Swedish Update #2

Part I: Why I am spending a year of my life living in an orphanage studying the bible.

If this season along the banks of the Skaggerak is a chapter in my life, it is a part of a book of my life, one that started in September of 2010, and it started with a choice. I was lying in my bed, facing the imminent terror of graduating college and not knowing what was next. The dilemma I faced was centered both around how uncertain all of life can feel and about what it meant when I believed to myself that I was a Christian. In a way, the second part was easy - It didn’t trouble me that I was a Christian, I had come to a point in my relationship with God that I knew that was what I needed, but I didn’t know what that implied for the actual patterns in which I lived my life. I found myself torn between how safe and easy it would be to just go and find a job somewhere, earn some money, be comfortable. I knew in my heart from the beginning that this wasn’t going to be an option for me; life is too short and too filled with wonder to squander on comfort and security. The other option was to legitimately give up all resemblance of a normal life and legitimately depend on God and earnestly try to fulfill his commandment: to love him and to love others. 

A premise tempted me, though, one perhaps more dangerous than before. Live wild and free, for a year or two. save some souls, feel the air as it radiates off the hot pavement of a long road - then pack it in, go home and be normal. Get some degree that assures me a comfortable life. I am convinced that this is the more dangerous lie for me, because of how nice it sounds. But it worked for good, getting me out of the door. I spent those lovely seasons in Kirksville and Thailand, enjoying every minute of the air through my skin, as though I needed to get it all in before the road ended in some place of comfort where I didn’t have to think so much about how life can be so beautiful and yet so ugly, so joyful and yet so sad. But through the whole thing, something even more dangerous and wonderful happened. I realized that I had been set free, free from normal. As a good friend of mine put it, “We have enough people choosing the life that comes to them when they don’t put up a fight, and I don’t intend to be one more.” And it was as if I was climbing a hill, thinking that the place I was reaching towards was just over the ridge, and when I came to the peak, before me the path of discipleship stretched endlessly into the future, across a thousand peaks and into the horizon. None of that is to say I have my whole life figured out, I don’t. I don’t even know what happens in July when I finish my studies here. I only know that I want to be kind, not as a hobby but as something I do with my life. I gave up that normal life, and the new one is as exciting as it is terrifying. 

And there were a few things that occurred to me when I decided to give up the normal life. It meant that I had to trust God to be my provider. It meant that I wouldn’t always be comfortable, and that I would even be risking my neck, knowing that if God is real whatever happens is his will. I have learned to be grateful for everything. But let us not be naive: it meant that I needed to be equipped. When I would say that I believed in God and Jesus and what it said in the bible, I really meant it, but there was this part of the truth that rang hollow. I believed in it, but I didn’t really know what it said, which robbed me of any sense of authority. I believe in the church, not as a bureaucratic institution but as a literal family. I believe that if the church fulfills its’ calling, we can provide solutions to the great problems of the world. But I don’t think we are what we ought to be, I think something is terribly wrong with what we’ve done here, and I think our generation can fix it. And if I am to speak that with authority, I ought to know what I am talking about. And the thing is, I don’t think this is just for me, I think it’s something at the very heart of discipleship, that most believers neglect at their own expense. That isn’t to say SBS is for everyone, but that inductive study of the bible is for all believers. I am convinced that the reason why the gospel isn’t appealing to many people is that many of the people that proclaim it don’t actually know what it says. I intend to contribute to the solution to that statistic.

So I knew I wanted to study the bible. Here’s why I chose SBS: It forced me to give up all of the bad reasons. It isn’t accredited, so I won’t have a shiny piece of paper to wave around to anyone to show how qualified I am. It isn’t preparing me for some specific occupation. It’s preparing me for life. SBS is an inductive study, which means we emphasize with everything what it actually means for the way we live our lives. Every day I am confronted truth that I’m forced to deal with. I don’t know what happens from here, but I know that what I’m learning is important because what I’m learning is about who I’m becoming.

Part II: The Restenäs Life

It’s hard to know what to say in a way that could translate, so much of it it feels as if one would just have to be here. 

I am grateful to God. for everything. For the little patch of Sweden I call home, for this place and these people, for all of the people and places on all the paths I have traveled that brought me to here. I’m grateful for the morning walk to breakfast, hours before the sun will rise, to eat muesli and drink coffee and appreciate waking up as a sort of an act of worship. I’m grateful that I get to do this, to set aside time to grow and to wonder and to rest and to explore. I’m grateful for the path to the sea, the path to the mountain, for undiscovered corridors and attics filled with wonders, like flags and newspapers in swedish from a century ago. I’m grateful for long walks into town that take me over large hills, and how from the top of them I can see the ocean, and for the detours along the path that let me walk along the rocky coast. I’m grateful for fika, the lovely Swedish tradition to emphasize how important it is that every day we make time for each other. at 10:30 every morning the entire base (and all of Sweden) drops what we’re doing and we sit at a table with one another drinking coffee and sharing life together. I’m grateful for how hard it is, how studying the bible 50 hours a week pushes me and forces me to grow, and how there are days that I wake up and I don’t feel like it, but I find the strength to do it anyway. I’m grateful for how cold it is getting, how short the days are becoming, how our scarves and coats become more and more mandatory. I’m grateful to have a home, a room that overlooks a lovely valley, and the feeling that I can settle for a while and invest in this community. I’m grateful for how simple my life is for this season, how I never have to drive anywhere and all of my meals feel as if we’re sitting around a family dinner table. I'm grateful for how kind people can be, for friends who take care of me when I'm sick and who share life with me. I’m grateful that learning about the meaning of life is my job. I’m grateful for relying on I’m grateful for all of the many people I miss so dearly, because the longing reminds me of how much I love them. And I’m grateful for Jesus Christ, who not only saved me from death, but saved me for a life of meaning and beauty. I am grateful for the life I have, and I am excited to find out where it goes from here.

There’s more I could say. I find it hard to write because I’m very busy studying the other six days of the week, and life is too short to spend so much of it on the internet. If you want to know more about my life in this season, actually get ahold of me! Send me letters! Draw me pictures to put on my wall!

Austin Roberts / SBS Sept 2012

Restenäs 239

459 93 Ljungskile

Sweden

(All YWAMers depend on support and are basically unemployed vagabonds. I am committed to providing for my school, but if you want to help let me know! If you can afford but a postage stamp, send me a letter and say hello and that would be blessing enough. End of plug.)

pictures only prove you can't convince.

Hello again, dear readers. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It has been a long summer, one I decided to take a sabbatical from blogging for, and now the summer is over and I will do my best to bring you inquisitive ones up to speed with where I am now.

Greetings from my new home. I’m sure at some point pictures of my new home and my family here will come, but I will indulge myself with a description. I like that better, because even if I could transport you to where you could fully picture this place, to stand in a photograph isn’t the same as to dwell in a place. I live in a small village in Sweden called Restenäs. It is about an hour’s walk to the closest town, Ljungskile (pronounced Yew'ng-skeelay). All around me are bouldering hills and clouds and wildgrass and tall trees. I live in a big brick building called Solbacken, which began its’ life as an orphanage but now houses disciples of all kinds who come here to Restenäs to study in the various schools that are taking place. We have four schools going on right now as well as many people who live here in positions of ministry, so the whole campus is alive with people of all kinds from all places. Our collective home for this season consists of a large handful of buildings which dot the circumference of a large field where several cattle endlessly chew away at tufts of wildgrass. Across the road and through many yards of wooded glen, there lies a saltwater bay, and beyond that the island Orust, and beyond that the Skaggerak straight which connects the North sea to the Baltic. The sea is filled with plankton which shimmer out with bioluminescent light when one runs their hands through the waters.

Every morning begins before the sun has made its’ way over the hill, and by 6:50 I’ll be bundled up and on my way across the field to our dining hall for breakfast. All of my days are filled with all sorts of wonderful disciples and servants from all over our lovely planet that fill my life with joy. I get three lovely meals each day prepared by our cooks Maarten and Pierre, and I have a warm bed and our village has wonderful trails that allow us to see all the pastures and hills that surround us. Every morning we have fika, that grand swedish tradition where all of us sit down as a big family for tea. All of our days are spent in fellowship - walking and having fun, fulfilling our daily chores. My chore is to help run the café in our main fellowship building - brewing fika and cleaning so that everyone can have a place to fellowship. In addition to this - the reason I'm here, in fact, is a nine month inductive study of the bible through the School of Biblical Studies. It's going to be a long and lovely winter.

To have a home on this earth is one of those most tenuous and special things for me, and I can’t say how grateful I am to get to have one here for a time. I will speak more of all of these things later, dear friends. I’m glad you’re reading! I don’t know how often I’ll be able to update and muse during these next few seasons, as things are about to get very busy. Give me grace as I do the best I can, and if you haven’t subscribed do so as this is the most frequent way I will be updating. More to come soon.

Tack för läsning!

unread books and unwritten essays

Creating something beautiful and meaningful is hard. I know I haven't blogged in a while and it's no accident; I've made a few basic attempts and thrown them out. I find that whenever I "want to create something beautiful" I end up with rubbish, and it's only when I let the chaos take over and the order of the universe throw something beautiful in my lap do I have any odds whatsoever of coming up with something that someone else would gain anything from reading. Otherwise this whole thing, writing in general, becomes politics. "What can I say to somehow win people over?" It's all vanity. Therefore I must approach this whole business not like a general bent on conquest but rather like a meek child staring into the night sky, filled with all its' distant unreachable stars, shouting a verse into the universe in hopes of coming up with some meaning to it all. This isn't just a metaphor, I actually did this once, in the middle of the night with the new moon bringing clarity to all the sparkling stars and the peaceful riverside along the Nam Kading river as it merges so peacefully into the Mekong. And it was odd how such a scene takes the shouts out of my mouth and reduces me to whispers. And even if that's all I have to work with, here's a few whispers into the darkness.

I'm back in America now, and it's always a thing that causes me much inner wrestling; not so much the specifics of the place itself but what it represents in my mind. 'Home', perhaps, and many of the things that word might imply, but also the old self, the me I used to be. I walk down roads I've walked before and I think of the ways my mind used to work and what used to matter to me. The unimportant things I used as foundations for my decisions, the selfishness that seemed to cripple me. It's as though I find myself in an old faded photograph from a time a part of me never wanted to remember. There's this weird irrational fear in the back of my mind that the mystic properties of the place itself might cause me to relapse, to take a step back into the old me that was capable of such silly and damaging mistakes, to be so careless and thoughtless and foolish. I had these same feelings last summer when my entire world seemed to be falling apart, so I printed out about 40 pictures from better times in my life as a sort of a constant reminder that the past happened - even the good parts. especially the good parts. And it gives this neglected room some color and some warmth in spite of itself.

It's odd to me how a bedroom can take on a sort of mythical symbolism to it. It's "my room", this brick of space about 12 feet by 10 feet by 8 feet that's specifically designated to me. As one inhabits a place for a decade or two all of the charachter of it begins to bend to the character of the one who occupies it. The dings in the walls and the new paint job from when the 8-year-old version of me would have temper tantrums and kick the wall until it was brown. The old furntire, some of which was given to me and some of which was cast off by others, only to be rescued. I have all these books in my room. Stacks of them, and the sad thing is that I haven't yet gotten to most of them. I wonder if I'm really the best steward of them, wonder if I should give them away so they might get read and appreciated by someone who doesn't spread themselves so thin.

The old things intrigue me in a new way. What was once the future is now the past, and what once seemed so mysterious and dangerous and risky now feels conquered. This feeling that I made it to this point in spite of all of life's twists and turns gives me hope as I look ahead, into the dark speckled night sky that is our future, something that at once seems both so mysterious and yet so inevitable.

the things you carry.

The old things ending are only a sign of something new.

Ohh, haven't forgotten about you, friends. I've actually written a handful of drafts for different blog ideas I've had floating around, but every time I ultimately decided this wasn't the venue. I'm pretty sure that most of my readers are in some way related to me, and so this seems like an odd place to discuss what how my heart is broken for the sexual slaves of southeast asia and how this is a dirty broken world that has a way of leaving one jaded about where it's headed. So many of my experiences here have been very profound, and yet in a way it's very hard to make them translate. I do my best to put you in my shoes, but with much of this stuff you'd just have to be there. There's the easy gross-out stories about getting vomited on in the middle of a twelve hour bus ride or what it's like to use a squatty potty, but I think those miss the point. I've gone through some really uncomfortable stuff, true, but oh, how the joys do outweigh the sorrows. So instead, here are some thoughts. And the funny thing about them all is that so much of it are tiny little lessons, the little things one picks up over the course of a day. But they all add up somehow into a grander wonderful truth, and life made beautiful.

It starts here: With everything in life worth doing, there's this moment. You take the step that can't be undone, can't be partially refunded, where suddenly there is no going back and undoing. It's no longer ideas, or plans, but what you're doing with this part of your life. And for me it meant to get on the plane, one that sends you far away from everything that seems normal to you. and it's just you, sitting there by yourself. and you feel very alone, helpless, and nervous. Don't panic, it gets better from here. The hardest part is over. And yet so much of the wonderful things that can happen in our lives hit the roadblocks here. Often it feels like too much work, too much to give up, just to get to this point. Getting past that moment is a prerequisite for living well.

A true friend is something precious. The kindness of strangers is a humbling and life-affirming thing that restores my hope in times where I feel like accepting cynicism. I have so much gratitude to the friends I made along the way. Living in community is just beautiful, and can't be replicated. The way a group of strangers can turn into a family is something to be treasured. Being so far away from home, it's nice to have a few familiar faces to see every once in a while. Many of the things that seem like they'll be a big deal about living in a new culture, the things about comfort and food and what you will and won't be able to buy - that's the easy stuff. Being a tourist is easy, living somewhere is different. It's hard and frustrating, but it's beautiful and it's worth it.

Designer clothes and luxury cars are boring. All-inclusives are for those who don't want to actually experience anything. Many people don't understand what gives things value. There's a beauty to the dirt of humanity. We're all just dust anyways. There are few things that are as shocking as just how little care is given to the poor in this world and how little people think about where their money goes when they spend it. Scrapping your plans and having to do something completely different can sometimes be better than anything you could have planned ahead of time. If you really want to live fully, you have to accept that sometimes it will be smelly, sometimes it will be uncomfortable, sometimes you'll feel very alone. If you aren't ready for that, stay home. Sometimes the experiences won't be happy things, and they won't be nice or pleasant at all. Sometimes life can downright hurt, but the whole trick to joy is to take even the bad things and use them to get better and to learn. I'm learning to appreciate the good in everything.


It's weird to pack everything up, to see everything in your life fit into a few bags. But that's ok. it was never the stuff that made life fulfilling anyways. What I really carry with me are the stories, the memories. thousands of pictures. places I'll remember all my life. And most of all, the people, and the way they changed me. I love Thailand, and I'll miss this place very much. Mostly I'll miss the people. I have been shown amazing kindness, and my time here has changed me for the better. Those who've been a part of my life in the past six months, thank you so much. America, see you soon!

Other things I should mention.
What I've been up to: Traveling. When I was booking the plane ticket last august I decided to stay late, and booked my return flight about 8 weeks after DTS ended. Originally the plan was to stay in Bangkok the whole time, find something to do. When I made the decision to pursue a School of Biblical Studies in the fall, it meant that suddenly the next year and a half of my life is looking very busy. So I decided to take a break, and took two trips, taking up about half of my time. I went to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos on the first trip and Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore on the second trip. It's been crazy, and while I scribbled journal notes all along the way I'll probably save those thoughts and stories for elsewhere. But it was good. My mind works better when I'm moving, which is as it should be. And in the last few days being back in Bangkok with not much to do, I see it's been good that I had something to keep me occupied.


What's next: I'm going HOME. On Wednesday. I'm going all out and I'll be scraping my heels to the finish line. My amazing charles schwab use-it-anywhere-for-free debit card, which is ever so handy and I'm so grateful for, expired at the end of january - so I made one last final withdrawl at the end of last month to cover all my expenses to get me home. I'm down to 254 baht with 3 days to go. (I'll need to save basically all of it for the cab ride to the airport at three in the morning, so if anyone in Ramsong wants to buy me a meal, let me know!) I do have a loaf of bread, though, and some coffee grounds, and a can of baked beans (leftover from my flood survival kit), and some peanut butter. Gonna make it, kids. As soon as I get home I'm going to sleep for two days, and then subject myself to CCF spring break. I'm pretty excited about seeing many of your lovely faces. After that I have a window of about six months. It's gonna be good, I've applied for a few internships and will otherwise plan on finding some job somewhere (can't be too picky, I suppose). If anyone has any ideas, or is looking for a housemate, let me know. Then, if all goes well, Sweden in mid-september. More on this later.

I do love you all, by the way. Thanks for reading and caring.

on self-serving blogs about travel.

ohhhh, dear readers, I'm not even gonna post this one to facebook, because it's just a thought, for you.

I'm in Penang, Malaysia. It's lovely here. And I could wax poetic about all these lovely old brick buildings, and I know that I'm supposed to blog about my adventures, but the subtext of all of those blogs written by everyone has always been "hey, look at meeeee...."

and so much of what I do isn't just to brag to my hypothetical readers. Several times now people have said that they were jealous of my travels, and it makes me reconsider everything, because what my entire generation seems to be fixated on is doing stuff just so other people will think highly of them. and that's stupid. I never want to be a part of that. ohh, I have stories, mind you, but I'd much rather like it if you asked me about them instead, because wheras bragging is stupid, stories are beautiful. It's lonely sometimes out on the road, and getting on here and writing to nobody doesn't seem to help with that all that much.

anyways, off to Kuala Lumpur.

lessons learned, part 1.

I'm a few weeks from going back to America, the land of my birth. I have one last adventure in me yet, but even now I've begun to do more to reflect on my time here in Thailand, to make sense of it. to think about what it's meant to me, specifically in terms of the lessons learned, and how it should affect me going forward. So here are a few thoughts I've had. I'm going to save my more sentimental "aww, I'm going to miss Thailand" thoughts for a later post, this is going to focus on two lessons.

Lesson #1. Places are just places, and people are all people.

in a few of the interactions I've had with people back home, one of the most striking things that I've noticed is that being here in Thailand, many people back in the comfort of the developed western world seem to be under the basic assumption that I miss all America has to offer.
Meals with cheese and bread, readily available air conditioning, my own room, my own car, having a lot of control about how I spend my day, never getting sick, bathrooms where the toilet and the shower aren't the same thing, being able to read the signs on highways, being able to communicate using big words that express myself. Want to know a secret? I don't miss any of that. at all. I would give it up willingly again without much thought. Oh, dear friends, please don't take it personally. If I say I miss America, it's no lie, but it's you that I miss. If you were all here I might never go back.

Some of my reasoning for this is just as surface-level as the assumptions people have come to. for example, I don't miss american food because thai food is great. Every restaraunt sells only fresh food, and the reason the markets sell the meat and fruit and vegetables on hooks and on tables instead of in refrigerators is because the food was harvested and butchered only a handful of hours ago. Thai food involves more creativity and variety in a single dish than in an entire western buffet. Western food is built around french cuisine, which is a bit like science: mix exactly the right amount of each ingredient in order to replicate past perfections. Thai food is truly a bit more like art. Work with what you have, be daring, create something new and wonderful every single time. At every table there's an arrangement of peppers and oils and sauces so that you, the eater, can go even farther if you want to.

but there's something deeper. I could make a line-by-line comparison of my Thai experience and my American experience and try to measure them up, but I think that would be missing the point. It goes down much deeper than our daily conveniences and into the things our heart believes. One natural thing we as humans seem to be ingrained with is the idea that our experience - our country, our particular sports team, our school, our city, the little unique things about the way we live our life - is somehow intrinsically better than the next guy's. American politicians are quick to pander to this line of logic, often reminding us that "America is the greatest nation in the history of the world." But living cross-culturally, that pride only serves to humble me frequently. America isn't somehow magically better than other countries. (I would even go so far as to say that while I was in Laos I couldn't help but feel great shame for my country, who "secretly" carpet-bombed a beautiful country out of xenophobic paranoia.) And the thing is, it's not that we're better or worse than other people, it's that when it comes down to it, nationalities are kind of imaginary. There's really no such thing as an American or a Thai or any other nationality; on some level we're all just people. Trying to use words to further qualify that definition isn't a good thing.

So what to do with this knowledge?
walk humbly. act justly. love mercy.
be kind.
love your neighbor.

it's always the simple lessons that are the most profound.

Austin's new rules for personal photography.

I'm angry at my former self.


cutting down my photo library to "things that aren't awful" is taking WAY longer than it should, in no small part due to the fact that I've gotten a lot better at photography than I used to be. In other words, a lot of pictures that are in some way or another greatly flawed. So I'm setting forth some new rules for my own picture-taking-and-library-maintaing practices:

1. Go through and delete duplicates and unnecessary pictures from the rolls within a month of adding them. don't wait for them all to stack up.
2. If you're taking pictures of food, and there aren't any people in it, it better be some really interesting-looking culturally informative food. No pictures of the soup you ate. ever again.
3. if you stay in a hotel room, you get one picture of the room. one. find a way to fit the stuff in the frame. if the view is notable, that's your picture. bathrooms aren't worth remembering.
4. less is more. three thousand pictures aren't as good as twenty pictures. ever.
5. if the subject matter is important to you, but the picture didn't come out, delete it. tough cookies.
6. Just because you're ashamed of past haircuts and overall sense of style doesn't mean you get to delete every picture of yourself from 2004 to 2009. The past happened, and you need these pictures as a way of keeping you from regressing.
7. Don't be lazy. don't settle for the most convenient way of getting the shot possible. stop your car and get out and take a picture. don't upload pictures to facebook without cutting it down to the top roll or two of shots (I'm SO SORRY, Cape Town '09 team.)
8. When using a camera in a historical museum, don't use your camera in such a way that you attempt to replicate a walk through the museum, complete with every single title card and object. If you use a camera at all, stick to artistic shots and things you can't just look up on wikipedia.
9. If you're looking at a way to frame something, involving people in the subject and not trying to isolate something from its' environment nearly always makes a picture better. Capture moments, not things.
10. If, looking back at a picture from 5 years ago, you don't have any idea what is going on but you clearly did at the time and there's no way to jog your memory, delete it.
11. If you have a picture that encapsulates a friend looking particularly unphotogenic compared to normal, it doesn't matter what else is in the picture. delete it.

Meta-rule #1: You can make exceptions to the rules, but they have to be actual exceptions and not just a recursion to arbitrary decisionmaking.