The immigration officer with the stamp in his hand had a strong Long Island accent. We’d been up for nearly 24 hours, and our kids were melting down waiting in the first of many lines at JFK, while more English than we’d heard in a long time swirled around us. We handed over our passports, […]
I’ll go ahead and say sorry. I’m sorry in advance for the things we’ll do and say on furlough. We’ve only been away from the States for a year and a half, but we’ve already forgotten a lot about how to live there. When we show up to speak at your church and neither of
My five-year-old daughter leaned against my pillow, a rainbow of gel pens spread out on the bed around her. Her face was all concentration as she added vibrant life to the black and white outlines of a flower. “Mom?” “Yeah, babe?” I folded another dress and added it to the box that will store my
I write like I breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Pull thoughts into the core of me, let them saturate, then push them out as words. It’s less a pastime and more a necessary function of life. Sometimes, though, the thoughts and emotions flow wild and the framework of words doesn’t hold them. They pour out like water,
I freeze people. Not as dramatically as a singing snow queen, but I do. I freeze them in my mind. I remember who they used to be, what they were like before, the words they’ve said, the hurtful things they’ve done. And I keep them there in my head like little shrines to unforgiveness. I
I have this thing about flowers. And the Highlands of Papua New Guinea is a good place to have a flower obsession. All year round our yard is an explosion of pink roses, red and yellow dahlias, tiny orange honeysuckles, peach gladiolas, and these poofy purple things that I’m sure have a name. But my
The biggest blow up of our early married life was over a teddy bear neither my husband or I ever owned. Before we started dating, during that tenuous stage of trying to figure out how to define our budding relationship, a close friend of Mike’s pulled me aside and said, “Be gentle as you get
I took a deep breath and pushed the words out of my mouth. “Do you want to see the rest of the house?” I didn’t know Susan well, but I had invited her in for a spontaneous cup of coffee without a chance to even try to straighten up. The living room was a wreck
Dear friends, Today I wore a fancy necklace. It’s just cheap costume jewelry, but it belongs to a heart sister who left it for me to wear while she’s in the States for a year, so I would think of her. That’s part of why I wore it, but also because it goes well with
It started with a purple popsicle. At least that’s my first memory of something that would become one of my biggest life struggles. My sister Faith was five and I was eight, and our family had just moved to the Philippines. We were leaving church when a vendor pedaled up with his bike-mounted cooler and