Tag: memories

Posted in Living this Life

That old car

Posted on by Sara

I was just running errands.

I was on my way from Walmart to Taco Bell, to be precise. My Taco Bell lunch order was set, the boys were waiting at home, and I just needed to swing through the drive through, pick up their grilled cheese burritos and be on my way.

But my boys never got their grilled cheese burriots. I never made it to Taco Bell. I ended up screeching over the sidewalk and coming face to face with our Scooter’s sign instead. I didn’t expect my day to go this way when that guy turned into my vehicle as I was just cruising on down main street. I was unhurt – and the Scooter sign was unharmed as well. All in all – it could have been much worse.

But the car … that old car that has carried us more miles than I can count. That old car was not fine. This story isn’t really about someone hitting me while I was on my way to Taco Bell. This story is about that old car.

That 23 year old car with 265,000 miles on it. When we got the call from the insurance company that they were totalling the vehicle, we weren’t surprised.

A couple days later, as we went to clean it out so they could haul it away, I found myself unexpectedly tearful. We grew up in that car – our life as a family was built in that car … and it may just be earth-stuff, but it held alot of memories.

In those heart palpitating moments following the discovery that I was carrying our first child … we realized we needed a “family car”- one that would be safe, dependable, and have room for all the gear that comes with children. A “grown up” car. This was it – and we were elated when we found it.

Each of our 3 children came home from the hospital in this car when they were born. I think of that holy space – filled with such awe, wonder, terror, curiosity, insecurity… and all the times God came through in their lives (and ours).

While cleaning out the car one last time, I found this petrified chicken nugget under a seat and chuckled as I thought of all those drives throughout this country and the rich memories, sibling squabbles, loud music, Veggietale videos, and answered prayers that we experienced while fueled by chicken nuggets and coffee.

There’s the armrest my restless son peeled away on one of those drives that would never end..

There’s our 2015 parking pass for our favorite amusement park – a place that has been a thread of continuity in our lives since before we were married..

There’s the spot under our car that got ripped up by a stray “rez dog” when we lived in Arizona – his nick name “Butcher the meat eater” fit him well, and one day he decided to see what “meat” he could find tucked in that space under our car. (it may have had something to do with a bird we hit earlier that day … I can’t blame him that much, after all)

Then I see this – the sticker that has marked our family for decades: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”… and I marvel at the over-arching banner of the goodness of God.

Because the whole time I’m going through this beautiful old car, the song on repeat in my head declares this truth: “all my life you have been faithful. All my life you have been so, so good. With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God”.

Let’s be honest – not everything feels good. In the midst of all the beautiful memories also came the flood of those tearful, fearful moments. There was the drive home from the doctor’s visit where we were told that our baby (in utero) had “anomolies” and they didn’t have answers for his future (or ours).

There was the day after he was born when we were told he would need surgery at 3 days old – and we had decisons to make that we didn’t know how to make. We retreated to the only safe and familiar space we knew – this car – and we sat and cried out to God for help.

There was the late night race to the hospital while holding my son years later while he was in respiratory distress and having a seizure… crying out again to God for his life.

There were long drives in painful silence – so filled with anxiety and confusion and discouragement that we didn’t even know how to talk to each other. Looking back, I see how God was there in the middle, holding each of us together – even when we couldn’t see it at the time.

As I write the words, the memories keep flooding, piling up on each other like a torrent. I won’t take you down every trail with me, as I think we all have more to do with our day than just camp in my memories. But my eyes fill with tears as I sit here in wonder.

Yesterday I read these words in God’s Book:

“In a desert land He found him,
    in a barren and howling waste.
He shielded him and cared for him;
    He guarded him as the apple of His eye,
like an eagle that stirs up its nest
    and hovers over its young,
that spreads its wings to catch them
    and carries them aloft.
The Lord alone led him…” Deuteronomy 32:10-12

I was sad to say goodbye to this old car – but more than that, I was overwhelmed by the story it told.

It is a story of God’s faithfulness in the joyful, victorious times, and in the darkest and discouraging days. As I walked through the memories and all the changing seasons of our life as a family, I found myself in that moment seeing and savoring the truth that our God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)

It’s just an old car. It may just be earth-stuff. But it held alot of memories. And those memories matter. They are our “stones of remembrance” on which God writes His story in our lives. In his final address to the people of Israel, Moses entreats them to “be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.” (Deuteronmy 4:9)

Maybe today is the day to walk down memory lane a bit. Rejoice and laugh over the beautiful, the silly, the unexpected … and even in the sorrows and the tears, remember how your God has walked with you. How He has found you in the wilderness, and guarded you as the apple of His eye.

And I return to the song as I head into the rest of this day: “All my life you have been faithful. All my life you have been so, so good. With every breath that I am able – I will sing of the goodness of God”

Posted in Living this Life

the e-mail

Posted on by Sara

I could tell by the subject line that I didn’t want to open the e-mail.

Yet, I knew by the subject line that I just had to open the e-mail and read the words I didn’t want to read.

It was true. Another place closing. Another place that I love – gone.

Thing is, this isn’t just another place. I drove by one of my favorite restaurants the other day and saw the for sale sign. That was a bummer. This was different. This hit deep, and I suddenly didn’t know how to process it.

It’s one of those places that I have never been able to get out of my soul. One of the first places I understood the word “home”. In a life of feeling perpetually out of place, this was a place that welcomed misfits like me and gave us a sense of belonging.

It was my sophomore year of college – that summer when I walked through the doors of a The Shelter, a youth hostel in the middle of the city of Amsterdam on the edge of the red light district.

I had no idea God would forever change the trajectory of my life that summer. That He would show me who I was created to be and that I would never be satisfied settling for anything else.

I went back after college and spent a year in those walls – eager to learn, eager to meet people from around the world, eager to share my Jesus with them. God used that place to forever alter my life.

You may say it’s just a building surrounded by a multitude of other buildings. But it was on that rooftop I would pace when I felt my world crumbling around me – I would pace back and forth – praying and pleading with God for His Truth.

It was in that dining room where I would eat with people from around the world – Laughing, singing, talking, doing life together.

It was in that kitchen where I learned to make Moussaka and Boerenkool. But it’s really the place I learned that the simple act of spending a day cutting onions and peeling mounds of potatoes can carve out quiet places to let the Spirit in.

It was in that snack bar where I would discuss the beauty of my Jesus with a Spanish traveler who had just from a Tibetan monastery. Where I would pore over the Scriptures and rest in the peace of the Psalms with my friend Jess, a gay prostitute who was desperately hungry for balm for a hurting soul.

It’s where I learned not to fear the questions – for if you keep looking you will find the Truth. It just takes a lot of courage to face the real questions and a lot of persistence to uncover the answers. It’s where I saw that we aren’t really all that different under the surface – where a smile has the power to transcend all cultural, racial, and political differences. And sometimes when trying to register a group of 20 travelers who don’t speak English, a smile is all you have.

It’s where I learned to love shoarma and frites with mayo. And I learned the value of knowing how to ask for coffee with whipped cream in Dutch (Koffie met slagroom, alstublieft)

So I read the e-mail, and as the truth soaked in that they were having to close their doors due to the current condition of our world, the tears started to fall. Not just for all the faces I saw, the people I had come to love, the memories I cherished… I wept for the loss of a place to return to.

Oh how the heart longs to remember what fades so quickly! How often we long to return to places that matter because they remind us of who we were. More importantly, of who God is and what He has done. And I don’t have many of those places…

Growing up in the jungles of Africa was an unmitigated blessing and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But my home no longer exists – the ravages of war destroyed my childhood village many years ago, and I will never be able to take my family to the place I grew up. I can show them the country as it is, but it will forever be a different place than the home I knew.

So all these years, my heart has clung to this special place on the edge of the red light district in Amsterdam. I longed for the day I could show my family the place where God changed the course of my life. Where I learned how real He truly is and discovered that He really will catch us when the world crumbles around us. I have walked through those old hallways with my family so many times in my mind – just waiting for the day it could become reality.

And I wept for the loss of that opportunity.

God has placed eternity in the heart of man (Ecclesiastes 3:11) – and yet we try to fit this small earth around that. We grasp for the ideal of an unchangeable good – a place where our hearts feel safe. But buildings crumble and heroes let us down.. What do we do then? Construct new idols? New mirages of control or illusions of contentment? Or do we reject the stuff of earth and place all our hope firmly and only on heaven?

We’ve all experienced loss this year. And I know my story is light compared to the life changing loss many have endured. But we all share this one thing – longings for something we may not be able to return to. It comes out in grief, sorrow, rage, cynicism, depression… and I wonder – what do we do with all these feelings?

When the longings start and we are torn between what is and our nostalgic memory of what was … we often think we have to choose between the two. Instead of rushing past the callback, why don’t we linger a couple more minutes and let it bloom into something of beauty? What if we’re experiencing a foretaste, a promise, a shadow of what is to come? In His moments of greatest agony on earth, Jesus looked to the “joy set before Him”. (Hebrews 12:2)

Do you see it? Can you smell it? The welcoming notes of the fresh baked bread? The delicate aroma of flowers we have yet to discover? We blush and call it childish nostalgia – but could it be so much more?

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves… These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” CS Lewis

So today i don’t think I’m going to wipe these tears away too quickly. I think instead I’ll try to just rest in the magic of the mystery. To let the ache in my heart intensify my longing for heaven – that great unending good that will never be taken from us. That we will never outgrow, move away from, or lose. This is the gift.

“For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” Hebrews 13:14

Posted in Living this Life

The scent of a flower we have not found

Posted on by Sara

I had that dream again. It’s never the same, but the location is. I guess some places are so tied to our emotions in a visceral way that we can’t shake ourselves free of them.

amsterdam street 2

In my dream, I’m back in Amsterdam … I don’t remember all the details, but I always wake up with that aching sense of homesickness. I call it homesickness – I think the proper word might be nostalgia. Bittersweet nostalgia – pulled to the surface by the adventures we’ve had these past weeks.

Over the last week, I have walked down trails of remembrance with my family. It started at the ocean. Walking down the boards, my husband told us stories of when he was younger and the memories carved into that beach. We re-lived his memories and made new ones along the way.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We worshiped at the church he grew up in, hugged and kissed faces that had watched him become the man he is today. We saw old schools, drove by old banks and post offices, and ate way too much pizza. We drove by the beach where he learned to swim, and saw the brick steps of his old house, where a 6 year old Brad sat with his mom and asked Jesus to be Lord of his life.

IMG_3185

It was beautiful and fun. I love hearing the stories that come when we are in these special kind of places. And yet in the quiet moments, I found myself feeling an ache creep across my soul.

An ache for my own memories. My dreams bring me back to Amsterdam, but there are other places. Ones that pull at my heart even stronger. They live on only in my mind … changed forever by the ravages of war. Places I haven’t seen since I was 14 – places I can never return to.

me and monkeyThere are foods I try to describe to my children, but the words don’t exist to really capture the sense. It would be impossible to find a way for someone to feel the sticky wet air of Africa, the smells that fill your senses, the noises that are so rich – and yet it’s all so different. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are accurate – it’s been so long. How my heart longs to walk those red dirt roads one more time, to experience the wild cacophony and colors of the Liberian marketplace!

lbr-market

BooyaIMG_0146

Nostalgia is a strange beast. It seems to always be there, waiting for the right trigger to explode in your heart. But like an itch you can’t reach, it’s an ache that can’t be filled. So what do we do with these strange longings that surface and call our hearts to other times and places?

I wonder if this is what Ecclesiastes 3:11 means when it says that God has “set eternity in the heart of man”. One version says He has planted eternity in our hearts – like a seed that grows ever bigger, beckoning us to another time and place. We think it’s a longing for the past, when in reality it’s a longing for our future home. Our longing for heaven, for that one good that will never end, is wrapped up in these exquisite remembrances, carrying so much joy and pain in the same breath.

In 1 Chronicles we read that our days on earth are like a shadow – A shadow is but a distorted reflection of what is real. We are filled with this sense that this life is all so fleeting, but someday we will live in what is real and will never be lost. And so we call it names like nostalgia, and we long for the “good old days” when life was simpler.

C. S. Lewis puts it so much better, of course. “Apparently,” he says, “our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”

Keep reading! He says, “In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves… If [we go] back to those moments in the past, [we] would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what [we] remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering… These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

When the pangs hit my heart, I think of what is to come. And I marvel that when Jesus said He was going to prepare a place for us, He meant it – a home that will never end, a safety that cannot be taken from us, an eternity that won’t rust or fade.

It leaves me hungry for heaven. How about you?