"(If You Don't Understand Grace, See Page 177)"

I am supposed to teach a confirmation class at my new church. This is a good opportunity to lay out some solid Christian teaching. If only 1) I were a decent teacher and 2) I knew what a confirmation class was really supposed to look like. This is not part of my church tradition.

Meanwhile, I've been given certain tools and helps, such as files from past confirmation classes, and a book from my new pastor. The book is pretty useful, though maybe a little simplistic. I was particularly struck by the simplistic bit when I read the quote that makes up the title for this post. (I'm not sure it was page 177, but you get the idea.)

I think when you grow up in the church and basically follow the rules, the concept of grace is particularly hard to grasp, both because the word gets thrown around a lot, and because you don't realise how much you need it and have been offered it. I still remember a particularly rocky time in London when it finally hit home to me both how powerful grace was to receive, and how difficult it was to give. I thought to myself, "How did I even think I was a Christian before?! I never understood this!"

And I'm not sure I understand it even now. Grace shows up in unexpected places, and is required in them, too. Sometimes I blink and miss it, and sometimes it stares me unblinking in the face so that I can't miss it but I almost want to run from it. It's so simple and so difficult, and right now I feel more in need of giving and receiving it than ever, and from many different angles.

What I do know is that, even when I'm afraid of it, I'm grateful for it. I don't understand how people make it through life without it. And I'm quite sure page 177 isn't ever going to sum it up.

Messiah Complex

The other confusing thing about a "missional" bent is that it really does look like arrogance at some point. I already blogged a little about how I don't think it ultimately is arrogance to say, effectively, "I have Good News for you that you can't live without" (well, it might be arrogant to say it that way), although I definitely see how it can look like it is.

If there is a God, and He's the God portrayed in the Bible, particularly through Jesus, then the Good News surrounding that comes from Him, not from any of His so-called representatives, and so there's not a lot to do with arrogance there.

It's the so-called representatives part that seems a little off. I mean, I can say that I used to pray for movie-stars after movies when I was a kid, so in some sense I'm "wired" to pray for and care about whether or not people have a relationship with God through Jesus. And it's sort of hypocritical to say I care about something if I'm not going to try to do something about it, I suppose. But at some point I have to wrestle with the question about why I think I'm the one God wants to use to help other people get to that point. Particularly when I haven't seen Him actually do it very often, to my knowledge.

It might be a better question than "Where or to whom am I called?" More like "Am I called?" Who do I think I am? Seriously. I have lots of questions in my faith, and not a lot of answers, and the answers I feel like I have don't translate very well into dialogue with people who are disinclined to agree with me on this to begin with. Besides, my attitude is very often not "the same as that of Christ Jesus," and so I'm not sure how excellent my witness-by-example really is.

I would like to assert here in all honesty that this question did not arise from an outside source; I've been mulling it over a little (and avoiding it a lot) for quite some time now. What kind of messed up Messiah complex did it take to make me think I myself had something to offer the people of East London--or does it take to make me think that somehow the Milk Guy or the people of my city in general need me in their lives to show them that Jesus loves them?

I really do think sometimes this ends up being more about me than about Him--or even about the other people I care about.

On the other hand, one time, within my first few months in London, I messed up. (I don't mean I only messed up once in London. I wish! I'm just talking about this one time.) I honestly don't even remember all the specifics, but I know that I ended up looking somewhat hypocritical and I was keenly aware of how that was, in that moment, going to make all my nice words about Jesus up to that point, sound. I walked home that night feeling all self-flagellating and I remember articulating in my head the words, "I don't deserve to be a missionary!"

And suddenly it was like my brain stopped and Someone else thought into it, "Bingo!" Or "You sure don't!" Or, "Well, duh!" Or, "Seriously? Is that why you thought you were here?" Something like one or a whole bunch of those. And then the thought went on to assure me that, regardless of my inherent merit or ability to do the job, He was the one who had brought me there, and I just needed to keep going.

Even saying that sounds a little arrogant. It's a weird position, this one that Jesus puts us in. As soon as I'm humble enough to go there, I notice . . . and then I'm not humble anymore.

So strange.

Can I get, um, a witness?

This Time It's Personal

I grew up reading missionary biographies (as well as a lot of other things, but they're not immediately relevant here). These people were amazing followers of Christ who gave up things that were really hard to give up, so that they could tell a bunch of people they had never met before that Jesus loves them. I found these stories daunting and inspiring, and knew I wanted to "be a missionary when I grew up." So I did, for a while, although I never felt like I was quite giving up as much as I should have been.

For example, in the 1800's, this dude Henry Martyn broke up with his fiancee so he could go to Asia Minor and translate the Bible and make the Gospel known. He did, and people who would otherwise not have heard about the truth of Jesus, actually did, even though Martyn himself ended up dying very young. I think I always thought eventually I'd go overseas and get martyred or something dramatic, too.

If God actually called me to be a missionary, shouldn't I be doing something like that? So what am I doing at Starbucks? Particularly when, in the course of the last year and a half, I've hardly had the opportunity to share the Gospel with anyone?

Then I got to know the Milk Guy.

Someone said to me recently, "If you were once a missionary, I would find it very unlikely that you would date a non-Christian." I considered this, and thought that actually, in some ways it might make perfect sense, because a missionary (or an evangelist, or anyone like that) ideally already loves the people who haven't met Jesus yet--that's why they tell them about Him. If there's already that initial caring present, and then some sort of "chemistry" is added to the mix, there's nothing very surprising . . .

I suppose some would say that, whether surprising or not, my actually deciding to consider a non-Christian "romantically" is out-and-out disobedience to the Gospel. I guess I think it's a little more open to debate, but I certainly don't want to be disobedient. Which is why my brain is getting all mixed up about this "just one person" concept. I know that we are called to put Jesus above all other loves. I truly want to do this. But if I have a missionary call, does it mean I should start investigating international options again, and clear myself out of here? Or would that, in this case, be like running away, and am I being called to reach out with Jesus' love to this "just one person" who happens to be in the place Jesus most recently brought me?

Either way requires a sort of sacrifice, and I don't know for sure which is the one Jesus is requiring of me. I don't know what the end result will be. According to the law of averages, I'd be better off going and doing "official" missions again, because I'd have a broader base of people to share Jesus with than "just one person." Also, shouldn't I be going someplace where people have less access to the Gospel? On the other hand, as I said to Jeff in the comments previously, I'm not sure God's all that concerned with the law of averages, even though He created it. And who am I to say who God should send to, say, the Turks, and who He should send to the Milk Guy.

Meanwhile, oddly enough, since I've been seeing the Milk Guy, suddenly I'm having all these other Jesus-conversations, too--at Starbucks, where I hadn't had one in ages.

Photo by jennw2ns: Sheep by water, Dingle, Ireland. 2008.

London Calling?

Here is (at least partly) how I came to be in London in the first place, and how I came to leave it again:

I grew up wanting to be a missionary. It didn't hurt--though it very well could have given another set of parents--that my parents were missionaries and church planters and pastors (sometimes at different times, sometimes all at once). I also grew up wanting to live in England. I thought the two "wants" were mutually exclusive, and then one amazing season (around my senior year of college and for some time thereafter) I discovered they weren't. I went to England on a two-year commitment, but I said early on, "I have a feeling I'll be here five years."

At the end of my first term, I really finally settled in, and, having received "indefinite leave to remain" from the British government, I decided to remain indefinitely. I was queuing up for dual citizenship. I was thinking about transferring my church membership to the church I attended and worked in, in London. Then I went back to the US for another furlough.

While I was there, I had a number of conversations with people who didn't even know each other, and who, though all Christians, have very different approaches to God. (Well, I mean, they all approach through Jesus, but their respective "styles" are different.) These conversations shook me up a little and started to make me wonder if I was supposed to leave London instead of staying there. Three days before I was to return, I was overcome with a sense of utter dread at returning to my life there, that I never really could explain. I decided to go back, take six months, and see if I could figure out what God was really telling me to do.

I guess it depends on your level of cynicism as to how you interpret things, and which things you decide are open to interpretation. It's probably also partly dependent, if you're looking for God's leading, on what kind of church you affiliate with. I've affiliated with a pretty broad range, so when I got back to London, I was bombarded with intimations in my Scripture readings, words of counsel from my friends, dreams of my own and dreams of my friends and colleagues, strong senses of direction. Eventually I decided that, though things were tremendously better for me than they had been immediately before I had left London, I was being called to move away. It was okay that I was leaving when things were good again; I always think that it's better to leave on an up-note than in shame or high dudgeon. On the other hand, it was hard to leave, too--all those friendships that had been forged, all those prayers that had been prayed, all that learning and growing. Not to mention the urban environment and the cosmopolitan nature of the place. I knew I'd never find another place like it. I haven't.

But the sense to leave seemed unequivocal. I even believed I had been directed as to a specific date of departure, which was appropriate, because the date of my arrival had also been significant. And so it was that in May 2002, I moved back to the USA. I had lived in London for five and a half years.

To be continued . . .

Number 7

The day I moved to London, Lisa took me to have tea with Megan, so that I could stay awake and get over jetlag more quickly. Megan lived at number 7, Cotswold Gardens, a house with a Winnie-the-Pooh-yellow door. (You could maybe also call it goldenrod, but Laura Lee, a much later addition to the team, cited Winnie the Pooh.)

I'm not the biggest fan of "goldenrod," except on goldenrod, but I absolutely loved this door. It was such a happy shock of insane brightness in such a usually grim and grey city. I also loved the house on the other side of that door. I thought to myself, "I love this house. I'm going to live in it one day." The house was owned by the churches I worked for, and it was often changing hands, though I didn't know that when I first "met" it.

About two years later, I really did move in. That first night, as I lay down to sleep, I thought to myself with a sense of confirmation, "Yes. This is your house."

It was my house for three years, and when I left, they painted it and Laura Lee picked the colour. She wanted to paint the door something sensible, but I made kind of a stink about and spoke up for the yellow door. So they did repaint it, but it was still that crazy yellow.

Last year Jayne told me in an email that the church was trying to offload some of their extraneous properties, and that was one of them, and they were putting it on the market. I wanted to buy it. It was my house, after all. But they don't pay you enough at Starbucks to put a downpayment on a home in London. I never heard anything else about it, until I got to Jayne's house for dinner on my first day in London last week.

"Number 7 finally sold last week," she said.

I shouldn't have been surprised. And it's good for the church and everything. But was I ever disappointed. I stayed the week in the house next door, with some friends, and so I got to see my house every day. But the house had been painted off-white, and the door had been painted blue, and the last three days I was there, the new owners spent gutting the place. The front garden was full of the bricks that didn't fit in the skip (dumpster) hired and sitting in the middle of the street.

I think I might have been sadder, except with the door now blue instead of yellow, it wasn't my house anymore. It does kind of feel like the end of an era, though.

London Revisited

After Ireland, I spent this last week in London and saw a whole bunch of people I love and missed a whole lot of other ones because of time constraints, and saw the first copies of my book. I just got back and now I have a headache, but it was worth it.

London still holds a strong and significant place in my life, even though I haven't lived there in six years and I actually got lost trying to walk from Oxford Circus to Covent Garden yesterday. (This was demoralising. And I didn't have an A-Z to help me out.) London is the place, I tend to say, where I became an adult. Not necessarily a mature one (maturity might be an attribute my possession of which is still debatable. But it's okay. I've got the convoluted grammar down). I've changed in some ways since then, and there are plenty more ways I dare say I should change. But I still feel like that was the beginning of it.

So going back is kind of bittersweet. The first time I went back after moving to the States, I felt like everything was all wrong, and London was my home, and why was I not permitted to live there anymore? The next time I went back, I felt like I was in a place I had never been before--but where I knew exactly what to expect. This time I feel like I could move back. Or not. (Most likely, according to the Home Office at this point, not.) It's both hard and easy to imagine moving back and slotting into the same neighbourhood and churches that I worked in and with before. And it's equally hard and easy to imagine moving back and living and working somewhere else.

And meanwhile, I still haven't found a new job.

I have a lot of posts built up in my head since probably January. They're going somewhere, I think (kind of like me), but I'm not quite sure where (also kind of like me). Bear with me while I keep trying to figure it out.

The Edge of a Precipice

You would think I would be all "Ireland this," and "Ireland that," and I dare say I'll get to that point . . . sometime back on the other side of the Atlantic. But for now, we're going to talk about other stuff.

Someday, when I'm ancient and long-ago menopaused, so that no one about whom I could possibly be alluding even remembers me, let alone thinks I'm talking about him, I'm going to write a book about the role of sexuality in evangelism. Of course, it might not make much of a book. I can tell you the conclusion right here: it doesn't help anything. At least until recently, any overt or covert heterosexual attraction between me and any guy I've ever tried to talk to about Jesus has not led either to dating or to conversion. I do wonder sometimes, though, if God allows that dynamic so that people who might never get prayed for otherwise, get someone praying for them for a while. (When I'm feeling less positive about this, I think cynically that God's purpose for my life is "bait.") At the very least, it paves the way for unexpected conversations.

Like, one time I was returning to London after a visit to the States, and there was this striking man on my flight. We caught each other's eye, and then, during a stop in Frankfurt (yes . . . I had to fly through Frankfurt to get to London), ended up conversing a little bit. He was Turkish, and a doctor. (Well, he might not have been a doctor, I suppose, but he said he was.) My relationship with Jesus is usually the first thing I tell attractive men about me. In this case, I think that information might have come right after telling him I had learnt to make kisir and borek a few weeks before. Turkish Doctor, trying to be tolerant, no doubt, did not try to argue with me about my Jesus-fanaticism, but he did hint something along the lines of people being like trees--how they grow and change and don't look the same when they're finished as they did when they've started.

I had just recently gone through the tolerance-challenging, grace-building upheaval of my life, and so I could agree with this, except that I would have said that that had only drawn me closer to Jesus instead of making me branch out farther. And after Turkish Doctor and I had got on our respective and divergent planes, it occurred to me that what I really could have said was that he was right about the tree, except that the thing is, it's still always a tree.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago on a walk when I passed this tree. I pass it every time I walk in that direction, but I had never looked up at it before. This time I did, and it struck me just how astounding it was. It's enormous and beautiful and serene. I thought about how a tree's root system is supposed to be as extensive underground as its branch system is above-ground. I know something about this tree's root system already (see fifth photo down in this link). It has kind of "eaten" the rocks in the stone wall above which it grows, and I could imagine the rest of its roots extending back into the yard behind it. It is kind of awe-inspiring. Who knows what it's gripping, under the grass, under the rocks, under the road. It would need that, because like I said, it's a massive tree, and it's growing right on the edge of a mini-precipice. I don't know how big or how old it was when they dug out the land to make the road this tree is on, but it's still growing straight and strong and rooted.

I couldn't help wondering, though, what would happen if there were a really big storm. I suspect it has already weathered really big storms, and like the house on the rock, this tree is rooted in the rock and it's still standing. But the last few weeks I feel like I've been standing on the brink of a precipice, too. Maybe a bigger one than the one than the hop between yard and street. I feel like, thanks to God, I'm pretty well-rooted. But it's still scary on the edge like this. I have to trust in the Rock to hold me and not let the big winds blow me over.

Good Tolerance/Bad Tolerance

Back in January when our Teen Girl Squad started, we were talking about the charge to love God and love people, and some question came up--maybe one about how to do that, exactly. And somebody mentioned tolerance.

Tolerance is (and has been for a while) the big-word-on-campus. The "secular world" loves to exhort us to exhibit it, and, by and large, the Christian subculture like to tut about it and talk about how it's all well and good, but What About Relativism, and Humans Do Sin, You Know.

All of that is as may be, but I have a sort of tenuous relationship with the concept of tolerance myself--partly because I grew up as a self-righteous twit for some reason, and partly because my own encounters with tolerance have left me a little jaded. So I told the girls about this jading experience:

Back in the day ("the day" always being a different point in time depending on my story, in case you hadn't noticed), I had this group of about six friends. We were a mixed group both in terms of gender and in terms of culture, so this led to some interesting dynamics and also a lot of talks at McDonalds. McDonalds was the place where any two of us would meet to "have it out" if we were experiencing, shall we say, communication difficulties, and because of this we ended up avoiding it most of the rest of the time. (Well, also because, you know, it was McDonalds.)

Everybody has their own personal failings, and mine were, perhaps, a little more glaring or culturally inappropriate in this group or something, and so eventually things broke down pretty badly, and I had to meet up with one of the guys in the group--at McDonalds--to have things out for the last time. The conversation (which is a polite word for what actually went down) was summed up when the guy made this statement: "Jenn, for as long as I've known you, you've been [this particular personal failing]. I've tolerated you for four years and I can't take it anymore. I'm not speaking to you again."

We ended up speaking again (though we're not in touch now), through a long and painful and healing process, but it was in that one instant that I decided I don't have much use for tolerance. It sounds all nice and innocuous when someone says, "We should just tolerate everybody," but when someone tells you they are, or have been, tolerating you, it's like they just slapped you in the face.

I don't, I realised, want to be tolerated. Ideally, I would like to be understood, but I'll go for being challenged if understanding isn't a possibility. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference (quote, anybody?), and I think that's true. Love and hate at least both dignify their object with some sort of value. Indifference is complete and utter disregard. Indifference and tolerance, in my experience, end up being just about the same thing.

My McDonalds friend was right about my personal failing. I can see how it could have become unbearable. But I wish these friends would have told me ahead of time how unbearable it was, and would have tried to help me through it, instead of tolerating it up to the point where they couldn't take it anymore and just slammed the door in my face. I realise they might not have known how to do that, or furthermore that I might not have been as willing or able to change if I had been coaxed instead of being outright rejected. Sometimes it takes a shock to make a change. But I'd still like to make the argument that love of any variety, and tolerance, don't really go together very well.

But, we asked in our girls' group, aren't there ever times when tolerance is good? The girls talked about their younger siblings, and how they would stand up for them if it came down to it because they love them and they're their siblings, even if they drive them crazy. We tried to define this and didn't really come up with anything more definite than "good tolerance" versus "bad tolerance." But upon further reflection, I have started to wonder if maybe the name that distinguishes "good tolerance" is grace.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

Itchy Feet

Store-Manager-Hillarie said, "Are you just getting that five-year itch thing you were talking about?" And I said probably.

Then Decaf-Scott asked me if I didn't just want to settle down and have kids or something. This is the kind of question you maybe try to dodge when a customer asks you it, because you can't be entirely sure what they're asking, even if they sport a wedding ring and have just mentioned that they have a six-year-old. But I'm also not very good at dodging direct questions. (I have gotten in trouble because of this before, but fortunately that did not happen this time.) I said actually, yeah.

Then Decaf-Scott looked at me really hard (but not too creepily) and said, "You do." It was less of a question than a statement of skepticism, and I could have grumbled that what did he know about it, except that I had just given him the run-down of my Adventures-Since-Growing-Up-Here: 4 years in Chicagoland, 2 years in Nannyfield, 5.5 years in London, and roughly 4-5 years here. "Um . . . " I said, "well . . . I'm not sure about the kids part."

I'm not sure about the settling down part, either, apparently, because although I've applied for a few jobs out here, most of the ones I'm looking at are in the Northwest or the Midwest. (And seriously. You would think that if I were going to relocate, I'd at least pick somewhere warm for once.) Over the weekend it occurred to me to wonder if my problem is not an actual desire to pack up all my earthly goods and cart them around like an overladen turtle, but more some sort of inability to do Something Different in the Same Place.

Maybe I identify so fully with whatever my occupation happens to be at any given time that once I feel the need to do something else, I also feel the need to be somewhere else--at least for about ten years or so. I mean, I grew up in this area, but I couldn't come back and live here until I had redefined myself in about four other places first. Now I would, for example, like to move back to Chicagoland, but it's been aeons since I lived there before, so I'm okay with it.

In the last week I actually got contacted by two different academic institutions at which I would like to work. Neither of them are local. Whether or not the jobs panned out (and one of them already hasn't, by mutual but more-than-amicable agreement), it was a great relief to hear something from anybody, because I was starting to fear that I was utterly useless for anything except serving coffee. I had visions of becoming The World's Oldest Barista, at age 97 still hefting change-laden tills to the back room to count them in the wee hours, simply because I never made enough money to retire. However, now that I'm hearing from people out of state, it's making me second-guess myself. I love my Starbucks and its people. Do I really want to move?

I think I do. But there are things that might keep me from it. I don't know. I expect I'll explore some of that here more later.

Yes, I Have Written a Book

I seem to have acquired some Readers since this post. (How gratifying.) What's more, even some colleagues and Favourite Customers (I'm sorry, but I have favourites, okay?) have stared at me blankly when I have said, "My book has a cover!" Then I have to say, "Oh. Did you not know I was having a book published?" I guess I thought everybody knew, partly because the ones who do know have been asking for about a year, "So, what's the latest with your book?"

Anyway, for those of you who haven't been asking that because you didn't know you could, here's a recap:

I have written a children's novel about an 8-year-old refugee girl and her family who flee prejudice in Kosovo, only to arrive in London and discover that prejudice is alive and well there, too--outside them, but also within them. It is fiction, but I couldn't have written it had I not lived and worked among refugees (quite a few of them Kosovar) in London myself in the 90's.

Christian Focus Publications (in Scotland) has kindly taken it upon themselves to make this story available to the world, so stay tuned. It will be available in the UK (and on-line from them) in May, and everywhere else in June. It's been kind of a long wait, and so I've been kind of blase about it up to this point, but now that it actually looks like something, it seems for real.

There is probably some deep philosophical point and analogy that can be drawn from that, but we'll just leave it there for now.

Sweet Little Woodland Creatures

Last night I heard a fisher for the first time.

For those of you who don't know, a fisher (locally known as a "fisher cat," though all the on-line blurbs make sure to let you know this is a misnomer) is, essentially, a gigantic weasel with a rather sinister and ferocious reputation and an almost legendary scream. When people talk about fisher cats around here, you feel like they're telling a ghost story or something. The fact that almost no one ever sees them adds to the sense of horrifying mystery. I actually have seen one, or at least its silhouette; before I moved back into my parents' house, I lived in an apartment in a wooded area, and one night I saw one slollop across the road.

(I made up slollop. Say it out loud. And picture how a weasel walks. You'll know what it means.)

I only know one other person who has seen one, but I know plenty of people who have heard them, and they all say the same thing, "It's terrifying. It sounds like a baby screaming."

When the sound started last night, I was sitting in the Little Room painstakingly filling in a job application. I've been a nanny and I've also known cats, and at first the sound reminded me more of cats in heat than of babies. I don't know why none of the on-line definers don't posit this as one of the reasons people here call it a fisher cat. Whatever. Caterwauling isn't really that pleasant.

As the sound went on, it started to remind me of the two red foxes that used to run around the streets of East London near my house. Also a rather disarming noise. But it didn't stop there, either. The shrieking went on and on and on and on, and then it did start to sound like a baby. A very upset, demon-possessed baby. Sitting on the front step. Trying to get into the house.

I don't know that that's where the fisher actually was. Its cry was undeniably eerie and could have been coming from anywhere. But I didn't feel any better about the fact that the split second I stood up to see if I could see it anywhere, the cry stopped and never started up again. How did it know? Was it actually looking at me?

I went around the house and rechecked all the door locks, even though, as far as I am aware, fisher cats do not have keys.

Unpatriotic?

On Friday I made ghormeh sabzi for the first time. This is a Persian dish I have not had since I lived in London, mainly as all of my Persian friends still live in London. On Friday I decided that if I couldn't mooch any off anybody else, I could at the very least make it myself.

My mother quipped, "That's not very patriotic." I don't suppose I could really be considered overly patriotic, I'm afraid, although I certainly wasn't trying to make a political religious statement. So I continued chopping parsley.

I had pulled some meat out of the freezer the night before, and I cut that up and put it in the pot, only then realising that what I had thought it was beef was really pork. I don't think I know any Iranians--not even non-Muslim ones--who would put pork in ghormeh sabzi. I feel that I have now sufficiently flaunted the culture and nationality of two opposing countries, in which case, there shouldn't be a problem.

It tasted good anyway, by the way.

Traitor (to) Joe's

I like Trader Joe's. You know this. Ex-roommate-Sarah (who at the time was still Roommate-Sarah) got me into shopping there about six months ago, I guess. I like their food and their ambience, and their prices are usually not too bad, either. They also have some pre-made dinners which are not scary, taste good, and seem to be made of more or less healthy products.

And, of course, conversation with the people at the registers is always enlightening. A couple of weeks ago, I made friends with an older British chap, who was very personable and probably more chatty than the people behind me in line would have wished. He told me that his daughter recently tossed strawberries with balsamic vinegar, pepper, and sugar, and then put them on vanilla ice cream. According to him it was delicious. Being an avant garde eater, I tried it, and--what do you know?--he was right.

You can't really put a price tag on interactions like that.

But Price-Rite is just around the corner from where I work. Someone at church said, "You should go there. Their food's really cheap!" Probably less likely to be organic, though. Still, sometimes cheap is what I need the most. Not to mention right around the corner. Our closest Trader Joe's really is not that. So yesterday, as my section of the fridge was fresh out of everything, I went to Price-Rite.

Thus I discovered where all the non-European Americans go to do their grocery shopping. Or maybe, where very few of the European Americans go. Seriously--there are so few places I go in town, and they are always so overwhelmed with people of European stock, I'm sometimes not very sure there is anyone else in this city.

But at Price-Rite, I felt like I was back on Green Street. There may not have been much certifiably organic produce there, but there were multiple kinds of avocado, plantains and cooking bananas (there's a difference?), piles of mangoes, lychees, papaya, every "green" imaginable, and that was just the produce aisle. The bakery section boasted Jamaican sweetbread and things I had only ever seen on shelves in East London. The aisle of Goya products was extensive. (I also learned that I should be harvesting dandelions from my yard, because they were selling huge leaves of the stuff for 99 cents a bunch.)

The whole experience reminded me how much I miss a multi-cultural milieu. It's pretty easy to get used to being the majority ethnic group if you get the chance to be, and I am used to it, I'm reluctant to say. But the thing that I loved so much about East London was not being the majority.

I've had people accuse before me of trying to be part of a culture that I'm not. I guess that happens sometimes. Probably it's good for each of us to be secure in who we are within our birth cultures. But it's also possible, I think, to really thrive on crossing cultural barriers--and that can be just as much a part of "who I am" as the fact that I'm what is typically called "white" and that I'm from the United States. Or maybe moreso. Just because I'm likely to don a shalwar kameez or a sari for a Pakistani baby's first birthday doesn't mean I think I am Pakistani, or that I think I know anything about being Pakistani, even. But there are aspects of that culture that I like, and that I'm willing to investigate, try out, enjoy--and that enjoyment of those things is, I feel, in part what makes me, me.

I don't know what the Jamaican or Ghanaian or Indian or Puerto Rican subcultures of my city are really like--most particularly because I don't truly know any of their representatives, if anyone can truly be said to represent a group in that way. But it was kind of a relief to know that there are some, and to get myself into another environment for a change. Trader Joe's hasn't lost my business completely--but in spite of offering pretty decent attempts at world cuisine, there are some things they just don't offer. At least not in my neighbourhood.

Everyone Keeps Dying All Over the Place

Well. They do.

So far I still don't know what it's like to have family kidnapped and my entire community slaughtered. But some people do. Like Emmanuel, for instance.

Emmanuel and Jemima came to work for the group of churches I also worked for, just about a year before I left London. They're Rwandan. Emmanuel was a pastor, and he and his wife and children were not exempt from experiencing many of the atrocities that occurred in their home country. The faith they exhibited in the aftermath was inspiring, and the love was more inspiring still. Although they reached out to whomever God put in their path, they're heart's mission was to bring the reconciliation of Jesus to their fellow Rwandans, even though they were no longer in Rwanda. They never told whether they were Hutu or Tutsi. They never told anyone. "We belong to the Third Tribe," they said. "Jesus' tribe." They wanted everyone to belong to that tribe.

"Someone should write their story," I said, on probably more than one occasion. I never did anything about it, though.

Then Emmanuel contracted some sort of cancer. It was pretty sobering news to find out, so soon after leaving the scene. "Someone should write their story," I said. Emmanuel and Jemima and their adult children believed he would be healed, and truly, I didn't hear anything about the cancer anymore for a long time, so I thought maybe he had. You sort of lose touch with people after a while of not being in their presence regularly anymore.

Then this year, three years after the first diagnosis, my friend Jayne wrote and said that Emmanuel's cancer had become suddenly very aggressive.

"But someone needs to write their story!" I said. It hit me, then, that I had wasted a lot of time and opportunity. People are worth more than their stories, but their stories are always worth telling. Everybody has one. Over the last few months, as people I care about keep dying (Grandpa, Lloyd, Phillip), I've been realising with waxing and waning but quiet desperation that there are all these people around. And no matter how well you love them, you never quite love them enough, and you always take them a little bit for granted, and there are always things about them you never quite learn or know sufficiently, and most of the time you miss out on something.

Emmanuel died over the weekend.

I could still write Emmanuel and Jemima's story. I could talk to Jemima. Her side of the story is just as compelling as Emmanuel's and I would be remiss to discount it. I could talk to their children. I could talk to my London church family, who got to know them better than I. But the grief's too fresh now, and I don't know when it won't be. And in the meantime, I missed the opportunity to really sit down with this man of God and take down the story from his point of view.

I have a Rwandan outfit that Jemima bought me when we celebrated Emmanuel's induction into the service of our church in London. It's purple and beautiful. Maybe I'll wear it on Sunday.

Terms of Endearment

I've never dated anyone long enough to get to the phase where we start whispering sweet nothings to each other and all that gushy stuff. Even though I have this idea that such things might be kind of nice, I have another idea that it might take me a long time (in the event of going beyond, say, a second date) to be able to dish out or receive such comments with a straight face. This is probably because my personal experience of such terms and phrases has always come in the context of trading commodities.

When I lived in England, the shopkeepers in the off-licenses where I bought my Underground daypasses would call me "love," or sometimes "duck." Which was okay if it was a maternal-looking older woman, but not so okay if it was a rather dodgy-looking older man. Or a dodgy-looking younger man, either.

Nowadays, it's usually "hon," and I'm usually called that by females younger than I am, who are buying frappuccinos from me. I really hate the term "hon." I don't care who says it--how old they are, what gender they are, whether or not I know them--to me it always sounds condescending. And I really can't stand condescension. (I'm also unsure whether or not I can spell it. Can I?) But it's worst when the females-younger-than-I-am call me it.

The newest development in this area, though, is that these variously-aged male customers who have been coming to our store for a while are apparently suddenly feeling at ease, and have been adopting pet names for me (and probably everyone else). These are not the old guys who throw the word "sweetheart" around gratuitously. Nor are they guys whose names I actually know, with whom I have some camaraderie. They're just random familiar faces.

I had scarcely been back from Chicagoland a day when the guy who gets an iced venti hazelnut coffee called me "honey." Not "hon." Honey. Huh? Then today, two different men called me "dear." I think you'll agree that "dear" has different connotations than the much more casual and oft-used "darling." I'm feeling really confused. And a little bit, I might say, "sketched out."

I.D.

"Wow!" said Mary Ellen at church on Sunday. "Your eyes exactly match your jacket."

The jacket in question is sort of a sage green corduroy. I don't think Mary Ellen was including the corduroy aspect in her analysis. Then again, you never know, I guess.

"Really?" I said. "That's sort of cool. My eyes change colour, actually. Usually they're blue or grey."

"Ah," said her husband knowingly. "You have chameleon eyes."

Furthermore, although this was not included in our discussion that morning, my hair is of a shade typically described in Western literature as "mousy." It is that sort of unimpressive, nondescript brown which most white women would rather disguise with a tragic hair-dying accident than display in its original hue.

It was surprising to me, therefore, to discover that most of my Middle Eastern and South Asian friends in London experienced tragic hair-dying accidents in an attempt to get their hair just this colour. One day, in my first year living there, three Persian women, after oohing and ahhing over my hair, came to the consensus that its colour was "olive." To them, the term "olive" described the colour of the wood of the tree, and not of its fruit. I liked my hair better after that.

Perhaps the next time I set up a profile on another dating website, I shall announce that I have olive hair and chameleon eyes. Do you think it'll help?

Pieces of Eight

That's for all of us who are looking forward to Pirates 3 . . .

Someone ("namely," A Musing Mom, though I suspect that's not really her name) tagged me to list eight random things about me. I definitely can come up with more than eight random things about me, but I'm not sure I can come up with that many that you don't already know. Still, I'll try. Here's the rules I am constrained to list, having acquiesced to the meme:

• Post the rules of the game.
• Tell us about eight random facts/habits about you.
• At the end of the post, choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things.
• Leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are the eight things:

1. I play the flute with one of the worship teams at my church.

2. I have a false tooth, the original of which I lost at age seven while playing "Kitty and Doggy" with my then three-year-old brother. The tooth doesn't come out or anything, but you can tell it's there if I try to whiten my teeth; it doesn't cooperate with White Strips.

3. I have always taken seriously the oft-mocked warning, "You'll poke an eye out!" This is because, as a young girl, my grandmother actually did get her eye poked out while playing with some friends. (Maybe I mean "friends.") I have some really cool Grandma's-glass-eye stories, but they, I feel, are not germaine to this post. (I inherited the artificial-facial-feature trait from her.)

4. While in college I used, on a fairly regular basis, to climb out of the fifth floor window of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, inch along the ledge up there to the next window, shove it open, hoist myself in, and open up the attic door from the inside so my friends and I could play sardines and have surprise parties up there. During my senior year, Public Safety or someone put a metal grill over the window, and an alarm on the door.

5. Right before my high school graduation, the Edison Electrical Institute surprised me by awarding me $200 for a science fiction short story I had sent in to a contest of theirs and forgotten about.

6. My house in London had a bright yellow door with the number seven next to it. I didn't live in that house until I had been in London a year, but I visited some previous residents there on the first day I arrived in London, and knew upon entering that I loved that house and was going to live in it.

7. I can say "thank you" in eleven languages.

8. I have had fifteen roommates over the course of my life, including Roommate-Sarah, and her sister (who just moved in last month), Roommate-Rachel.

I'm feeling a little stymied as to who to tag, since almost everyone I know by blog has already been hit with this one. But here goes, and if you've already gotten this one--well, consider it retroactive tagging:

Christy, Cubicle Reverend, brother Dave (even though his blog doesn't lend itself to such memes), other Dave, the Item, Christianne, Jasdye, and Peacepipes. (Peacepipes, this, of course, means that you have to get a blog.)

Onions and Old Coffee

Last night at Pioneer Clubs, Mrs. P demonstrated to our four- and five-year-old boys that you can be aware of the presence of something even if you can't see it. One of the ways she did this was to blindfold them and have them smell certain odiferous items and guess what they were. One enthusiastic young lad asserted that he had "a nose like a bloodhound." He revised his comment later when he was unable to guess any of items while one of his friends guessed very well. Another little boy, clearly impressed by the simile regardless of its truth, kept saying at random, "He has a nose like a bloodhound!"

This was my first experience helping at Pioneer Clubs. There was a time when kids were the people I knew best. They were the ones I wanted to tell about Jesus. I worked at a daycamp for five summers during high school and college. I taught Sunday school in London. I tried to start a kid's club. I hung out with the children of my refugee friends. I had this lifelong idea that it would be great to work in an orphanage in Morocco or somewhere.

Then I moved back to the States and I was tired, and I said, "I'm done. No more of this taking care of other people's kids." There wasn't a really good reason for this. It was just how I felt at the time.

In our church, we have a children's sermon during the earlier of the two Sunday morning services. The children stampede to the front of the church so they can hear and see what's going on better. After they've left their seats, the church looks about half as full as it was to begin with. That's how many children attend our church. Recently it's been dawning on me that I don't really know any of these kids. And that I am the one being impoverished by this state of affairs. So even though I can't make it every week, I have decided to help out with Pioneer Clubs. If I even get to know five children, it will be better than my record of late.

Travelongings

The Mysterious Justin recently asked me the following question:

"If money & time were no object, where would you go? What would you do?"

It took me a while to figure this one out. Actually, I don't think I really did. But because I like to travel, I liked the question, and here, with some editing, are the general points I came up with:

If time and money were really no object and I could go anywhere and do anything, I would volunteer for a Christian aid organisation and bring humanitarian and spiritual goods and services to people around the world. That way I would get to see a lot of places, and help out in a good cause at the same time. I would tell you which organisations I am considering, but then I'd have to kill you. Oh, wait--that doesn't sound right.

Then, of course, there are the non-helping-people options. Not harming people, either, but just the things I was thinking about while trying to leave out the aid-aspect. I realised part of my trouble nailing down an answer to the question was because I've actually already been to all the places I would have been disappointed not to see if I died first.

Places on the tier below that ( i.e. places I'd love to visit if the opportunity allowed, but which won't make me feel unfulfilled if I don't) include Mongolia, Nepal, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Italy, Spain, and oh . . . maybe Kenya. I don't have an agenda for any of them, though. I mean, there are things you "just do" if you go to those places (Mongolia: look at yaks and ride wild horses--well, maybe they don't let tourists do the latter; Nepal: visit temples and ride elephants; Iran: try not to get blown up; Egypt: visit the pyramids; Morocco: um . . . what do you do in Morocco?; Italy: stay in a villa and drink wine; Spain: run with bulls; Kenya: go on safari), but there isn't anything out of the ordinary really--except that these things are all out of the ordinary.

Someday I would love to eat at a really posh restaurant and include a bottle of wine and all possible courses, but I wouldn't like to do that on a regular basis because I can think of all kinds of charitable organisations that I would rather spend the money on, and plus I actually have done that a couple of times--all of which were very enjoyable and memorable flukes. And also, you can do that without going anywhere exotic.

The thing is, I prefer community to tourism, and so I typically only visit places where I know people. This does have economic reasons, too, but I honestly think that even if I were independently wealthy, I would still want to travel to where I knew people, because I'd rather see how everyone actually lives in other places, than visit all the tourist hotspots. I heard some probably-19-year-old on the plane the other night talking about how her goal was to be all "worldly and well-traveled" and have a photo taken of her in every bar in every major city in Europe. Personally, I prefer being able to say things like, "I spent my 21st birthday stranded in a bungalow in central India during a monsoon." I like knowing a little about the different rules of etiquette that go with eating with one's fingers and how the rules change depending on the region of India that you're in. I like hanging out with the late-teens in the local pub in a Slovak village and letting them ask all manner of amazed questions when they find out from our mutual friend that, at age 27 (well, it was a while ago), I am a missionary but not a nun, and what do I believe anyway--and why on earth do I? I like walking down to a local non-Starbucks coffee shop in Santa Barbara and watching the morning rush and the kinds of people that are in there and feeling the city wake up.

The part of me that's at the forefront of my wanderlust says I would rather go back to a place I have already been, the top 3 being India, Turkey and of course London. Well, or maybe I'd trade Hungary for one of those. And if time and money were really no object, I'd not just go back to visit one of those places, but I'd try to relocate there.

The thing about second-tier tourist longings, however, is that they're probably worth pursuing, because you might find a country you just love which you would have missed otherwise. For example, I would never have known quite what "wild" means if I hadn't had a three-day layover in Iceland and soaked in the otherworldly scenery. And I never would have known that Budapest, Hungary, is one of my favourite cities in the world if I hadn't gone to visit friends there whom I had once known in London.

Anyway. Those are my thoughts on the question. What would you do?

Melange

This last weekend was, I realised, a surreal mix of my whole life. Well, minus the Latin American part, I guess, although the cute young restaurant host was Latino. It's not really the same context, though . . .

There I was, being reminded (accurately or not) of London all over the place, what with shopping and multiculturalism and the wedding reception of the couple whom Christy of DryBonesDance calls, "the fabulous Kathy . . . and Adam." Adam is British, and so, naturally, is his family, and so, naturally, are their accents. Plus there were photos of their wedding in London . . .

Christy of DryBonesDance was actually at this reception, too. So was MarciaMarciaMarcia. And Kathy and I don't know each other by virtue of London. We know each other because she was my roommate once and my suitemate before that. All of these are friends from college. And some of us have the connexion of the same missionary organisation in our pasts or present. Christy keeps turning up delightfully at random points in my life. She probably doesn't remember all the times, but I think I've run into her every time my life changes course, except for the brief time I lived in Denver. I wonder if seeing her over the weekend is to make up for not seeing her during that transition, or if I should be keeping my eyes open for a new one.

That night I stayed at Starbucks-Stephanie's, who recently moved with to Santa Barbara with her boyfriend Mathias, and the next day Starbucks-Jerry and Starbucks-Kristin (who also moved out west within the last year) picked me up and brought me back to LA.

The whole thing left me feeling somewhat dizzy. My worlds do not normally converge in quite this way. Although I guess if they were going to, Southern California is as good a place as any. Even when it rains, which it did for two days. Kathy's father said that with guests coming in from the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, and London, we didn't really have a chance. He's right, I'd say.

But in any case, I enjoyed myself, and I would like to take this opportunity to say--thanks, guys (as in, all you people I've mentioned over the past four posts or so)! It was a fun weekend.