Back to Nyirtelek from Budapest...

Ok, this should be postdated a week or so, but I kept on forgetting to post this. Ah well...

People keep telling me to talk more in this language, but too often I give up before I even start by assuming that I won't know key words or that I'll just end up wasting their time and find myself in some awkward situation where I'm stumbling over words and tenses while the native speaker simply twiddles their thumbs and waits for the American to finally spit it out. Or I convince myself that I have nothing worthwhile to say.

Well, today I took the train back from Budapest, where I had spent the weekend with the Otternesses and saw other volunteers who are living in the city. It had been a good time and it felt great to be among people whose situations were similar to mine. For the first part of the train ride, I was alone in my cabin. But when we reached Debrecen (it's a big city south of Nyiregyhaza and definitely out of the way, I still have no idea how we got there, I thought I had bought a train ticket directly to Nyiregyhaza), another young guy joined me in my cabin. He seemed friendly, but I quickly told him that I was a foreigner and that my Hungarian was not very good (as he could obviously tell). Then I went back to reading my book.

Yet, something seemed to be pushing me to talk to him. The old excuses quickly came to mind, but the feeling wouldn't go away. New excuses cropped up: he's busy reading the paper, he's listening to music, he probably won't want to be bothered. But something else urged me, "Just ask how long it will be 'til we reach Nyiregyhaza." "I don't know how to say it grammatically correct!" I responded. A weak argument, I know. My eyes flitted back down to the book I was reading and landed on the title of the next chapter: "The Question Nobody Is Asking". Hmm. Maybe this wasn't a perfectly corresponding sign to my current circumstance, but it was close enough to convince me that God was pushing me to throw aside my self-doubt and take another step towards becoming the courageous man He's calling me to be. I stuttered and stammered my way through "Hany ora Nyiregyhaza-ig?", and he smiled, took a moment to digest what I had tried to say, and we started communicating!

The rest of the train ride was very fun! The guy turned out to be a college student in Nyiregyhaza. His name was Zoltan. His parents lived in Debrecen, an older sister worked at some sort of Christian mission in Budapest, and an older brother volunteered in Austria with youth and evidently had "a long beard and hair like Jesus". He himself was hoping to make big bucks working abroad in the insurance business. He and his girlfriend had also gotten engaged recently! I searched for the word for "Congratulations" in the dictionary and discovered that it was "Gratulalok"; it's always nice when English and Hungarian words are relatively similar!

We were chatting away when he suddenly pointed out the window and said that we were in Nyiregyhaza. I had been expecting the bigger buildings that I had seen on previous visits closer to the center of the city, so I probably would have been confused if Zoltan hadn't let me know that we had arrived. We got off the train and I immediately realized that I hadn't been in this part of the city at all before. But Zoltan asked me if I was heading for the bus station and told me that his place was right next to it, so he would walk me there. Phew! It ended up not to be so far away, so when we got there I said thanks and goodbye to my train friend, puzzled over bus schedules in Hungarian with unfamiliar place names for a while, asked a guy which bus headed to Nyirtelek and ended up boarding the bus with around 40 high school students who were headed home after the school day.

I've got to say that God is good, not only in the big things like salvation and purpose-giving, but also in the smaller, more mundane things, like helping us to get up the courage to speak and to find the way home through an unfamiliar place. He wants us to live our entire lives with Him, looking to Him for everything and trusting that we will find what we need in Him!