Train of thought

Thursday I went for my pre-op visit, a quick in-and-out so the nurse could check my blood pressure and tell me how long I’d be in surgery (I’ll be getting out the same day!) I’m always amazed at how nurses can go through the same process, time after time, with one new face after another, with the same good cheer and patience. I’m grateful, because for me it’s my first time. How often we sit at opposite sides of some desk or table, one experienced and one not, and we forget how differently the other person feels. Maybe this will help me remember as a teacher when I have some new student sitting across from me on her first day of junior high.

I have begun to feel twinges of uneasiness, especially if I wake up in the middle of the night. I know the surgery is not long or dangerous, but it is irreversible, a forever change, with a long list of possible consequences. I make myself think of other things, reciting Longfellow’s “The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of night…” or even his “I heard the bells on Christmas Day…” anything strongly rhythmic to change the train of thought, (though anyone with trains in their back yard knows that changing a train of anything from its nailed down route  is not possible. Maybe it means passengers changing trains. That’s not what first came to mind because, honestly, how many of us do that? Today we get in a car and stay there till the journey’s done. Maybe “change the plane of thought” would work. That we’d understand. Have I changed your plane of thought yet?)

I also feel time marching inexorably toward Tuesday 11:15. And the thought crosses my mind to simply blow it off and not show up. But I won’t. I’ll walk in and lie down and let them put the IV in and just wait for it to happen. How much we wait for things to happen. Robert and I watched a movie about a Jewish family during the holocaust that just stood up against a wall, waiting for the bullets. A woman in the background watched. This is not comparable, of course, but it has the same sense of taking steps of your own toward an inevitable end, of acquiescing to a process you’d like to stop.

Enough morbidity. The new place is full of windows and green lawn and Robert’s mom’s pictures on the wall, and fresh, juicy tomatoes from Stella’s garden, and fresh, juicy peaches from the Walls’ peach farm, and a borrowed lathe in the garage (!) and a Group of Seven straggly pine calendar in a prominent spot, and Gabriel’s cow slippers that go mooo (his parents are Colombian missionaries visiting us for a few days, and they accidently left his good shoes on the counter where the immigration officers ask to see your papers), and a jacuzzi and the occasional rumbling train in the back yard. It’s cool and sunny outside, so I don’t need Longfellow to change my plane of thought.

Our two days away to celebrate our 25^th changed our plane of thought. It seems to me that after a while we get wound up and lose our ability to see things from the other’s point of view, and we understand the person across the table a little less. When that happens, it’s time to slow down and just be together, walk around town at a slow, low-red-blood-cell rate, do something fun (watch Carousel), snuggle on the couch to admire Banksy’s Wall and Piece, and agree on things (we didn’t like the message of Carousel that women should just take whatever their fella hands out, and everyone should just BELIEVE!-- but it was well performed). It’s cool how we can watch our plane of thought take off and take measures to get off at the next stop and switch planes. I can somewhat control my route though the destination stays the same.

Ugly places

When I was just out of college and working in a refugee camp in Honduras, our employer flew groups of us into the city for a break every six weeks. We would eat salads and burgers and would gather in the evenings, eager for some relaxation after the isolation and harsh living of the Mosquito Coast. One night several people in the group ordered drinks (we were not a drinking or carousing crowd; just a young and energetic one, happy to be laughing or eating or dancing together). I had a drink, maybe two, though I doubt it; my tolerance for alcohol is alarmingly low. As soon as I could feel any effect at all, I stopped. I didn’t like the feeling that something was getting to me, affecting my brain, manipulating me. When one of my friends urged, “Ah, have another one,” as if this were funny, I reacted because it angered me. Why would anyone pressure a friend to do something that affected her brain? What was up with that? When I feel pressure, manipulation, I resist (as any passive aggressive introvert does). Isn’t that true for us all? Recently I felt that pressure, that manipulation, distinctly, and it bugged me just as much. But this time it was in the heart of Toronto at Dundas Square.

Our last day together with Mikael and Elai, we were driving back home through Toronto after visiting family in Coburg. We dropped the two of them off in Cabbagetown, so Elai could show Mikael around, and we kept going on to the Peninsula (it’s more of an isthmus, but that is what the Niagara region is called because it has a lake to north and south and a river cutting off the east end at the US border) and picked them up later from a bus station. Cabbagetown was once the home of immigrants to the city, especially Irish, who, as legend has it, were so poor that they planted cabbage in the tiny patches in front of their homes. Today it’s the home of the largest stretch of Victorian homes in North America. Immigrants plant their cabbage elsewhere.

At one point we drove right through the heart of Toronto, some wide intersection that is probably one of the most traveled and expensive spots in the country.  I realized that rather that looking up at the sights, I wanted to put my head down because all I could see was advertising. Right in front of me as we drove was a building-sized woman in a slinky dress and high heeled shoes wanting me to buy something—I don’t even know what—perfume, vodka, jewelry, shoes? All around me, it was the same thing. All the buildings wore signs, most of them flashing LED and LCD screens, and all of them selling something.

The day before, we had come from an art gallery, where I’d been impressed with what Canadian artists could do. Here I was in the heart of the country, and it was repulsive. I’d probably feel the same in Time Square.  Recently Oaxaca has been putting up those LED screens at busy intersections of the city, and I find them irritating and distracting. Why would a city allow this? With all the beauty possible in these countries, why waste hot space on ugliness? Of course, consumerism runs our economy, and if people don’t keep buying, our countries are in trouble. But what I know is that the manipulation, being forced to look at a giant flashing screen with a scantily clad woman selling who knows what, feels like a “friend” handing me an unwanted drink. The passive aggressive in me says, “Oh, no, you don’t.”  I’m told that advertisers are just as happy with a negative response, so they have us both ways. I guess I just keep my head down and think happy thoughts.

I'm not as brave as Banksy who wrote,
        Brandalisim
        Any advertisement in public space that
        gives you no choice whether you see it 
        or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's 
        yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.
        Asking for permission is like asking to
        keep a rock someone just threw at
        your head. 

Power Lines

When Mikael and Elai were here, we decided to drive past Toronto to see aunt, uncle, and cousins. On the way we stopped to see one of the most beautiful art galleries in the world (according to us who have seen them all) the Kleinburg Art Gallery. The log and stone lodge set on 100 acres of forested land houses Canada’s most renowned artists, the Group of Seven, and feels like art, itself. We also found an exhibition of First Nations art we’d not seen before.

The Group of Seven loved Canada’s North and painted it in impressionistic styles that capture the bleak beauty and rugged isolation of its terrain. Every year I buy a Group of Seven calendar so I can have a bit of Canada in my Oaxaca home, and last school year I even had one in my classroom to inspire my kids. Robert knew about the Group of Seven because his mom, an artist, took him to the Kleinburg Art Gallery as a kid, and when we were married, since we had planned events every day of our wedding week, we packed our entire wedding party to the Gallery one day and after enjoying the art inside, we had a lunch picnic out on the lawn to enjoy God’s finishing touches. I don’t know what our wedding party thought of the Group of Seven, but we loved it.

After we were married, I used to drive to Hamilton to help my friend Dale in her framing shop called Leading Edge, and as a gift, she framed two Group of Seven prints for us that we have packed around and tacked to walls in place after place in Canada and Mexico, for twenty-five years. I love the purples of the frozen lake and the straggliness of the pine struggling against the northern wind. Remember I said that Canada’s national metaphor is the Survivor? The lonely struggling pine, fighting the wind, is the perfect example of survival and makes its way in various forms onto Canada’s calendars and postal stamps.

When we visited the gallery this time, it was our first serious introduction to First Nations artists. Their art shares the stark, block features of the Group of Seven paintings because of the stark, block features of the northern terrain and because they reflect the flat rock paintings of earlier artists. We were also impressed with how foreign the First Nations art felt to us. We weren’t drawn to it, didn’t understand it. Robert’s comment was, “The First Nations people must see the world so differently from us.”  I think this is true. I’ll include some of the art here so you can see for yourselves. It might help to know that radiating black lines reflect power. One of the pieces is called The Gift. The black spots, still symbolizing a type of power, also portray small pox, which devastated the Ojibwa tribe represented in the painting.

The Gallery, of course, celebrated the art as an expression of First Nations traditions and heritage and regretted the imposition of the white man’s power, religion, and culture, as it should. But as outsiders, peeking through the colored window of art, with its medicine men and sacred bears and thunderbirds, it is impossible for us to understand what aspect of the First Nation’s heritage was right and healthy and beneficial, and what was not, for, of course, all cultures are a mix, and we make so many mistakes when we rush in and make a judgment without knowing.  We hurt so much and destroy so much beauty. That is what I saw in this art. And many (though not all) of those who destroyed were only trying to help. And, of course, it makes me think of the Mixtecs we visit and the judgments we make and the harm we can cause when we rush in and make judgments without knowing, without looking into the colored window of their art and music and tradition, for it too, of course, is a mix of good and evil and desperately needs God to be there, redeeming and desperately needs for us to let him without getting in the way. Again. As we do with all our money and power and blind ethnocentrism. And I want to be reminded: Stop! Look! Listen! Love what they are before you change it into us. This is what I saw at the Kleinburg Art Gallery.

                                                                                                

Honorary Latin Family

Written a while back…

I’ve never lived in a place with a cornfield out my back yard. I take that back. I’ve lived where the cornfield walked right up to the front door and surrounded the house, back in Yuvinani, but there I did not live with the farmers in the house.

It’s 5 am, and I hear Host Dad Larry up already, checking something in the office overhead before heading out to plant his last acres with white beans. The cornfield outside my back window is planted, but you can’t tell because it’s no-till. I learned this. Larry knows the winds and the rains and adjusts his work to the weather. I’ve never lived in a household where what you do depends on winds and rains. I take that back. I’ve lived where winds and rains cancel flights and raise rivers and close down roads, so loved ones can’t get home, but not where coming in for lunch depends on whether the winds have shifted.

Hostess Marg will be up later, managing the household. There are three Sisters in and out of the home still, making me miss my kids, and Brother Ben, who lives in grandma and grampa’s old house across the street, and Brother Jamie Engineer, who is married and lives just around the bend in the opposite direction in our town of ten houses. His wife is my Home Nurse Becky, who rescues me from getting shots from (ex) pig farmers. When she goes to work, she drops off her two kids with Gramma: Joshie, who is two and can name any farm implement on the place and has ridden them all, and loves Gramma’s homemade pickles, and Rachie, who when Josh turns to her and hugs her forehead, beams like heaven. Rachie can outeat anyone at the table. And when she gets fussy, Larry picks her up and takes her to the piano in the office and sits her down for a musical romp, all improv, until she quiets. This is a man of hidden talents.

The girls are artists. Kendra, who just graduated from Wilfred Laurier Univeristy as a singer of operas, wanders the house singing, a nightingale on the loose. Katie is a professional seamstress, learning to sew up costumes from any period, and this summer, she is making shrouds for premature babies out of wedding dresses that make my heart twinge. Emily creates sets for plays. She helped create a set for a play in an old school, bought just for the occasion, where characters were acting their parts in every  room and even in closets so that you had to choose who to follow and had to buy tickets for next nights to see more of the action. Oh, create such a set here! I want to see this play!

And Hostess Mom Marg is Manager and Mistress Chef. She serves sit-down hot lunch and dinner to her farmer crew every day. The island in her kitchen is so big the family calls it the continent, and it is always a busy place. Yesterday I walked upstairs to find Marg making rhubarb platz. Rhubarb platz! And she knew what recipe to use, having experimented already with a few, and this one would be moist and last. Me? It takes me hours to build up the nerve to go in the kitchen and bake. Anything--much less platz.

And Brother Ben knows stuff about all the cars ever made, and he holds barbeques at his house, and he takes Joshie out on tractors, because he, too, is a farmer, and plying the trade. He walks down the stairs when he comes over, and visits us. And that is what makes this family an Honorary Latin Family. They take in guests without batting an eye. There are adjustments as there always are between cultures, but this family has a knack of hospitality, a willingness to open up the door to strays. And Mexico, with its insistent “mi casa es tu casa,” seems just that much closer.

Now, as Elai and Mikael are gone, and we have moved to a new place, an in-law apartment attached to the house of friends, with train tracks rather than corn rows at the edge of the back yard, we will miss the pickles and plum jam and platz, and the daily news of the farm, and the  bustle of five kids plus grandkids coming in and out, where there is always someone around doing something interesting (after staying with them, Elai says she wants a big family because it's more fun!). So when you visit us now, it won’t be as interesting or as flavorful, but still, “mi casa es tu casa” still holds.

Announcement

I wrote this when Elai first got here. But she wouldn’t let me post it till right now.

This is a day you pray for. This is a day you wonder about. This is a day you aren’t ready for even if you saw it coming. This is the day your daughter walks out the double glass doors of the airport with a silly grin on her face and a spring in her step and you start the twenty questions game because it’s bursting out of her and you know it, and she doesn’t want to say quite yet, but she never could keep a secret from you. This is the day your daughter tells you she’s getting married.

I have a new son. Mikael. How do I introduce Mikael? Mikael loves God and my daughter. What else is there to know?  Born in Texas, he grew up in northern Mexico where his parents translated the Bible into Pame and where his mother also grew up in a missionary family. He met Elai at a camp in Puebla, held every year for missionary kids from all over Mexico, and they started dating after Elai graduated from high school. So two years now. This last year Elai transferred from Redeemer College here in Canada to Wheaton College outside Chicago, so they have spent the year studying there together. This summer Mikael was a lifeguard supervisor at Schlitterbahn Water Park and also coached their lifeguard team, Top Dog, taking them to compete at state level. At Wheaton he’s interested in Economics and Math and International Relations. Busy guy. Smart. Hard working. Elai adds love of Art, Sociology and Cats.  I’m glad to welcome him into the family.

So many thoughts go through my head. Do they know what changes lie ahead? Are they ready? My instinct is to want to shield them, but of course this is exactly what they don’t want. They want to step out and take their own chances, and I need to let them. I think of how similar their backgrounds are, and how this will help them understand one another better and go for the same things. But I also think of how different they are, and how different Robert and I are, too, and how that has worked out just fine after all. I think of how Mikael ran for student government his first week of college, while Elai is my free-spirited hippie child who will never quite conform to anyone’s norms, and how they could either fight or complement one another, or both, according to their will to love. And with all my heart I welcome and bless this marriage.

 I know it feels like years instead of months away for her. I felt the same, thinking back. I wanted to elope, but now I’m glad my future husband thought it through, and now, 25 years later, we have a wedding to remember. Some girls dream of their wedding day and have plans made from childhood, imagining dresses and vows and wedding songs. This was not me. Nor is it Elai. But yesterday I got Elai to draw the dress she’s looking for. She’s had much practice drawing dresses, but they’ve usually been for mermaids and Indian princesses and warrior women, not for her own good day, so this was a new thing. I noticed on the paper she also drew a random manga princess. My princess turning bride.

We got the dress. As you know. Just waiting for the day. December 22. If you can come, please do!

Mikael has spent the week with us, getting details straight, and today the two of them drive  back to Chicago to start school. Meanwhile, Robert and I are driving to Stratford (Canada’s theatre town) to celebrate our 25^th on the 26^th. And the computer isn’t going with us…

Canada Fleabane

Our farmer host was explaining how clover seeds are so small and difficult to clean that one of his friends ships them to Manitoba, where they have specialized machines that run through seven different processes to do the job right. One of these machines has velvet rollers that snag the tiny, barbed weed seeds, leaving the tiny, slick clover seeds behind. He went on to explain that one of the weed plants hiding out in the clover (it’s called Canada Fleabane; you know who gets to name these babies!) can put out 230,000 seeds a year. 230,000! They are so tiny that they can ride the wind right into the stratosphere. We’re being invaded from space! It’s a wonder we aren’t smothered yet.

When Jesus compared the Kingdom of heaven to a plant, he chose the mustard seed. That was two thousand years ago, and the mustard seed is still proliferating today. Farmers here in Ontario say they find wild mustard in their fields all the time, though unlike the stately mustard trees that can grow in the Middle East, the mustard plants in Canadian fields today look more like…weeds. Apparently they were also weeds in the time of Jesus, and the rabbis forbade planting them in your garden because they could so easily run away on you and take over the neighbor’s garden. (Driving home today, Robert told me that here in Niagara it’s against the law to let your vineyard go wild because it can host pests that will take over the neighbor’s healthy vineyard, so today’s “rabbis” are still hard at it.)

It’s comforting to realize that Jesus expected the Church—the culture of God, the way he does things, his realm, his kingdom—to spread like a weed, to float to the stratosphere with the wind and come down who knows where and settle comfortably in foreign soil. Sometimes we give the impression in our churches that the kingdom of God has its back against the wall, that it’s just barely surviving. I drive around the Niagara region, and I see churches converted into homes, masonic lodges, community centers, stores, breweries, and historical sites. What are we doing wrong? God’s kingdom should be spreading like a virus, like a plague, like yeast in dough, like the mustard seed. Instead we are closing churches as if Church were going out of fashion like in-door malls. It’s not. Those converted church buildings are misleading.

Jesus compared his kingdom—his church—to plants because it is a living organism whose nature is to grow and reproduce itself after its own kind. It carries within its own DNA the ability to reproduce, or bear fruit, thirty, sixty, or even a hundredfold. Maybe 20,000 fold, for all we know. Although in this culture churches rarely reproduce even once, mostly because the process of church reproduction in this culture is terribly complicated and expensive (kind of like the process of cleaning clover or genetically modifying corn), there are many places in the world where the church reproduces like rabbits, or weeds. It doesn’t need money, or buildings, or professional pastors, or leadership from the outside to reproduce. It multiplies spontaneously, often in the face of great persecution, because the craving for Jesus is sharp, and no one is critiquing the music or comparing the sermon to the “other guy’s.” They’re just glad to see each other and break bread together and know Jesus is there among their “two or three.” What would it take to provoke such hunger in us, in this culture, that we would jump at the chance to gather anywhere, anyhow, even with those people, just to experience the presence of Christ among us that only gathering makes possible? Maybe we have to die first for such rebirth to come to this place. Meanwhile, in other places, it’s already come. I’ve seen it.

Ceiba trees

My friend Suky flew to Canada to see me for a few days. I haven’t spent a day with Suky for forty years. Short visits, yes, but this takes me back to high school, waking up Saturday morning in her room, with her still sleeping while I, the early riser, finished another Alistair MacLean thriller checked out from the Standard Fruit Company library and waited for a lavish Honduran breakfast of scrambled eggs with stuff in them, bululo (French roll), refried beans (red beans, not black), heavy sweet cream, fried plantains, strong coffee, butter avocado, and hard salty cheese.

We lost track of one another for years because her husband is a petroleum geologist and had got moved around the world to wintery places like Russia, Alaska, and Denmark, where I wish I could have visited her. I found her when a mutual Honduran friend recognized me in the Houston airport and gave me her number—she happened to be in town. Since then we’ve kept in touch, and when we meet, all the intervening years disappear. She is most comfortable around people who weren’t born where they now live. Oz people.

Suky is a collector of people. As we reminisced, she mentioned high school friends I haven’t thought of for years. She also brought me a gift from Sister Christina, whom she’d just seen before she flew to Canada. Sister Christina was our principal in high school and had gone to a Bible Study with my mom. She’d kept a photo of the Bible study group tucked in her Bible for all these years, as a reminder to pray, and sent me a copy along with a book of poetry (how did she know after all these years?). There in the photo is Sister Christina and my mom. Some forty years back. My mom’s hair is still jet black.

Memories of Suky’s family come back to me now because of all the hours I spent in her home. I remember her grandfather pestering us with tales of older days yet at the dinner table. I remember her younger brothers, who teased me and irked me as younger brothers do. I remember her mother giving motherly advice and her dad giving fatherly affirmation. I had a nickname in that house that no one else remembers, thank goodness. I remember a dinner party her mom gave, and Suky and I got into such a hysterical giggling match that her mom came into our room and checked our drinks (there was nothing but coke and ice, I assure you), and we were offended. We competed for the highest grades and ran neck in neck, but she won because she was athletic and Honduran, so her Spanish and her basketball lay-ups were better. We analyzed everything and everybody and not once, that I remember, got cross-wise of one another. I lost something when I moved away.

Did we all grow up in idyllic times? Will our kids think the same when they are old? Back then La Ceiba, Honduras was a small town with safe streets. You always knew where you were because to the south rose Pico Bonito (Pretty Point) and to the north lay the beach. You couldn’t get lost. I used to ride a big, black Chinese bike all over town: to school, to dad’s office facing Central Park with its enormous trees, and to Suky’s house. There was one stoplight in town. Mom used to pick up her order of meat from the neighborhood butcher once a week and buy hand-made tortillas and fresh, hot coconut bread from the ladies that came by the house with baskets on their heads. She shopped in the marketplace for local food and had our clothes made fit to size by the local seamstress. Everything fit. The ceiba tree, for which the city is named, was called a “life tree” by native Americans, holding earth and sky together, past and present.

Today La Ceiba is a city, and I’d get lost (or worse) trying to find familiar places. As the world changes, I still get lost trying to find my familiar places. And change itself becomes my kids’ familiar place. Robert has a home place where people knew him when he was born, but I don’t have this, and nor do my kids. We need “life trees” to orient us.  I hope they find their Suky’s and Sister Christina’s to orient them when they have traveled far--to remind them their past had goodness in it, and it’s good to be reminded.

The Competition

Say you are a missionary, and you’re sitting on a plane, and the person next to you is actually talkative and introduces himself as some kind of sales rep and asks, “So what do you do?” Do you say you’re a missionary, knowing how that triggers as many alarms as the word terrorist? I wonder what Paul answered? “Oh, I’m a slave. My master is Jesus Christ, who is sending me as an ambassador to the Gentiles…do you know him?”

What about if you find the shoe on another foot?

Robert was riding a taxi between two towns in Guerrero one day, and the found out the driver was a Jehovah’s Witness missionary. The taxi driver explained that all Jehovah Witness missionaries are bi-vocational (self-supporting, as are their church leaders; we’ve met a number of them working as taxi drivers). Robert has found that long taxi rides are ideal for in depth conversations about faith, and this was no exception. The taxi driver explained some things that Robert found impressive. Once a year the group holds a national rally in a large stadium. At the last one in Mexico City, the speaker explained that Mexico has 15 million Indian people and that very few of them are Jehovah Witness (almost as few have any relationship with Jesus at all). He called on people to commit to go to the Indian communities as missionaries. This would mean finding a way to support themselves, since the Jehovah Witnesses don’t support missionaries financially. A thousand people answered the call. That is a thousand Jehovah missionaries headed for the Indian villages of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatan, Veracruz, and other states. These missionaries commit to using indigenous languages, so when they find the Bible translated into an Indian tongue, they figure out how to use it. One “local” language they’ve already mastered in Mexico (and, I think, everywhere else) is sign language. Throughout the entire country there are congregations for the deaf, and even in small rural towns, anyone who is deaf is likely to be a Jehovah’s Witness, no matter what else their family believes, because this is the only place of fellowship available to them.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are impressive for their unity. We know of buildings that house six different congregations. The congregations don’t ever lack for leaders because they don’t rely on seminary trained pastors or priests. They choose elders who fulfill the requirements of 1 Timothy 3:2-7 and Titus 1:5-9, and then train them in on-going seminars. When an area needs a new building, people show up from miles around to start building on Thursday, and the doors are open for business by Sunday. Their Watchtower is published in 247 languages, all by volunteers, and is the world’s leading magazine with a monthly print run of 55,000,000. Tell me you’re not impressed. I asked Robert if he didn’t want to join, but the thought of having a committee in Pennsylvania format his thinking every month was more than he could bear. As evangelicals we aren’t, perhaps, as efficient (or as united…sigh) as these folk, but we sure are freer. And which of us could give up Jesus as God incarnate, come to live among us?

I’m not sure what vocabulary the JWs use to describe their motivation for going where no JW’s have gone before, but my guess is they would say it’s a call. Freaky, isn’t it?  Since that is what we would say. So a call wouldn’t be the only requirement for going—for being sent. No one goes without a call, of course, but I guess a call isn’t enough. There are plenty of odd calls out there. There’s got to be more.

Persuasion

I’ve been working away at my writing project and got stalled out at trying to describe the process of coming to Jesus for the very first time. It’s such a mysterious thing, such an internal and individual thing. Like Jesus says, you see the effect of the wind on the trees, but how do you describe the action of the Spirit itself? You see people beaming as they try to describe the difference inside them, and you see their lives change, but how do you describe what happens? All you can do is say what it was for you.

I was five. I was at an evening worship service at the church in Honduras where we attended, and I remember what struck me of the sermon. The preacher said that God wanted us to become His children. That we had a choice, that there were two roads laid out before us, and we had a choice to make—today. As a five year old, I got that. I figured I was too young to walk down the aisle at the church, so I waited and talked to Mom when we got home. I asked her if kids could make the choice of becoming God’s children. She said yes, and prayed with me, and I remember the next day sitting up in a crook of a tree, thinking proudly, “I’m a child of God; I’m a child of God.”

I’m not so sure about the theology of all that now. I don’t think I became a child of God then. I think I woke up to the fact of God’s fatherhood just about the very earliest that a child can awaken to it and responded just about as soon as a child can respond. I think that when the choice became clear to me for the first time, I jumped right into God’s arms and never looked back. I am a child of God in a dozen different ways. I’m a child of God’s because He created me. Because he put me into a family that dedicated me to Him from the day I was conceived. Because I grew up in a family that pointed me to God at every turn. Because I recognized God’s love as a child and walked trustingly to Him and became his little child. Because He adopted me as a child through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Because he grafted me into His family as a descendant of Abraham, the Father of Faith. Because he chose me from the foundation of time.

Like many who come to Christ young, I felt a pang of longing when I heard testimonies of those who came to Christ after a long fight, who could confess great sins and leave behind great evils of drugs and liquor (maybe I’ll tell you Robert’s testimony some time). I wanted to give Jesus this kind of faith and give to others such convincing proof. I remember listening to Billy Graham on TV when I was in high school and wishing I could convert all over again, so persuasive was his message (my dad came to Christ in a Billy Graham crusade).

I don’t feel that way now. I realize that I was privileged to be a five year old child of God, aware of how he cared for me though all my life with goodness and wisdom. Not that I’m better. I’m not. I’m simply familiar with Him, with his Words, his ways, and his love. I’m so convinced of his goodness that it surrounds me like the air. He lives in every good story I hear, every great wonder I see, every moving piece of music I hear, every great piece of art I admire, even the good movies I watch, just ask my kids. He is there in my sleeping and waking and resting and working. He shapes the history I read and the science I discover. He shapes world politics and under-girds philosophy. In all my years since childhood, he has persuaded me. As the Benedictines say, conversion is an every day thing.

The Pearl

Talking about God, even though he's the God of the universe and gives us immortality, can seem so complicated, so guache. You have to figure out how to make this particular news sound relevant to your neighbor, who’s heard it on the radio, seen it on a billboard sign, been blasted with it in a thousand ways, and is bored to death with it. As the apologist/novelist Walker Percy explains in Message in a Bottle:

“It’s like a man who found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but the people  [who lived in it] have moved to the suburbs, sick of the old house and everything in it.

“It’s like a starving Confederate soldier who finds a hundred-dollar bill on the streets of Atlanta, only to discover that everyone is a millionaire, and the grocers won’t take the money.

“It’s like a man who goes to a wild lonely place to discover the Truth, who finds an apostle there who gives him great news, who runs back to the city to announce it, only to discover that the news he carries has been on the broadcast for so long that in fact, it is now in the weariest canned spot on TV, more commonplace than an Exxon commercial, so he might as well be shouting “Exxon! Exxon!” for all the attention anyone pays attention to him.

“It’s like a man who finds a treasure buried in a field and sells all he has to buy the field, only to discover that everyone else has the same treasure in his field, and that in any case, real estate values have gone so high that all field-owners have forgotten the treasure and plan to subdivide.”

This is our culture. But what we forget is that not all cultures are this jaded. While we research new ways to make good news sound like good news to those around us, other cultures respond to the original story just as the people heard it in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, or the Gentiles heard it when Paul preached in their streets. So when we take the Good News to cultures that aren’t jaded, we do well to stick to the original story: “It was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the dead on the third day. This message would be proclaimed in the authority of his name to all the nations…there is forgiveness of sins for all who repent.” or as Paul taught, “I passed on to you what was most important…that Christ died for our sins just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day…”

Missiologist Rolland Allen observes that Paul’s sermons resulted not in mere believers but in true disciples. He stuck to a few key elements: he established common ground with his listeners by appealing to the past; he stated the facts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection; he answered the objections people might have; he appealed to people’s spiritual needs; and finally, he gave grave warnings of the consequences of rejection. All this he did with respect and even sympathy for his listeners (he never attacked the gods of the day, though he did expect absolute commitment to Jesus). He showed courage by facing the difficulties of his message without watering it down or disguising what might give offense. And he spoke with confidence in its power to fulfill those who responded.

I have seen the power of this kind of preaching in Mixtec culture and heard of it in other cultures, too, where good news has been announced for the first time. In this culture, today, it is just as powerful as ever, but it's so hard to hear above the media storm--a pearl buried in a field of noise.

First Day of School

 Today is the first day of school for my students in Oaxaca. I miss them today and regret that I am missing another school year with them.

I think of how, when I went to my friend Kath’s dance recital at the beginning of the summer, the director of the dance school stood up and told the kids how proud she was of them, and told the teachers how well they had done. She had broken her foot mid-season, and they had to carry on without her, and those teachers made it all happen. Kath and the other three moms choreographed their own dance and performed it for hundreds of people. I’d be proud, too.

I think of how the Shakespeare play I had planned to do with my OCS students at the end of last school year had to be canceled when I couldn’t go back. We were going to attempt Henry IV, Part I, our first history play. Every year for the past six years, I’ve done a play with all my 7^th through 10^th graders, some 24 of them last year. I divide the play into two parts, because I only rehearse with two grades at a time, 7-8 or 9-10, and then I pull the whole play together just in the last week before the performance.  I do the play right at the end of the year, because even though it makes scheduling a nightmare with all the grad activities coming up, English class goes out with a bang. It’s an end-of-year memory-maker. Last year I had them all perfectly cast, and had all their scripts printed out, and had their props figured out, including bright yellow hose for Ryan, who was supposed to be Falstaff, when I found out I was moving to Oz. The teacher who graciously took over for me last minute had to cancel the play, of course. But I couldn’t help feeling sad because I knew what the play does for the kids. It makes them work hard, push for excellence, and be creative and responsible, and maybe best of all, it pulls all of us together as a team. In years past, when they came out at the end of the play for the final bow, I was just bursting with pride. It was always the emotional high of the year. There is nothing like it. My great adventure with cancer just doesn’t compare (heavy sarcasm).

The last play we performed was The Tempest on the school’s two-leveled play structure. We called it Shakespeare’s Playground. Isn’t that cute? The kids worked hard. They would tell me how many lines they could handle, and I would try to match their roles with what they could do. They would surprise me. There was JD, who never got his lines right but paraphrased them in a JD way and made us all laugh. There was Noemi, the sprite Ariel, who was so busy flitting around and jumping off benches and climbing ladders (as she was supposed to do), that she had to stop and catch her breath before she could get her lines out. There was Anna as Prospero, who had way too many lines but assured me she could handle it, and of course nailed them all, every time. There was Niclas, who was the evil Caliban, and who plastered his face with mud, and made evil, scary noises, and came out stomping on bugs and banging firewood everywhere to show how evil he was, all the while keeping the sound system going, which was playing, “I’m having a really bad day.” Every last one of my kids made the play work. Every last one. Even Joel. Who said he wanted no lines at all, but still hauled sails, and still yelled, “Heave ho” with a will.

When you work at something good together, really putting your back into the thing and making people glad of it when you are done, no matter what it is, God is glad.  He designed us to love good work and excellent service. He calls us to it. He blesses it. And just as God is there when doctors and nurses are competent, and when moms dance grace, and baby angels try, I think he is there, too, on that school playground, clapping with everyone else, when 19 nervous kids and one proud English teacher attempt 45 minutes of Shakespeare’s Tempest together--and get it. I miss this.

Burning heretics

I already wrote about the Jesus Freak book, mentioning that some things took me aback. Here’s one: the author had a Christian friend who became a Santeria priest. The author readily acknowledged that this was a form of syncretism, but invited her readers to embrace Santeria as an expression of Christianity.

Syncretism is a fusion of different beliefs into a new system. In this case it was the fusion of Catholicism with the Nigerian Yoruba religion that worships nature. A person baptized Catholic begins to add to the rituals of Catholicism the rituals of Santeria, which include feeding powerful but mortal spirits called orishas with animal sacrifices so that they will give him energy to meet his destiny.  The orishas are given the names of Catholic saints, like St Lazarus or St Barbara, but they are not any saints that ever lived in flesh and blood on earth.

Robert and I see syncretism in Mexico all the time. Although the Mixtecs call the spirit they venerate St Mark, the only thing the god of rain and thunder has in common with the writer of the gospel is the day on which they are celebrated on the Catholic calendar. On St Mark’s day in the town we lived in, the celebration is not held in the Catholic Church but on a mountainside, and there are animals sacrificed on an altar. To join the procession to the altar requires drinking, and men carry cases of beer on their shoulders to make sure they are well intoxicated by the time the rituals begin, which include divination and speaking to the dead. Although everyone at the altar is Catholic, this is not a Christian ritual but a veneer of Catholic terms and rituals overlaying a pre-Colombian faith in nature spirits.

I think the Jesus Freak lady does right in welcoming everyone and anyone to dinner at her table, no matter what their creed or status or race. She’s had lots of practice at it and, I bet, does it better than anyone I know. I think Jesus asks this of all of us, and we have much to learn from those who do it well. Our churches should feel like home to anyone coming in the door. But embracing Santeria is another thing. Animal sacrifices pretty much deny the effectiveness of Jesus’ once and for all sacrifice.  This is one mixed up lady, someone who in the churches I frequent would be called a liberal heretic.

And what do we do with heretics? I think Jesus asks us to live out this terrible paradox. We are to welcome people even while we sharply disagree with them. How does one do this?  That’s my question. How do we welcome a Santeria priest and not her spirits? How do we greet her and explore together the truth about Jesus, who makes her orishas obsolete?  More difficult, how do we greet a liberal heretic minister and sharply disagree with her lifestyle and her syncretism without sending her to hell? It’s always harder to handle heretics.

Lord of Paradox, teach us!

I do not think we’ve mastered this skill. Either we rebuff those who believe differently, or we welcome their beliefs right along with them like this lady does. I think it takes practice to live a paradox. I think it takes lots of time and lots of practice, and just when we congratulate ourselves on getting it right, God puts a yet more difficult person in our way, someone even more impossible to eat with, and we have to start from scratch. I think it is so hard that only Jesus ever got it right, and we always fall off the horse on one side or the other. I think “this one only comes out by much prayer and fasting.”

I think the man left wounded on the road that the Samaritan found bleeding learned it, though. Who is my neighbor? The Samaritan was not just a racial half-breed, he was a heretic who didn’t worship in God’s Holy Place but came up with religions of his own. Conscious, the wounded man would have dropped the man’s loaf on the ground and shoved his olive oil aside. But somehow it wasn’t necessary to agree at all to be shown love. This is a crazy parable, because doggone it, we’re the wounded guy! Maybe that’s the only way we learn. Maybe it’s a liberal heretic hoisting us up on the donkey! Aaaaaahh!

All I know is if we get comfortable writing off heretics, especially from a position of power, just on hearsay, without listening to them first, sooner or later we’re going to end up writing off (as close to burning as we get) someone God intended us to listen to—a wacko like John the Baptist, or John Huss, or John Wycliffe or…  It always happens.

Just in time

In Mexico there is a kind of restaurant that doesn’t exist in North America. It’s a small family restaurant where you sit down for a full meal, but it has no menu. You’re served the dish of the day, complete with sides and flavored drink, and it’s fresh, home-cooked, and fast. It’s also cheap, as cheap as any fast food. It’s called comida corrida, meal on the run, a fine Latin American invention. You do get variety from day to day, and I know some people who eat a comida corrida every day. The comida corrida uses a technique newly applied in North America (my brother-in-law uses it in his mechanic business), the just-in-time inventory. The chefs (as do most moms) shop fresh from the market every day. Although I doubt the comida corrida would take off in our culture, the concept of just-in-time is gaining ground in other fields.

Take education, for example. I have a niece who is graduating as a computer programmer from Waterloo University, a university made world famous by its co-op program. This program requires a four month job placement after every four month academic term. By the time my niece graduates, she will already have two years of experience. With great feedback from her employers as well as her profs, she can now pick the job she wants. She chose Google.

My brother-in-law, who uses a just-in-time inventory, also uses just-in-time training. He starts his apprentices on simple jobs, changing oil and spark plugs, but as they learn, he trains them for more complex tasks. Throughout the process, the apprentices bill out their own work, so by the end of their training, they practice all aspects of the business and have clients of their own.  When they finish, they run their own business. This is just-in-time training.

If you think about it, this is the model Jesus used to train his apprentices. He put his disciples to work right away and gave them the training they needed for the immediate tasks at hand. He modeled everything for them and gave them immediate feedback when they finished. Paul did the same with Titus and Timothy. A more familiar term for just-in-time apprenticing would be discipleship.

Discipling means learning what tasks people are facing and helping them do these tasks well. Instead of laying out a long plan of study disconnected from practice, a good teacher teaches to the tasks at hand. This means using a menu-based teaching style, “bringing from his storeroom new gems of truth as well as old.” (Matt 13: 52) If the task is evangelizing, then teach and model how to evangelize. If it is preaching, then teach and model how to preach. If it is baptizing, then teach and model how to baptize. The best teachers have always trained their disciples for specific tasks by giving them the principles, the modeling, and the practice they need, and then putting them to work. How much do we hear complaints about how college didn’t prepare students for the actual work they do or about how quickly they forget everything because at the time it wasn’t relevant? What would it be like if higher education used more of a menu-based approach?

In just three years, Jesus taught his disciples so well that he could step aside and send them on their way. They had what they needed. Paul sent his disciples to start churches, name elders, and manage disputes in a matter of months.

I think it’s a good model, this kind of just-in-time training. I want to learn how to use it more in my teaching and writing.  The first task for my writing project is to build a menu directed at specific tasks that cross-cultural workers might face as they take the Good News to people who have not heard it. The first item to tackle was the menu.

Risk

With Elai around for a few weeks (don’t know how many more times I’ll have the privilege), we introduced her to some classic movies that our hosts have laying around: I Am Sam, which shows how fiercely people can love no matter what are the differences between them (my favorite part is when Sean Penn makes that “O” with his mouth when he first sees his baby daughter as a newborn: you know right there what the whole movie is about). That was the first, and then last night, Shawshank Redemption. Anything with the word “redemption” in it has to have something intriguing, is my guess.

I’m not a risk taker. So of course what gets to me about this movie every time is the risks that Andy takes, knowing what is coming.  I don’t mean the calculated risk when he bargains with the evil guard to get beer for his friends and almost gets himself thrown off a building. This was a risk to get ahead in the game, and it pays off. No, I mean when he locks the guard in the bathroom, and sits back in the warden’s chair, and plays Italian opera for the whole prison camp until the guards break in and stop him. He pays dreadfully for this moment of freedom, but you get the impression he doesn’t regret it. It’s almost exactly the same scene in It’s a Beautiful Life. And there is a scene in one of Ayn Rand’s stories like that, too, that I can never forget: A couple is pursued by the police (can’t remember why) and she is shot, and he stays with her, holding her, even after she dies, and the police get him. Ayn Rand is all about knowing how to value things and being willing to pay, even with your life, for what you really want.

She’s an atheist, but she gets some things really well, for example, this whole “What does it profit a man to save his life and lose his soul,” idea, even though she doesn’t believe in souls. She doesn’t believe in heaven, either, but she has the best picture of heaven in Atlas Shrugged that I’ve ever read. She paints people’s gifts building on each other, and everyone adding value to what everyone else does, so that the community soars together as a body into achievements none could reach alone. And near the end, the hero comes out of hiding to spend a few minutes with the heroine and then pays for it with his life (almost—Rand cheats and practically resurrects him; she just can’t get away from Jesus, no matter how hard she tries, which is why it’s so much fun to read her)

Do you know Rand brought Robert and me together for the first time 25 years ago? We were at a church conference, and at the end of the day I found him in a chair outside his hotel door, reading C S Lewis (my favorite). He asked me what other books I liked, and I mentioned Ayn Rand (his favorite; there is a whole story there, but that’s for another time), and he had never met a Christian who would admit to liking her, and so the conversation began.

Jesus’ whole life was like Shawshank Redemption, was what inspired Shawshank Redemption, as well as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (isn’t she in for a surprise!) . He prepped for 30 years to get it right. Then he threw his life away so he could spend three short years with us, the love of his life, knowing what was coming, the torture, the death, the consequences he’d pay for what he’d dreamed of and hoped for all those years: us, coming to him, recognizing him. He played his three years like a forbidden opera in a prison camp, and we looked up at him whom we’d pierced, and we tasted freedom for the first time, and we fell in love.

Fledglings

There are parrot nests in the tall eucalyptus trees on the street down from my house in Mexico. They are more like parrot apartments, because several couples seem to be flying in and out of different doorways of the same giant nests. I watch them add twigs when I take walks and sometimes catch the whole family taking off when the babies are grown.

This week Philip drove from Chicago to Colorado to see Cailey. He’s a good driver, but the thought of him driving sixteen hours, late into the night, by himself, weighed on me throughout the day. Couldn’t help it. I called him every couple of hours, when he pulled into rest stops, to check if he was alert. He was, of course. And at the end of the week, he takes another long drive by himself to go back to college. And Elai and Mikael are getting seriously serious, and I think of how young and unprepared they are for a future together. I was 29 when I got married, therefore so much more prepared. The one most unprepared for the kids leaving the nest might just be mom.

Makes me think of how in Scripture God gathered people in families and then let the children go. I think of Jacob leaving home to seek his fortune (I wonder how old he was). I think of how God spoke to three generations of forefathers (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), showing up at dinnertime and at the top of ladders, and then was silent for 400 years while his children turned into slaves in a foreign land. Then I think of Moses holding on to his belief in God while he grew up as an Egyptian prince, then leaving that all behind to live as a shepherd in the desert, and then coming back to confront Pharaoh at 80 years old (think of the 80 year olds you know). God seems to take so much set up time for a lightning drama.

After Moses, the Hebrews kept looking back to those glory days, but for the most part, God was silent, and they had to figure things out for themselves. I think of Jesus “wasting” thirty years to acculturate as a Jew and then spending only three lightning years with his disciples. And if you think about that, God had already invested thousands of years preparing a way for his son to come to earth “in the fullness of time.” He had set up a very specific culture for Jesus to fit into when he “pitched his tent among us" so that he could live incognito for thirty years before his public ministry began and then be recognized as Messiah when the time was right. So much process. So much time. So much preparation for a short, powerful drama.

The days since Christ seem to follow this same pattern. God lived among us for a short time with stunning miracles and revolutionary teaching, which birthed the first congregations of His followers. He passed his mantle on to his disciples and left them so that the Spirit could carry on in all of us now. And since then, he’s been visible to the world only through us, His children. We are his hands and feet and voice. I think we wish He’d do more, take on more of the responsibility, but he refuses. He trusts us.

As Robert and I work with young churches and church planters, this is perhaps the biggest difference between our work and God’s that we see. We trust His children less than He does. He lets go so soon. He trusts so much. When Paul started a church in new culture (Gentile), he stayed for such a short time (months, only) and left so little behind. He never took on its local leadership and never left behind Jewish culture or Jewish sets of rules. He let them find their own way and make their own mistakes and he praised and rebuked as things came up, in letters.

As it’s my job to do now. What a strange transition. From being mom to being peer with no more authority than what love and experience gives you. Our all-powerful God and Father worked hard at this, letting us go and calling us back with no more authority than love and experience gives him. 

Worlds

Yesterday there was sunshine, but today the day is overcast. It’s supposed to rain. Host dad has been out all morning getting the wheat off the last field before it rains, and when he comes in for lunch, after the last pass of the combine, everyone cheers. He looks like he needs a couple nights of long sleep now to recuperate from harvest. And that’s just wheat. Out the window I see a sprawl of corn like city blocks next to a waving sea of soy beans, still waiting.

Out another window, I see another field, a miniature forest of vines, trunks bound by twine but branches waving freely in the wind and laden with heavy bunches of tiny green grapes. The farmer is riding a small tractor, pulling a sprayer. These look tiny next to the equipment needed for wheat.

In another world, I sit in the chemo lounge once again with a needle stuck in my arm. On the heavy double doors as we walk in, Elai notices the red warning “Cytotoxic.”  I guess this warning is for the staff  because which of us would understand it? I had to look it up. It means, “Watch out! There are chemicals in here that kill your cells!” It’s why the nurses suit up completely when they hook me up to the IV machine and hang the bags of cell-killers. This time it’s just for an hour because I am receiving, not chemo, but a monoclonal antibody called Herceptin. My particular cancer is caused by breast cells producing too many (or overexpressing) copies of a gene, labeled Her2. This gene acts like ears or antennae, listening for signals to make the cell grow and split. So you can imagine what happens when suddenly the cell receives far too many signals to grow. That’s why this form of cancer is so aggressive. The Herceptin blocks the receptors on the surface of the cell, killing the signal. As a type of “targeted therapy,” they do double duty, marking the cancer cells so that the immune system will target them for destruction. Hopefully this is what has been happening in my cells for the last four months: targeting, marking, blocking, and destroying. Over the next eight months, more Herceptin treatments are meant to keep the cancer from spreading elsewhere.

In the armchair beside me there is a woman wearing a bandana and a brand new port in her chest. She told the nurse she had to figure out what to wear to accommodate the port, the area still bruised and sore. The port signals to me that her cancer has spread. Her treatments are going to last longer, be harsher, have a harsher prognosis. This is another world.

Elsewhere, on a screen, a young man sits on a stool in shorts, T shirt, and sandals talking about ancient creation myths. With a lattice of wooden pallets hung over some kind of blue/green lighting behind him, and a video camera in front of him, this guy opens his Bible to Job and Psalms and explains how many of the ancient Biblical writers drew from the science of their day to describe God’s power: Job saying God opens his storehouses of snow and hail up in the atmosphere, as if there could be storehouses of such things. Job saying God shakes the pillars of the earth, pillars that steady a flat earth floating on the sea. David mentioning the earth’s foundations, a solid core underneath the sea, underneath the flat earth that floats on water, steadied by pillars. The young man is tackling some of the difficult things we read in the Bible, where the language of ancient sciences shows up. He says that God could speak through prophets who used ancient notions of science because that didn’t change the message that He was pursuing a relationship with us.

In a sister church just a few miles down the road, the preaching is live, and the preacher is wrestling with how to take back our culture for God, how to stand firm in the face of change. I walk in the auditorium, and the place and the people feel like home, as much as that happens in Oz. This, too, is another world. We move in and out of worlds and catch but glimpses. It's a wonder God gets through from His to all of us in all of ours for all these millenniums. But He does!

Shopping

My daughter needed to buy a dress for an occasion coming up, so off we went shopping. I’m not a great shopper at the best of times. That’s Robert. I’m more of the in-and-out-let’s-get this-over-with kind of shopper. But you can’t do that when the dress has to actually look good on someone, so we did some proper shopping, and I got to see what it feels like to go through all the stages, and we came home with an ooh! and aah! prize after all. Feels kind of good, really, though I don’t plan to make it a habit and waste the novelty.

Robert likes shopping because he sees it as the simple economic exchange that it is. As he might put it, “I have need of this to help my business grow or my family eat, so I give you money, and you hand over the goods.” Robert can put a bid on Ebay for some tool he wants to take to a Mixtec carpenter, and he knows exactly what it’s worth, and if the bids go too high, he simply shrugs and walks away. He can do this with big things, too, like plane fares and cars. I, on the other hand, feel shopping as a tug of war. Except when it’s about simple things like milk or tomatoes, I keep wondering whether I really need it. Then, when I decide I do, but it’s out of my price range, I feel the pressure to buy, especially here in Oz. Boy, does this culture know how to apply that pressure! And it bugs me. (Robert doesn’t even feel it.) I wish I could turn it off, but then our civilization would implode, wouldn’t it.

So back to the shopping.  Elai and I started our adventure at the This Is Way Too Expensive Store. (Somehow you can just tell by the décor.) Everything on the racks in this store was beyond our (my) price range. When I gasped at the price tag of an accessory that outdid the price tag on the dress, I got the look. I’m not supposed to let on. From there we went to the High Pressure Store. The sales lady kept bringing beautiful things to the change room, and no one was looking at tags because that’s, well, embarrassing, and the perfect dress surfaced, and the sales lady kept up a one-woman chorus of  “Ooh, aah…it’s perfect on you…matches your skin color so well…very flattering waist line…don’t you think so?…

So what do you do when your daughter is smiling, and the dress is beautiful, and the lady is going on and on, putting on the pressure? Maybe you hide behind the “We’ll think about it” line and walk away. Then the sky clouds over. You know you are never going to find the right dress, and your daughter will have to settle for some frumpy thing and resent you forever (you are obviously not thinking straight), and where is Robert when you need him?

Fortunately, we found the magical Hole in the Wall Store with a stunning dress (my daughter makes it stunning) and an acceptable price, and we came home happy. But there’s no guarantee. The pressure to buy can make you do crazy things. I remember the very first time I walked through a mall. It was Christmas, and I was 15, having moved to Oregon from Honduras to finish high school. I remember looking in the windows and for the first time in my life feeling a pull, an almost physical force, drawing me to buy something (a big white teddy bear, as I recall) that I did not need. I had never felt this temptation before. There were no malls in Honduras, and consumerism was yet to strike in our small town. Either that, or I was growing up. And embarrassment can come to sit on your shoulder when you don’t live up to expectations or keep up with the Joneses. (I remember overhearing in a bathroom, “I look like a missionary!” Heaven forbid.) And self-deception can arrive as a house guest when you buy whatever catches your eye. So in Oz I realize you live with this tension all the time. Isn’t it tiring?