I couldn’t afford to travel during Holy Week this year, but it was just as well because I got quite a bit of reading done. I’m on chapter eleven of the Gospel of John commentary from biblegateway.com. Most chapters fill about twenty pages in a Word document. I’ve learned quite a bit from it, but it’s starting to bore me. Bruce Metzger’s Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation is far easier to read and fascinating. It’s nice to know that not every Bible scholar thinks that John wrote Revelation to scare the crap out of us and turn us into neocons to counteract the UN’s overnight transition from little more than an idea into an oppressive police state.
It’s a beautiful day and I really needed a break from reading so I decided to take a stroll through the Casco Antiguo (“Old Town”), where I now live. I sat in the Plaza del Castillo for a little while with my one scoop of mint gelato in a cone. Actually, I prefer the richer, chunkier Ben & Jerry’s ice cream over the smooth gelato. They just opened one three streets over from my flat. I know that’s not very European of me but oh well.
The plaza’s always full of life on weekends and holidays, with children running in the middle near the kiosk and parents and elderly people seated on the surrounding benches resting on their canes. It seems even busier this week because spring brought warm weather and many tourists, mostly from Spain.
On days like these I want to stay here forever. On other days, dwelling on the awful experience in December, I can’t help thinking, “If they don’t want me here, I don’t want to be here” and dreaming of an embarrassing account (for Spain and the EU, I mean) of my deportation buried in the New York Times. I often hear, “Ah, you’re American, they don’t care.” The only advantage of American citizenship is that it’s very unlikely that they’ll deport you. Still, I could save a few hundred dollars by turning myself in on the day after my visa expires.
When I came to Pamplona in December, I actually found a school that wanted to hire me, but the director told me in the interview that the Ministerio de Trabajo (Labor Ministry) would not let her hire any teachers from outside the European Union even though she needed more native speakers and the American business requested American teachers. After the obligatory joke that I get married, all she could do was recommend that I go to the immigration office and hope that they give me residency because I studied here once already. I went to the office, and, as I expected, they told me that I would have to be here for three years before they could give me residency. They sent me to the Ministerio de Trabajo to look into the work permit process.
I stumbled over my Spanish there an hour later, but I was able to explain that I found a school that wanted to hire me and asked how it could happen. In hindsight, I don’t why I thought I could accomplish anything by going in there. The girl at the reception desk walked me over to a desk nearby, explained the situation to the man seated there, and he said simply, “No.” Not only that, he proceeded to rub it in with a slight smirk on his face, “There are Irish and English teachers that live and work here. It’s not us; it’s the European community.” That last sentence was the most insulting. Maybe they would have to ask for permission from Madrid to approve a work contract, but I know they don’t need to send it to Brussels. My Spanish isn’t that great, but that doesn’t mean I’m that stupid. I was so angry that it finally made sense why crazy people occasionally shoot up government offices.
I signed up for a Spanish class the Public University of Navarre’s language center and returned in January with a student visa and very little money. The plan was to supplement my parents’ help with some private classes. Thousands of non-EU teachers in Spain make their entire living that way, but for me it was a disaster at first. I felt (as the Spanish government told me and other Europeans implied) that I didn’t belong here and that I had made a huge mistake in coming back. When the immigration office refused to give me a document that I needed to open a bank account, I was visibly upset, and the lady said, “Take it easy.” Easy for her to say. The people who work in these offices know very little about life outside their doors. Even though I have a valid student visa, I got a taste of what immigrants- legal or not- go through. When you move to another country, you are no longer a person, you are a problem. In the United States, if I work hard to qualify for a certain job, and a company decides to hire me, I can take the job. Work ethic here doesn’t really matter.
Things gradually improved. I no longer think that coming back was a mistake, but I would have a hard time recommending it to anyone else. I completely lost control of my life. Of course, God is in control, and even though I feel that I am more in control in my own country, it is essentially an illusion. After this experience, it will be much easier to be content in the future. I look forward to working any job, teaching English or not. If a Subway opened downstairs, I would be thrilled if I were allowed to work there. If I get stuck working at a Subway in Orlando this summer, that’s fine too.
Since I haven’t been able to rely on myself much lately, God has drawn me closer to Him. I started reading The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard when I arrived. When I pulled the book off my dad’s shelf, I thought it was a rehash of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, but actually Willard focuses not on the practice but on the purpose of the disciplines. His main point is that individual lives and nations will not change until Christ’s followers incorporate the disciplines into their daily lives and give Him control over everything they do. He goes very deep in connecting the physical and spiritual realms. I had heard and read challenges to live like Christ before- but none of them touched me quite like this one. I downloaded The Case for God by Kathleen Armstrong a few weeks later. Actually it should be titled The Case for Spiritual Relativism. She is clearly not a Christian, but I found it interesting that she agrees with Willard in the importance of the disciplines in the spiritual life. It’s interesting that my reading of both books coincided with one of the most challenging seasons of my life.
The past couple months have forced me to really reevaluate my life. What does a life completely devoted to Christ look like? On Thursday night I rented the film Brothers from iTunes. It tells the story of a soldier who is thought to have died in Afghanistan. He escapes his captors and then totally loses it back home when he finds out his trouble-making brother was romantically involved with his wife while they thought he was dead. It is the first movie I saw since returning to Spain and a powerful reminder of how broken the world is.
Being in a season of life with very few commitments, this is a very good time to think and pray about that. Living “comfortably” is far less important now. I just want to earn my own income. It doesn’t need to be very much.
Now that the disciplines seem more important than ever, I really want to make an extra effort to incorporate them into my life. For the past few weeks I’ve wanted to get into a morning routine of one hour of prayer and Scripture reading at six o’clock followed by a run and then breakfast. I started this morning. Hopefully I can keep it up once my classes and prayer meetings restart next week.
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