Yesterday evening, J (a fellow teacher on the LCC Georgia program) and I hiked to the top of Sololaki hill to get a view of Tbilisi at night when the city lights come on, and everything is illuminated. Interestingly enough, it was the aluminium statue of Kartlis Deda that caught my interest most (see picture below). Standing at 20 meters tall, she is said to be the 'Mother of Georgia' and holds a cup of wine that offers hospitality in her left hand and a sword that warns of defense to enemies in her right hand. From her vantage point on Sololaki hill, she looks downward on the city and watches all of what it does. In my mind, she is the personification of Wisdom, as written in Proverbs 9, verses 1-6.
Wisdom has built her house;
she has carved its seven columns.
She has prepared a great banquet,
mixed the wines, and set the table.
She has sent her servants to invite everyone to come.
She calls out from the heights overlooking the city.
"Come in with me," she urges the simple.
To those who lack good judgment, she says,
"Come, eat my food,
and drink the wine I have mixed.
Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live;
learn to use good judgment."
J and I stayed on top of the hill past sunset, capturing some images of the city in its illumination. On our journey down hundreds of steps as we descended the hill's northeast side, we talked about future plans. I confessed to J that I used to plan my life in five-year chunks, but at this moment, I can't even think past a year. What is fairly certain at this point is that at the end of December 2017, I hope to have completed a Master's degree in language testing. After that date, there will be many branches on the fig tree (to steal an analogy from Silvia Plath's The Bell Jar) that will move out from its trunk, yet I am neither in knowledge of nor committed to which branch to pick figs from.
This morning, I had in my mind that for Sunday morning devotion, I would listen to a Tim Keller sermon. I fired up the old YouTube search box and was delighted to see that the second sermon in the list was one titled "Your plans: God's plans". I intentionally did nothing else (no multitasking), and listened to Keller the whole way through. The majority of his sermon focused on the 'paradox' that is Proverbs 16, verse 9: "We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps."(NLT). We are free to make our own decisions, and yet it is the LORD who has already determined His plan for us. How then, do we make decisions in our lives if God already has a plan for us? Do we become paralyzed and do nothing, knowing that the end fate will be the same, no matter what we do? Or do we become passive, waiting for God to tell us what to do? We need guidance.
In the final year of my studies as an undergraduate English major, I was in definite need of guidance. What do I do after graduation? was the key question on my mind. I sought guidance from Dr. B, my linguistics professor. No joke—I used to spend at least two hours each week in his office. It was usually a Friday afternoon, when the week was at an end, and I could give all of my attention to listening, truly listening, to what he had to say about language, philosophy, teaching, jam bands, university admissions procedures, politics, and his ambition to visit every single country in the European Union. When people ask me how I ended up teaching English to non-native speakers of English, I explain that the idea was given to me by him. When people ask me how I ended up in Lithuania, I credit his stories of his Fulbright experience as a lecturer at Vilnius University and his giddy fascination with the complex, case-rich syntax of the Lithuanian language. Dr. B's office was the place I went to for guidance and wisdom, and he offered it up so easily and willingly every week.
At 22 years of age, in that last year of my studies, I wasn't specifically seeking God's guidance in discerning what His plan was for my life. I made my life decisions based on what I thought would take me outside of the United States, outside of myself so that I could find what I so painfully longed for: an understanding of the world from perspectives that were not American perspectives. Dr. B's guidance was in alignment with that purpose, and so I never questioned it. I used my agency to guide my life in that direction. As Keller so aptly pointed out in his sermon, God was not absent in those years. No matter the decisions I have made, He has been faithful in His presence through the people I've met, the ideas I've been exposed to, the challenges I've faced, the hard lessons that I've learned, and the landscapes I've witnessed that reinforce how small we all are in this universe of creation.
I write all of this because here I am in Georgia, serving as an English teacher for refugee and IDP youth. To be honest, upon learning that this program would become a reality, I initially wanted nothing to do with it. I had a negative bias against Georgian students, I was not optimistic that Lithuania (as a whole) would be accepting of a sudden intake of twenty Arab students, and I wondered if the good intentions of teaching youth and adults English to help them pursue higher education in English-medium universities outside of their home regions wouldn't somehow play in to linguistic and educational imperialism. However, I watched one too many UNHCR videos on the humanitarian crisis taking place in the Middle East and North Africa, and I came to the conclusion that if I didn't use the pedagogical and personal talents that God has given me in this opportunity to serve, then I would have to live with the knowledge that I denied someone something that I could have offered so freely. And so, I used my agency to say yes.
Fast forward five months later. As of today, there's two weeks left in the program, and I'm second-guessing whether my decision to come here was really God's intention for me. The IDP Georgian students whom we are teaching in this pilot summer program are already enrolled in Georgian-medium universities for undergraduate programs and have no intention (as of now), to study at an English-medium university. What's more, with such a varied language proficiency range of enrolled students, we're unable to teach academic English (the original goal) and have shifted focus to general English. Most distressing is that, politically, we've not been able to get visas granted for the twenty Syrian and Iraqi refugee youth that we were hoping to serve. One. That is the number of students who is from either of those countries and who will begin studies at LCC in Lithuania in the fall. Have we failed in our mission? Was it our agency that pushed too hard for this mission to succeed?
she has carved its seven columns.
She has prepared a great banquet,
mixed the wines, and set the table.
She has sent her servants to invite everyone to come.
She calls out from the heights overlooking the city.
"Come in with me," she urges the simple.
To those who lack good judgment, she says,
"Come, eat my food,
and drink the wine I have mixed.
Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live;
learn to use good judgment."
J and I stayed on top of the hill past sunset, capturing some images of the city in its illumination. On our journey down hundreds of steps as we descended the hill's northeast side, we talked about future plans. I confessed to J that I used to plan my life in five-year chunks, but at this moment, I can't even think past a year. What is fairly certain at this point is that at the end of December 2017, I hope to have completed a Master's degree in language testing. After that date, there will be many branches on the fig tree (to steal an analogy from Silvia Plath's The Bell Jar) that will move out from its trunk, yet I am neither in knowledge of nor committed to which branch to pick figs from.
This morning, I had in my mind that for Sunday morning devotion, I would listen to a Tim Keller sermon. I fired up the old YouTube search box and was delighted to see that the second sermon in the list was one titled "Your plans: God's plans". I intentionally did nothing else (no multitasking), and listened to Keller the whole way through. The majority of his sermon focused on the 'paradox' that is Proverbs 16, verse 9: "We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps."(NLT). We are free to make our own decisions, and yet it is the LORD who has already determined His plan for us. How then, do we make decisions in our lives if God already has a plan for us? Do we become paralyzed and do nothing, knowing that the end fate will be the same, no matter what we do? Or do we become passive, waiting for God to tell us what to do? We need guidance.
In the final year of my studies as an undergraduate English major, I was in definite need of guidance. What do I do after graduation? was the key question on my mind. I sought guidance from Dr. B, my linguistics professor. No joke—I used to spend at least two hours each week in his office. It was usually a Friday afternoon, when the week was at an end, and I could give all of my attention to listening, truly listening, to what he had to say about language, philosophy, teaching, jam bands, university admissions procedures, politics, and his ambition to visit every single country in the European Union. When people ask me how I ended up teaching English to non-native speakers of English, I explain that the idea was given to me by him. When people ask me how I ended up in Lithuania, I credit his stories of his Fulbright experience as a lecturer at Vilnius University and his giddy fascination with the complex, case-rich syntax of the Lithuanian language. Dr. B's office was the place I went to for guidance and wisdom, and he offered it up so easily and willingly every week.
At 22 years of age, in that last year of my studies, I wasn't specifically seeking God's guidance in discerning what His plan was for my life. I made my life decisions based on what I thought would take me outside of the United States, outside of myself so that I could find what I so painfully longed for: an understanding of the world from perspectives that were not American perspectives. Dr. B's guidance was in alignment with that purpose, and so I never questioned it. I used my agency to guide my life in that direction. As Keller so aptly pointed out in his sermon, God was not absent in those years. No matter the decisions I have made, He has been faithful in His presence through the people I've met, the ideas I've been exposed to, the challenges I've faced, the hard lessons that I've learned, and the landscapes I've witnessed that reinforce how small we all are in this universe of creation.
I write all of this because here I am in Georgia, serving as an English teacher for refugee and IDP youth. To be honest, upon learning that this program would become a reality, I initially wanted nothing to do with it. I had a negative bias against Georgian students, I was not optimistic that Lithuania (as a whole) would be accepting of a sudden intake of twenty Arab students, and I wondered if the good intentions of teaching youth and adults English to help them pursue higher education in English-medium universities outside of their home regions wouldn't somehow play in to linguistic and educational imperialism. However, I watched one too many UNHCR videos on the humanitarian crisis taking place in the Middle East and North Africa, and I came to the conclusion that if I didn't use the pedagogical and personal talents that God has given me in this opportunity to serve, then I would have to live with the knowledge that I denied someone something that I could have offered so freely. And so, I used my agency to say yes.
Fast forward five months later. As of today, there's two weeks left in the program, and I'm second-guessing whether my decision to come here was really God's intention for me. The IDP Georgian students whom we are teaching in this pilot summer program are already enrolled in Georgian-medium universities for undergraduate programs and have no intention (as of now), to study at an English-medium university. What's more, with such a varied language proficiency range of enrolled students, we're unable to teach academic English (the original goal) and have shifted focus to general English. Most distressing is that, politically, we've not been able to get visas granted for the twenty Syrian and Iraqi refugee youth that we were hoping to serve. One. That is the number of students who is from either of those countries and who will begin studies at LCC in Lithuania in the fall. Have we failed in our mission? Was it our agency that pushed too hard for this mission to succeed?
Regressing back to when I had frequent access to an advisor, , I imagine that Guidance and Wisdom have an office somewhere here in Tbilisi, just like Dr. B's, where I could knock on their door and shout through its wood, "Hey! I need an hour of your time. Give me some answers about what we're doing here at Beteli!" On a rational level, I acknowledge what Keller shared in his sermon: "... guidance is as much something God does as something God gives." On a visceral level, I am impatient to know what my purpose here is. Perhaps I should use my quiet time of today, list and evaluate the small things that God has done this week. In these small things, there I will find Guidance's office door. When I knock on that door, Wisdom will be there as the receptionist, an offering of wine in her left hand and a sword of defense in her right. She'll share with me all that she has seen from her vantage point atop Sololaki hill, and tell me that Guidance is at their desk, holding office hours.
1 comment:
Monique, thanks for sharing your heart openly. This spoke to me today as I read. I'll be musing on it all day, and perhaps all week. Best to you, and may you continue to see God's guidance and blessings in small and not so small ways.
David Krise
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