Mama Duck Across the Pond: April 2012

Reality has hit my friends. 28 more days until I will be back home deep in the heart of Texas. I love and miss everyone at home and it will be a wonderful reunion I am so looking forward to! There are many things and places here I still have on the list to see and do before my time is up! And they will all get done if I don't sleep for the next month! haha just kidding. But it really looks like it will be a whirlwind of adventure from here on out.
It also looks like a whole lot of papers and exams and finals will somehow be caught up in the whirlwind of adventure as well. ACU puts the study in study abroad. I am usually a very tidy person but I admit I have so many piles of different things on my desk right now to do that you can hardly see the surface. The saying, "Like mother like daughter" is turning out to be true. Anyways, all that to say that I will do my best to put up pictures and write about things as much as I can. (Stories and pics from my previous trips to Scotland and Italy are on their way I promise!) Here is my pre-apology for doing a poor job of keeping up with the blog. I love you all and I hope to see you very soon and keep better touch when the mountain of homework is lessened.

Shalom

I will tell one short quick story.

Easter was fantastic. We woke up and went to the original Methodist Church founded by John Wesley. Then we went to the street food festival down the road and had a great lunch. Then Kirsten and I went out and took Easter pictures together in the wildflowers to send to our moms. The whole afternoon we cooked up a storm and our kitchen had a dozen people cooking all at once for our Backyard Bash Easter potluck. Kirsten and I made chicken salad and egg salad and deviled eggs and cookie brownies - all like my favorite foods on the planet. I could live off those 4 things. We found little umbrellas and scattered them around all the food everyone made. Everyone ate together in the common room because it started to rain and we ate til we were stuffed. We had so many leftovers that we are still eating today! Everyone walked to church at St. Aldates and it was great to sing Bless The Lord O My Soul again. New favorite song. We really have become a family here- potlucking and churching and watching LOST episodes and complaining about hw together for 4 months. It just has an irreversible effect on people. I am so blessed.

I learned so much about glass this semester and have been greatly blessed to see tons and tons of it! From stained glass to painted to stainless to intricate and to simple. I have been absolutely fascinated by it because there are no two alike. Styles change from century to century and even over decades. I can't wait to study more about these distinct patterns and how they are made with different techniques.

So why this new fascination with glass besides the fact that I am surrounded by it everywhere I turn here?

Well the truth is that the first time God spoke to me through stained glass was sitting in the Chapel on the Hill at ACU first semester freshman year. I had a big project due for my cornerstone class and the deadline was quickly approaching. I had no clue what I wanted to do. How on earth do I begin to depict my worldview? A series of events and people over the course of my lifetime has shaped who I am today and how I see the world around me. But, God wanted to show me a new way to look at it. As you may know the walls of the Chapel on the Hill are covered from floor to ceiling in a spectacular pattern of stained glass of all the colors of the rainbow. I was just chilling in there and looking at the glass when this thought came out of nowhere.

We as humans are like the colored pieces of glass. Often our lives seem broken and things don't make sense. We don't know where they belong or if there is any order to the chaos of our lives. We are two dimensional and flat. God can see straight through us and all of our pretenses to know what our hearts and minds are truly saying. He is the light and the thing which brings us beauty. Without him putting our pieces together in the right places and choosing to shine his light through us, we would be worthless.

Have you ever seen stained glass at night? You can't. It's black and it's beauty cannot be illuminated when there is no light to shine through it. We are called to be children of the light.

Another part of the window that is unmistakably necessary are the black lines that hold all the colored glass bits together. I see this as our sins. They are in the past, but they are still a part of us in the future. The lines are the lessons learned and the times where maybe we felt alone. God knew that part of our life would be the glue that held us together later on. And He never truly left us at all.

These windows also go to show no one person can do it alone. One "light" or panel of a window can take thousands of carefully designed little bits of glass. God calls his community of followers to work together to bring His Kingdom on earth and to create a beautiful image when we come together in His Name.

Some of my favorite stained glass pictures from the whole semester have been when the sun shines through the window and reflects the array of colors onto the wall inside. And sometimes even onto certain individuals as they sit in the church pew on a Sunday morning and discover they are a rainbow. How do I interpret this one? Well, we are merely a medium and when we are in position to serve God and bring Him glory, we never know how far His light can shine. It can touch people and places we never dreamed of. It could even start a revolution of vibrant color and passion for our Lord.

If you're curious about the core project I did end up making a stained glass window of my own about the aspects of my life that formed my worldview. It was made out of poster board and tissue paper but it is one of my life goals to construct a mini real stained glass window. All these windows tell a story. A story of our lord. Of Jesus. Of his disciples. Of the prophets. Of the saints. Of me and you.