For those of you who may not know me
incredibly well, just let me list the things that will always… ALWAYS make my
heart leap for joy:
a piano
cheese
puppies
coffee
purple wildflowers
Day 1 at our Ukranian home:
Fifteen hours from Kiev, we got off the
bus in Simferopol. (I’m adding as an afterthought that the roads here are
pit-less asphalt wonders.) Two lovely women with waist-length braids greeted us
in beautifully accented English. We loaded our packs into a 15-passenger van,
and drove for an hour to the Biletsky house.
Anya, the mother, herded us into her
kitchen with her bright smile and beautiful green eyes. Our breakfast was
waiting on the table: instant coffee, plenty of tea, scrambled eggs with dill,
and slices of warm bread covered in sausage and melted cheese.*
And not a single grain of rice.*
When we finished eating, we were shown to
our rooms. That’s when I saw it: a light wooden upright piano, clean and
perfectly in-tune. After 9 months without one, I have a piano in my living
room.* Anya said she plays, and the children do too. That was just the tip of
this family’s iceberg of musical talent. But I’ll get to that later.
The 7 of us (yes, Tricia and Andrew are
joining us for the first part of this month!) have three bedrooms with spring
mattresses. You read that right; not 2 inches of foam or a blanket on a wooden
table. Real mattresses. And right next to my mattress stands a dark wooden
upright piano, clean and perfectly in-tune.* Our team has started to recognize
that when it comes to good things in life, there are blessings, and then there
is abundance. That’s a clear example. One piano = blessing. A second
piano in my bedroom = abundance!
That pattern continued for our whole tour
of the home. Two puppies tripped around our feet in the backyard while Anya
pointed out all of the things in her garden that surrounds… yes, completely
SURROUNDS the house. Peonies, irises, roses, grape vines, blackberry bushes,
strawberries and herbs. Anything they need to cook or decorate is right outside
in the dirt.
When Anya said that “the children
play music”, she didn’t just mean a quiet recital every now and then. Anya
and her husband Andre have 12 children: 6 biological, and 6 adopted. It’s easy
to tell who is who: the biological kids all have Anya’s green eyes and dark
hair. But the blonde kids don’t stick out at all–in nearby Saki, the Biletskys
have 10 blonde cousins who also play any instrument you could hand them.
So this is no solo act. It’s an orchestra. We had barely been here for 6 hours
when the jam sessions began.* And they haven’t stopped!
Later that day, we went to the sea. As if
this place could get more amazing, it’s 3km from the Black Sea. We can walk
there whenever we have time. The water is freezing, but it’s gorgeous. Manhattan
people, if you can imagine the Konza at springtime next to the ocean, that’s
exactly what this place looks like. We walked back in time for dinner, which
included plenty of bread and cheese.
The day-to-day stuff:
No surprises here: music is a big part of
our ministry. Yesterday, we packed up every existing size of a traditional
Ukrainian 3-stringed triangular instrument, a guitar, a drum and a few
harmonicas, and went to a nursing homes to sing & play for residents and
patients. One of the women there told us we were “a ray of sunshine in a
very dark world.” That’s just this family: light.
Downtime here is my favorite. My Russian
is still limited to a few words, but I love hanging out with the kids. The
cousins bounce back and forth between each others’ homes constantly. We’ll pick
up one to come somewhere with us, and he’ll just stay at the house for a few
days. Or we’ll start to wonder where one of the girls is, and she’ll be at the
cousin’s house the next time we go there. It’s a familiar way to live. I just
love it here.
Honestly, the comfort is a challenge in
itself. Europe feels like home to me, and it has everything I could want from
home except my family. For the past 9 months, worship, reading the Word, and
generally seeking God has been easy to prioritize, mostly because it’s the only
joy I can find in a day. Feeling at home has forced me to think about how I’ll
make those same things a priority when I’m really at home. Will I still
want to wake up and worship first when I can so easily make coffee, go running
in a beautiful park, have a hot shower, and go about my day?
I’m asking myself more and more questions
like that lately. The length of this Race is starting to make sense to me.
There is a certain amount of “normal” we have to establish to keep
ourselves sane. Those habits of singing together, discussing what we’re
learning, and constantly trying to honor one another… I don’t really know how
to NOT do those things anymore. Remember my breakdown in India? That was a
turning point. The things we do are no longer isolated as just “how things
were on that mission trip”. That was the point at which I had to decide to
make those things my lifestyle, to really stop living out of my own strength and
knowledge and just walk in the Spirit. To stop seeking self-improvement or
greater understanding, and just seek the heart of God.
Now that I’m in a place where I DO have a
hot shower, a great place to run, and so much of the food I like, I’ve caught
myself choosing those things over reading the Word. It’s like a dry run for
being home! Thankfully, I’ve got my community keeping me in check. They’ve
gotten so good at that. And in this place, let’s face it. It’s impossible to
forget to sing.
-Katie
*this is where I do that
laugh/jump-around/super-excited thing.
P.S. slightly irrelevant to the rest of
this post, but this family has helped me come to an important conclusion about
life: Happiness is in direct correlation to how
close you live to your cousins. I miss you guys so much!
