Life has been pretty busy lately. It's funny, I had a conversation with a good friend from back home and he was saying that it seems like I'm busier here in Stockholm than I was in Minneapolis. That is so, so true. It's a good thing, though - it would be really difficult to be living in a foreign country away from your family and friends and not have much of a social life. I often find myself craving my "nights in" where I can surf the 'Net, read books, call people, and do a facial mask. So, what has been keeping me so busy lately??
I had a fun night with Nikki and Philly, the two other American au pairs that I do lots of stuff with, last weekend. We all went to Nikki's house for the weekend since her family was out of town and had a birthday dinner with the three of us. We had stuffed salmon (laxfile in Swedish) that was SO good, and mashed potatoes, and a sweet potato (or was it a squash? cause that's a lot of potatoes that we ate, which I just now realized). Philly baked me a confetti cake, and we drank some really great wine...all in all, a fun night.
me and nikki...trying to make a '26'The past few weeks the three of us have developed a week night jaunt in the city with us girls where we'll meet up for a drink at a low-key pub. I really look forward to them, we'll usually randomly pick a night to get together and then meet up in Philly's neighborhood and walk until we find a random, cozy pub. I usually always order a pear cider, which is my favorite. Very sweet, almost like drinking a soda. But we'll spend a couple hours talking and catching up on each others lives, and a lot of times have these deep, meaningful conversations while sitting at the bar :) On a side note, Stockholm is extremely 'warm' and cozy in the winter! Much more than I thought it would be. It's usually pretty cold at night, but lots of places will light candles outside of their establishments, and the window fronts always look so inviting with their low lighting and candles everywhere. There's one pub that we like to go to that's really small and has lots of woodwork inside, and I swear, just going there gives me warm fuzzies cause it's so inviting and intimate and warm.
This last weekend I went to a conference at my church on the arts, it was called Synergy. I helped out on Saturday morning with random things so I missed the opening service, but I was able to attend some workshops on the arts and being a Christian artist. It was really good - I'm not an artistic person, per se, but I do love photography, so that's what I applied everything to. The main speaker was a man named Ellis Potter, who, in my opinion, was an absolute genius. I'm pretty sure he could be classified as an apologist - I attended a workshop where he just talked for an hour about how he converted from Buddhism - he was a Buddhist priest - to Christianity because he said that for him, following Jesus Christ required less faith than Buddhism. Now, to hear him explain it, it's brilliant and I feel like anybody would suddenly decide to follow Jesus just based on his explanations, but that's why he's an apologist and I'm not :) So I won't attempt to explain why he believed what he did, but I was struck by two things while listening to him speak - 1.) he said something so profound that I've never realized. He said, "Relationship precedes identity". He went on to explain that Adam only realized who he really was as a man once Eve was created, and that in the New Testament, Jesus teaches us to pray "OUR Father," rather than "MY Father." I love the idea that we're completed only in our relationships with others - specifically with knowing Jesus - but beyond that, we were created to be in relationship with one another. What a controversial idea in our society of individualists. And, 2.) I was amazed when I was listening to him speak so intellectually and on a level so far above my own, and it made me realize that the beauty of the Kingdom of God - of the good news of Jesus - is that He really is able to meet the needs of such a wide scope of people. This man was so smart and brilliant and such a thinker, and obviously found fulfillment in searching the Scriptures, and thinking about the deep, intellectual concepts of Christianity. But to compare him to a child, or a person that is mentally handicapped and yet has such a simple, basic faith and understanding of God's love, and for both of them - they're satisfied and have exactly what they need. Does that make sense? I doubt that the same could be true in other religions, but that just goes to show the personal nature of the God we serve.
So, that was my weekend. Sunday was a lazy day - I didn't make it to church. I've been on such a WEIRD sleeping schedule lately. On Saturday morning I woke up at 3:30am and couldn't fall back asleep. I came home from the conference on Saturday night around 9pm, crashed in bed and then woke up around 2am, and couldn't fall back asleep until early, early morning. So, Sunday morning I slept right through my alarm. Spent most of Sunday hanging out with Nikki and our friend, Robert.
This week is pretty busy - tomorrow night I'm going to a showing of a documentary about the Darfur crisis that Philly's au pair mom produced. Wednesday night is my first session of Pilates at the Stockholm Pilates Center and then all this weekend I have the kids while the parents are in London. Should be eventful and crazy, as usual :) However, me and the American girls are celebrating Thanksgiving here on Saturday night, so I'm really looking forward to that. We're saving the box of Stove Top Stuffing that my best friend Steph sent me, just for the occasion! I'm also going to attempt to find a turkey, but I'm not sure that whole turkeys would be purchased by these minimalist, eat-like-the-European-Swedes that they are. So, if worst comes to worst, we decided to do fish. Definitely not the same, but hey - you do what you gotta do, right?
This last weekend I went to a conference at my church on the arts, it was called Synergy. I helped out on Saturday morning with random things so I missed the opening service, but I was able to attend some workshops on the arts and being a Christian artist. It was really good - I'm not an artistic person, per se, but I do love photography, so that's what I applied everything to. The main speaker was a man named Ellis Potter, who, in my opinion, was an absolute genius. I'm pretty sure he could be classified as an apologist - I attended a workshop where he just talked for an hour about how he converted from Buddhism - he was a Buddhist priest - to Christianity because he said that for him, following Jesus Christ required less faith than Buddhism. Now, to hear him explain it, it's brilliant and I feel like anybody would suddenly decide to follow Jesus just based on his explanations, but that's why he's an apologist and I'm not :) So I won't attempt to explain why he believed what he did, but I was struck by two things while listening to him speak - 1.) he said something so profound that I've never realized. He said, "Relationship precedes identity". He went on to explain that Adam only realized who he really was as a man once Eve was created, and that in the New Testament, Jesus teaches us to pray "OUR Father," rather than "MY Father." I love the idea that we're completed only in our relationships with others - specifically with knowing Jesus - but beyond that, we were created to be in relationship with one another. What a controversial idea in our society of individualists. And, 2.) I was amazed when I was listening to him speak so intellectually and on a level so far above my own, and it made me realize that the beauty of the Kingdom of God - of the good news of Jesus - is that He really is able to meet the needs of such a wide scope of people. This man was so smart and brilliant and such a thinker, and obviously found fulfillment in searching the Scriptures, and thinking about the deep, intellectual concepts of Christianity. But to compare him to a child, or a person that is mentally handicapped and yet has such a simple, basic faith and understanding of God's love, and for both of them - they're satisfied and have exactly what they need. Does that make sense? I doubt that the same could be true in other religions, but that just goes to show the personal nature of the God we serve.
So, that was my weekend. Sunday was a lazy day - I didn't make it to church. I've been on such a WEIRD sleeping schedule lately. On Saturday morning I woke up at 3:30am and couldn't fall back asleep. I came home from the conference on Saturday night around 9pm, crashed in bed and then woke up around 2am, and couldn't fall back asleep until early, early morning. So, Sunday morning I slept right through my alarm. Spent most of Sunday hanging out with Nikki and our friend, Robert.
This week is pretty busy - tomorrow night I'm going to a showing of a documentary about the Darfur crisis that Philly's au pair mom produced. Wednesday night is my first session of Pilates at the Stockholm Pilates Center and then all this weekend I have the kids while the parents are in London. Should be eventful and crazy, as usual :) However, me and the American girls are celebrating Thanksgiving here on Saturday night, so I'm really looking forward to that. We're saving the box of Stove Top Stuffing that my best friend Steph sent me, just for the occasion! I'm also going to attempt to find a turkey, but I'm not sure that whole turkeys would be purchased by these minimalist, eat-like-the-European-Swedes that they are. So, if worst comes to worst, we decided to do fish. Definitely not the same, but hey - you do what you gotta do, right?
1 comment:
Hope your Thanksgiving went awesome!! Lets talk this week..please!!! Love you! Thanks for sharing about the conference...its good to hear what you have been up too!! Love YA
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