A Weekend in Moscow

On Friday evening, while the Crusade team went to the circus, I went with Alex and a couple friends to Tretyakovskaya Park. It was the circus: fire-breathing and fire-spinning, plus live drums, singing, dancing, and a bunch of people fighting with swords. Also in the park was a statue series of the "12 sins against children." The sculptures are very haunting, and the place is at once secular and sacred. In the center of the 12 enticing sins are two blindfolded children reaching their hands out into the world. At the entrance to the park, a series of metal "trees" covered in locks lines the bridge. The tradition is that when you get married, you put a lock on one of these trees and throw the key in the river. Tretyakovskaya was really interesting in that way, in that there were these visual recognitions of these huge life concepts, sin and marriage, surrounded by this parade of fire-breathing counter-culture youth. Very different side of Moscow from the Kremlin crowd.

Saturday we went to Kolomskaya Park as a team and invited all our Russian friends. I invited one of the guys I'd met once earlier during the week, but I didn't think he'd show up. Still, I thought best to wait 30 minutes in case he showed up at the Metro. The rest of my team left and I said, "Okay God, I'm gonna wait for three more trains, and if he hasn't showed up by then, I'll go to the park." So I wait...nobody shows, the third train comes, I look around and start to move away from the platform, but a guy and girl come up to me and the guy says, "hey are you an American? I think we met last week." Sure enough, these two were coming to meet us in the park. The guy had just started reading John, and asked me which of the gospels I liked the best. So I got to share what I thought was awesome about each of them, which was really cool (didn't have much to say for Mark except for its brevity, but...). This lead to another conversation with his friend where I talked about how I thought Jesus was awesome and that she should really read what he has to say. So that was one of my clearest chances to share the gospel in a way that was completely natural to the conversation.

In the park I got to play guitar with some Russians. The only song I played that anybody knew was "Falling Slowly" from Once, and I didn't know any of the Russian songs they played, but it was still really cool. I'd play a song, then try to explain to my friend Misha what it was about, and then he'd do the same in Russian. There was a lot of frisbee going down, but I pretty much talked the entire time, it was really cool just connecting to people.

Sunday after church I got together again with Misha and his friend Nikita and we pretty much walked Moscow...it was a really good time, I want to share the gospel with these guys, but they shied away from discussing serious topics because our language overlap was relatively small. (Neither their English nor my Russian provided much common ground for a in-depth conversation...) Misha's a guy that won't ever be convinced by discussion, but Nikita seems to be a pretty open guy. I hope to continue to talk to them online, pray for them please.