Emerging from the Shell, Part 10: Coda

Ironically, it has taken the entire Trinity term for me to finish blogging about my experiences in Macedonia--to the point where I have finished my Oxford degree and am back in Skopje! There is little left to tell after the preceding post, or at least, there is little left I can tell, given my limited literary capacity. Our group's spring trip to Macedonia in March touched a chord deep within me left unresonant since my trips to Romania and Zambia in high school. I was reminded of this chord a few months earlier, at PEF's missions conference in the spring of 2010. This conference left me profoundly unsettled, after it reminded me of my childhood sense of God's calling me to missions work; written in my uneven, yet earnestly adult-emulating cursive, my fourth-grade journal in my "Posterity Box" records my ambition to be "either a missionary or an archeologist [sic]". When I heard Jon Hinkson preach at Princeton about the legacy of the four Princeton students who founded the Student Volunteers Movement in 1888, therefore, I was abashed. Why, when had I abandoned that childhood dream? What was I doing on this straight and narrow path into English academia? Were all my applications, acceptances, independent work for naught? Should I drop everything and go into missions instead?

I was distraught for days. Though it may not have been evident to those around me, I was torn mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, as I wrestled against what felt like Jacob's angel himself. I was experiencing a battle between the will to stay on the academic, world-sanctioned path to which I thought I had been called, and the will to obey the missions urge that had been reawakened so recently in McCosh 10. I sought advice from those around me--Christian professors, PEF staff, etc.--desperately hoping for insight that would soothe the conflict within my breast.

And then it hit me: There should be no such dichotomy between missions and academia. Who was I to think that I wasn't called, like every Christian, to be a missionary in whatever pursuit to which God calls me? As anyone who has ever broached the upper echelons of higher education will tell you, the academic world is dark, particularly in the humanities. It is a world, in many senses, of irrevocable subjectivity, a world in which the absence of truth verifiable via the scientific method has spawned an unquestionable acknowledgement of the inherent personability--and therefore non-communal relevance--of Truth (however one chooses to define it). This is the world to which I feel God is calling me. And Macedonia was the place where I first glimpsed the slow, yet substantive overturning of that world in action.

Hence, I am now back in Macedonia, volunteering my time with the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture in any and every way I can. This means, in my case, teaching a writing seminar for young Macedonians and helping edit English-language documents. I cannot be more honored to be here. And I cannot be more excited about what is emerging in this nation.

Rachel Dunn, Macedonian correspondent, signing off.