Looking Up

My wife and I lived and worked in Riga, Latvia from 1993 through to 2004. We had a good time there and one of my favorite pastimes was to walk around in “Vecs Riga”, or the old city. I really enjoyed reading the history of Riga and looking at all the old buildings. As time went by I started noticing that there was more to those buildings in old Riga and other parts of the city then I observed the first time I visited.

The truth is that when I first moved to Riga I spent a lot of time just trying to find my way around. I often looked at maps and road signs and spent most of my time looking straight ahead. After a while I got to know my way around and it was then that I started to notice things I had never seen before. There are many buildings in Riga that are built using Jugendstil architecture. This type of architecture has faces and people built into the walls etc… in an amazing way. As I walked around Riga I began to see... a lot of faces and people that were looking down at me. In other words as I looked up I saw faces and people looking down. I started seeing a whole new world. I would love to know some of the stories that go along with some of the faces that I began to observe on the buildings, but most of them I will never know.

Check out some of these faces and figures in my link called “Faces of Riga”. I took these pictures because I found them fascinating. All these faces were there the first time I arrived in Riga but I never saw them. I never observed them. I never took the time to look up. When I think about looking up and seeing a whole new world I think about my time here on earth. You see when we are first born and begin to grow we learn to live in the world we were born into. We need maps and road signs to find our way. As time goes on and we feel a little more at home in this world and there is a chance that we might begin to ask more serious questions about who we are and why we are here. It is at that moment that our questions lead us to look up. When we begin to do that we will see things that have always been there but we never knew it because we were only looking straight ahead. The Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. (Psalms 19:1)

Take some time today and look up! 

Love your What?

The other day a friend asked me how I was settling in here in Stockholm and I began to write a reply. I explained that having lived in Sweden before I should know the place well. I can speak the language and that really helps. But I also admitted that I had been gone for eleven years and that a lot had changed here in my absence. Living in Stockholm is also a new challenge. It is Sweden’s capital city, and before I had only lived in small Swedish towns.

One of my sons is finishing University in America soon and says that he really enjoys European culture better than American culture! What he means is that he actually feels like he understands the European mind set and ways better than the American. He has felt a little out of place in America these last five years, so...he is moving back to Sweden and wants to try living in the country that he lived in as a child. One of my other children has told me how they would much more prefer to live in America. Wow, how different my children are! One would like to live in America and one is moving back to Sweden.

How about me? Where would I most prefer to live? I am learning that... I like where ever I am as long as there are people I love there. That might sound strange but I actually believe it more and more. I have now lived in three very different countries in my life time. In each country I have lived I have been happy and enjoyed myself as long as I had people there that I loved.

Once a Pharisee asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not a perfect neighbor, far from it. And I also realize that I do not live among perfect neighbors, far from it. There are no perfect neighbors and no perfect people as far as that goes but I am still told to love them in spite of what they do or say. Sometimes it is easy to love and sometimes it is real job, but when I do it, it is amazing how fun life becomes and how much richer (humanly speaking) I become, when I get to know others that are much different then myself.

So how am I settling in? Well, I guess that depends on me more then where I live, or who I live beside.