ukraine

two years ago today, i arrived home from an 18-turned-19 month mission to ukraine. two years isn't much...i know. but it sure feels far away.

i remember when i opened my call, surrounded by friends with several members of my family on the phone, there was a moment that seemed like a movie. you know, where everything slows down and you can hear muffled shouts from the crowd but the main character is fixed on the girl/the bomb about to go off/a life-changing epiphany? yeah, that. in my life movie, this is that moment.

i felt like i was completely by myself in the room, just staring at a word on a page. ukraine. i have video evidence, though i may never be able to convey what was going on inside. you can see my face and my reaction...

 the call. right about 12 seconds is where it gets real.

i love that video because every time i watch it, i remember how it felt. i knew that ukraine, the word and the place and the culture and all that it implies, would be a part of my heart. i knew that the mere mention of the word would carry so much weight. 

in a journal entry written one year to the day before i entered the mtc, before i had a call, before i had even started mission papers, i wrote about my desire to live somewhere in europe and be so immersed in a culture not my own that it became a part of me.
Heavenly Father answered my prayer by calling me to ukraine, a culture that was actually partly my own; my great-grandfather was born in rozdil, a small town just 25 miles south of l'viv - a city i would serve in for seven months. 

you can never anticipate, can you, just how much something will affect you? i thought i knew in that moment, because i felt that time-stops-and-my-heart-just-got-hit-with-a-ton-of-bricks feeling. but i think that was the spirit's way of telling me that i really had no idea what i was in for. 

i grew to love and come to understand what it really meant to love the interesting, unique, frustratingly tactless and offensive, but somehow always endearing culture of the country. the people are strong and resilient, stubborn, cautious, and often cold. but also some of the most generous, loving, kind-hearted people i have ever come to know. ukrainian latter-day saints amaze me with their faith and dedication to the gospel, and their love for and trust in the Lord.  

ukraine will always be sacred space for me. it will be holy ground and someday i'll go back, and it won't be the same and i'll have another my-life-in-a-movie moment where i realize that life is something very different now.  

you know, for as much as i love words and using them to express my thoughts, i realize that i just can't explain how deeply i love ukraine and the people that i met there. so accept my pictures and my semi-decently formed thoughts and just know that i really really really like that place.

(i always said that the sky seemed bigger in ukraine. this picture makes me think i'm right.)