Dear families,
It is a new year. We've arrived in Korea, settled into our housing (dorm rooms for the students), and begun our class. We've been to the DMZ and on a city tour. Some of us worshiped with the international Lutheran congregation where we ran into an Ole from the class of '05 or '06. If this were just an interim abroad course we'd still be getting to know each other, six days into the enterprise. But we are living in several time-frames that ask us to give our full attention to a new place and class even as we prepare to return home. Tonight this is vividly clear to me since as I write this Thomas and Wrick are packing to leave in the morning. Wrick's spring semester starts in less than a week. The minutes of my class here are divided between preparing for the transition back to home and considering Korean Christianity with comparisons to the communities we have considered elsewhere. Students are busy writing their last essay which asks them to wrestle with this hard, important question: How can people with differing religions live well together? Soon, however, they'll be wrestling with how to live well in places that seem both familiar and foreign, with people well-loved and yet oddly strange. Already they are anticipating sleeping in, eating favorite foods, telling you stories, and so much more. Even as we call the end of college commencement, so too the end of global semester is really the beginning of living out what we've learned. Thank you once more for sending these young people away. I assure you that they will be all the more remarkable when you welcome them home in not so many days.
with warm greetings from cold Seoul, DeAne