Midnight on the Mountain

I had been fully aware of what I was doing - drinking over a liter of water at dinner. I had held the bottle in my hand and thought to myself, “You will regret this when you have to find the outhouse in the middle of the night.” But my tongue had cried out "Thirsty!" and overruled the logical part of my brain. After all, I had just hiked up nearly 1,000 meters in elevation and needed to replenish. And that’s how I found myself around midnight in a Swiss mountain hut dorm room, firmly ensconced in my sleepsack between Emily and the wall, farthest from the door, and needing to relieve myself.

I was doomed. There was too much night left to make it all the way until morning, and I knew that if I went now, my chances at comfortable sleep would only increase. Still, as became instantly clear, shimmying out of my sleepsack was going to be a challenge by itself, let alone trying to do so without waking Emily. I slid my body down until my feet touched the footrest, then pulled my knees up as much as the linens would allow. Trying my best to slide like a worm, I managed to sit up and free my torso. After repeating the motion a few more times, I had finally freed my body from blankets without any of them ending up on Emily. Success! However, there was no way to turn myself around with my friend mere inches away and a wall on the other side, so the hardest part of this endeavor actually came when I tried to get out of bed, feet first. The push up and over the footrest was no joke and took all my tricep arm strength as well as stretching myself to my full 5-foot-3.5-inch self.

Five minutes later, I exited the dorm room into the fresh mountain air, and all my struggle became worth it in an instant. Quaint little solar-powered lights illuminated the path from the dorm to the outhouse, but as I spun in a full circle out in the open, I was struck by how alone I was, outside on a mountain at midnight. Apart from distant cowbells tinkling at random intervals, there was hardly a sound. The air was fresh, almost sparkly with the leftover raindrops from the storm that had passed through. Above me was a mostly clear sky with the Big Dipper showing off in all its glory. Enough moonlight was filtering through the clouds that that snow-capped mountains across the valley were illuminated. Nature was grand and beautiful, and I was minuscule by comparison, yet my heart swelled to overflowing with worship. Because that’s what happens when I’m right-sized again in the face of my Maker’s glory.

pre-rain the night before

dorm beds at the Lobhornhütte

The Class of 2025 is Leaving (me)

It’s the week when I’m feeling all the feels, when my heart is being squeezed by a giant fist, when my eyes constantly leak my emotions. Okay, enough of the cliched phrases to date myself. It’s Grad Week. That says it all.

It’s been a good one, too. Tuesday was the last day of MS classes/exams, and we traditionally end with a half hour of yearbook signing and goodbye hugs. This year the kids struck the right balance of being sad at the loss of friends without heavy sobbing and being excited for summer break without rebelling. Honestly, they were such a great group of students this year, and I’m a bit sad that we did have to say “Hope to see you again some day” to some quality Middle Schoolers. 

Wednesday was the last day of HS exams followed by the annual Alumni Games. The alumni who are in town play against the senior class athletes in volleyball, basketball, and soccer. The last game in particular was made more exciting by one ball that broke the Head of School’s car windshield, another ball to the face of the goalie which resulted in stitches, and a random brush fire a Science teacher discovered and put out with two alumni. Crazy day!

On Thursday it started to get hot. Really hot. We cleaned the campus and set up everything for graduation. The evening contained the highlight of the week for me personally: the HS Awards Ceremony. Half of girls got called up on stage for either academic, athletic, performance, or character awards. This is when the tears started for real.

The commencement ceremony on Friday was absolutely wonderful, and not just because I had a front row seat for the first time ever. Each graduate was honored with a personalized tribute, and one of my very own got to give the Valedictorian Speech in which she declared that only God was worthy of anything and everything that the Class of 2025 could dream of. That’s my prayer as we say goodbye to these wonderful students - that they would exalt above all things God’s name and God’s word. What a gift they’ve been to me, especially the eight who graced my couch every Tuesday, and I really am going to miss them very much!

My Eight!

Tanzania in the Fall

They had told me it was the rainy season. I half believed them and threw in my umbrella at the last minute. What a necessity it was on those first days, full of cloud and mud, the tight, frizzy curls on my head bearing witness to the humidity of northern Tanzania in the autumn. It was a unique rainy season to me as well - alternating between dark thunderstorms with heavy rains, an entire morning of mere mist, and then bursts of blue sky before going back to a soaking of grass and ground. It was a delight and fortunately never detracted from the deep thinking that was going on in the classroom. 

The PSI launch in Tanzania was an absolute success. The trainees arrived ready to absorb anything and everything they could, enhancing the materials with their own experience and rich theology. Even as I taught them about Biblical Worldview Integration, they revealed to me gaps in my own understanding and filled in their insights and love for God’s Word. It was a beautiful coming together of educators for the good of their country, united by a vision to see more children be reached with the good news of Jesus. I left with a newfound respect for the challenges they will face and a hope for the future of their nation.

But not before an unplanned and thoroughly wonderful side trip to Tarangire National Park, where I saw elephants rough-housing in more mud, lions sleeping in a tree, and lost part of my lunch to a thieving monkey. What a treat!

trainers and trainees

Safari!

How fun to see such young elephants playing up close

Walking with Ellen

International living often means more hellos and good-byes than anyone would likely wish for. It's not exactly my favorite aspect, but sometimes God is kind and gives you a friend who walks alongside you for more than just a year or two, but a whole season. Such a person is Ellen to me. And this weekend is a time for celebrating her!

A few months ago, I finally wrote the manifesto I'd been joking that I would write for years. Largely it was due to Ellen's support of it. So, in honor of Ellen, here is a sample from my work, "How to Walk in Public." To show my further appreciation of her, here it is in orange. 😄 Enjoy

How to Walk in Public: A Manifesto

by Katrina Custer

Dedication

To Ellen, who quoted from this work frequently, even before a single word was written.
My gratitude also goes to Suzanne and Heather, who made it better.

Introduction

As long as humans have existed, they have walked places. It was essential to survival as fire and food couldn’t exactly walk themselves into our homes. Over the centuries, we have devised all kinds of creative ways to walk less, including domestication of horses, chariots, steam-engine locomotives, airplanes, electric scooters, and the like. Yet none has ever negated the need, at times, to walk. It is a skill still celebrated worldwide by parents with their toddlers and Fit-Bit-wearers who achieve digitized fireworks.

What this manifesto seeks to address is specifically the skill of walking in public. Perhaps it is better labeled an art form, a silent dialogue between our own bodies and the environment around us. The goals of this writing are to illuminate basic principles of walking in the presence of others, thereby raising awareness of each individual’s responsibilities in the shared effort of moving ourselves from point A to point B.

General Principles

Largely the ideas laid out in this manifesto can be boiled down to one objective: having respect for those around you. However, there are some specific principles that can guide us in our quest to walk in public well, led solidly by our own goal to get where we are going and to be mindful of the purposes that guide others as well.

Happy Birthday, Ellen!

Seek First the King

It’s spring break, and yet every morning I’ve been waking up before the sun, which is early now that we’re past the solstice and fully into Spring. Annoyed, most mornings, I simply turned over and willed my body back to sleep. Not this morning, however. The instant I crack my eyes open and see that it’s only 6:02, I hear the whisper. “Come away with me,” and the image of Hochblauen swims into my mind.

I know what he wants, the surrender he’s going to ask of me. It’s going to be both a physical and a spiritual 5-hour journey up and down a mountain because he and I both know that my mind and heart have been swirling with impending anxiety. Again. That I’m dwelling on the forthcoming applications and cuts I’ll have to make. That I absolutely dread disappointing people.

How fitting that I’m sitting now in a castle ruin. Earlier this week, I got to witness a Shakespearian castle on the stage as the setting where King Richard II held up a literal mirror to his face. In fiction at least, he was a king who valued the glory of his kingdom over the reality and well-being of his subjects; he sought the praise of men more than true intimacy. Ellen I both noticed the acting choice of the king to consistently pull back from human touch. Friends, family, his own wife would reach out a hand to him, and he’d recoil. Until he was in the castle prison, alone, and the only person who visited him was a stablehand. The dethroned Richard, curled up like a little boy and fell into the poor man’s arms for an awkward hug, but it was too late for the kind of intimacy he clearly craved. I don’t know what he saw in that mirror, but here in my little castle and with my Bible splayed in front of me, I see my own fear of rejection, my own desire for the praise of others. If I’m honest, I long to hear all my self-love come out of other people’s mouths.

I feel gross admitting it. Shallow. Pathetic. That’s when I hear his voice again, a prompt to a question I was asked earlier in the week of whether or not Jesus ever disappointed people. (Often, I had replied.) As a follow-up, he asks now, “What is the praise or the disappointment of man compared to pleasing me?” I write in my journal, “And what does please you?” A poster that hangs in the Middle school student center floats into my mind. “To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” There it is: the surrender. The reframing of the decision ahead of me. Will I act justly in interviews and in the way I talk about these applicants? Will I love mercy as I make cuts? Will I walk humbly with God in all my communication and in all my prayers? Then all else is forfeit. All striving for approval is vain unless I’m seeking the heart of my King.

I summit Hochblauen in the euphoria of accomplishment, as usual, before returning to the valley floor once more. There’s no doubt the surrender was genuine, even if I will have to repeat it again tomorrow. Yet in the end, the truth that brings the most comfort as I haul my sore body into bed is the one that is the greatest difference between Richard II and myself: I will never be alone and forgotten, shunned by all but a stableboy. My King values the glory of his kingdom AND the well-being of his subjects; my King is an intimate one - who calls me awake as well as granting sleep, who tends to my heart, mind, and body with equal care, and who desires good for me all the days of my life.

Sausenburg Castle

Dry Spaghetti

Chaos reigned. Balloons and dry spaghetti noodles were everywhere, kids were squealing, and adults darted in and out of the mess with instructions and cameras. We were midway through the annual Mega Relay at High School Retreat.

Having become an annual tradition for this weekend, the Mega Relay is a crazy 12-course relay, in which you run all the relay challenges back to back without pause. Every year, Lance outdoes himself with creativity, such as making us transport pasta in our hair. But the kids’ favorite part is rarely the relay itself; it’s the fact that Small Groups come dressed up in some kind of matching costumes. This year, for example, my senior girls came as superheroes with capes we designed ourselves using stickers and coordinated masks. Another group came in prison uniforms while their leader was dressed as a cop. One girls group dressed like senior citizens, complete with wigs and curlers and canes; every few minutes their leaders handed them tic tacs and told them to “take their medicine.” The favorite group of the night, however, was the boys group who looked like hot dogs, and their leader was the chef and fashioned himself a person-sized spatula.

And so it was that we found ourselves midway through the relay, having completed all 12 games, and sitting at the center line waiting for other groups to wrap up. They girls were busy picking noodles out of our hair when MG gasped sharply and slapped two of her peers on the knees. “Guys, I just had the best costume idea for next year! We should --” but we never got to hear her idea, for at that moment it hit her that they were seniors. There is no “next year.” This had just been their final Mega Relay. As her face fell and her lip quivered, seven arms reached around her for a collective “awww” and a hug. 

I was both thrilled that she would be excited about a next year with this group and crushed at the thought that it’s quickly coming to an end. I pray that wherever my girls find themselves next year on High School Retreat weekend, that it’s a place of friendship, laughter, and dry spaghetti noodles. That it’s a place where Jesus’ name is spoken often and joyously worshiped. That they’ll find themselves to be known and loved.

Mega Relay costumes

Photos courtesy of BFA Communications

Analogies of Game Time

It was beautiful. I was standing in the gym for game time amidst blaring music and flying dodgeballs, and I had to fight back a swell of emotions because in front of me, kids were playing “Protect the President.” A Middle Schooler stood in the center, and one of their Senior leaders was attempting to take all the hits of the dodgeballs being thrown at their kid. Every time someone from the edge successfully hit the Middle School “President,” they got to run to the middle to become the new target, and the best part for me was watching their Senior leader in the moment he/she recognized the new president was one of theirs. Without fail, they launched themselves into the center as well and started diving in front of dodgeballs and wrapping their young protege behind themselves. One of them nearly fell on top of his kid in an attempt to protect the guy from ball-shaped ammunition.

It was an analogy of my life. Me, the helpless little needy child clinging to the back of my Defender and Savior. Jesus, taking all the shots meant for me. And he doesn’t just do it because he has to or happens to be in the way. He’s throwing himself in front of death for me. Like I said: it was beautiful.

Gratitude made my heart swell. Gratitude for what Jesus has done for me, and gratitude for what these Seniors are doing for their Middle Schoolers. Let's do it again next week.

Defenders