Tag Archives: Germany

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Ist dieses das Ende von meinem deutschen Traum?

Just shy of three years ago, I wrote a blog post infused with all the pent-up anxiety and intrigue of what it was going to be like to leave my home in America and go work in the semi-exotic foreign land of mystery and sordid history that is Germany. I was scared and excited and intimidated and overconfident and ambitious and underqualified all at the same time, and the last three years have taught me that this mix of emotions never really changes or goes away. Sometime we feel one of them, but most of the time we feel a little bit of them all, all at once – life demands a lot from us, and the only way we are able to cope is to keep our quivers full of arrows, even the ineffective ones.

And so, I return to the land of possibility. At some point tomorrow, I will descend in that big iron bird somewhere over that big iron lady (she’s made of iron, right?) and I will feel a mixture of emotions, some of which are not a far cry from tired and poor and yearning for freedom.

But I return with a sense of newness. The last three years have been a joy in the midst of struggle, and a lesson that there is no real joy without struggle.

It will be good to come home.

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Cutting through France

This is a short one today, but a definitive case of wonder.

On Thursdays, I meet with a small group of twelfth-grade boys for food, Halo 3, and a little spiritual discussion thrown in at the end. This evening, while we chomped down on our Döner Kebap orders at the Munzer, I asked one of the guys, Josh, what he thought of the Angels and Airwaves concert he attended last week. He replied, “It was awesome” (which is a standard senior guy adjective of response, right up there with “wicked” and “epic”).

“Where was it?” I asked.

“Luxembourg,” he said as if the Grand Duchy was nothing more than a club down the street.

“Oh, wow,” I replied. “That’s farther away than I thought.”

“It’s not to far away,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty close,” said Jan, one of the other guys.

“Oh, I guess you’re right. It’s just north of Ramstein, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Josh. “Doesn’t take that long to get there. You just cut through France.”

There are very few places in the world that allow for a statement like that. It’s even hard for a Massachusetts resident to explain a route by saying, “Oh, yeah, you just cut through Rhode Island” (though, really, the real extraordinary thing about Massachusetts residents is how every set of directions they give contains at least one Dunkin Donuts as a landmark). I found it extraordinary not that Josh and the other concert-goers “cut through France,” but how nonchalantly he said it. I guess I still haven’t gotten used to the whole European lifestyle – carving a swath of expedience through an entirely different country still seems … well … foreign.

I’m not sure exactly what this exchange can teach me, but I know one thing: if you’re ever up from southwestern Germany on your way to visit the Grand Duke, take the highway through France. Apparently, it’s a shortcut.

Pictured: a shortcut

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Far from a Final Draft

A considerable number of my students are grumbling through an assignment I handed out a little over a week ago; it is due Friday. We have been reading some of the early American short stories in which the main character encounters, and sometimes even converses with, the devil. Such a concept was a fascinating thing to writers like Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe, and in recent years those who keep an eye on both literature and pop culture have noticed a resurgence of these same early Romantic themes. The assignment my students have been given is intended to not only draw out their creativity, but to determine how closely they have paid attention to some of the basic themes that lie within the selection of stories we have read. They are to write a story in which the devil is one of their characters, and though I am only requiring 3-5 pages (thus rendering their foray into creative literature to merely a “flash fiction” length), the prompt requires they consciously explore, within their own tale, the themes of good and evil as they are presented in such haunting stories as “The Devil and Tom Walker,” “Young Goodman Brown,” or Stephen King’s more contemporary yarn, “The Man in the Black Suit.”

I expected more complaints from missionary kids on the requirement of having the devil as a character in their stories. Instead, most of the complaints have been in regards to the fact that I want them to bring in their rough drafts over the next few days of class so we can work on them all together.

“We’re not just turning in our rough drafts?” is a question that has been whined by several students today.

Another is, “We need to have a rough draft?” as if everything one writes is immediate gold devoid of flaws and a need to restructure.

And, of course, all this got me to thinking…

Why is revision such a difficult thing? From essays to life events, the concept of revision can be a wearying thing. It is not a difficult thing to want to change, but it is indeed a difficult thing to actually get started. Revision does not come without pain. Ask any writer who knows it is in the best interest of a story to lose a particular stretch of finely-crafted description or dialogue – it is not easy to click that “delete” button. Ask any human being who is struggling to clean up their act, be it from drugs, alcohol, selfishness, greed, anger, lust, even depression. Change is a tough opponent to wrestle, and in the midst of grappling and twisting and desperately scraping for a foothold, we don’t recognize that this might be one match where getting pinned is worthwhile.

I am struck with the idea that life itself can often seem like a rough draft in need of constant revision. So many of us gaze back wistfully into our past because we desire to go back and relive things and maybe, in the midst of doing so, make better decisions that we feel would have brought about a different, more satisfactory outcome. And perhaps, were we actually given the chance, we would make better decisions. Yet our lives keep spinning forward, and we are all racing with such fantastic momentum that it seems almost pointless to undertake any kind of personal redaction. Sometimes I nurse the silly wish that maybe, at the end of my life, God will send me back down to earth to do it over again. A second life. A second chance to live a life with far less mistakes, errors, and absurd little typos. But, of course, such an opportunity would almost certainly produce not a perfected final copy, but another version of a rough draft – in need of outside revision to make it acceptable. Polished.

My students grumble at having to write these stories and then tear them all apart and rewrite them, but on Friday, hopefully what they will place in my “In” box is not a mess of fragments and thoughts and random ideas glued together by conjunctions and paragraphs, but something beautiful – something that wondrously and excellently reflects who they are and what they think.

We are far from our final drafts, but life is found in the revision. We should not be afraid of being reworked and revised, renovated and polished. After all, we have a very talented Writer who is dedicated to our perfection.

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Leigh and I were recently blessed with a long weekend, and here are some pictures from the trip we took to Bavaria, and the towns of Mittenwald and Fussen, and Neuschwanstein Castle.

Our B&B and the Alp in its back yard

Our B&B and the Alp in its back yard

 

The alp that lives next door to Mittenwald

The alp that lives next door to Mittenwald

Mittenwald is famous for centuries of violin craftsmen

 

A line of mountains and an Alpine lake on the Austrian/German border

A line of mountains and an Alpine lake on the Austrian/German border

 

Neuschwanstein Castle! ... and some scaffolding.

Neuschwanstein Castle! ... and some scaffolding.

On the hike back down from Marionbrucke

On the hike back down from Marionbrucke

Leigh snapped this beautiful little church in the Alps

Leigh snapped this beautiful little church in the Alps