedule’ for electricity outages – there was a comfort in that which is hard to explain. I think it met an important part of us that God created for us to have deeply, which seems so hard to have in this modern life, and that is a deep need to be in community with, to ‘fellowship’ as it were, in this case, because of enduring, forced difficulty.

So as much as it was an idea to try to give a sense of what those months were like by my previous posts, I think I’m not going to keep going through my little journal with those. Hopefully what I did write gave some idea, but it seems like it’s time to move on. Dear Nancy likely won’t know that she’s the impetus for me writing today, but I want to make a goal of writing here more frequently. And maybe give myself permission for the posts to be encapsulated snapshots rather than a coherent, overarching narrative. I so want to use this tool to communicate some of what life is like, what the Lord is doing in me/us, or whatever, for many reasons that I won’t search for clear articulation on right in this moment. 

May you know the Lord’s presence in a profound, personal way as you go about the rest of your day, and if you need it, may you know a bit of peace and even joy in making a course correction on a plan or idea, all for his glory!

in december – part five

12/27/22

Almost to the Polish border. 

Easy train trip, easy connection in Chelm, easy to get car, got books mailed (we had taken lots of luggage plus 13 kilos of books – it was a bit of a wrestle with the up and down of getting onto trains and switching trains [3 in all] and mailing the books).

12/28/22

Abby had an easy time at the airport – ready to see her!

Two extended air raid alarms in Kyiv but no incoming.

12/29/22

Easy day. Abby arrived with no difficulty. Already an air raid alarm in Kyiv, other places. And incoming, with debris hitting 2 private houses and a car “in the Darnytsya region” of Kyiv [our region, although very, very large]. Lasted 4 hours and 44 minutes, will impact electricity and water. Also in Holosivski. Meanwhile, we’re at the beautiful airport in Barcelona, easy, calm…

12/30/22

I don’t even know what day it is. People kept referring to Sunday or Tuesday and I was like, ‘Hm. When is that?’

_____ reached out to see how we are after yesterday – it was kind [she didn’t know we were traveling]. I should have thought to reach out to her.

12/31/22

Seemed like a peaceful day, then early afternoon a barrage country-wide. Just after midnight another long barrage (four hours). [I noted for myself the dissonance I felt being at this meeting and the jovial atmosphere while watching incoming heading to Kyiv].

in december – part four

12/20/22

Electricity went off per schedule at 9 a.m. and was off through the night. All water went off until later in the day. I went with _____ to _____ and _____, zero phone all all day.

12/21/22

Electricity still off. Had a small window 11:45 a.m. – 12:05 p.m., but still off at 5 p.m. Water and even warm water. Some cell service!

[I wrote a little side note, ’37 hours this time’.]

12/22/22

Quiet day. Electricity on like crazy today. Were able to get books at Knizhkovka Politsya (in the dark!) and maybe new internet provider!!! Got gifts finished up for a lot of folks here – yahoo!

12/23/22

We were able to send packages, do seminary Christmas gathering, then meet [Ukraine WorldVenture teammates who have been out of country] for dinner! Electricity on at home kind of per schedule!

12/24/22

Quiet so far. Electricity on more than scheduled so far this morning!

12/25/22

Electricity and warmth and calm. [Personal note about a sad occurrence.] Electricity on all day, not just us.

12/26/22

Electricity still on. Finally had a short outage from 6 p.m. to 8:30 or so. Went to the train [we headed out on the trek across country by train to then cross Poland in order to fly to a conference over New Year’s].

in december – part three

12/13/22

Still hard. Another painful conversation, same conclusions. Waited all day to hear from ____ professor re: narrowing material for the final, and from ____ and ____ about the project – no word from either. _____ meeting discouraging…

12/14/22

6:20 a.m. – new strikes on Kyiv, still discerning damage – not infrastructure this time – “military district” near _____.

Spent yesterday with _____ and _____ doing shopping for Christmas Gives Back packages. Thankful.

12/15/22

Quiet, actually. Lots of snow. Finished _____ exam, semester.

12/16/22

Large-scale nationwide strikes this morning (starting around 8:15). So far, three waves, incoming to Kyiv, some have been intercepted [air defense was slowly improving, but direct hits vs. damage from falling debris were still occurring]. Others not (apparently over the Left Bank Troyeshina, Bereznyki areas thus far). Electricity went off as scheduled at 9 a.m. (strikes were still happening) then hot water, then all water. In those ways reminiscent of 11/23. We’ll see.

4 p.m., still no electricity, no data since about 10 a.m., also no heat and still no water [we had stocked up on water, candles, flashlights, batteries as recommended].

7 p.m. some neighboring buildings have light back – still none here, no water.

12/17/22

Electricity came back on around midnight, don’t know when the cold water came on. At 5 a.m. no hot water or heat, but not cold inside despite cold outside.

12/18/22

Mark taught on the Psalms at the seminary for the Lentium (pastoral abbreviated program), I headed to church for the Christmas Gives Back singing thing. Some electricity but off longer than usual when we got home. Still no hot water but a wonderful blessing to find it this morning at 5 a.m.

12/19/22

Quiet day all day, electricity and internet and hot water – woohoo.

20 drones to Kyiv before 6 a.m., 15 downed in town – west of Podil again. (Forgot – enjoyed driving in Podil yesterday, shopping at [an all-locally produced fair/market].

in december – part two

12/4/22

Made it through last week with no new mass attacks.

12/5/22

More afternoon strikes. None landed in Lviv or Kyiv city [Kyiv is also the name of an oblast, or state] but extended period of electricity out even here [in Lviv]. _____s invited us for dinner – always nice. Streets dark like in Kyiv.

12/7/22

Still quiet here. Nothing big yesterday. Apparently UBTS [school Mark was teaching at in Lviv] is not used to having electricity out, so the plan to just do classes feels weird when that foundational thing is not steady.

12/8/22

Quiet day, 4am Zoom [for a class I was taking online originating in the U.S.], met with ____, knocked out end of school stuff while Mark taught his last day. Zelenskiy and Ukrainian people on TIME cover, Politico Man of the Year, etc., etc.

12/9/22

Heading back to Kyiv today (train). I just noticed (again) the tendency to go through something big, then to settle back down into a sense of more or less calm/just keep on, but also the tendency to forget what went before in any detail – just broad strokes, larger moments – like the strikes on October 10^th. Even now I know that there were strikes after that, and the steady decline into limited daily electricity, etc., but the strikes on 11/23 have dimmed all of that detail (even the dates of what then were significant strikes in Kyiv and around the country. The following Monday? [in October] the 17^th? then another, but not on a Monday? – I’ve already lost track).

The “new norm” of not scheduled outages [the city announced a change] but emergency outages has even become a blur. We weren’t really keeping the schedule before 11/23, but that has erased all memory of those. 

Being in Lviv will impact my sense of the strikes this past Monday (12/5), but I know Kyiv is definitely feeling them; here, the seminary had electricity out for the first time (for them – maybe they’ve had a generator?).

12/11/22

It seems to be the norm to not have electricity at church on Sunday mornings now. The ability to do electronics and coffee at the same time is an issue [due to overloading the generator] – but people are consistently coming anyway!

12/12/22

We haven’t had anything new in Kyiv, but I’ve realized that in my focusing on Kyiv, I have not been seeing (and feeling) the fact that the losses and stresses grow in a lot of places, every day.

I was feeling pretty out of sorts Saturday and Sunday – wanting to be seen and even appreciated [by people who were present] and it wasn’t pretty. People outside of this can’t pull all the pieces together, or if they do, it’s a shock, and then it fades. The day in, day out is utterly incomprehensible. The desire to “take a break” was real, and then I see that no one around us has that option. Humbling.

in december – part one

12/1/22

EC [Mark’s meeting at the seminary] and then to Obolon to meet A——, and one brief air raid alert, but no attacks on Kyiv (had wondered if we’d get ‘gifts’ for the first day of winter [our cynicism ran pretty high as we saw strong correlations between attacks and dates or occasions significant to the Russians]. Our electricity was out in the morning and again 4-10 pm, but overall, fine.

12/2/22

Quiet day. [Mark’s uncle] started his chemo today. Air raid alert in the afternoon but no sense of active strikes.

12/3/22

Took the train to Lviv so Mark could teach, both normal and very weird. Debated bringing the large back-up battery thing – totally not necessary! We are in a hotel room and it’s crazy. It’s so normal, but compared to home and Kyiv, it’s warm, super lit up (Christmas lights, extra [electricity being used] everywhere), hot water without interruption, internet – wow. A little hard to reconcile. Even in the dark, street and traffic lights [Kyiv had not had ordinary street lights on for some time, and if a sector of the city had no power, the traffic lights were also off. Lviv’s sparse lighting felt like a vast change from Kyiv, even though it was very odd for Lviv to have so few lights on.]

november 28, 2022 – part four

[I was taking two on-line, “asynchronous” courses for my studies in counseling. I am so glad I did not have live classes that I needed to be online for every week, because it would not have been possible The increasing electricity outages made it such that we also had extremely limited wi-fi, and skimpy data on our phones.]

I’m nervous about these last two weeks of classes and then finals week. I just realized I may not have the uninterrupted [online] hours for the final exams.

We are supposed to go to Lviv this weekend and who knows what it’s going to be like there. They’ve been in similar shape [as Kyiv].

The local news now seems to be saying we should expect a pretty hard week. They are expecting more strikes – a weekly thing now. They [the Russians] did a serious of Monday strikes in October then stopped. November 15^th was a Tuesday. November 23^rd was a Wednesday. With Thursday both the next in a possible sequence AND being December 1^st may make it a day of strikes. We’ll see. [We were looking for patterns everywhere, trying to understand what might happen in order to choose the best course of action for safety, etc.]

(It was nice to get a long-overdue haircut last Wednesday morning – that extra 5 inches was pretty noticeable when trying to wash it [in trying circumstances]!).

11/28/22

We got word this afternoon that the city says they are going to try to provide electricity for 2-3 hours, 2 times a day 😳

11/29/22

Expecting a fresh, mass attack this week. Today has been quiet and cold. Lots of snow fell overnight. Got some more supplies at Epicenter (antifreeze, batteries, candles, etc.)

november 28, 2022 – part three

[The power was off 36 hours straight, from noon that day before Thanksgiving to midnight Thursday, Thanksgiving Day.]

The power was on for two hours and 45 minutes (we didn’t stay up, but I woke up around 2:30 am, so we were checking things out when it went off again) and then it was off again for several hours.

A little 15-minute blip Friday morning gave us hope, then not. All in all on Friday, we had power that one time just after midnight, a 15-minute blip around 8:00 am, for two hours at noon, and at 8:00 pm. A startling new reality.

[And yet we laughed in that new reality. We left the apartment mid-morning on Friday in search of some internet and some hot food. When we got home, we were surprised that the power had come on more or less according to the so-called schedule and we had missed most of it. As we walked into the building, two women were standing in the entrance talking. We asked them about how long it had been on and they said, ‘almost 2 hours,’ at which we looked at each other wondering if we should risk taking the elevator up to get home faster and use that last 15 minutes to quickly get some things done, or to take the stairs to not risk getting stuck in the elevator in the dark. The older of the two chuckled and said, ‘Go for it!’ and we laughingly dashed off to the elevator, risking that 21 seconds going up and holding our breaths till the doors opened again.]

We had been planning to go out to Josh and Sveta’s house to check out that as an option [colleagues had offered their home in a village outside of Kyiv a good ways from us] so we missed whatever electricity there was during the middle of the day, but is was out 3 ½ hours I the morning and when we got home again, till 5:30 in the evening. You feel a little crazy when it’s on for more than 2 hours and you feel so rich because of that.

It didn’t go off as scheduled yesterday (Sunday morning) but getting up before it was scheduled to be off [at 6:00 am] in order to shower was good, even though sleeping longer might have been nice. It went off earlier than the schedule said – at 2:15 pm – and stayed off until 10:15 pm. There had been a 15-minute blip around 7:00 pm but it was clear that although buildings nearby were back on, something was wrong in ours. Oh well. 

[Different sections of the city were assigned different times for outages, and our building was at the edge of one of those sections, so we could watch and see how things were going.]

I got up early before the schedule outage time to boil water [for coffee] – often (before the 11/15 strikes) the morning schedule wasn’t followed because the system could apparently handle the load in those hours. That was nice because it meant (for an early bird like me) some extra opportunities to run the washer or whatever.

Today, we’re not getting that morning bonus – popped off at 6:20 am (schedule says 6). With the troubles last night (couldn’t seem to get our building back online even when others were) it’s hard to predict for today.

We’re going to risk getting some groceries today, using the balcony instead of the fridge. Yesterday’s 8 hours off doesn’t bode well for safe food.

[I’ll continue this post in part four. I had stopped on November 28^th to jot down a lot of thoughts at once before they got too overrun by new happenings.]

november 28, 2022 – part two

Continuing from the last post: Between figuring out food and meals… I couldn’t really feel the impact of the strikes [Natalie was referring to] on Tuesday November 15th.

On 11/23/22 – a Wednesday – we were in the middle of a scheduled blackout that had started at noon when a fresh attack on Kyiv started. 

[I’ll note here that now in June of 2023, after daily strikes all last month, this feels almost odd to be so concerned. But back then, the cold weather, air defense being less able to defend and thus the hitting of targets, and the blackouts made the thought of incoming missiles cause a whole different set of feelings.]

We watched, and things seemed initially tense and then pretty quickly seemed relatively normal. (‘Watched’ = looking out our various windows to see how people were reacting, behaving.) I began to feel stress as the hours went on, mainly thinking about the refrigerator and freezer.

[This was happening on the day before U.S. Thanksgiving; we were not having a TG meal as electricity and cooking were already pretty stressful and it didn’t make sense to expand that stress, even for a wonderful reason.]

By that point we already knew that some power station in Darnitsya (the Left Bank, not super far [yes, it wasn’t very close to us, but also not very far away either]) had been hit and that this blackout could go on for a while. Before nightfall – 3:30 or 4 these days! – we also lost all water. (We never have hot water when the power is out.)

We also had no cell service, so in that regard, we were completely cut off from communicating with anyone here or anywhere else, from news, etc. That was another stressor for me, and I think for Mark too.

We had systematically been getting candles, flashlights, and batteries, and I stocked up on clean and utility water. We weren’t doing well on the food front, not yet finding good options that work without refrigeration or cooking.

It was relatively cold outside but not cold enough on the balcony [enclosed] to make that a fridge substitute [yet]. We considered using the back-up powerbank thing for the fridge, but worried that draining it to run the fridge and still having no power might not be good [a little late for being economical, we bought a backup powerbank which could run our computers, phones, a lamp or two].

It was good we didn’t do that. From noon Wednesday to midnight Thursday [36 hours] without power meant the fridge and freezer both had to be emptied into the trash.

[I’ll continue this post in part three, but those 36 hours were both very, very quiet and very intense.]

november 28, 2022 – part one

So it occurred to me that it might be good to write down what things are like as the winter begins.

[We’d already had snow, and by the end of November it was clear that it would be an atypical winter, weather-wise. Usually in November there is no snow, or a single, light snowfall, but this year there were several in November and the snow stayed. We had at or below freezing temperatures during the day in November, so that was unusual too. Not typical to be thinking about ice on the sidewalks in November and early December.]

On 11/15/22 – a Tuesday – we had fresh strikes in Kyiv. I don’t remember now exactly where or the results because of last week’s [strikes] overshadowing them. I do remember Natalie* asking me early last week how I was “after Tuesday,” and all I could think was, ‘Tuesday?’ I drew a complete blank. Between figuring out food and meals, working to get schoolwork done [for my counseling program] before Saturday’s women’s retreat at church, and then baking for that in the wee hours – I couldn’t really feel the impact of the strikes on Tuesday.

[I’ll stop to clarify several things here. First, when we got permission to return to Kyiv at the end of the summer, there was electricity, relatively normal life, relative calm. Then, Russian rockets to Kyiv shocked everyone in mid-October, and it was clear they were aimed at crippling critical infrastructure such as the power grid. Kyiv’s air defense was not as good as it later became, so many of those strikes were successful.

Kyiv is a very large, modern city and as such, hitting the electrical grid meant impacting the city’s ability to function at every level. City authorities worked valiantly to repair and just provide electricity on a limited basis, rotating outages through sectors of the city. It quickly became clear that even scheduled outages and extreme conservation quickly became emergency outages. Most days became days with power off more hours than it was on, and unpredictably so.

The unpredictability became both a shared joke to the 2+ million people of the city, as well as a major stressor: as the city worked to make sure hospitals and sewage, basic heating and major public transportation kept the city and the economy alive, all normal kitchen functions, elevators in all those high-rises, street lights and traffic lights, school and stores and internet and cell phone towers suddenly were off without warning, for hours on end, and no predictability. Each fresh strike meant more darkness, more difficulty.

I’ll end this post with those clarifications and continue that November 28^th entry in subsequent posts.]

*I will keep names as generic as possible to protect the privacy of others.

what to say?

I was not surprised to see the date of my last entry here. The intervening two years have been a bit like being in a food processor – rather choppy – and catching up would definitely be jumbled. At the same time, some significant things have happened so I’ll just press on and hope that you can forgive the mishmash.

It is now June of 2023 and I had the thought of posting some of the entries from my journal that I started last November, as we were facing a hard winter in wartime circumstances. My hope is that it will give you a glimpse of life as it was and at the same time, catch you up on what we’ve been up to. I will add notes that clarify or explain, but my hope is to post what I wrote in my journal without changing or editing what we were thinking about and feeling then.

I’ll also sprinkle in some posts that fill in gaps between the Hebrew in a Hotel Room entry and now, and gladly answer any questions you direct my way. Because there are so many ways to connect, I’d recommend sending those via email to donna@mcdonnel.net so that we can make sure they don’t get overlooked as a popup message in some other app.

Hebrew in a hotel

Mark was scheduled to teach the first course in Biblical Hebrew this month, a course which comes up on the rotation only every other year. Any language course is a challenge in the one-week intensive format, and doubly so when it has to be transitioned to an on-line class.

We had been thinking through how to take a trip to Texas for a number of months already, always with an eye to what pandemic-ness would mean for not only travel, but ongoing teaching at the seminary. A hidden blessing of 2020 was being forced to figure out and then do on-line teaching, rapidly. It has meant a flexibility that although not a first choice for teaching, makes teaching still possible.

After Mark’s father’s death on December 20^th, we immediately packed our bags… and then didn’t go anywhere. Mark started feeling achy and had some fever on the 22^nd and it seemed wrong to just muscle on through and get to Texas. What we had been thinking about happening all year was confirmed on Saturday, January 2^nd when we got tested in order to meet airline requirements. Mark tested positive for the virus and I tested negative. This made us both automatically ineligible for travel until we could both show a negative test.

We read everything in sight but the gatekeeping factor always came back to the airlines. It didn’t matter how we felt or any other guidelines. What we hadn’t known until then was the very real possibility of re-testing positive after recovering, due to the biology of it (not the quality of the tests, etc.)

Faced with the upcoming class, we couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. Finally, Mark said, ‘Ok, let’s look at it this way: What do we have to lose? If we test now (the Wednesday before the class) and it comes back positive, then we just have to stay in Kyiv until the class is over. By the time we re-test after the class it will be the same as having just waited the recommended amount of time.’

The Ukrainian celebration of Christmas on January 7^th pushed the test to Friday the 8^th, with the results coming by email within 12 hours as they had before. By this point, the bags had been packed for two and a half weeks, we’d had to tentatively re-stock on some groceries with a view to trying to eat well in the waiting, and the apartment was a little less ‘travel-ready’ than it had been.

We had been looking at flight options, with the upcoming Monday class start very much on our minds. The academic dean at the seminary offered to move the class from 2:00 – 8:00 pm Kyiv time in the event that it would be happening from Texas instead of Kyiv. (The ordinary class time would have meant teaching from midnight to 6:00 am in Texas!)

At 9:20 pm the email came in and, miraculously, we were both negative. After being stunned for several minutes, we both started looking at flights, and were even more stunned that we were considering getting onto a flight out that left just a few hours hence.

The Lord gave us the wherewithal to re-pack, tell everybody who needed telling, get the apartment back in order, find a place to land on the other side, and more that I’ve already forgotten. We walked out the door six hours after we got the email.

It was interesting each morning last week to be all set and ready to go before 6:00 am, when the class started. It was a wild swirl of Russian and Ukrainian and Hebrew and English, with hilariously Ukrainianized descriptions of how to write Hebrew letters, an 8-hour time difference that constantly had Mark correcting his time references when he announced a break, and blood-pressure raising moments of the internet going out mid-sentence. I saw the beauty of the Lord’s enabling as, at the end of the first day, the timing worked as Mark had planned (even with the fog of all that had preceded it) and they all read slowly aloud the very first verses of Genesis chapter one in Hebrew.

It was a joy for me to be in the room, quite literally, to see how years of experience and interacting with students and culture and so much more come together. Mark isn’t one to tout his own virtues, but his humility and humor and hard work were clearly on display, and the respect of the students and his Ukrainian colleague and academic dean are plainly evident.

(If you’d like to hear as they read the first verses of Genesis in Hebrew, click here.)

Biblical Theology

Sometimes when I write about some of the courses Mark teaches, it occurs to me that the name of a class may not make it very clear what the class is about. Biblical Theology has the added burden of begging the question, ‘If it isn’t biblical theology, then what kind of theology is it?!’

Theology can be seen as something pie-in-the-sky, not-for-ordinary-folk oddness that only intellectuals and scholars and, well, odd people are interested in.

Mark says, “Many people would like to say, I don’t believe in theology, I just read the Bible, but the minute the words go from the page into your mind, you’re doing theology. In all of this, we can do theology well, or do it poorly. Do it such that it’s a good reflection of what the text says, or do it such that we’re only confirming our own thoughts, wants, and understanding – confirming what we want it to say.”

So it’s actually pretty important for all believers.

Theology is a field of study that looks at what the Bible says and means about God, his attributes, his creation, and how he relates to the world. But the Bible says it is God’s word to us, “Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Ti 3:16), and as such, we need to be careful in how we read it and understand it.

If you were to look up theology, you might find that there are a lot of different kinds of theology – systematic theology, biblical theology, historical theology, practical theology, exegetical theology, natural theology – which could be rather confusing. Theology comes from the Bible and is based on the Bible, but getting from the Bible to our daily lives – understanding it in order to apply it – can be a complicated process. Most of the time, though, each of these types is attempting to address specific questions, and may be an application of a specific method of study.

Systematic theology, for example, is the process of understanding the Bible in order to understand modern questions. It usually starts with who God is – theology proper – and then systematically works through how we know God – revelation, the Bible – on out to creation and how God interacts with creation.

The ‘modern questions’ part is determined by the time period when the systematizing is being done. Questions about Christ’s nature – his humanity, his deity – are a good example of this. The Bible says that Jesus became like us, but in what way did he become ‘like us’? How human was Jesus? In exploring Jesus’ human nature, terms borrowed from Greek philosophy helped explore how human he was – terms like will, nature, person. Over time, those terms changed as understanding of the mind grew. More terms were added – soul, spirit. In the present, we think in terms of the brain and intelligence and memory and thought. How does the biblical language of the heart, soul, and spirit relate to the electro-chemical operation of the brain?

Each generation brings questions to the text that biblical authors had no idea they were going to need to answer.

Another area where the passage of time influenced the questions being asked is the creation. In reading theologians in the first century, they weren’t trying to answer questions of how a world-wide flood occurred. Over the course of time, questions about creation were influenced by a growing understanding of gravity, heliocentricity, relativity, and a host of other more modern studies. When Moses wrote, ‘Let there be light’, he wasn’t thinking about photons and light particles.

And every generation since the first century has identified signs of Christ’s coming and has felt like the signs indicated that their generation had all of the elements for Christ to appear.

In biblical theology, Mark tells his students, “We’re asking about how the different parts of the bible relate to each other. With systematic, we try to bring it into the modern world.”

“We study biblical theology because we believe that, for all its different parts, the Bible tells one large story. Biblical theology is the study of the plot and development of that story, with the goal of seeing ourselves as continuing that story in our lives.”

little things

One of the joys of a home assignment aka furlough is the little things. They are, in themselves, little – moments here, a conversation there – but the accumulation of them is sweet.

Since 2010 we have mostly done shorter, summer home assignments. In the short format, you hit the ground running and try to get as much accomplished as humanly possible, on as many fronts as possible, before frantically packing at the end of it and dropping exhaustedly into an airplane seat, wondering wearily if you actually managed to say goodbye to [fill in the blank, but it was someone important] or if you hoped to and it didn’t quite work out in the rush to the finish. So the little things have come to be very special.

One of those little joys has to do with having the joy of basically calling one address ‘home’ for the last five and a half months. And a fun part of that has been ‘the squirrel tally’. A dear family member who shall remain nameless J found a possible solution to the squirrels eating very expensive holes in the wiring of the yummy-wire Toyotas that live at this address. A friend suggested some humane, catch-and-release traps which allow the squirrel (and other small animals, but I digress) to get in, and then the whole thing can be carried or driven to a place where they can be released, preferably a park a very good ways away from the house.

So on most days, there’s a running background commentary on ‘the tally’, with the latest squirrel antics recounted for everyone’s enjoyment. None of us will soon forget the one squirrel which literally entered five different times, removed five different pecans – native to our yard – and then climbed all over the outside of the trap before going into the now pecan-less trap and finally stepping on the plate that closed the door (yes, we were watching, as the device is now outside the kitchen window!)

Another treasure is the times of just walking together in the evenings, or when we could manage it, early in the mornings. It was almost always a snatched moment after we had been traveling and spending time with supporting churches or families, and it was never as regular as any of us wanted it to be. It was rarely the same combination of people at any given time, but the preciousness of doing something so ordinary with dear ones when that is something that is not usually possible – has been a true joy.

Laughing over a board game and the number of house rules which have become inviolate, being able to join on trips to the radio station where Mark’s dad records his weekly broadcast and the conversation that Houston traffic affords along the way, running over to grab a quick visit with Abigail just because we can and soon we can’t, sorting through the deluge of mail that comes to parents’ address because they have hosted so many of us over the years and laughing as we lay out each recipient’s haul into separate stacks, and so much more.

We’ve driven thousands of miles – sorry, no tally to dazzle you with – and have spoken with innumerable people in a number of states I can’t quite remember in this moment. We’ve reported and expressed thanks, we’ve talked with folks who wanted to learn about our ministry or more about missions in general. We’ve taken care of family business and health things put off for times like these. We’ve stayed very busy. And yet, the Lord gave us small treasures along the way in a lot of very little things. Sweetness indeed.

laughing

So we’re again visiting a city we’ve been to three times already during this home assignment, and we are coming to look for and even delight in what surprises the Lord has in store for us.

We gave a report at one of our supporting churches on Wednesday night, and are still in town for some other meetings. A pastor of yet a different supporting church in the area had posted on his facebook page about a visiting pastor from Zambia being in town tonight, at an unrelated-to-us church on the other side of town. As we had the freedom in our schedule to go over there, we hopped in the car and went to hear Conrad Mbewe speak.

After Mark filled me in on who Pastor Mbewe is, I don’t think I expected to drive up to a church that is so like so many of the churches we have visited on this home assignment – a modest, small country church – and to take our seats in a sanctuary very like so many we have been in in the last several months.

As it turns out, Pastor Mbewe is friends with another pastor in the area and, in coordination with the pastor of this church, came to speak about Titus 2:11-14 this evening. And that was the icing on the cake. Mark is preaching at a church back in the Houston area this Sunday and had just settled on that very passage as his text. When Pastor Mbewe started by uttering words I have heard Mark himself say so many times, I knew this was going to be a message meaningful to Mark. For Mark’s part, he was thankful to hear how Pastor Mbewe connected verse 13 to the rest of the passage, something he had been mulling over himself.

After the service, we turned to speak to the man behind us, who turned out to be the friend Pastor Mbewe was visiting. We had immediately recognized the name of the church when he had mentioned it to someone before the service started, but were wracking our brains trying to remember the connection. It turns out we had, indeed, visited that church some 20 years ago, and that this man had prayed for us and our ministry in Ukraine!

So, we drive to another state and in a free space among planned meetings with people we had set up a month ago, we go to a church on the complete other side of the city to hear a pastor from Africa, who is friends with yet a different pastor in this city, and who chose to speak on a passage Mark is preaching on this Sunday. As we drove away, Mark commented, ‘God must be laughing up there with all the various connections he made for us on this trip!’