Little Talks

With a month and a half left of my exchange, I have suddenly begun to see England as my home, however temporary. Even just in these past few weeks I've been forming deeper friendships. I've grown so much in my time here. The people I've met and the experiences I've had have definitely shaped me, and God has taught me so many things about myself and about Himself. I am truly stronger for having lived here these past few months. And as people start to ask me about going home I realize that it may be harder than I thought to leave this place. Yes, of curse I want to go home. But I miss the people more than I miss the place. Home will always be familiar, but now that I've gone through the struggle of leaving it behind, it's not as important to me to go back there. I'm more excited to have my family join me here than I am to go home with them at the end of all of this (although, that will be nice). What I wonder now is whether home will still feel the way it use

So I think I should be really open with you. I don't know who reads this blog (but obviously somebody does because the count keeps going up), nor do I know why you read this blog. However, I want Little Talks to be helpful, not just entertaining. If you are having some of the same struggles in your life as I am, or if reading about my walk can help you, then I want to share it with you. That's what I've tried to do this year, especially being in a totally unfamiliar situation. I think it also helps me to feel like there are people out there who might see my posts and understand what I'm going through. I have struggles with my faith, but who doesn't? Anyways, my greatest struggle for the past few years has been rooted in my singleness. I am completely content being single. Yes, I would love to get married and have a family some day, but for now I am okay without all of that. But my writer's imagination has a tendency to pull me into a world of my fantasies and

The police break onto the scene, facing off against the psychopath they've been chasing all episode. They take him down, but along with him they arrest the person or people he has manipulated into doing his dirty work. Or they get to a scene moments too late to stop the crisis, but the victim has managed to overcome the criminal and kill him. In both cases the officers try to soothe the "innocent" party by saying, "It's okay, you didn't have a choice." But is that really true? Just take a minute and imagine yourself in a similar situation. A psychopathic killer abducts you, puts a gun to your head, hands you a knife and says, "Stab that guy," indicating a man he has trapped in front of you. What choices do you have here? Not many, but still some. First, though dangerous and unlikely to be successful, you turn on the psychopath. Kill him, overpower him; you decide what feels right to you. Of course if you kill him that still makes you a murder

[Warning: Mild Spoilers] Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is the story of a scientist on the moon-world of Anarres who is given the chance to go to Urras to share his findings and work at the most prestigious university. Shevek, our physicist friend, is nearing an understanding of the way that time can be simultaneously cyclical and linear. (In a previous post I discussed whether Le Guin's book may intentionally fit into the dialogue about the nature of time in fantasy books, so I won't go into that here, but I find it really fascinating.) Right from the start there is tension around Shevek's journey. The people of Urras and Anarres, once part of the same race/species of people from the main planet, know very little about each other. After an anarchist uprising led by a woman named Odo, a small group of Urrasti moved to the habitable Anarres to start their own civilization free of government. The book essentially uses Shevek as a method of transportation between

I know todays saying maybe doesn't fit my little talk, but we're just going to roll with it. (Okay?) Now that it's April I am officially at the two-and-a-half month mark of my stay in England! And this week I noticed a change: I stopped feeling like I was meeting people and started feeling like I was making friends. I'm sure anyone who has ever moved has had that moment. But maybe not. I've never moved before, so I wouldn't know. I don't expect to come out of this trip with new best friends or anything, but I'm hoping that I can strengthen the relationships I have made so that maybe I won't just lose all contact with the community that I've become part of here. I suppose if there's any connection between this and the Sunday Saying, it's that I may have lost one of my best friends in the past year (no, she's not dead, she just walked out of my life). As hard as that was, I'm sure that these relationships are going to be so great,

I have just read the most insightful article on Tolkien's Middle-Earth and how the stories are not  about a world in the balance between good and evil, but a world that is always in danger of being overtaken by the darkness (read it here ). It clearly highlights the Christian narrative that he wove into his stories, but it also explores the ways in which he altered that narrative to create a world that was always on the edge of falling into darkness. While I agree that his cosmogony sets up a more unbalanced world through a fall before the creation, I think that he was still trying to explain through his faith and his experiences what his saw in this world. Consider that Tolkien fought in the First World War and lost most of his close friends in battle. That was by far the darkest period in modern history - until the Second World War, anyways. How can a man living through all of that violence and destruction understand or come to terms with the darkness all around him? It appears