Saturday was a beautiful day in the highlands. A “hey, let’s try this” moment from a couple of weeks earlier turned into a day of study that included not only people from around the country but also a family from Slovakia and a man from Romania. As a sign of the times, we also had several people join via Skype from various places. In our morning session I used the account of Abraham offering Isaac in Gen. 22 to suggest a hermeneutical paradigm for how we can approach any narrative of an historical event in the Bible to properly work through historical, cultural, linguistic, and etc. factors of the initial setting to finding the significance of the story in our lives today. When we broke to cook sausages over a fire for our lunch, a soccer game broke out- after all, this is the Czech Republic.
The afternoon was a workshop with the folks broken up into multiple groups with the assignment of choosing an OT story and applying the paradigm. We finished with each group presenting a summary of their process and conclusion. As I moved around from group to group listening to them dive into and discuss the word- well, I’m not sure how to express how profoundly moved I was by what I was seeing.
When the meeting broke up, several of the guys went to Marek’s lake for a swim and then a couple of eschewed the vehicle in favor of the hike back through the forest that would get us back to the village. A supper of homemade Russian borscht was on the table when we got back to the house. We relaxed before I had one last informal session with the young folks and ended an amazing day.
