jill.musick

Wednesday was Emily’s birthday, which happened to coincide with the first full day of classes. It’s a bad time to have a birthday, especially since there was a meeting in the evening on top of a full day of work, but we managed to make it fun.

I made breakfast for her in the morning: blueberry pancakes, raspberry syrup (made from fresh raspberries!), and sausage. This was partly to give her a treat, but also to keep her at home a little longer while some other friends of ours decorated her office! I joined in the fun at the very end.

I also decorated Gustav for the occasion, on top of the welcome sign decoration I had made the day before. Gustav is a frightful sight!

After the school day was up, we met with a group of friends for dinner. Before we left, though, we started giving her our ‘special’ birthday cards made from various nursing materials, such as band-aids, surgical gloves, and masks.

We drove to Fünfschilling for dinner. It’s an amazing restaurant – they grow all the food on their property, so it’s always fresh and delightfully seasonal. I was hoping the soup of the day would be pumpkin soup, but alas, it was tomato. It was a great time!

Then we headed back to school for the small group leader meeting.

Yesterday was the first day for all the new students. In the music department, we answered all kinds of questions about lessons, auditions, and ensembles.

Today was the first official day!

8:00 – Met with the worship team to rehearse In Christ Alone

8:45 – Staff & faculty lined up

9:00 – Opening Ceremony Started

• Processional of faculty and staff
• Flag processional with seniors (check out my facebook page for a video of this processional)
• Opening remarks by director Scott Jones
• Charge to Faculty
• Charge to ResLife
• Charge to Seniors
• Roll Call of the Nations (all 52 countries represented – video is on my facebook page)
• Student Body President’s speech
• In Christ Alone – congregational worship
• Prayer
• Closing Announcements

10:00 – The goodbyes and hellos of a new year. It was an odd mixture of the joy of returning students embracing and exclaiming over the excitement of another year together, with the heart-wrenching sadness of seeing parents say goodbye to their children, some of them for the first time.

10:30 – Middle school departed, High School had a meeting

11:00 – Allison Stroud and I went to the Middle School to explain the music/drama offerings

12:00 – Back on the main campus, we had a bit of a break for lunch.

12:35 – Rotations – each class visited 4 stations. Marit and I stayed at the extracurricular sign-up area and recruited a bunch of kids to play in orchestra and band. We also have a couple chamber ensembles in the works!

2:20 – Mock Schedule run-through. Students visited each of their classes for approximately 8 minutes. I gave a brief introduction to guitar class and high school orchestra and met the new students! It was short but effective in letting the students find their classes.

4:00 – Auditions!

Tomorrow is the first full day of classes, followed again by more auditions. Tomorrow also happens to be the birthday of my roommate Emily Kelly. Happy birthday, Emily! It’s your birthday in Moscow already!

Wednesday was our work day – all the staff members basically do the equivalent of a detention duty in order to get the campus looking clean and ready for the students and parents to come Monday.

It wasn’t really like a detention, though, because our jobs were fun to do together. I also really liked my job:

After cleaning the building, we all weeded the paved areas of campus.

After a hard day of hauling, cleaning, sneezing dust bunnies, and scraping insolent weeds out of the bricks, each mission had a dinner in the evening. WorldVenture went to a Chinese restaurant in Weil am Rhein.

We all look pretty happy out there. That was shortly before the storm came. We blame it on France. The thundercloud definitely originated on that side of the river. The waiter was taking our order when we saw the storm coming in, so we asked if we could move inside. He said, “It’s not raining yet!” We said we’d finish ordering before moving in. So we moved inside, and the food had just started arriving when a huge gust of wind blew through the restaurant, sending napkins flying all over the room! The wind also blew the umbrella over outside. It was quite the storm! We helped close the door and pick everything up, before enjoying our dinner with a bit of lightning as a backdrop to conversation.

Last week, we had our first official music department meeting before the schedule got really full and crazy. It was a good time to set the tone for the year and to talk through some logistics.

Katie gave each of us a little bottle of scented hand lotion as a reminder that in our classrooms and lessons we are to be the fragrance of Christ. It’s also a sobering reminder – to those who are perishing, we are the stench of death (2 Cor. 2:14-16).

As we start the year, we want our minds to be on Christ so He can be the one leading us as we spread the fragrance of Him to those around us!

This morning we had the first session of All Staff Conference, in which half the new staff (a huge number this year) shared their testimonies of how God brought them to BFA.

In the afternoon, I worked on a small project: My bulletin board. I’ve been wanting to create a giant photo collage, and now I finally got around to it! Here it is.

This weekend I traveled with some German small group friends up to Bremen in northern Germany to see our friend and fellow small-grouper Rebekka get married! In German, Hochzeit=wedding.

Carpooling can be an efficient way of saving money and protecting the environment, but when you travel with interesting people it can also be . . . memorable. And fun. Kay and I drove up together, Rico hitchhiked up then rode back with us, and Gerfried took the train there and back.

Most of the time we spoke German, but sometimes we switched to English. In any language, Kay enjoyed speaking in various accents (French, German, Italian, Alemannisch dialect). I started compiling a list of quotables from the trip (translated into English when necessary):

• “Isn’t it sad that the great American company Chrysler has been bought out by the Spaghetti eaters?”
• “Every American is afraid from the Canadians. They pee in the Lake Michigan! Ask a Canadian – why you pee in a lake?”
• “How should I say this. I try it in English. You have a very good relationship to the restroom.” (I didn’t have to make too many restroom breaks)
• “What is green and stinks of fish? Bremen!” (yelled out the window to a random stranger in Bremen)
• “He likes the music. He has rapid eye movement with the fingers” (we listened to classical music while Rico slept)
• “I don’t know whether it’s Rico or the bad weather – the wind I mean – , but we’re going to need to tank up again.”
• “I don’t like the northern German accent. It’s not very sexy.”
• Looking at Bach CDs, Kay said, “Looks good, looks good…” – Looking at a CD of Hilary Hahn, Rico said, “SHE looks good!”

As you can see, the ride up and back was enough of an adventure. But the purpose of the trip was the wedding, my first time attending a German wedding!

German weddings and American weddings aren’t very different; German weddings are just longer. The bride and groom have to sit down in white chairs instead of standing for the whole ceremony. There also wasn’t a long line of bridesmaids and groomsmen. I played a violin solo for Bekki; I also played in the worship band “ganz spontan.”

After the ceremony, the newly married couple greeted every guest, then we filed into a room for “Kaffee und Kuchen” (coffee and cake). I met a few other guests during that time.

Then we all went out to the waiting car . . .

and drove to the reception in a long procession of vehicles!

The reception lasted a loooooong time by American standards, but it was typical for Germany. The reception party is a bit smaller than the wedding guest list, but it was still fairly large.

Here’s a general run-down of the evening (times approximate):

• 5:30 – pictures outside
• 6:30 – to tables inside, drinks served
• 6:45 – appetizers
• 7:15 – main course
• 8:00 – program begins (games, slideshows, skits, songs)
• 10:00 – dessert served, program continues
• 11:00 – first dance
• 12:00 – cutting of the cake
• 12:30 – “Mitternachts-Suppe” (midnight soup)
• 1:00 – flat rate drinks ended, dancing continued
• 2:00 – I went to sleep; most people partied on till 4am.

 The next morning, all the guests had breakfast in the hotel together. After filling up on good food, Kay and Rico and I explored Bremen and headed back home to Kandern.

As I look forward to this year, I have some vague goals and ambitions, but I know the road will twist and turn in unexpected ways, so I’m not hoping “in” the circumstances of the year, be they good or bad.

1. My main overarching goal for the year is to stay fully invested despite this being my last year. I don’t want to get “senioritis” and stop caring. It will be a tricky road to navigate – who do I invest in? Do I invest in a new person knowing that I will not be there next year to help them? Is it worth it to spend time with new people even though we won’t know each other for very long? Yes, it may hurt when I leave, but the relationships now are worth it.

I’ve started out this year by hosting Allison Stroud, a new member of the music department. Having the car for this year, I’ve already been able to help her out. One of the big successes was getting her cell phone set up. I’m foreseeing a trip to IKEA in the near future. God will put staff, students, and neighbors into my life this year, and I will be ready to help them out in big and small ways.

2. My second goal is to celebrate. It could be a year of mourning, of recognizing “lasts,” but I want instead to celebrate a year of “firsts.” Here are some of the “firsts” so far:

• Seeing official Black Forest Clocks at a museum in Furtwangen
• Having a pet cat (Suzanne’s cat Dwini)
• Owning a car (Watson family’s green Ford Mondeo)
• Operating a carpet cleaner (last Wednesday)
• Operating a riding lawn mower (today)

Clock trip:

Edwina “Dwini” Micheals:

Carpet cleaning:

John Deere Mower:

Just a word of explanation: This week, the new staff members were learning German while others of us were helping clean up campus and do work around the dorms (hence the carpet cleaning and lawn mowing). Next week we will all be working in our various work spaces to prep for the year; the week after that is All-Staff Conference, and the week after that school starts!

My time in the States over the summer was truly a blessing. Spending time with friends, mentors, and family was nourishing to my soul. Several people went out of their way to care for me. They fed me meals or coffee, offered their time, shelter, clothing, money, and warm hugs. Most were friends or people I already knew. But the downside of newsletters and blogs is that, for the most part, they are one-sided. People really know me and what I’m doing, but they haven’t all kept me in the loop about their lives, so this summer was a time of catching up with people and finding out what they had been doing.

All that attention was weird. I’m not used to having people lavish affection, attention, and care on me. Sure, my mom cared for me immensely, but complete strangers? No way! I could easily point this to Christ and His example of loving the church completely though we are unworthy, but I want to take it in a different direction.

People have been caring for me in part because I’m a missionary. Missionaries sometimes have celebrity status in church, but we just see ourselves as normal people doing what God called us to do, just as others in church working in different vocations are also doing what God called them to do. Do missionaries get too much attention? Maybe, but we also need a certain amount of visibility in the church for support raising.

What worries me is that some “normal” people in “normal” jobs aren’t getting the care they need. As I look at transitioning back to the US next year, will anyone care what I’m doing in a public school or in teaching private lessons? I think I have enough good friends and mentors to say yes, people will care for me. But what about others in the church? What about the ones that nobody knows because they never stood up on the church platform to tell about their ministry teaching kids in the inner city, or in day care, or in an elementary music class?

When I get back, I hope that I can be that support for others. In the meantime, can you?