God is Good, and I am Happy.

Dear Family,

I anticipate my emails being rather sporadic this year. So far they’ve been coming once a week, or so. Later they’ll probably become spaced out between months. Who knows? Tonight I write because it’s 7:30, and my mind is wide awake and longing for interaction.

This semester has begun slowly. Two four-day weeks (of which this is the second), and a three-day week to come. It’s given me some time to brush up on all the grammar and vocabulary that I forgot over the summer. I’m surprised at how much I know. Last year I measured my progress from one day to the next. Today was set next to yesterday, and tomorrow next to today, so that I often felt discouraged. This time I have two other advents in Korea to compare my present state to, and the conception of those both were distinguished by a remarkable inability to communicate. So the contrast between where I am this semester and where I was the last time I landed in Korea has been pleasantly startling. I could almost suppose that everything I studied in the nine months prior to going back to the States seeped into and saturated my mind while I was away. I’m good with that.

As a full-time student, my life has been (necessarily, to some degree) quiet inverted. Every other occupation (with, perhaps, the exception of modeling) is geared toward serving others in some way, regardless of motive. When I worked as a housekeeper, I made other people’s beds. When I was waitressing, I served other people’s food. At U.V. I processed other people’s money. The point of an occupation is that other people need something which you must work to supply. However, as a student I simply take. All morning I take from my teachers, and all afternoon I give to myself. Every daily necessity and provision is for self. I don’t cook or clean or shop for ‘our’ family; I cook and clean and shop for me. All of it turns back upon myself. Of course, this is a somewhat inevitable part of my existence here, right now, and I some of it can’t be altered. But, as such, I must fight against a self-focused attitude much more fiercely than I would if I had a normal job, or lived with other people.
One very obvious way to do that is to make a point of becoming involved in the lives of one or two people, with the specific goal of blessing them. I’ve determined that, this year, knowing people well must take priority over every other consideration. Finding friends is easy. Everyone wants to be friends with ‘the foreigner’, so every date on my calendar for the coming weeks has been filled with engagements for coffee, or for lunch, or whatever. Unfortunately, I have yet to learn how to approach a thing moderately. I tend to rush headlong toward a goal, and end up, more often than not, in way over my head. My dilemma here, is that relationship-investing is time consuming. And time is not a commodity that I had a surplus of. I want to be entirely available to God, and I know that He will hone my friendships, as they develop, and will cause certain ones to fizzle out, while others grow deeper. But meanwhile, I feel crunched.
I’m trying still to be regular about studying Korean (which is also, of course, a time-consuming priority). I’ve been getting up earlier, to give myself two hours before school to memorize vocab, which helps a great deal. And I bring my books with me on the subway and bus, so that I can study en rout, when I go wherever to meet people. By the end of a day, though, I feel so over stimulated and exhausted that it regularly takes me two or three hours to relax enough to fall asleep.
So I’ve picked up juggling, again. Literally. I taught myself how to juggle when I was about thirteen, but haven’t done anything of the sort for quite some time. I still have my balls, though, and have dusted them off (so to speak). Juggling, they say, uses a different part of the brain than most mental activities use. The mind and body have to both be entirely relaxed in order to catch and throw the balls with perfect synchronization. I lend what support I can to this theory by affirming that when I’m throwing and catching, I don’t watch either the balls or my hands. I stare through them, as though I was watching something on the other side, and let my hands do the work with out the help of my mind. The motor skills wake up, and the cognitive skills (thinking, organizing, solving) seem to go to sleep. It’s like a brain cat nap, or something. So for between ten to thirty minutes a day, wherever there’s time, I throw and catch balls. I don’t know whether that really helps me to balance my schedule better, but at least it puts me in a better frame of mind, beside providing me with a little bit of much needed physical exertion.

Meanwhile, and all the business notwithstanding, I’m enjoying being here and being alive. God seems to meet me in a new way every day, showing me things about myself and about Himself that I never knew. Each morning I come to Him, and each morning I’m brought back to a place of complete rest. Somehow He manages to completely remove the weight of the previous day’s stresses and to pave a clear road through the present, so that there is never a buildup of pressure. Every day there is new strength, new pleasure, new grace. God is good, and I am happy. I couldn’t ask more of life.

I miss you all...
Elisabeth