i have done more than three cool things recently, nonetheless here's three cool things that i have recently done:
went skiing with aaron (who snowboarded) in the mountains that are about three hours of pleasant bus riding away from here. the snowflakes were many, the slopes taxing and forgiving all at the same time, and they had these t-bar lifts that got aaron giggling like a school-girl everytime one hit me in the back of the head.
taught more czech students about canada - doing my best to correct some of the stereotypes and typify some of the others. by the end of class we had discussed igloos, beavers, maple syrup, canadian beer, the existence of God, favorite ice cream flavours, and i had them all singing 'o canada' with gusto.
finished reading 'resurrection' by leo tolstoy. it is a novel that has the potential to pull its reader into the centre of a struggle with the complexities of the system of oppression and injustice that was apparently functioning at the head of russian society around the time when horses pulled carriages through the city streets (the sort of system that still functions today in so many societies and in the world at large). it is about a rich guy who encounters his own idifference, rebels against it, and spends five hundred pages trying to atone for his past sins while coming face to face with the sins of his present - sometimes feeling beautiful and noble like atonement and sometimes feeling dirty and messed up like sin. it's about a rich guy who had dreams, lost them, and goes through a very slow process of finding a field of hope to cultivate more dreams (similar ones, but new ones) in once again.
and now i will go do more things..
Speaking of Tolstoy, and jumping off your post below on KEEPING JESUS, I stumbled across this quote the other day by Dostoyevsky, that knocked me right between the eyes, and then I grabbed onto it for dear life and engulfed it deep down into the recesses of my heart. He said, in a letter to a friend, "If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth...then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth." Sort of reminds me of Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, when they're trying to fight off the Green Lady's spell in the Underworld, and he spouts out that even if Narnia doesn't exist and was just a dream concocted by a bunch of silly kids, it put her world to shame. That he was going to live to see Narnia and Aslan again even if there isn't a Narnia or an Aslan.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe it reminds me of Daniel and his buddies, when they said that even if God didn't save them from the furnace, they wouldn't bow down and worship anyone else. :)
Grace and peace on your adventures in the Czech!
~Becca