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.