Le Chesalet

Switzerland is now our home. 

More particularly, the community of L'Abri is now our home. A lovely chalet, named Le Chesalet (all the homes have names) awaited us. It used to be a barn a couple hundred years ago, and has more character than I could ever design into a house: the central stone fireplace, the little window seats in all 4 windows of the living room, the hidden closet under the stairs, the huge bathtub, and ohhh! the balcony! I admit to processing a little guilt in this new set-up. My childhood conviction that your life must be miserable in order to really be serving the Lord still creeps in from time to time.

Le Chesalet, along with 6 other equally delightful chalets, is situated in the community known as L'Abri (the Shelter) on the side of an Alpine mountain overlooking the Rhone valley. I don't know the names of the peaks I oggle everyday, but I hope to learn them all. We've started a new life here as workers at L'Abri, but we have returned to an old life, too. My husband and I met here, in one of those 6 before-mentioned chalets, over 10 years ago. 

I had come as a student to this place as a nineteen-year old, feeling some confusion and cynicism color my world at that time, and desperate not to let that be my defining viewpoint. I had read about L'Abri online, from the desk in my dorm room at Virginia Tech. I remember reading the description of this Shelter in Switzerland that took in anyone who wanted to step away from their regular life and look at their questions with honesty. L'Abri did not promise me perfect answers to every struggle or perfect relationships due to their commitment to communal living, but it seemed to offer a safe place for me to air the nagging edges of my mind:  

"How can we Christians claim that God is good when the world looks like it does?"

That question was the reason that I came. I tried to make it seem like my questions were actually about the evils of Capitalism or my own journey into Calvinism, but neither of those big  "C's" quite reached into the dark depths of my one question:

"Is God truly good?"

That's why I came to this place in February of 2003. Here it is October of 2013 and I am back. This time with husband, 2 sons, 4 suitcases, and 1 guitar.

A Year of Packing

All of the stuff that I own is now somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. On a ship. The CMA CGM line- perhaps you've seen their containers as you sit and wait at your local railroad crossing. Or maybe that's a coastal region privilege. Anyways, my couch, my books, all of our bicycles, my precious scrapbooks, all of my children's toys, our computer, all of it- on a ship now, hopefully avoiding icebergs and such. It's a strange sensation. One that I am certainly not the first to feel. A self-imposed asceticism.

As I've mentioned before in previous posts, we have been in the process of moving for a long while. I packed up much of our home in order to stage it, when we put it up for sale in April of 2012. We had then given our "yes" to join the work of L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. My uber-colorful home:

had to become a blank canvas for potential buyers. And thus, part of my soul died.

OK, not exactly, but the day my fireplace turned from turquoise to off-white was a painful day indeed. My cluttered (and wonderful!) craft room became a guest bedroom. All boxed up and un-Anna-ed. Toys were minimized, personal pictures taken down and what had been our home for 5 years became much less of a home. 

During the months of a "For Sale" sign in our front yard, we applied for authorization to live and work in Switzerland. In month 6 of waiting (10 months after we listed our house), we sold it -miraculously! More on that another time. We moved our family of 5 into my parent's generous living space while we waited.

And waited. 

The number of documents we had to fill out, our confusion, as well as our patience all grew in the long months. Christmas of 2012 came and no word. Spring of 2013 came and went. Another school year ended. The conversations in which people asked "Aren't you supposed to be moving to Switzerland?" piled high. Our initial, excited momentum died away. Sometimes it felt like only my Pinterest board for "Chalet Ideas" kept the dream alive. 

But also prayer. Mostly prayer. Not "prayer" as a discipline, but prayer as a real conversation with a Person. My husband and I prayed together. We prayed with our boys, my parents prayed for us, my siblings prayed, our church prayed with and for us. Without a continued confidence that God is for us -that we believed he had called us to the work of L'Abri, we could never have waited through the nearly 400 days of waiting. That is 54 weeks, my friends. After the lady at the Swiss Consulate told us that this process usually took 8-10 weeks, we waited for 54. 

And now finally I'm looking forward to UN-packing! In approximately one month, we will get to UNPACK, nestle down and be at home in Switzerland. My Pinterest board will, Lord willing, become a living, working, healing, hospitable place. Our place.