Fall Shadows

Dear Friends,
Greetings from Louisville!

Even though it is hot and muggy outside, I can feel fall and that is exciting and sweet to me.
I can sense fall in the shadows as they they fall in the apartment. The lighting of the sun coming
through the windows is not as direct and brutal as it is in the high summer months.

Fall has always been special to me because it meant that it was time to go back to school and start learning again! It means classes and community and thinking and praying. And nowadays it also means for me, teaching! I find myself delighted and enchanted with the role of teacher. Everything that I see or touch during the day is a potential teaching tool, a new way to show my students a practical application to a lesson being taught. And while this is a process that goes on all year, it is especially during the season/time of fall that it becomes intensely precious and real to me; I get to go back to South Sudan and start teaching again VERY SOON!

I am sitting on the coach in "my" apartment at the Furlough Home on the campus of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This has been a wonderful temporary home for the last few months. I am coming to accept that homes will probably always be temporary for me. There is a struggle within me to learn how to make "home" lighter, to travel more easily. I enjoy creating home and making home inviting for myself and others. I am moving into the concept of doing that more and more with local materials and not so much with taking home with me.

My hope for the Nile Theological College is that at some point down the line we will be able to move into a more adequate facility for a college. We are blessed that we are being hosted by a local Christian school in Malakal, and just as with a host home, it isn't quite our own. I am learning both in my own personal life and in my communal teaching life to be something like the Israelis of the Hebrew/Old Testament who were kept on the move for so many years, finding God as their true home.

So here I sit on a coach as I type this blog. I am surrounded by the supplies that I have been purchasing, and some that have been gifts, over the last few months while I have been "home" in the states. I have plastic trunks (only to be found at Walmart as far as I have seen) and a limit of 50 pounds for each trunk. Pretty hard to figure out what 50 pounds is....books and cooking supplies seem to be the most important items to take this time around. Somehow when I went to China in 2007 I didn't think to take kitchen things and my apartment was indeed fully supplied (although I went and got my own dishes because I didn't like the mismatched lot in the kitchen there). I never asked about the kitchen in Khartoum in 2009 and yet it was indeed fully furnished. This time I have inquired ahead in 2011 and I know that I won't have anything in the kitchen, except running water and that is a huge plus in South Sudan! So I am taking from the United States what I can anticipate needing....I may publish a book someday with a list of everything that I took to set up house in Malakal!

I have had major moves in 2007, 2009 and now 2011. I pray that I will be able to settle down for a few years now and dive joyfully into the work that the Lord has made for me. For Just Such a Time as This I am being sent to Malakal in the newest country in the world, the Republic of South Sudan. Our God is an awesome God and I am awesomely joyous that I will be going soon to my new home and to continue my work and be with my well loved students and colleagues once again. I know that the heat will be there and I will face on a daily basis the challenges of living in a less developed town and country. I also know that I will have to daily draw on Jesus' strength to see me through the trials. And yes, there will be trials.

Somehow I have to get the 500 pounds of going home into the ten pieces of luggage. If there is more than 500 pounds then they may not be going home with me. I am praying now for patience and fortitude. If I can do this job and do it well it will make my homecoming easier. Not easy, but easier. I need to be able to eat, to clean up in the kitchen, to wash my hair and take my medications and vitamins. I need to have the things with me that I require to keep my body, mind and spirit healthy. I seem to require different things as a North American than my African brothers and sisters. So I have to haul with me those differences. That's okay.

That's just okay. That is just fine.
Blessings,
Debbie