March 7

I decided today what I will do next year.  The deadline for the decision was actually March 1, but ESI was kind enough to give me an extension.  I spent this week praying, tearing my hair, gnashing my teeth and flipping lots of coins.  I weighed the pros and cons.  I meticulously examined my relationships with students here, current and former and prospective.  I was very self-conscious about what I thought about Prague, marking the good and bad points in my mental ledger.  It’s old and romantic and lovely, on the one hand.  On the other, there are lots of people who are in a hurry.  There is also some pollution, but it is not as bad as the pollution in St. Petersburg (which turned my boogers black), so I think that I would be able to handle the two or three years that staying another 10 months would undoubtedly lop off my life expectancy.

In the end, I decided that I would neither return to America nor stay here.  I would go to Hungary and teach there.

Crazy, huh?  Doesn’t it make you want to hear my reasons for arriving at this conclusion out of the apparent blue?  Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but there aren’t any reasons.  At least, not any reasons that I would classify as good.  When I thought about teaching here in Prague next year, I thought about going back to Nad Aleji, and the prospect was not very appealing.  I don’t quite know why; maybe it was the fact that I had to leave there under such bad circumstances.  Maybe it was that many of the students I liked most were graduating, and it would not be likely that I would teach the others which I got along with the best.

I also thought about teaching somewhere else, but then I figured I may as well go to Hungary if I was going to start over.  I would have to have a new teammate in either case, too, because Caleb is going home after this year.

I prayed, as was mentioned before, and listened for God’s leading, and heard nothing.  At least, nothing that I can point to confidently as being a reason for going to Hungary.  God has plans for all of our lives, I think, but there are times where it doesn’t matter at all what we do, so long as we are following God and deferring to his guidance if it’s there.  I was waiting for something, maybe the still small voice, preferably the earthquake, but nothing happened that I could see.  So I just made a decision.  For no apparent reason.  I like Hungary, and I like the people there, but I can’t say that I dislike it here.  I just felt, mostly because of my work situation, that I was at loose ends here and that it wouldn’t hurt if I started over somewhere.

I questioned this decision, of course.  I’m still questioning it.  I will probably still be questioning it until this fall, when I begin teaching down there.  But I really got the feeling that it didn’t matter where I went.  And I will certainly miss getting to know the new teachers here next year, but there are people all over the world that I don’t know (and moreover, don’t lose any sleep over not knowing).

I am encouraged, in all this, by knowing that God didn’t say anything to Abram until he was well into his retirement years. 

Also, though God DID speak in the case of the little prophet Samuel, this still happened in a time when visions and God’s obvious, unmistakable communication with people were not common.  So at least there are times like that in history, and it’s nothing personal.  Don’t you think so?