Crossing KCU

Suffering in Silence

It was a cold evening in St. Petersburg. After four separate flights, and some fourteen hours of time in the air, and then a twenty-minute bus ride, I had arrived in the famous northern city of Russia.

At present I was shuffling wearily through the cold, damp streets, struggling to keep up with the pace of the rest of our group. We were twenty Americans, walking nearly single file as we wound our way through the streets like a snake in search of its prey. Around each corner and across each intersection was a new group of faces, all wearing the same cold, expressionless stares as they met our gaze. As we passed there seemed to be sporadic patches of semi-hushed laughter taking place all around us, but always from a source that was just out of our line of vision. It was always behind us, or across the street, and it seemed to contradict the expressions on the faces that were making eye contact with us; always intensely serious, hard, and somehow sad. We pressed on through this maze of people, cars, streets, and buildings, moving as a single entity, following close behind our enigmatic leader. Harley Wagler, the fastest walking, sixty year old Mennonite I had ever met.

We hardly knew each other, the twenty of us, all from different backgrounds and various areas of our country. We had all come to Russia for different reasons I think, but this evening we shared a common purpose as we trudged through the muddy streets of this foreign city. It was a fairly new city, in the grand scheme of things, only 300 years old and yet still older than our own country. It seemed to me as if it could have been a thousand years older than it was.

The rain was falling in a slow, steady drizzle, adding to the chill in the air and at the same time enhancing the pungent smell of the environment. Muddy, greasy water was collecting in a seemingly endless series of little tiny lakes that had carved places into the uneven sidewalks. A heavy cloud of automobile exhaust, cigarette smoke, and human sweat permeated the polluted air, choking out any pleasant smells that may have been present; if indeed there were any.

I was exhausted, hungry, and overwhelmed by this new place in which I had landed. I was nauseous from an empty stomach and the smell of the city. We had been walking for what seemed to me like several miles, though it may have not even been one. And then we turned a corner and everything changed. There, standing like a beacon in the gathering dusk was a sight of unbelievable magnificence. Two arches had been melded into the form of a golden “M” and thrust out like a banner for all to see. We were in front of a McDonald’s, slowly moving toward it as if caught in some magnetic pull emanating from the building itself. We were now caught in this invisible tractor-beam fully overcome by the magical spell which had been cast on us by the mere sight of the golden arches. I was in the very back of the line, watching as each member of the group disappeared one by one into the building through the doors which I myself was soon to pass through. As I moved into the building, shutting out the rest of the world, I could not help but feel overwhelmed by the sense that I was somehow stepping back into an America which I had just spent the better part of that day leaving behind.
_______

Of course that wasn’t the case. The sanctuary that McDonald’s provided was only a temporary illusion. When I first arrived in Russia I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and it seemed that all the thoughts, effort, preparation, and perseverance that had gone into getting me there was a distant set of memories that no longer had any relevance. Despite months of preparation, I very quickly discovered upon my arrival that I had done something that was very terrible, and which rendered all of my prior classroom training in the area of intercultural studies pretty much useless.

There is a term that is used when referring to the reaction that sometimes can occur when an individual comes into contact with another culture. This term is known as “culture shock,” and is used primarily within the academic realm. It carries a negative connotation with it, as it is used primarily to refer to the difficulties a person experiences when trying to adapt to another culture’s normal way of doing things. This was a term that had been discussed many times in the classes I was taking, and even though I was very familiar with what it meant, and the theory behind it, I still didn’t know what it was until I actually found myself experiencing it for the first time. Even so, it took me awhile to come to grips with the fact that I was experiencing culture shock, because when we had discussed it in class, I had dismissed it as something that I was quite sure other people might have to deal with, but never me of course.

My perception of the world, up to that point, had never really been challenged all that much. As a result, I had accumulated a reasonably comfortable view of the world I lived in from day to day. The rest of the world was something that I knew about from a distance. I only ever really encountered it through books, or movies, or the news. As such, I didn’t realize just how sheltered I had been throughout my whole life, having never experienced what life was like without many of the numerous luxuries and accrued personal comforts that had always been there. Nor did I realize how much those comforts and luxuries had shaped my view of the world, and how dependent I was upon them. But all of these things simply disappeared at some point while I was flying over the Atlantic Ocean, and across Western Europe. When I stepped foot into the Saint Petersburg airport, the world I knew was no more, the comfort of familiarity was gone, and I was in another world.

My words cannot adequately convey the panic that began settling itself over my thoughts within the first hours of my arrival in Russia. It was the worst kind of panic. This was the kind of panic that isn’t really that visible to other people observing you, but which you yourself are overwhelmingly aware of on the inside. It was the kind of panic that took every rational thought and planned decision which had led me to that point, and carefully and systematically tore them apart one by one, gradually leaving me with no ability to rationally justify why I had just flown halfway around the world and landed in this country.

The world I knew went from a place where I was able to comfortably navigate with extreme ease and independence, whichever road or path I decided to take each day, to a place where each and every step was an exercise that involved walking blindly into the unknown, and following in another person’s footsteps. Moreover, I didn’t know the person I was following. He was a very quiet and little old man named Harley Wagler. He was raised Amish, but had left his community at an early age, and gone off to become a missionary in Eastern Europe and Russia since the early days of the Cold War. I would later come to find that he was a very humble and kind man, who knew what he was doing. But when I first arrived in Russia, all I knew was that he was a stranger; a stranger who knew every step I was going to take in that country before I took it.

That’s where the panic began to form. It took awhile to grow into a huge monstrosity of fear that threatened my ability to entertain any semblance of sane thought. That moment was still well ahead of me, about four weeks ahead of me to be exact. If I had known that the initial shock I experienced within the first few hours was only the beginning of four weeks of the most hellish nightmare I had ever experienced on this earth up to that point, I would have never left that airport. As it was, however, that initial shock was sufficient enough to numb my ability to think very far ahead, and I was resigned to following the steps that had been planned out for me.

The transition from an average high temperature of about 90 degrees in central Indiana during late August, to an average high temperature of about 45-50 degrees in northern Russia marked the beginning of my decline in health. It was this temperature change which produced a particularly nasty cold, and pretty severe sinus infection within the first week. The sinus infection was so bad that I often had bloody noses each morning when I got out of bed. Another contributing factor to my poor health was some kind of bug that gave me chronic diarrhea, which I still acquired despite the fact that I had taken every precaution to not drink the water in Saint Petersburg. On top of all this, was the fact that I was already extremely out of shape from a summer where I had been relatively sedentary. Moreover, the physical endurance I was required to muster to move myself back and forth across Saint Petersburg each day as we walked from one tourist attraction to the next was nearly the end of me. With my weight being just over 300 lbs., and with all my other ailments, the fact that I was able to function at all was nothing short of a small miracle.

By the second day there, I was already so sore that it took me several minutes to get where I could stand up and get dressed in the mornings. This was exacerbated by the fact that there was no hot water with which to take a shower and soothe my aching muscles and joints. The attack I was enduring on my physical body each day was by far the worse form of punishment I had ever subjected myself to. I was functioning then, on what I now believe to be a basic set of survival instincts. I was moving through each day, with nearly every ounce of strength I could muster, completely focused on one thing: putting one foot in front of the other. The food I ate was energy to get me from one place to the next, the clothes I wore were put on with the sole consideration given to comfort and mobility, the moments of sleep I was granted were small islands of refuge in the sea of misery I was drowning in every second that I was awake.

Now, all of this I’ve just mentioned, was only the beginning. The physical trauma I had to endure was just the backdrop to a nightmare that was continually playing itself out in front of me. Each day we were in Saint Petersburg basically consisted of a long hike across the city and back. For nearly two weeks, this is what I did, and while it was already enough to drain me physically, it caused a reasonable amount of mental stress as well. But there was still another aspect of this new environment that began hacking away at my emotional and mental well being, almost from the second I stepped off the plane.

A common feature of trekking through the city each day, was enduring an endless bombardment of laughter from people who beheld the group I was in; a group of about twenty Americans usually moving in a single file line from one place to another. I was, of course, always at the very back of this line, struggling to keep up with the pace, which was my main task. The thing that made the laughter sting even worse, was the stark awareness that my presence in the group was the main attraction. I discovered this during the few times that the main body of the group moved farther ahead of me, leaving me like an island in a sea of Russian people, walking as fast as I could to catch up with everyone. But the most tormenting aspect of the sound of people laughing as I passed, was the fact that I could never see someone laughing. Anytime I wasn’t looking at the pavement or street at my feet, I was met with a silent mass of stoic faces, all staring blankly, and almost mechanically ahead, with few eyes even on me. The paradox between what I was seeing and what I was hearing, played on my mind with a tormenting mix of thoughts about why I was there anyway, and why I hadn’t listened when Lena told me about this. From the beginning to the end of each day, this was an ever-present part of the environment around me, and a constant strain on my thoughts and emotions. It wasn’t long before a profound sense of depression began to swell in my mind, and it robbed me of the ability to find any kind of peace in what I was doing there.

Our group was staying at a small, private college on the edge of the city. Each night, I would curl up into my bed, put my headphones on, and cry silently to myself until I fell asleep. I had never felt more alone in my life, as I did during those two weeks. Not only was I suffering a great deal, but I was in the middle of a group of Americans, students like me, who were having the time of their life. My struggles seemed to set me apart from absolutely everyone, American and Russian, and left me with a constant, and nagging feeling in the back of my mind, that I should just leave and go back home.

There was one day in particular, where this thought of leaving was especially strong. It was about a week after arriving, and it was a Sunday. The day began pretty typically. We got up early and headed off to visit a monument to Peter the Great before catching the services at an Orthodox cathedral. During part of our journey to the monument, we took a trolley bus. Now, for anyone who hasn’t experienced public transportation outside the U.S., and specifically public transportation in Russia, it’s quite an uncomfortable experience when you encounter it for the first time. The thing that makes it so is the fact that Russians have no concept of an idea that we Americans find to be an essential aspect of life: the thing we refer to as, “personal space.” You know what I’m talking about? It’s this invisible force field that we have, and it extends around us about two or three feet at all times, especially while we are in a public atmosphere, and when we allow that space to be invaded, it’s usually a mutual, intentional decision that is made because we like the person who is doing the invading. It’s the thing that makes being close to someone in proximity (someone inside of two or three feet) evidence that we are close to them in relationship. Well, this is something that does not exist in Russia. Case in point: When taking public transportation, Russians will fill the transport vehicle, whether trolley, bus, van, or subway car, well beyond actual capacity. In fact, they will fill the vehicle to the point where there is absolutely no room for any person in that vehicle to move a single inch in any direction. This means, that you are typically standing up for the duration of the ride with your primary support usually being the other people that are crammed around you so close that it holds you upright as the transport goes speeding recklessly down the street, and around corners, making screechingly abrupt and frequent halts to let people off and on.

So that’s what we were doing this particular Sunday morning, on the way to visit Peter the Great’s statue. What makes this one use of public transportation stand out among the hundreds of times I traveled this way while I was in Russia, is the fact that my camera was stolen right out of my front jacket pocket during the ride. It was a nice camera, and the skill it took for the guy to actually steal it, was nothing short of super-human in my opinion. I was crammed into the middle of the isle of the trolley, with three people from my group around me, along with two Russian guys on either side. I was wearing a vest jacket, with four pockets on the front. My wallet was in the lower left pocket, and the camera was in the pocket right above it, situated on my chest. I could feel one of the guy’s hands reaching for the wallet, so I kept my hand over it, never even thinking about the possibility that my camera was accessible to a pick-pocket. But when we stopped, and the doors opened, these two guys, pushed their way out quickly and took off running. They were pretty far away before I realized that my camera was missing.

So I was in a pretty sour mood as we paid homage to Peter the Great, sitting atop his great big horse, his right arm extended out in front of him, posing as if he knew something that we didn’t. Maybe he did. But what I knew about him, was the fact that he had built this city about three hundred years earlier, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives, and that the bodies of those people had been thrown into the swamp upon which they were working to build a foundation for the city. And I had sacrificed my camera to go and have a group photo taken in front of this madman.

After leaving the monument, we went to observe the Sunday services at one of the more prominent Orthodox cathedrals in Saint Petersburg. Russians, traditionally speaking, are a deeply religious people. Likewise, the Russian Studies Program was part of a larger conglomeration of Christian colleges and universities, which gathered together students from all over the United States who wanted to participate in this study abroad opportunity. As such, the study of religion in Russia was an integral part of our larger experience on the whole, as mandated by the nature of the program itself. So this particular excursion to an Orthodox church, was just the first of many such experiences, and it left a stark impression upon me.

As I entered the cathedral, the first thing I noticed was how small it made me feel. It was a massive structure, with an entrance lined by large pillars that arched high overhead. The doors which were easily about 12 feet high, opened into one very large circular room, with great stone support pillars spread throughout the auditorium. There were no seats, aside from a few wooden benches against the outer walls. At the back, was a small booth which sold a variety of religious oriented items, most of which were geared towards tourists. In the front was a stage area, with a great wall spreading across from one side of the room to the other. In the middle of this wall was a door, and behind this door could be seen another room. In that room there were four or five priests milling about in front of a table, waving around incense and chanting some sort of liturgical mantra. It was very dark, with the only real source of light coming from hundreds of candles, along with a few electrical chandeliers overhead. There were groups of people all over the place, just standing around, involved in a variety of different activities. In several places stood large old paintings of Christ, or the Apostles, or illustrated portrayals of different biblical stories. People would line up in front of these icons, and in their turn, kiss the pictures, light candles in front of them, and say a prayer before moving on to a different one. The entire place was filled with the smell of incense. In the dimness of the smoke filled gloom, with the only sound coming from the chanting priests, the church had the feeling of a very large, underground tomb. In fact, the body of some long dead saint was actually buried right there inside the sanctuary a few feet from where I was standing as I entered. I walked around for about 20 minutes taking all of this in, and then, overwhelmed by the atmosphere, decided that I could take no more and quietly exited.

I was alone as I walked out to the edge of the stone causeway that lined the entrance. I leaned up against one of the great stone pillars and just looked out over an empty square underneath dark clouds, with a slight drizzle coming down and adding a chill to the air. It was about that time that a man walked up to me. He was a short man with a shaved head. He was missing some teeth, was dressed in pretty grimy clothes, and he smelled pretty bad. He began speaking to me in Russian, and when I didn’t respond, he began to get really loud and really angry. It wasn’t long before he was shouting directly in my face, and pointing at me. Then he abruptly stopped and began crying. Then the crying stopped just as quickly as it had started and he began shouting again. The only thing I knew to do was to just put my head down and ask God to help me. As soon as I did that, this guy immediately took off running into the church building. The rest of the group began coming out a few minutes later and we were off to our next destination.

I was ready to leave Russia. At that point, this country was beyond my ability to appreciate in any sense of the word. I hated it. It was dark. It was depressing. Everything felt dead. This was reflected in the cultural centers which our group was touring each day. It is no exaggeration to say that nearly every work of art, in every museum we visited dealt with suffering, and death. Even the depictions of Christ in each painting dealt almost exclusively with his crucifixion, death, and burial. It could be seen in all of the Orthodox cathedrals we visited, all of which looked and felt like the one I’ve just described; large tombs, with many of them having bodies buried in the sanctuary. In contrast to the macabre appearance inside the churches, were the cemeteries, which were actually among the most beautiful places I visited. Yet even in that, the intense focus on, and exultation of death could be seen. In a way, this magnified my own personal experience during those first weeks. I was suffering every day, physically, emotionally, and mentally, and I was experiencing this kind of suffering in the midst of an environment that was saturated with a spirit of suffering, depression, and death. In a society consumed with death, I felt like I was dying more and more with the passing of each day.

During this time, I retreated far inside of myself, and I just did the only thing I knew to do… I prayed. And when I say that I prayed, I mean that I really prayed. I wept for God to help me make some sense out of what I was experiencing. Talking to God was literally the only option I had. Too much money and too much time had gone into getting me to that country, and the thought of leaving was unthinkable. Yet even this could not stop the voice which had started out in the back of my head as a small whisper, and was steadily growing louder with each passing day. A voice that had only one thing to say: “Leave… give up and leave.”
_______

The passing of a couple more weeks found our group settled into a dormitory on the campus of Nizhni Novgorod State University. We had taken the overnight train south from Saint Petersburg, and the ride had actually been one of the first calmingly pleasant experiences I had encountered up to that point. A girl who was in our group, by the name of Juliet was in the same compartment as me, and it didn’t take long for us to become friends. She was a very slender, brown haired girl, with glasses and a lot of energy. Juliet really liked to talk a lot. But she was a good listener as well, and it was easy to open up to her and get past the typical, surface relationship that defined most of the relationships that existed in our group initially. All of that was understandable, considering most of us had been complete strangers until we met for the first time in New York right before flying to Russia.

Talking with Juliet on the train was my first real departure from feeling like a stranger. She found it really interesting that I was there just because God told me to come, and we stayed up most of the night talking about theology, the schools we went to and what they were like, and our personal struggles in growing to know God. Juliet would become one of my closest friends during the next few months. Whenever she saw me lagging behind the rest of the group she would hang back and walk with me, so I didn’t always feel alone. She was one of the few people I met while I was there who really watched me. But she didn’t watch me out of pity; she watched me and walked with me, knowing that God was teaching her something through my suffering. That night on the train, she slept on the bunk across the isle from me, and in the morning commented that my snoring was really comforting to her, because it made her feel like a really big lion was asleep right there, watching over everyone. Aside from being the only positive comment I have ever received about my snoring, it encouraged me a great deal, and I was glad to have a new friend. I was reminded for the first time since I had arrived in Russia, that I was there for a reason, and that perhaps, it really didn’t have that much to do with me at all.

There were other people to consider, and there was a reason why God had brought me to Russia and stuck me inside the group I was with everyday. As we all moved into the dormitory and began attending classes at the university, I began remembering some of the things that God had been teaching me before. Within the midst of my own suffering, I began really seeing the people who I was living with, and I realized that I needed to pray for them. This might not seem like a very profound realization, but it came to me like a bolt of lightning that shocked me back into reality. One of the important side-effects of praying for other people, as I had learned, and am still learning to this day, is that it takes your own focus off of yourself, and it helps you become sensitive to others needs as you see them the way God does. As I began making a daily effort to do this, God began clearing my head out, and slowly began waking me up to this place I was in. In essence, God began allowing me to see my environment, not through my own struggles and difficulties, but through his eyes. It was an important step because it prepared me to confront the confusion I felt about whether or not I should stay there, or pack my bags and head back to Indiana.

There wasn’t much to it really. I just woke up one morning, about a month into the semester, still sick, still tired, and still wanting to leave. I realized that I couldn’t continue like that any longer; not unless God spoke to me directly and told me to stay there. Otherwise I was going to get my return ticket, directions to the airport, and I was leaving. I made this decision while I was sipping my tea after breakfast, and as everyone else went off to morning classes, I stayed in my room. I sat there, on the edge of my bed, literally only a few moments from leaving, and I bowed my head, and I asked God to tell me what to do. I poured my heart out to him, and I told him how lost I felt, and how tired I was, and that I couldn’t go on without a word from him. I told him that I would do whatever he told me to do, but I just needed to know for sure.

As I sat there, waiting for an answer from God, I opened my Bible. There, tucked into the middle, written on a small piece of torn notebook paper, was a scripture reference that I had scribbled down months earlier. One evening back in that summer before I left for Russia I was talking to Jeff on the phone, and he gave me this scripture. He had specifically told me that it dealt with my time in Russia:

“But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life.” –2 Corinthians 2:14-16

The second one was:

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.” –2 Corinthians 4:7-11

When I finished reading these passages, I just began crying. I knew that God had answered me through these scriptures; there was no doubt in my mind. I just responded with a simple, “Yes Lord,” and the peace that washed over me in that moment was so strong that it drove everything else completely out of me. It was the turning point of my journey in Russia, and a turning point in my life as well. It was God who had sustained me through the illness, weariness, ridicule, and humiliation. The suffering itself, as much as it killed me, had a purpose. It caused me to rely on God in ways that I had never done before. And as I did so, it filled me with a fire and a strength that was not from me, but from the creator of the universe.

From there on, everything was different. I was filled with purpose, and I was full of determination. My entire outlook was changed the next day, and for the first time, I began going out on my own, and I began hanging out with the Russians who were living in the same dorm. Within a couple of weeks, I found myself in a room with about a dozen Russian students, playing cards with them, listening to music, drinking tea that they would make for me, and just talking to them, as I found that many of them could understand and speak English pretty well. Their hospitality was completely selfless, and their curiosity was genuine.

That was right about the time that we all moved out of the dormitory. The program had assigned each of us in the group to a Russian host family, and so we all split up and went to different areas of the city to live. The family I was put with lived in a really nice two story apartment right off the main square of the city. The family was made up of a widow and her two children. The boy was older, about sixteen or seventeen and he had a younger sister who was only about four years old. Every morning at sunrise, the mother would get up and begin making breakfast for me. It was so good, and usually too much for me to eat. This woman, after making my breakfast, would struggle to get her daughter ready for school, and then go off to work where she managed a grocery store. Then she would come home each evening and make a huge feast for all of us. She would wait on me hand and foot like I was a king. The few times she caught me trying to do my own laundry, which had to be done by hand without a machine, she would yell something at me in Russian, and smack me upside the head while laughing at the same time. In Russia, all housework is considered to be a woman’s duty, and they actually get defensive and territorial whenever a man tries to help in the kitchen or with the laundry. I guess I got used to it after awhile.

I lived with this family throughout the next couple of months, and I can honestly say that I loved them, and I cried when I had to leave them. It’s strange because they couldn’t really speak any English, and I could speak even less Russian, and yet, despite that huge language barrier, they adopted me into their family like I belonged there, as though I had always been with them. I saw tears in my host mother’s eyes as she hugged me before I walked out the door for the last time. The little girl Anastasia kept yelling, “Goodbye Adam, goodbye Adam,” as I walked down the stairs and out of the building.

My host brother took me to the train station, and as I boarded he gave me a hug and asked me not to forget him. Sasha was a good kid all in all, but he was very angry and very sad much of the time. He listened to a lot of heavy metal and had a pretty tough exterior, but he still gave up his room and bed so I could be comfortable while I was living with his family. One of my favorite moments with him, was when I came back from school one evening to find him listening to my Jennifer Knapp CD. He was listening to the intro of Kansas where she just sings by herself without any instruments. He couldn’t understand anything she was saying, but he just kept listening to her voice over and over again, trying desperately with the little English he did know, to figure out a word or two.

I think it was through the experience of living with my Russian family, that I began to really connect with what it meant to live in Russia. Even though they were not a Christian family, the way they served me without even thinking about it would put most Christians in our country to shame. They served me with joy, as though it was the only thing that brought real happiness to their lives, and they hardly knew anything about me. Despite that, they lived very hard lives, and there was a deep sense of sadness within them. As I slept in their home each night, I would sense that they had somehow been touched by suffering as well, and that this suffering was a small bit of what I had seen and experienced in Saint Petersburg when I first arrived in the country. But I had seen and felt it everywhere I went in Russia. It was always there, in the art museums, the great cathedral tombs, the monuments to past dictators, and even the famous mausoleum of Lenin that adorned Red Square. It was in the faces of the people that I passed every time I went outside, all serious, sad, and astonishingly quiet, like they were always either leaving or on their way to a funeral. It was in the cemeteries that housed some of the most beautiful scenes I saw in the country. It was even in the novels I had to read for the literature course I was taking. It seemed that the thing which tied together every great Russian author, no matter what century they lived in, was their ability to embody, articulate, and artfully represent the concentration of this heavy spirit of depression, misery, and suffering that seemed to saturate everything in the Russian society.

By the time I left Russia, after almost four months, I was keenly aware of how much of a blessing it had been for me to be able to spend that time there. Throughout each phase of the semester, as I grew more and more accustomed to the culture, as well as the demands of daily life, I began to understand why God had sent me there. He had simply been refining my relationship with him in a way that required me to be put in a situation where I couldn’t rely on anything else, or anyone else, to find peace, purpose, and a reason for living. He was teaching me that I just had to learn to do what he tells me to do, regardless of how much it doesn’t make sense, or how painful and uncomfortable it might be. He was teaching me that suffering isn’t really a bad thing for us human beings, because it helps us break through the boundaries of self that cut us off from other people. Suffering helps us to know Christ more, because in suffering, we are able to identify, in a small way, with the pain that he endured for all of us when he was tortured and put on the cross.

My relationship with the rest of the American students had also changed a great deal by the time I left Russia. There was hardly a person in the group that I couldn’t sit down and have a meaningful conversation with. All of the times I spent at the back of the line, trudging from one place to the next, had made an impression. Over time they had watched me struggling and suffering, and they couldn’t understand why I kept going, and why I didn’t give up. Because of this, one by one, I found myself having conversations with them where we could open up and really get to know each other, and I was able to share my relationship with Christ with them. That’s what the fragrance of knowing Christ is really about.

This is how I grew spiritually during my time in Russia. In experiencing a little of my own suffering, I learned to be sensitive to the suffering of others around me, however evident or hidden it was. This, in turn, helped me to connect with the pain and suffering of an entire nation, desperate to know who Christ really is, and that he is still there for them. But the most important thing I took away from the time I spent in Russia, was the realization that I couldn’t have learned any of these things in a classroom. I could only learn them by following after Christ, and allowing him to teach me… even when it hurt.

“Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.” –Romans 5:3-5