Scary

The conversation topic was "fear," and I was the only one in class, with a substitute teacher. She wanted to talk about the train crash.

The teacher knew I was a Christian since we had talked about Christmas the day before. She asked me what I thought about the role God played in such tragedies. Somehow we got to talking about predestination, and I realized that I am not very good at explaining it in Russian.

The next time we had class, our regular teacher was back. She asked us about our childhood fears and then each of us had to tell about a scary situation that had happened to us.

My incident took place a few years ago, but before I started blogging... read/-

I was going home from one of our first worship team practices that had lasted about 4 hours. It was late. The subway train stopped one station before mine, and there was an announcement that it would go no further. Since it was around midnight, I thought maybe it was the last train, and decided to exit the metro and get on a trolley, which would go straight to my house.

When I exited the metro, I saw the trolleys all tucked in for the night, and I realized that there weren't going to be any more. I thought about hopping on a route taxi, but as I looked down the street, I saw that instead of picking up passengers, they too were all turning into a parking lot. It was too late.

In Russia it is more standard to hitch-hike than in the States. But I had never done it on my own. Even though people do it all the time, I wasn't sure what would happen to me as a foreigner if I tried to hail a car. At the very least, they might charge me more money. It seemed safer at the time to continue down the dark road by myself, on foot.

That was before I came upon the cemetery. It was along the road in a wooded area. There was no one else on foot walking around, and the cars were coming along every few minutes. Sometimes they would slow down as they neared me. I was, essentially, alone in the woods, walking by a cemetery.

I can honestly say that I wasn't really scared, but it was one of those situations where I had to ask myself, "how did I get into this mess?" Otherwise known as "if my friends back home could see me now..."

After the 10-15 minute walk through the "woods," I reached a better-lighted intersection that I actually recognized. In fact, my friends lived in the building on the corner. I could have stopped by, but they were probably sleeping, and I wasn't really in trouble.

Down the block, I could see the metro station that I was SUPPOSED to be at. But the trolley wasn't running there either. I passed the metro and walked the rest of the way home.

I got home sometime after 1 am. No one was waiting or knew that I got home late, so it was rather anti-climactic. But all's well that ends well!

Epilogue: I later learned that my friends had actually called to make sure I got home alright. Only they got mixed up and called my friend Lida, who was home asleep in her own bed. "Did you get home alright?" they asked. "Yes," she answered. They wondered what was wrong with my voice, and she thought it was awfully nice of them to check on her.