Home Again

The trip is on its last leg and reflecting on it, I’ve learned many things. Some seem pretty profound, while others are pretty trivial. I guess in a sense, it all really is, but it all in all, God seems to work through the trivial moreso than not. Our last day in Riga, we spent the day with Dan, Courtney, and Ceara, the 11-day old latest edition to the Randall family. Dan and Courtney, both Duke Div graduates interestingly enough, are UMC missionaries in Latvia and together, essentially run the church. It was great talking with them about the new baby, Camp Wesley, as well as our common friends we had. LT and Eidson spent half of last summer with them in Latvia before heading to Russia, and Courtney was previously a youth director/minister at a particularly outstanding church I got to know really well last summer from Cary. The world is small indeed.

We broke schwarma together before saying goodbye to D, C and the baby and heading to old Riga. We decided to try our luck as street musicians in one of the old squares in town. Turns out, it was really hot and we hit an epic mental and musical block, which rendered us unable to think of anything to play, thus turning into a really long blues jam in E (obviously).

That night, we found a restaurant and ate one last meal out before doing various things the rest of the evening. Once we arrived in Frankfurt and made a futile effort to get an earlier flight home, we prepared for our 22-hour layover in Germany. After much indecision, we decided to take a train into the city to eat. We settled on a small outdoor café in which we ended up spending the next four or so hours sitting around. We tried to get the check at one point, but John, our Filipino waiter who lived in Germany but spoke English in what sounded like a California accent, insisted we hang around. Restaurants are one place in which American and European cultures differ dramatically. There is hardly a rush to turn tables, mainly because tipping is much different. I’m sure many servers were shocked to see the amount of tip we left throughout our various eating adventures, but oh well. I bet it made them happy and that is worth it enough.

The train ride back to the airport was as big of an adventure as we had. We followed all the correct signs back to the terminal, but when we stopped at the main Frankfurt terminal, the train shot us back the other direction towards the suburbs. It took forever to finally get it worked out, but we finally made it back around 1:30 a.m. local time. Turns out, we weren’t the only ones wandering around that particular city, though. Literally, and I’m not exaggerating on this, one in every seven or eight people was wearing a Bruce Springsteen shirt. It seems the Boss had made a stop in the city that night, which caused what would normally be a pretty vacant train station to swarm with people. It definitely made things more interesting. Once we got back to the airport, we set up shop in a dark area and each went about finding our most preferable sleeping positions. Some preferred the seats, while the Bob, Beesh and myself ended up on the floor. We left Frankfurt at 10 and arrived in D.C. a few minutes before one. We’ll leave here at 5:10 EST and get to Birmingham just after 6:00, thus ending the trip once and for all.

In Gallup’s StrengthsFinder, your top five strengths are determined from a list of several questions that you answer. When my results came back, not surprisingly, number one was connectedness. It is the idea that everyone in the world is seemingly connected, that we are all related somehow, that something greater links us together in a community that most, if not all, cannot understand. People with Connectedness carry this belief in the forefront of their mind, which coincidentally or not, is something that’s been happening to me all year long. God continually shows me ways in which we are tied together, be it through paint brushes and rollers at Urban, guitars in Latvia or anything else. He is teaching me something, though I’m not quite sure what it is.

One doesn’t need to spend much time around any number of people in my immediate or extended family to know that music is an important thing. To hear the Hastings family rip a 9-part harmony to the doxology before lunch or dinner at the lake is all-in-one hilarious, beautiful, inspiring and well, beautiful. Music has been such a large part of my life so far and I don’t think God did that as an accident. Music provides a place that the connectedness I’m talking about can manifest itself in my life. I knew going into the trip that I would be touched by the transcendence of the language barrier that would happen at the worship workshop at Camp Wesley. That, in itself, is a beautiful thing. The moment that I was really flooded by the emotion came during “All Who Are Thirsty,” as our Latvian friends gradually took the lead on more and more songs. They chose this particular song because they had the words translated in Latvian, so away we went. As I played for Sonita and Kristina, I began to sing the words in English to myself. We all started to jump into, gradually increasing the volume as they became more comfortable leading the song. Once the chorus hit, it was almost unearthly.

“Come Lord Jesus, come.”

Harmony knows no language. Harmony is universal. I believe, as I alluded to earlier, God gave me somewhat of a gift in music to lead me to a place where I can not only lead worship, but that I can realize this web of faith that is woven when we do worship. As we sang that simple chorus, with blending languages and everything, the presence of God was eerily palpable. It was almost as if words didn’t matter; we were offering what we could give, the harmony, the melody, in worship to a God who provides a way that connects us all, even when we can’t begin to understand words the other is spoken. I believe in a way, God is harmony. We’re not all in the same place, but we are in a place that when we summon that gift or offering inside us, beautiful music is made.

Throughout the trip, these things have continually been made present in my spirit and mind. Desmond Tutu speaks of this communal sense using a traditional African word: ubuntu. To have ubuntu is to recognize that your humanity is innately tied in your fellow man, that we are all, indeed, connected, that I am human because you are human.

May you recognize, affirm and live in this spirit of connectedness and ubuntu each and every day. Grace and peace.

jc