I arrived in Omsk from Moscow about 24 hours ago after a late-night flight and promptly went to bed. I slept for about 7 hours until about 2:00 p.m. local time. Omsk is 12 hours ahead of Central Time in the U.S., so that puts me half way around the world, and only one hour behind James in the Philippines. (I know. Go look and a world map and explain that one to me.)
I wrote a nice long passage just now about my flying experiences in Russia, but somehow that all got lost on blogspot’s interface – even though I repeatedly clicked save as I was writing. So now I’ll write using Word and then copy and paste. Lesson learned. I do not find blogspot’s (or blogger’s) interface intuitive, just for the record. (Can you tell I’m not happy?) So that will have to wait now, as I need to spend time preparing for my portion of the seminar this morning.
We began our two-day seminar last night with 8 pastors and lay people from various places in Siberia, with one more expected today. Bradn kicked things off with an introduction to the nature of the Lutheran confessional documents, and what a "confession" is anyway. That's a word that translates pretty well from English to Russian, with all of its various nuances, as far as I can tell. The students had what I considered good responses to our initial questions, and some interesting observations and questions of their own. I was buttonholed after the opening session by one of the students who had been to St. Louis in 1996, and he told me his long (and very interesting) story of how he came to be a Lutheran, from his Ukrainian mother having him secretly baptized in the 1980s and the complications of having a Muslim Tatar father, through his experience with the Russian Orthodox Church and his unlikely encounter with German Lutherans in Siberia.
I’m going have to leave it at that for this morning and get to work. I’ll try to get some pictures up before long.
