I just wanted to re-post a colleague's reflection that went out via email this week. Curt Luthye has been working with the Caribbean in several capacities for years, and I found his thoughts refreshing and appropriate in the days following the recent earthquakes near Haiti.

It is much too early to be able to reflect fully on the current and ongoing situation in Haiti, yet today I find myself beginning to process what I have seen and heard. Today is Sunday, a day set aside for worship. I imagine that worship today in Haiti included almost all the emotions -- lament at tremendous and tragic loss, joy at unexpected reunions, relief simply to be breathing and frustration or anxiety as the future looms uncertain and dark.

But I know my friends. I have seen Haitians in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know firsthand the resilience of a people who have faced a continuing string of unthinkable events. And in the midst of that, they trust God.

Today there was church, real church. Haitians sang and prayed today. They listened again to words they know by heart and in which they rest through faith. The LORD is Sovereign, and he cares about what happened -- what is happening -- to them.

Today there was church, real church. Christians around the world sang and prayed today. They listened again to words they know by heart and through which they feel the nudge to act. The LORD is calling the faithful to respond. He is calling them to love and to sacrifice in order to show that love.

The Church of the Nazarene is in the perfect position to effectively respond to this crisis. With more than 50 Nazarene churches in and around Port-au-Prince, these churches will serve as hubs for distribution of practical supplies and of an intangible hope.

Right this moment, more than 300 people are finding refuge on the Nazarene Bible college campus. Local Nazarenes are caring for their neighbors. And when you partner this with what Christians around the world, and the Church of the Nazarene in particular, are doing, what a powerful picture of God's love is shown!

Today we know there is tragedy in Haiti. Today we can also affirm a basic truth. God is God. And His people are to care for their neighbors like God does.

-Curt Luthye, Nazarene missionary

My Christmas gifts took up an entire suitcase coming back to the States, and since my parents decided to feed me an In'N'Out burger on the way home from the airport (OK, we were stopping in to see my brother; the burger was a side effect), I was awake enough once we got home to sit at the kitchen counter and wrap them. It would have been incredibly relaxing if the people whose gifts I was wrapping (my sister, my other brother and his fiancee) wouldn't have chosen to keep walking in the door.

But it was also nice to have this steady trickle of family back into my life as my sister returned from babysitting, my brother and his fiancee finished their socializing and my other brother's shift ended. I went to bed at 1 a.m. and didn't get up until, true to tradition, my brothers came in and insisted I get up so we could eat and open presents.

When the greatest accomplishment in your life is fitting the vital material elements of it into six suitcases (this includes four years'-worth of books and journals), your Christmas list is pretty small. Mine basically consisted of accessories for my new laptop (I got equally excited over the wireless mouse from my brother and Microsoft Word from my parents) and gift cards to places where I could re-stock my basic living supplies while I'm saving for school during the next several months.

So it was unexpected and amazing to also have greetings (how many dozen Christmas cards?) from several of my LINKS churches in Michigan, and all the holiday notes helped the end of my contract to feel a little less like sneaking out the back door. The gift cards tucked inside some of them made getting back on my feet in the States a lot smoother, and the fun stuff (Real Simple magazine! Peanut butter M&Ms!) just made the day that much sweeter.

Because my birthday falls in early January, it runs up against Christmas with cards and gifts, and the birthday add-ons from Michigan meant I got to play a little, too. Not that I'm good for much but sleeping, organizing letters and watching Scrubs these days, but with my cold persisting and jetlag clinging like a homeless puppy, the best thing about the holidays was the chance to fall apart so I can start putting everything back together.

It's not lost on me that in the middle of all these days blossomed the New Year, and even though I'm not one for annual resolutions, I see nothing but newness stretching before me, every single month of 2010 (January: honest-to-goodness time off, February: looking for work, March: getting paid by the hour, April: helping plan a wedding, May: becoming a sister-in-law, June/July/August: becoming London-bound, September: changing countries again, October: remembering how to be a student, November: figuring out how to be more than a student, December: making my own new traditions). So mostly I want to say, to everyone who sent cards or gifts or love or prayers my way this holiday season (in particular, my churches in Sparta and Grand Rapids): vielen dank, merci viel mal, mille grazie, muchas gracias, etc. Basically, thank you, in every language I've spoken with any amount regularity in recent years.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

I'm antsy when I finally stumble off the plane in Sacramento, 20 hours after leaving Büsingen in the slushy gray of Christmas Eve morning. I'm sweaty and my face is shiny and my eyes are dry and I need water and a shower. I wonder, as I always do after a transatlantic flight, if I will ever become immune to the smell of air travel, that fatal combination of hand sanitizer and Cinnabon.

My sister finds me in the baggage claim, and I am hit with joy at seeing her and jealousy of the red peacoat she's wearing, a duality of emotion completely normal among sisters. Her curly hair is finally (finally!) cropped short, and she waves down Mom, who gives me about six of her teary hugs and comes back to the carousel to wait for my stuff. She's got a textured black-and-white trench on, and I realize we've finally hit that point where I we don't need to schedule a fashion intervention every time I come home. Which is heartwarming, except that I always enjoyed those interventions.

My bags roll off the carousel together, and we haul all six of them into the back of the van and drive to In'N'Out Burger, where my brother is closing tonight. I order a cheeseburger (animal style, light spread, no pickles) and we all sit at a table in the corner and steal each other's fries.

Growing up, my family spent this holiday evening at home or church, singing carols by candlelight or drinking hot chocolate from travel mugs while we toured the über-lighted neighborhoods of our hometown in matching pajamas. This year, at 10 p.m., we're surrounded by florescent light and fast food, and I couldn't be happier.

It's Christmas Eve, and I'm home.

*

English is all I hear when I board the plane in Zürich, and I'm jolted by the overt friendliness the flight attendants display. It's so distinctly American, and after living among mild-mannered Europeans for several years, my homeland's brand of "customer service" feels like performance art in comparison.

It's a full flight to Washington Dulles and I'm in an aisle seat, so I can't see the storybook landscape of Switzerland falling away beneath us when the plane takes off. Past the Swiss girl in the seat next to me I catch the streaks of gray and white rushing past the windows and realize I wouldn't have seen much anyway. There's too much fog today.

The flight attendants bring landing cards through the cabin and I end up translating for my seatmate because her English doesn't include travel and immigration vocabulary yet. She switches seats a few minutes into the flight because her audio feed is broken, but returns just before we land. She's never been to the States before and wants the window view. The earth is a series of gray curvatures on white on gray as we arc toward Dulles, and as we touch down we chat. She's going to visit her sister in New Jersey, asks if this is my first time here, and I tell her I'm from California.

"I thought you were Swiss," she says. Or German. Or something."

I tell her my brother is getting married this year. She doesn't understand why anyone would want to do that at 22.

Immigration is a mess. There are translation issues with some passengers, and periodically an airport employee walks the line, asking if someone can help. "Does anyone here speak Chinese?" she shouts for several minutes, pacing the length of the room.

The girl in front of me, who appears to be returning from studying in Italy, glances at me. "I wonder if she knows Chinese isn't a language," she says.

Once I manage to pile all six of my bags onto a trolley and re-check them, it's another five hours to Sacramento, and all of them are a blur, except for this: there are no personal video screens, my iPod dies partway through the flight and I fall asleep in my contacts. When I wake, we're minutes from landing in Sacramento and all I want are eyedrops. And a bottle of water. And a shower, a toothbrush, and a change of clothes. And to see my family.

*

The Swiss passport control officer scrutinizes my ticket, barely glancing at my ID before waving me on toward the gleaming surfaces of Zürich's duty free shops. I bypass the designer bags and exorbitantly-priced chocolate and take the escalator down toward the tram that carries long-haul passengers to the E terminal. At immigration, I push my ticket and passport across the desk, say hello and wait, feeling as I always do that I need to raise myself up on tiptoes to hear and be heard.

The officer is uncharacteristically friendly.

"Going home?" he asks, examining my boarding pass.

"Yes," I say, the truth and the simplest answer finally intersecting.

"You live here?"

"In Germany."

He nods, flipping through my passport until he finds my visa.

"You speak German?"

"Ein bisschen," I say. A little bit.

"Sounds good"–– he means my pronunciation. "Sounds like more than a little bit."

I smile. "I hope so," I say in German, and he sticks with the local language as he thanks me and wishes me happy holidays and I say thanks, you too in German before I head to my gate because from here on out, life happens in English.

*

The downstairs door to the communications center clicks open as I'm unplugging my external hard drive from the office graphics computer and logging out of my email. It's 8 a.m. and Nikolaj, true to German punctuality, has already loaded two of my four suitcases into the office van by the time I get down the stairs. I've slept for four hours; I haven't showered. My flight leaves from Zürich at noon; the drive is 45 minutes, which means we're setting out comfortably within the "arrive three hours early for international flights" rule (though efficiency is never a problem at the Zürich Airport). The Gilberts, who have recently moved from Sri Lanka into the missionary apartment at the com. center, are standing in the hallway, and send me off with hugs and good wishes into the damp gray morning. This weather is not something I'll miss.

On the way to the airport, Nikolaj stops by a bakery that has his favorite rolls, and he buys me a Rosinenschnecke ("raisin snail"), a swirled pastry flecked with raisins and glazed with sugar. I munch through it while dotting on enough makeup to look awake. Nikolaj asks why I bother; he doesn't think "putting on a face" is necessary. I tell him jokingly that I don't want to scare the children, then seriously that people treat me better when it looks like I've made a bit of effort. They're friendlier. Security officers give me fewer dubious looks. He considers this while I curl my eyelashes.

The woman at the check-in desk is super-nice and doesn't even blink when one of my four packed-to-the-23-kilo-limit suitcases is 24 kilos; I buy my last exorbitantly-priced caffeinated Starbucks drink (grande size in Switzerland=roughly USD $7.50) for the forseeable future, hoping it will keep me awake until I board, and Nikolaj sits at the table while we kill time by saying the sorts of inane things you say at a major parting because the big things escape you, and feel like too much to hold.

Beneath the haze of exhaustion, I'm vaguely conscious that this is the end of something, that there are many good things behind me being crowded out by the sharper recollection of too many recent challenges and too little sleep. At this moment, I don't feel positive or negative about the place I've been living and working for the past four years. I just feel done. I try to express this, that it has encompassed such a mix of the wonderful and the absurd and the beautiful and the irrational, that I am simultaneously grateful for the past season and ready for the next one. "I know what you mean," Nikolaj says. He has lived there for at least 15 years. "It's a place that can make you crazy, but you also fall in love with it."

When I finish my coffee, he picks up my bag and walks me to passport control. And this is when it hits me: everything is finally done. I am packed, paid, checked in, caffeinated and out of time to kill. There's nothing else to do but say goodbye, and as Nikolaj hands over my carryon, he says, "Well, Simone..." and I can tell he's trying not to cry, and all of a sudden, I'm trying not to cry, too.

I am leaving Eurasia. There's nothing else, not the smallest pre-flight task, to distract me from that anymore, and all I feel is the overwhelming lack of balance at the notion that I am stepping out of the environment that has shaped so much of who I am today, and that everything past this point is just me, on my own, navigating a new sea.

We hug goodbye. He says "Tschüss" and I say "Merry Christmas." It's all either of us can manage.

Then I turn towards passport control and walk through the door.

I set my alarm for 6. Since I went to bed at 3 a.m., it's no surprise that I didn't hear my alarm until 7, but it's still really inconvenient to forego a shower before you're about to fly for 18 hours.

I'm putting photos on my external hard drive at the moment, and the clock on the town church is chiming 8, so I think that means I'm out of time. It also means I get to sing my favorite Joni Mitchell lyric of all time: "California, coming home."

I'm writing this from the hallway of the communications center guest room at 1 a.m. because I finished packing an hour ago, right before the fuse in my bedroom burned out, and then I made a to-do list for tomorrow and realized this is my last chance to blog before I leave in a little less than 30 hours. I'm sure the world would survive, but this is the best way I know of embracing the remainder of the experience.

Not that everything bears unconditional embracing. The snow that started falling Sunday night continued steadily into Monday morning, so when I met Marte at 3:30 a.m. to head to the airport in Frankfurt (a three-and-a-half-hour drive on a good day) for her 10 a.m. flight, it took us a good 30 minutes to scoop the car out from under all the snow and drag her suitcases through the eight-inch drifts. By the time we found Martin's GPS in his apartment, it was 4, the roads were barely plowed and the snow was still coating two of three lanes on the autobahn. Within 30 minutes of leaving, I hit an uneven patch of snow and lost control of the car, which is not the best way to start a road trip, especially when you're on a time crunch.

If I sound glib about a serious mishap, it's because hitting the center divider it was just the beginning of a seriously long day, one in which we were both fine and the car was still drivable (minus the front license plate, plus several scratches), Marte ended up missing her flight because the airport tram between terminals wasn't working, I was running a fever again by the time I got back to Büsingen around 3 p.m., and I was nowhere near being packed or moved out or finished with work. I'm no stranger to high-stress situations, but I generally see a path through them. When it came to my packing, last night all I saw were boxes and papers and suitcases about four sizes too small.

So Barry and Evan were total rockstars today--Barry because he spent several hours moving most of the rest of my stuff out of the apartment and doing the bulk of the cleaning, Evan because she is a packing legend and actually talked me through getting everything sorted and zipped into the appropriate number of suitcases. I don't really know how we got there, but we did, and if I had to leave in an hour, I actually sort of could. Which feels miraculous.

My to-do list for tomorrow is 14 items long, and none of those includes sleeping.

I can't believe Christmas is in two days.

I can't wait to be home.

I'm failing Advent this year. No matter how intentional and present I want to be during this season, life keeps crowding in on me. I am, according to Christian tradition, supposed to be spending these four weeks before Christmas stilling myself, stepping back from chaos, waiting, focusing on what is to come, living in anticipation and patience and calm, breathing deeply.

My life, apparently, did not get this memo.

Instead of peace, I'm living in a chaos of unsorted boxes and half-filled suitcases and soon-to-be-homeless books. I spent the first week of Advent slotted into one transition meeting after another, the second week participating in all the social holiday traditions of the college/regional office community, the third week curled under my duvet with a monster case of the flu, which leaves exactly three more days for me to pack up my life and work of the past four years and transfer it all to another continent. Forget peace and anticipation and stillness––breathing just seems a lot to ask of a person right now.

I'll admit, that's due partly to my lingering cold, but the bulk of it is tied to the manic fear I have that I'm not going to get everything done before Wednesday night. I like Advent and all, but practically speaking, it couldn't have come at a worse time this year.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe the fact that it comes in the middle of so much noise, so much pressure, so much anxiety, is what makes it so important. No one has to convince me that this practice of slowing down and living in a place of need and uncertainty is necessary. No one has to try and remind me that Christ's life beginning amid all the fear is significant. No one has to point out that this season asks us to spend four weeks dwelling in the "not yet."

Maybe it's not that I've failed Advent this year but that I've been living it for too long. I've known I would be leaving Büsingen since July, been working toward December's RAC meetings since August, been applying for graduate schools and job-hunting and making travel plans Stateside for most of the fall, and this thing of being asked to wait, of being asked to recognize that we are incomplete, that there is grace still to come--maybe I am uncomfortable with a season that pushes me to embrace where I have been living for far too long. I am tired and impatient and overly-ready for change, for new life, for healing, for peace, for Christ to even me out again. I'm not good at waiting. I am, as I suspect many people are, more of a Christmas girl than an Advent one.

I stepped outside this evening after sorting through papers in the communications center for four hours, and my foot sank several inches into the snow that is still falling fast and steady on the village. It's the first substantial blanket of winter we've had on the ground, and being the first one to kick through it, all dusty and bright under the streetlamps, made me feel like a little kid again. I found the spare key to Martin's car in the regional office, because I'm getting up at 3 a.m. to drive Marte to the airport in Frankfurt, then I followed a couple walking their Dalmatian back toward the communications center, my trail no longer the only one on the sidewalk. Snowflakes stuck to my coat and scarf and bangs the way they do in movies, and that Paul Simon song popped into my head, the one that says, "the nearer your destination, the more you're slip-sliding away."  

The handful of snow I tasted was cold and sharp, and I followed my original footprints back to where I started, an alien pattern of narrow, grey teardrop-shaped fish smudged tentatively across a wide, white canvas.

Saturday, 8:30 a.m. I wake up with my usual sore throat, but it's nowhere near as bad as it has been. I'm breathing better, and my body temperature seems to be regulating itself in a more normal range than earlier this week, so today is definitely going to be spent on as much packing as possible.

Marte's been amazing this week, bringing me medicine and helping me get things sorted, in boxes, transported and re-sorted on the floor of my office at the communications center, which is where we're all pretty much dumping everything in order to have the space to go through it. I'm taking four suitcases on the plane and I'm still not sure how I'm going to get everything into those--four years of life weighs a lot more than 88 kilos. 

I ran five loads of laundry yesterday, got about half of my stuff out of my apartment, and I still feel like I'm behind schedule. Sunday is church and a potential afternoon coffee in Konstanz, and Monday I'm getting up at 4 a.m. to drive Marte to the airport in Frankfurt. I'll be back mid-afternoon, but eight hours in the car does eat a lot of the day, and it only leaves Tuesday and Wednesday for finishing everything else I need to do in the office so that the next team doesn't have a meltdown in their first month.

I hate it when crunch time falls on a Saturday.

Last night, Sib and Marte and Victor and I joined Bonnie and Peso (the pre-holiday remnant) for hot chocolate and a movie since everyone else is gone and we had milk to use. It was cozy and conversational in the way that Advent gatherings should be: low on fanfare, high on familiarity.

It's snowing this morning in the broadest possible sense. The fields behind the communications center look like frozen spinach, grey-green and rimmed in white. A handful of flakes are drifting through the air, but they're small and insubstantial enough that they're not necessarily falling downward. They're just there, in the space between the clouds and the ground, moving.

Finally went to see the doctor today. She told me I have an infection but it is getting better (or will get better--hard to be specific with the mix of German and English). Then she gave me four different prescriptions.

Marte and I watched the season finale for "So You Think You Can Dance" and then spent a couple of hours taking things off my shelves and putting them into boxes and moving them to my car. It's very, very weird. Mostly moving is just something I need to do (I'll spend the weekend sleeping in the guest room at the communications center so that I can get the apartment cleaned), and fast: I've only got five more days here, and a ton of books to go through.