Taryn R. Hutchison's Blog: The Glorious Muddle, page 38

What Season is It?

Today is Groundhog Day. And it's 65 degrees outside.



Apparently, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, forecasting six more weeks of winter. But we haven't had the first six weeks yet. Yes, we had a couple weeks where the thermometer plunged below freezing, but overall, it's been an unusually mild winter. We haven't had any snow yet (which I love), but we've had thunderstorms and even a tornado this winter in North Carolina.



While much of the East Coast is facing the same freakish winter, that's not the case around the globe. Maybe the only consistent factor is that the weather lately has been inconsistent with whatever is normal. Eastern Europe has been in a deep freeze for over a week. A friend today on Facebook said that the weather in Romania is only 3 degrees Fahrenheit. That's bad enough, but she said with the wind chill, it feels like -14 degrees. Now that's cold.



Another friend posted photos of her teenage daughter, dwarfed by the gate in front of their house in Bucharest. Snow had drifted even higher than the gate.



Meanwhile, we have daffodils blooming. And it feels like spring.

Listen to my Radio Interview!

During my lunch hour today, I was interviewed by Life Lessons Radio about my transformative travel, as described in my book. My knees shook and I was plenty nervous, but I think I used the opportunity to clearly proclaim my faith in Jesus Christ over the airwaves. I stressed that the only reason I "traveled" to Eastern Europe in those dark days was because I had already been transformed by Christ. I had a purpose in going: to help introduce others to the only One who can truly transform us. And while there, I was transformed myself after seeing God do the impossible and changed by the graciousness of the people I lived among.



Take a listen:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lifelessonsnetwork/2012/01/24/taryn-hutchison-shares-her-transformative-travel#.Tx8HB3rX7hA.facebook

Rembrandt in Raleigh

Last weekend Steve and I, along with hundreds of others, thronged to an event in our state that was so popular that we had to park in an overflow field and wait in a long line for tickets. And it wasn't even NASCAR. We went to Raleigh to see some of Rembrandt's works at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Here we were privvy to a higher level of sophistication than we usually encounter in the foothills. And being a former art major, it's an aspect of life that I need from time to time.



I can't hear the name of my state capital, Raleigh, without picturing Barney Fife puff out his chest and put his thumbs in his belt loops, snorting as he boasted about going to Raleigh. And so the idea of going there to see the largest exhibition of Rembrandt works ever presented in  America, with its only East Coast venue being Raleigh, is incongruous. But that's exactly what we did. And we loved it.



To get to Raleigh, we drove through the Triad cities of the Piedmont area (Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and High Point) on to the Triangle cities (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill). With barely 40 miles separating the triangles, I think they should be combined and called a hexagon. But I digress.



The one day I spent in Amsterdam many years ago, Rembrandt's museum was closed. As was Van Gogh's. Just like my day in Rome. I happened along one of two days in the entire calendar year that St. Peter's (and the Sistine Chapel) are closed. Who knew that August 15 is Anunciation Day (or was it Assumption Day)? Not me. So when I heard that Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was coming to my state, I jumped on it. And it was worth it.

One Mile and Fifteen Minutes

Last Wednesday evening, I drove home at the end of a strange weather day. Several times, the skies had opened up and let loose a torrent of rain, stopping abruptly to gather steam for the next offering. Dark thunder clouds chased me home, but no rain fell on my car as I drove on dry roads. The National Weather Alert that sounded on the radio seemed surreal. A tornado – in January! – had just touched down in a county south of me. The warning said to abandon your vehicle or mobile home if you were in Catawba County (where I started) or Southeastern Burke County. I was on the edge, headed out of the danger zone to my home in the center of Burke County. I would've felt foolish laying face down in a wet ditch, so I kept going. Lightning flashed on either side of my car as I entered the safety of my garage and the comfort of a warm kitchen redolent with my beckoning dinner.



That night, the tornado touched down in the town of Icard, one mile south of the highway where I heard the warning, fifteen minutes after I passed by unscathed. The 130 mph winds classified it at the upper end of a Stage 2 twister. The pictures on the news showed uneaten dinners still on the tables or stoves where walls had been torn away. In all, 66 homes were destroyed, with $2 million damage (the amount for one home in California). The people interviewed made statements like "God protected me" or that they cried out "Jesus, help me!" The most censorable word in our politically-correct society was loudly proclaimed. Absent were the angry people blaming the government for the disaster, replaced by people thankful to God for life.



Every day, more times than we can count, tragedy almost strikes. We're late for work and come across an accident on the freeway, right at the place we should have been. A flower pot falls off a balcony and would've crashed on our head if we hadn't stopped to tie our shoelace. Rather than thinking how unlucky we are when something bad happens, I wonder how our attitudes would change if we were able to see the myriad ways we escape disaster and thank God instead.



This time, God protected me by just one mile and fifteen minutes. And I'm thankful.

Like Fingernails on Chalkboards

Noises bother me. I wish they didn't but they do. I realize it's my problem so I generally keep it to myself (except when I'm with my poor husband), but some days my head is pounding from sounds that grate on me. In my last job, I was subjected to a symphony of gum-cracking and pen-clicking noises that made me want to run, screaming, out of the building. In this job, the screechy dissonance I must contend with is bad grammar.



One of my Romanian professors would put her hands over her ears and wince whenever I made a grammatical blunder, which was quite frequently. She promised me that someday I would know the language well enough that mistakes would hurt my ears, too. I don't think I ever got to the point of pain, but grammatical errors in Romanian did start to simply sound wrong. I wonder why certain things don't "just sound wrong" to some of the people I encounter now, in my daily life. I've kept track of some actual statements I've heard lately, here in the foothills of Appalachia, that are the equivalent of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard to me:


Me and her had ate it up.
It don't matter.
Him and Carrie had went to . . .
We was sitting . . .
He don't know.
If it had became on sale . . .
I was froze.
Make sure it can be drove.
That song was sang.
She's fixin' to get her hair did

The words I've just typed look like a Christmas tree. The grammatical errors are underlined in squiggly green lines and the spelling errors in red. The only excuse for typos is color-blindness. If only we could see those squiggly lines when we speak.



A friend of mine here cringes every time a local person is interviewed on the TV news. In fact, North Carolina is crawling with colleges and universities, and there are many very intelligent people who make their home in the Tarheel state. Somehow, the ones who get interviewed seldom have good teeth (sometimes no teeth at all) and never use proper grammar. It doesn't help the stereotype. Another friend used to complain that whenever a Southerner is depicted in television or film, they are cast as the dumb one, even in cartoons like the Smurfs. Just because Southerners' words are slowed down with a big dose of kindness, it doesn't mean their brains are slow.



That said, I don't remember grammar being as large an issue in other places I've lived. I'm jes' saying'. . .

The Majority of my Waking Hours

I have now completed almost eight weeks at my new job, and it's high time I tell you how it's going. The week before Thanksgiving is an odd time to start a new venture, with nearly two full weeks out of my first eight being holiday time off. That's countered by the days being shorter and (especially this week) much colder, and the holidays dumping a ton of extra things on my To-Do list. My trusty alarm clock (my husband) wakes me up quite a bit earlier than when I did freelance work at home, which I remember fondly as being unemployed.



Commuting is the hardest part of my job; it's the first time in my life I've done it any distance. I now leave the house when it's dark and return when it's dark. I've had longer commutes before - longer in time not distance - but they've always been stress-free ones by foot on campus. My commute is directly due east, so I drive into the rising sun each morning and the setting sun each evening. I've learned that it's best to live to the east of your workplace and, if you can't, make sure the visor in your car works. (Mine didn't.)



Each evening, I'm only awake at home about two hours before I fall asleep sitting upright on the sofa. The majority of my day is no longer spent with Steve but with all new people in my life – my colleagues. Learning a new job is like learning a language. It takes a tremendous amount of mental energy and I'm depleted by the end of the day.



But I enjoy the work, the campus, and the people. And I'm so grateful to have a job. My first day, I discovered that three of us on my floor were raised on chicken farms. It just doesn't get any better than that. My second day, everyone greeted me with, "You came back!" I spend each day trying hard to prove that I'm indispensable, or I did until my husband reminded me that everyone can be replaced. He told me I'm very efficient, definitely unique, and a joy to be around, but indispensable – not really.



I was surprised to find that I'm one of the youngsters on my floor. The bad news is that I don't have the pool of computer knowledge available to me with younger co-workers, but the good news is that somehow I'm viewed as tech-savvy. However, it is a college campus and so the enthusiasm and energy of students is everywhere. I was thrilled to learn that 10% of the student population is involved in a student-led Campus Crusade group - probably a record - and hopeful that I'll be able to help mentor some of the student leaders. Could this be part of the reason God positioned me here?



To me, work is never about making money; instead, it's a place of ministry. I see this job as a calling, the location God chose for me to serve Him as I trust Him to provide for my needs. My aim is to work here for the next 10 years and then join my husband in retirement from the workplace, never retirement from God's work. I'm hoping this will be my last job. I only have 9 years and 10 months to go. I feel tired already.

It's All Over (and I don't just mean 2011)

This weekend, most of America will take down their Christmas decorations, if they haven't already. I'm waiting one more week. After all the effort to decorate, I want to enjoy it as long as I can. And it hasn't been long enough. I love the week after Christmas, savoring every moment of its slow pace. It's a perfect time to be snowed in and forced to spend my days curled up with a good book in front of the fireplace. Big tasks like un-decorating spoil the flavor of my week.



For me, the entire time between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day is Christmas. If someone says they'd like to get together "over Christmas," I'm thinking December 29 or 30, not Christmas Day. I guess I've always thought of a year in terms of an academic calendar. I went straight from college to working with college students, and my entire adult life has been spent at some sort of institution of higher education, places where Christmas break lasts for a few weeks. The phrase "next year" means the next school year to me, starting in September instead of January.



When I lived in Hungary, people put decorations up on December 5, the night St. Mikulas (or Nicholas) leaves candy and trinkets in the children's perfectly-polished shoes, placed expectantly by the window. They left them up until the 12th day of Christmas, January 6, also called Epiphany. In the Eastern Orthodox countries, Christmas isn't even celebrated until January 7. Here in America, the Christmas season begins earlier and earlier every year. The decorations appeared in stores back in September and radio stations started playing only Christmas music two weeks before Thanksgiving.



By the day after Christmas, Steve didn't want to hear any more Christmas music. I was ready to begin celebrating and he wanted it finished already. To remedy this, we agreed to ban all Christmas music in our house from now on until the first of December. Hopefully, next year, I'll be able to listen to it on December 27 without making my husband ill. After such a long – much too long – build-up to Christmas, the season is over so quickly. People rush back to the stores to exchange their gifts and radio stations revert to their regular playlists the very next day. 



2011 is over in just a matter of hours, but the Christmas season will last one more week in our house. And hopefully, gratitude for God's great gift to us will never end.

Christmas Traditions

The first Christmas Steve and I were married, we started a couple traditions that we've continued every year since. We decided to extend hospitality to at least one lonely person and attend at least one cultural event every Christmas season. Over the years, the recipients of our welcome have included internationals from such countries as Hungary, Vietnam, Japan, Brazil, Kenya, and Ethiopia. This year, we've invited an elderly widow, a couple caring for a sick father, and a single woman recently returned from 20 years abroad as dinner guests.



For cultural events this Christmas, we've been to several concerts - at the youth prison where Steve serves, the university where I work, and a Romanian one. The mayor of the nearby town where a Romanian Baptist church is located asked the choir to give a concert in a public venue. They said yes, provided they would be allowed to share the gospel message. The a cappella music was breathtaking, and yes, the gospel message was clear and piercing. The Romanian pastor even talked about carolers in the days of Communist persecution risking it all to go door-to-door spreading the news of Jesus through song.



He also shared their deep love and appreciation for America, grateful for the sacrifice of American missionaries stepping out of our comfort zones to come to them and tell their people about Christ. Our country became a safe haven for those defecting and seeking asylum during the dark days. In humility, these Romanian expatriates want to honor and give back to America. Thinking of other immigrants who arrive on our shores with a chip firmly in place on their shoulders, wanting to take all that they can, I find it refreshing. They are giving back in the best possible way: by helping to reach our country for Christ.



I knew the concert was free. And I knew that the essence of the Romanian character is hospitality and generosity. But I wasn't quite prepared for the huge and delicious spread, all kinds of food and desserts, that followed the concert. Richer than the food was the fellowship with my new Romanian friends, something that I didn't have and longed for in California.



I'll never forget the first time I heard the angelic tones of Romanian Christmas music. It was my first Christmas overseas. My team had been stuck in the Bucharest airport for a couple days. Finally we were able to get out and join our fellow short-term missionaries at a Christmas retreat in Switzerland. There I chose for my wrapped Christmas gift something the Czech team had bought in Prague, a cassette tape of Romanian Christmas carols that was not available anywhere in Romania. After my team leader's skiing accident, my team had to stay on an extra week to wait for his stitches to come out. It was one of the most refreshing weeks of my life. I slept late every morning, nestled under my thick down comforter, snug in a snowbound house in the Black Forest region of Germany. I listened to that cassette tape over and over. It was the most beautiful music I had ever heard, and God used it to cement the decision I had just made and communicated at the retreat – that I would stay on in Romania for a long-term assignment.



And this year I got to hear that music again. Glorious!

Of Shepherds and Sheep

I have a friend who feels offended that Christ-followers are likened to sheep. "They're such stupid animals," he frequently says. To which I retort, "At least we're not called chickens . . . or slugs."



But the fact is I love sheep and I love being called a sheep of Jesus' own flock. There's something soothing and restful about the bucolic imagery of a lone shepherd leaning on his staff, tenaciously guarding and tenderly caring for his animals, leaving the flock to search for the one missing lamb. Chugging across Europe by train, I often encountered the beauty of green pastures dotted with puffy white creatures. I love sheep so much I even keep a fleecy stuffed lamb in our guest room for kids to cuddle as they sleep.



We read in the Bible that Jesus is the Good Shepherd, we're the sheep of His pasture, and if we're in the practice of listening to His voice, we'll be able to distinguish it from the one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Jesus is the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God without blemish, sacrificed for our sins once and for all.



In Romanian, the word "pastor" is literally translated "shepherd." King David started out as a shepherd who led his people Israel "with skillful hands, according to the integrity of his heart." This time of year, we're reminded that the very first people - besides Mary and Joseph, of course - to see Jesus with their own eyes were lowly shepherds.



And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."



Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests."



When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."



So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.





No, I do not mind one little bit being counted in the company of shepherds and sheep.

Can Anyone Tell Me What Christmas Is All About?

Do you, like me, tire of people's attempts to define Christmas? "It's about love," they may say. "Christmas means peace on earth." Or, "Christmas is about giving gifts." Usually, the definitions omit the name of Christ.



While love, peace, and giving are all wonderful things, attributes which reflect the very nature of God, Christmas is not about us attempting to love our neighbor. It's not about us giving gifts to others. It's about God demonstrating His love toward us in becoming one of us. I can't imitate that kind of gift any easier than I can will myself to turn into an ant to try to communicate who I am to the ants, proving my love for them by living a perfect ant-life among them and choosing to die to save them from death.



Christmas is not about us at all.



In 1965, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was aired for the first time. It's been viewed on TV every year since then. Not only is the show a classic to watch, but Vince Guaraldi 's musical score is one of my favorites. It turns out that the network executives expected it to be a flop.



You know the story line. Charlie Brown, bothered by the commercialism of the season, so pervasive that even his dog Snoopy is affected, asks the question: "Can anybody tell me what Christmas is all about?" Linus steps onto center stage, asks for the spot light, and quotes Luke 2:8-14:



And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, "Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men."



Linus finishes by saying, "And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown." The show ends with the Peanuts gang singing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.'

 
The producers did not want Linus to recite the story of Jesus' birth, convinced that viewers didn't want to hear the Bible read (especially the King James Version). Charles Schulz was adamant about keeping this scene in, apparently saying, "If we don't tell the true meaning of Christmas, who will?"



Who will tell the world what Christmas truly means? We will. It's up to us.