Dear Friends in Christ,

Something has happened?! Time has gotten away from me, and it has been way too long since you've heard from Klaipeda! However, at last...here I am on a cold, gray and not-yet-spring day in Klaipeda with resolve to send Lenten greetings and to bring you a bit more up to date on what's happening around me and in me.

Firstly, though months have flown by (and I must say, without my noticing), your prayers and support from afar have truly been important and so very often encouraging to me. The intensive course in "Life and Letters of Paul" taught last May, moving to a new apartment in August, and English Language Bible Camp in Poland immediately thereafter, all transpired with only minor moments of chaos. This fall semester was hectic(we lost a teacher in the our department), and spring has been no less so (complicated by departmental duties of supervising comprehensives and senior thesis writing—I am English Dept. Chair). I'm learning again how demanding and consuming teaching is, how much I have to learn about WHERE I am, and how. Added to preparation for and grading of my class work (90+ students and 16 hours a week), have been the ongoing concerns for family, along with several trips home to visit and care and simply be with.

To say a bit more about Klaipeda and Lithuania Christian College... I've been teaching Literature and Reading" in the Language Institute, a year's intensive pre-college English course. Exhausting as it has been, I have LOVED the teaching and found myself invigorated and energized by the students. In the second semester, we read and discuss two wonderful novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Chosen which become the catalysts for all kinds of reflective and spiritual considerations in papers, in class interaction, and in ways I never would have guessed!

On the last day of class last spring, I shared quite openly my hopes and dreams with the students as well as my Christian conviction, telling them I hoped to stay at least a few more years here. I told them I couldn't expect all of them to understand but that I had prayed for them almost daily and was convinced that our paths crossing hadn't been an accident of fate. I told them I hadn't wanted to preach at them (I in fact avoided ‘God-talk' quite intentionally) and asked their understanding if I had come on too strong(there were a few moments when I ‘slipped' into a kind of pulpit stance). One of the students anonymously wrote the following in response, "I want to say thank you for the year. Thank you for everything you did for us, your students. You saw in us not only students but personalities. You understand us. Without many words, you taught us to be free. When I came into your class I felt freedom; fifty minutes passed very quickly. I don't exaggerate.......... You made me think about values in my life. You didn't tell many things about God, but on the other hand you told about Him more than any other teacher. Thank you for this!"

Did I really do this? I wonder even now and can only pray God is somehow using me again this year with a new group. If that is indeed what happens in a usual classroom, then it is God's goodness and grace manifest in my feeble attempts to teach and listen, to instruct and learn with those entrusted to my care and direction for a few hours of their lives while at LCC. AND NOW..... my second school year at LCC is practically over (six weeks of class remain in this semester). I write you in the first days of our Spring Vacation, and though the break was greeted by all, most of our students went reluctantly home with heavy news of tuition increases, which many fear will exclude them from attending the school next year. Though the issues are too complicated to go into, I am hearing and witnessing, in oh so many, a kind of shadowy and hopeless resignation bordering on bitterness and disillusion. It is a typical reaction by many in this part of the world (former east block and Soviet republics) to what we from the west call the ‘reality' of the free market. The financial chaos in Russia has affected life here in many places, certainly putting an extra edge of anxiety in the air. Our students, Christian and not, are being pushed to their own ‘edges' as well.

What to say? I am simply trying to be a good listener, to walk with, through the questions and the doubts and the fear, to encourage hearts and minds to think ‘beyond'( a ‘given' in the west, not commonly found in the post-communist mentality, even among 18-year-olds), and to grasp the possibilities and ways for ‘creative financing' (scholarship aid and loans which are both available— though both are almost inconceivable and seen as de-humanizing by students and especially by their parents, who can hardly imagine much less take such things seriously).

I have wondered more often these days than ever before, what gives a person hope? Where does it come from? How do I even talk about it, with these dear and questioning and fearful students? Apart from Christ, I know no answers. So, it seems the road on which they walk, and on which I trust I walk with them, is even now a Lenten road, a road of silence, a road in the desert, a road with twists and turns and questions and no signs pointing clearly where next to go. The ‘struggle' they face may sound rather small to you who are so far away, so very far away, but it is where I am standing this day.

AND....I know, as all who anticipate Easter know, that it is this very road which leads to new beginnings and things far beyond our imagination and dreams, to the hope so lacking. My prayer for my co-travelers, for you, for myself these days of Lent, is to be listening and watching and ready for the road to bring us to an empty tomb and then indeed, beyond!!

Grace and peace,

Jane Holslag