Thursday, October 15

Today was an interesting mixture of experiences. On the other hand, we continued our fruitful work with the Bible (not NT); in addition we talked a bit about Luther's Small Catachesis and how it can help us understand God and creation. After that, we talked about a small section of a document the Orthodox church put out - “The Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church.” It opened up a whole bunch of things, in particular, related to the ethics (environmental ethics, personal property, social justice) and ecumenism. While the latter didn't get very far, the former was one of the most open and interesting discussions about ethics I've had here – for students at the seminary, we eventually get to the point where they can speak about Christian ethics in a helpful way, but it is usually very difficult to get to that point. After that, we talked just a bit about prayer and then had a very moving time of prayer together.
On the other hand, the day was very hard. At our lunch break I checked my email and there I saw that my grandparents were in a serious (11 car) accident while on the way from Montana to visit my uncle and his family in Denver. We are blessed that they survived; I couldn't tell to much from my parents' email exactly how Grandpa and Grandma are feeling now, though it appears that their injuries are not too serious. Of course, I'm worried, though.
And then, as the day was ending and everyone was going back to their rooms, we learned that two of the girls had had their telephones stolen from their room. They were rather in shock and Dieter and I were sitting and talking with them when others among the church staff decided that they would call the police. When the police came, they rounded up all of us who were there and put us in one room, while trying to scare the thief into the open. It was rather crude theater, though I can understand it, considering it did really look like an “inside job” (the rooms are on the third floor and someone from the outside would be taking a big risk to go up there, besides the fact that they would have to know that we were all at the seminar and that their room would be open and empty at that time). I can even understand why they singled out a few individuals (the girls' roommates, a young many who would be leaving the next day) as suspects, but it seems to me that they went too far. One of the girls was questioned for about two hours; none of the rest of us could leave the room for 4 hrs.
The police eventually left and the phones, not surprisingly, were not found; we all felt pretty rotten after the whole experience... the last day of the seminar will be interesting.