But What About the Teddy Bear?!
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 to know him, because he had his heart broken not too long ago. He gave a girl a teddy bear, and she ended up giving it back to him.” As I got to know him, I kept waiting for Mike to open up and share with me about the girl who had broken his heart. I didn’t ask, afraid of pushing him to talk about something that must have still been tender. He never brought it up. Two years of dating, then engagement, and not one mention of the teddy bear. I didn’t think about it much in the...
Read MoreDon’t Wait Until I’m Ready
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 – toys and books and crumbs everywhere – and the rest of the house was worse. I had to swallow the impulse to try to explain away the mounds of clothing in the bedrooms and the dishes piled in the sink as I showed off the oddities of one of the quirkiest houses in our community. It rambles and twists like most of it was tacked on as an afterthought, and each turn revealed a little more of my mess. I would like to say this is unusual for me, but it’s not. Recently my friend Carrie told our Bible study group,...
Read MoreThe Chronic Fixer
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 propped open the lid to show us his wares. Everything still felt unfamiliar, but this… This we knew. Popsicles are a universal language. I picked a bright orange one, melon-flavored I think, and Faith chose purple. We thought it was grape. It looked grape. But in this strange, new place it turned out to be a strange, new flavor. Purple sweet potato. Overwhelmed by too much new in one day, she dissolved into pitiful tears. And I got mad. I wanted to smack the...
Read MoreYou Can’t Make Me
We spent a lot of time in the car when I was a kid. Hour after hour after day of nothing but road rolling on as we traveled the States, visiting churches and partners who supported my parents’ ministry in the Philippines. We were good little missionary kids. The kind who whined and fought in the sanctuary while our parents set up for their presentation. And when we got back in the car, my mom would put our little brother between me and my sister as an attempt at keeping the peace. So naturally, we would turn our focus on torturing him. First it was tickling. Each of us on one of his sides so he had no direction to lean to escape. And when the laughter became cries for help and our mom turned around and said, “You keep your hands off your brother!”… Then… Then the...
Read MoreThe Hellos, Too
I lost my grandfather last week. He was a quiet man, gentle and calm. He worked with his hands, and he could fix just about anything, from a leaky radiator to a hole in the wall (like the one put in his basement paneling by yours truly 27 years ago). The last time I saw Grandpa, he was stooped low, the weight of years on his frail shoulders. Even with pain and age shadowing his face, he looked so much like my dad that it stole my breath. Just for a second, even as I was saying one last goodbye to my grandfather, my mind fast forwarded to a time in the future when my dad will be the one stooped and white. One goodbye hanging like a cloud over the other. That’s the thing about goodbyes. They never stand alone. They resurrect past farewells and herald the ones to...
Read MoreWhere the Refrigerator Clucks and the Coffee Moos
Within a few hours of moving into the house we’ve been renting, we discovered something unique about the refrigerator. It sounds like a chicken. It squawks and clucks and murmurs like a worried hen. The other morning I pushed the plunger down on my coffee press, and it moaned like a pitiful cow just as the refrigerator began another round of its fowl chorus. My teenager looked up from her breakfast and said, “I didn’t expect to live in a barnyard!” We heard it over and over before moving here – Papua New Guinea is the Land of the Unexpected. The thing is that life here is unexpected in ways that, well, I didn’t expect! I haven’t been surprised by the sickness and power outages and sudden changes of plans. What has caught me off guard are things more like this: I...
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