Ebbs, Flows, & Cross Winds

Since I've been able to listen to my iPod in my car again, thanks to a perfect birthday gift, music has meant more to me. I usually put the songs on shuffle an more often than not, a song comes up in some other language. I acquired a lot of music from friends & students
while living in Lithuania last year. People knew I enjoyed music from different cultures, so they would give me lots to flash drives worth of music and "learn me" about their musical style, or what musicians were popular in their culture.
Since I attended a Lithuanian speaking church while living abroad, I learned a lot of vocabulary centered around the church. I have been back in the US for nine months now, and I have forgotten so many of those worship songs I used to know by heart. Those were the same songs I was listening to week after week as we met in each other's flats on Wednesday evenings to sing, worship, pray, and learn together. It kills me that those memories are fading.
When I first arrived home, I did my best to avoid talking about reverse culture shock, insisting that I was relatively immune to it. I pretended things transitioned along so smoothly that I didn't need to talk about it. The real truth, however, was two fold: that I didn't trust that people would know how to react to the changes within me, and that I didn't know exactly how to express how I'd changed in that short, but huge year. I also felt like I didn't have the time to go through reverse culture shock, since I was moving to Montana just a month and a half after arriving back to the East Coast.
As time progresses, I'm realizing more and more that this year has been given to me as a gift. "Do with it what you will, but it's meant to be a gift." That's how I feel I am to approach it. It's a time of respite from drama, worry, and the unpredictability of life. Without those things, I have to retrain myself not to default to boredom, but see it as a learning experience. Most of the time, the highest level of learning has been in a time of challenge, but maybe, just maybe, God is trying to tell me He can teach me at all points of the ebbs & flows of life.

P.S. This picture above was taken this evening at my next door neighbor's house :)