Le denouement

I feel I may have left off on a sour note at my last post. For those of you who couldn't decipher my poetic abstraction, perhaps you heard on the news about the volcano in Iceland that erupted some days ago and whose cloud of ash cancelled nearly all Western European flights for most the week. To be honest, it didn't affect my travel plans all that much. It prevented me from going to Dublin and gave me three extra days in London. Can't complain too much about that. Especially when you consider all the people who were really inconvenienced by the flight cancellations -- Britons stranded around the world trying to return to their families and their jobs, for instance. For me, it was just another part of the adventure.

Come to think of it, disrupted travel plans played a major part in my two-week break. My initial train from Montpellier to Paris was cancelled because of a rail strike; one night in London I waited for a bus until 3 am before giving up and going to a different stop; and when I returned to Montpellier yesterday the tramway was down because of a strike. I got back to Montpellier by taking a bus from London to Paris and then the TGV from Paris. Instead of going through the chunnel -- which I was pretty excited about -- the bus took a ferry. It was a surreal experience. My bus left London at 10:30 Wednesday night, and I woke up around midnight to the angry yelling of our bus driver telling us to get off. There were dozens of coach buses and cars in this long chamber, and we took a passenger lift to the lounge area. I was with this French student named Thibault who I met on the bus and who, remarkably, is a good friend of Marine, a French girl doing a year abroad at Whitworth! I followed him in a half-daze to floor 5 of the ferry, which, but for the people sleeping awkwardly in chairs and on the ground, may as well have been a shopping mall. For some reason I've never considered how large a ferry must be. Quite large, I discovered. There were cafes and shops, huge seating areas and carpeted walkways. We went up another floor and found a quiet place to sleep for the hour and a half before reboarding our bus. We arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris around 8:00 am, and as we looked at the metro map to figure out our route, my friend Rachel came walking up. What the hell? She's from Montpellier and was on break, too, but what are the chances we'd see each other in the Paris metro? What's even weirder is that I saw her in London, too, in the British Museum. Too bizarre!

After that journey down the rabbit hole, it's very nice to be back in Montpellier. It's warm and humid here, even when cloudy, and you can feel summer creeping on. Next week I have three major assignments due -- my last assignments of the semester, in fact -- which will be hard to finish with my playing in a Frisbee tournament this weekend. It also didn't much help that I made dirt cake with my friends Sarah and Eddy this afternoon. It sure was tasty, though, and fun!

It astounds me that I have only a few more weeks left in France. Two weeks of class, a few days of finals, then my dad will visit me for a couple weeks, and I'll leave soon after that. Just before break I spent my last time with the Tapperts (my pastor and his family) at the CFU (my church). They leave this weekend for the states, as they do every summer, to visit their base of support and ask for continued support for their mission in France. It was a sad and significant goodbye. By and large they have represented the most important aspect of my time abroad, that is, the development of my trust in the Lord. They were very nearly the first people I met in Montpellier, literally the first morning I was here. They took me into their church and their home like a son, and I have benefited greatly from the fellowship that's taken place in their home.

Well before break the idea of "denouement" came to mind. We use the word in English when discussing literature to mean the resolution of a plot, the events that follow the climax. In French it derives from the verb "denouer," which means "to undo," literally to undo a knot ("knot" = "noeud"). With my last time at the CFU with the Tapperts, with my vacation having finished, with only a few weeks of class ahead of me, I feel very clearly in the denouement of my chapter in France. It seems that I experience a somewhat significant denouement in my life every few months in recent years. Last year I started getting sad about leaving for France sometime in August! On the other hand, I'm already really excited about next semester starting and being an RA again. Transitions come at me so fast, they tend to blend together, these beginnings and endings, the process of making and untying all this yarn, all these knots. I go back and forth between Colorado and Whitworth, and now between the US and Montpellier and other places in Europe, and no matter how present-minded I am in each place, threads are constantly being done and undone. I am becoming more and more convince of two absolute truths. Human life is inherently transient, and all that remains and remains constant is God. What I wrote in my second post on this blog -- which I didn't understand as well as I do now, and which I still can't completely understand -- still holds true: God, the one Constant, is with us, ever with us. Two weeks of travel only served to convince me further of this. In allowing me to meet with good friends in Paris, in blessing my travels, in giving me a gracious host in Chester, in keeping me safe in London, in intersecting my path with those of Rachel and Thibault, in granting me a thankful heart, I know the Lord is in my life, solid and active and good.

I took several hundred pictures in Paris, Chester, and London, but since I'm still borrowing a computer, I unfortunately can't put them up here. Not too long from now, though, I'll be back in the US and can post them or, better yet, print them off and show them to you myself! With much love and gratitude, your Montpellier man.

My vacation plans are like a volcano...

My vacation plans are like a volcano
that unexpectedly blew up,
sending massive mushrooming
clouds over the UK,
grounding all the planes
until who knows when.
Oh wait --
a volcano actually did blow up,
and the planes are actually grounded.




(composed in an internet cafe in London)