Finding Community

I have spent some time abroad, including a total of four months in Ukraine and two months in the Azores.

Upon return, many people ask if the adventure was pleasant. A few people want to hear details. Years after the adventure, however, people stop asking questions and the experiences get tucked away in memory banks. This is, in its own way, necessary and natural; endlessly reminiscing can detach a soul from the present and prevent further growth.

Yet, like a splash of cold water, a good friend recently asked me a question while we cozily sat by the warm fireplace. It went something like:

“You had two very different experiences when living in Ukraine and the Azores, and I believe you learned different lessons while in each of those places. What made them different, and what did God teach you through them?”

Ukraine

My first experience living abroad happened when I was nineteen. Deep in my soul I felt the need to support the church in Kiev by being present, providing encouragement, and teaching English. I found a language school where I could learn Russian, and through that I found a host family to offer me a bed at night. Yet I went there without an arranged church program, without personal connections in Ukraine or from the United States, and with absolutely no prior knowledge of the Russian or Ukrainian languages.

Being the stubborn, passionate, coming-of-age teenager I was, I put on a wonderfully unflappable face while tromping through airports, city streets, and metros. I was living the adventure. I was seeing the world. I was big, and brave, and finding a way to use my bold excitement for the Lord.

I cried myself to sleep for at least two weeks. I was homesick and lonely.

Yet God saw my fear and loneliness. Before I arrived in Ukraine, while driving to the airport in the United States, I received a call from someone I had never met, providing me with my first and only connection to a church. The first Sunday after I arrived, an amazing and lovely girl from that church picked me up and took me to the service. She became my best friend there, and was all but a flesh and blood sister to me. Wonderful people came into my life, and none of them through my planning. The language school I chose to attend was lovely, and the people there were kind, yet my deepest connections and the remedy to my loneliness came from the places where God told me to be, serve, and rest.

In Ukraine, I learned that God provides people in the places one needs them. He provides community.

Azores, Portugal

Just over a year ago, when I was twenty-three, I traveled to the Azores, Portugal. I did not intend for this trip to be a missionary one. I went to learn technical skills for building a house out of a material called cob (otherwise called monolithic adobe). I have a dream that one day I may use several of my interests (such as farming, house-building, clothes-making, and others) to serve and minister to people. This trip was a necessary preparation should such an opportunity ever arise.

With the full-time job of building a house and the mental toll of learning cob, I had no time to learn Portuguese. This meant that I could not understand local church services, and so I spent the two months watching my home-church online in my grubby tent. Additionally, no one in the workshop was a Christian. Most were new age, polytheistic, or agnostic. Don’t misunderstand me; the people were lovely, and I genuinely delighted in their company. However, since my faith is such an integral part of my life, being unable to connect with others on the matter for significant stretches of time is deeply isolating. I felt alone.

I cried myself to sleep in my tent for three weeks.

Yet at that time, I was much more confident in who I was and what I believed than the nineteen-year-old Leenie who lived in Ukraine. I didn’t feel the need to prove myself or my beliefs to anyone, and was simply happy to live my life, neither hiding my beliefs nor forcing them onto display. It was a beautiful inner peace that lead many others in the workshop to ask deep, personal, and vulnerable questions.

Unwittingly, the Azores did become a sort of mission field; a place where I had to stand alone and show the character Christ was making me into. A common Christian phrase for evangelism is, “planting seeds” which essentially says you may not see the results, but simply sharing the Gospel with someone is deeply valuable and necessary. I would like to take the analogy a step further; you can’t plant seeds in poor soil. Many people come to Christianity with past trauma, rejection, or deep misunderstanding. For these people, I believe it is important to show radical honesty through actions and, where appropriate, words. To show them that as a Christian, I am flawed, yet because of the One in whom I put my faith I am loved and can be loving.

In the Azores, I discovered that even if there is no human to provide christian comfort, God is sufficient to be my community.

It is good to have a friend who will occasionally ask innocently simple questions which secretly probe at the deep inner workings of one’s heart.