L'Abri! aka this blog comes back to life

Hey everyone!

Despite the fact that I haven’t blogged in over a year, I’m going to attempt to blog while I’m at L’Abri and Oxford. For those of you who don’t know, this semester I’m doing study abroad at Oxford, and since that doesn’t start until the end of March, I’m spending part of the free time before then at a Christian program in Massachusetts called L’Abri. I’ve been there a week now, though it will have been longer when I actually post this, since I don’t have internet access at the house where I’m staying and have to wait for sporadic visits to the library or Starbucks to go online.

So, what exactly am I doing at L’Abri, you may be asking. Well, we spend four hours every day (in the morning for me) working around the big house where everyone lives. Mostly it’s a lot of cleaning, laundry, shoveling snow (it snows so much here!), and hauling wood (a lot of the heat here comes from wood stoves). That may sound boring, but I actually kind of like cleaning, and the only one I really dislike is hauling wood because it’s heavy and hard and outside. But working is a really cool chance to 1) not sit around studying all day, 2) to have time to digest what I’m learning here and sort of chill mentally, and 3) learn about how I can glorify God not just by doing “Christian” things like praying and reading my Bible but also just by living life and doing work (more on this in a bit).

Then in the afternoons I study. They have a ton of books and recorded lectures here about pretty much everything. The main topics that I’m studying are hearing from God and what it means to be a Christian in the world of academics, since I’m a student now and want to be a professor. I’ve listened to a lot of cool lectures on both, and here are some of the things I’ve been learning. First off, I’ve been learning how hearing from God isn’t about having times of silence in your prayers and waiting for God to speak by bringing thoughts to your mind, which is really encouraging because I’m super distractible and I’ve been really frustrated because I’ve heard it talked about that way a lot and it’s never really worked like that for me. Not that God can’t speak like that, but more often he speaks through nature, through other people, and mostly through the Bible. The most practical way to have a conversation with God is by reading the Bible while you pray. As to the second topic, I’ve been learning a lot about how God cares about our whole lives and not just praying and reading the Bible and such. Those things are still important to do and something I don’t do enough, but God also has created us to do normal human things like work and read and hang out, and those things can be equally glorifying to God. Partially because we can’t have an impact in a world that we don’t participate in and that we know nothing about, but also partially because God wants us to enjoy stuff. And those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive; we can watch a movie for pleasure and enjoy it but still think critically about it.

Besides working and studying, we all eat together (the food here is awesome), and some meals are discussion meals where we can talk about stuff we’ve been learning or random questions we have. We have nights and one day a week off. Last night some of us went contra dancing, which was pretty much the funnest thing ever. Everyone is in lines but you have a partner and everyone weaves in and out and there is a lot of spinning around. Think the dancing in Pride and Prejudice but faster and more exciting. We’re totally going again. Tomorrow we’re going to Boston on our day off, so that should be cool.

Overall, I’m having a really great time and learning a lot, and I hope school and whatnot is going really well for everyone.

Hope