Tuesday, 02 March 2010 22:59
It started out a heavy, headachy day: I didn't sleep well, and around 4:30 in the morning I gave up the fight and rolled out of bed. I spent a couple of hours answering e-mails--which, for some reason always makes me irritable--before the Horde descended and the school day was on us like an avalanche: gathering speed and no way to slow it down. It was one of those days where all you can do is plod through every activity trying to get through to the other side of it. It was not only physical fatigue: I've come to realize that discouragement is always lurking just behind the corner for me in this job. I have to be on guard against it all the time. Whether it's because I'm far from home, or because our work often doesn't have tangible results that we can tally up at the end of a day, or whether a different, spiritual force is at fault, I don't know. Probably it's all of that and more. Anyway, it was "one of them days."
It was an uphill climb: my eyes felt burny and gritty; my mouth tasted like morning breath, even after I brushed my teeth; my head was pounding. We have a private teacher who comes to the house twice a week to tutor us and the kids in Russian, so I trudged through an hour and a half of Russian verbs, loathing them more with every mistake I made (and lo! they were a great multitude.) I also had some housecleaning to do--never a popular project with me--and throughout it all, the whole family kept catching whiffs of some horrible, sick-making stench we couldn't identify.
Well, we thought we knew what it was, and at first poor Kopek got the blame and was banished outside until she could get herself straightened out. Then, Tim realized the smell was actually coming from beneath the living room window, where a rotten cow's stomach has apparently been ripening in a bucket for about 10 days. Vladimir buys these delicacies for the dogs now and then, and though my personal prejudice is that a cow's stomach is revolting at the best of times, this one was so far gone it had nearly taken on a life and personality of its own. Tim carried it around the back of the house and left it there for the neighbors to take a turn enjoying for awhile, but by then the odor seemed to be hanging in the air of our house like a blue haze.
Anyway, I was very near to hating this day by the time 5 p.m. rolled around, and we signed onto Skype for a video meeting with Mike, the pastor of one of our churches, in Carthage, New York. The half-hour or so we spent talking revolutionized my day. (That, and the 3 Advil I swallowed just beforehand.) Mike--I did not know this before--has the spiritual gift of encouraging people with sleep-deprivation headaches, whose stomachs have been turned by the vomitrocious odor of rotting cow stomach seeping into their living room curtains and furniture. I don't suppose he even knew he encouraged us: in fact, he's probably the kind of person who will claim that nay, nay, we were the ones who encouraged him, but the truth is that it was really nice to talk to someone from an American church who is behind us in what we're doing. I know that description includes a multitude of you as well, and it was a good reminder to me of how rich our family really is.
After that, we had our first English club with university students here at our house. Counting Tim and Sarah and me, there were nine of us altogether. We just had a blast. The students all worked really hard on their English, and we played a few games and sat around drinking tea for several hours. They're eager to meet every week for more practice in their speaking skills. Pray for these kids if you think of them. Pray that they'll meet Christ here.
So now it's bedtime, and I feel like a different person than the one who crept from a sleepless bed and limped through the day half-comatose. I still have some hours of sleep to catch up on, but tomorrow is a new day and I'm ready to take it on! It's amazing what a little encouragement can do for someone's outlook, isn't it?
