I had been looking forward to teaching Greek again for a long time but when the day finally arrived yesterday and I walked from my cousin's house to the bus stop on my way to the Seminary in Tartu, I was actually all nervous and worried. The preparation phase for the classes turned out to be harder and much more time consuming than I had anticipated. The only New Testament Greek text book we have in Estonian is unusable, as I discovered. So I faced the dilemma of creating new materials or having to teach from that terrible text book. I chose the first option, I ordered Duff's Greek textbook online (we used the same book in Newbold) and I decided to break every copyright law in the world and turn Duff's book into a decent Estonian-Greek study material. So over the past weeks there have been a couple of long days in the office when I've literally cut, glued, copied, pasted, scanned, printed, sweated and lamented, just so that my students would have something decent to study the beautiful Greek language from. It has been tough indeed.

But yesterday made up for the effort and for the sweating. We had three 1,5 h classes and if I remember correctly, there were 14 students altogether - more than I had expected. It's a really good size for a language class, not too big but yet big enough to have a good energy level in the classroom. And people were so nice and hard working! It's very inspiring to see people learning, working their way through the alphabet and starting to read and write in Greek.

I thought about it on my long way back to Tallinn yesterday evening (I was too tired to even watch a movie on the bus) - there really isn't anything for me that would compare to lecturing. Lecturing can make something inside of me come alive the way nothing else can. Preaching comes close, true, but only when I teach in the classroom something which I believe God has put inside me comes alive with such a force that all the other cares and worries disappear. It is a very intense time, draining, and yet so energising that only after the classes are over I realise I'm dead hungry. Only after having been on my feet for 4,5 hours I realise I could use a break.

I really wish I could continue doing this for ever and ever and ever.

What a day it was.

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One more thing. When I went to my cousin's on Wednesday evening, being in a bit of a bad mood (because of something that had happened earlier that evening), my 5 year old darling J. decided to draw and write me a card. He didn't know anything about what had happened but here's what he came up with:

 It's a variation of a usual birthday card but instead of "Happy birthday" it says "Happy random day". Which, frankly, I think is genius and much more needed than a birthday card. Because I care about birthday cards only for 1 day a year, but I could care about random day cards for 364 days a year. I'm thinking about framing this card and putting it on my wall. I totally need to see this every day!