Tag: Belonging

The City Within My Chest

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Yesterday, my friend Robynn shared a compelling video with me. The video was of Enrique Garcia Naranjo retelling a story about being stopped by border patrol. Before he gets into the actual story, he set the stage of where he was prior to the incident. He was speaking to a group of high school students in Douglas, Arizona, reciting a poem he had written about his life, describing his “barrio, the holiness of tacos, and the unrelenting spirit of Mexican grandmothers.” He describes the students as people between languages and cultures, as people of the border. At the end of his poem, he told them to get out pens, pencils, and paper and gave them a prompt. He asked them to write about “the city within my chest.”

The prompt deeply resonated with me, and I began pondering the physical missing of places, how sometimes it feels like they literally live within our chests. There is a heaviness to missing places and people, a heaviness of homesickness, a burden defying description. The weight of absence moves from our chests upward, constricting our throats, upward again to a burning in our eyes. Tears come unchecked, seemingly out of nowhere. Such is the power of place.

What city is within your chest? What place is within your chest?

Is it a city from your childhood, a place you’ve never been able to return? Is it the place where you first felt the security of belonging and love? Is it a farm where long summer days had you in bare feet, grass tickling your toes as you ate watermelon without a thought to the privilege and burden of belonging? Is it a beach town where you woke to the sound of the ocean crashing on the shore? Is it a town that kept you safe and secure in the knowledge that you held an undefinable “membership” that wasn’t because of anything you did or didn’t do, but just because you existed?

If you were to write about these places, how would you describe them? What would you choose to bring people into your memory of food and grandmothers? Would it be the pure joy of curry and chapatis as you break out in a sweat from the spices? Would you describe the resilience of boarding school people? Would it be about the grandmother who took your hand when you were young, and prayed you through life when you were older? Would it be about the rushing glory of rivers and forests and the massive snow-capped mountains in the distance, or the crowded spaces of public buses as you join a community of escapees from the cold winter days in a city, the bus driver smiling in empathy as you hop on? Would it be a park where you watch the seasons come and go? Would it be about mountains calling you and long hikes on crisp spring days?

On Sunday afternoons, I carry places and people within my chest. The morning’s liturgical joy gives way to a deep melancholy, particularly when the sky is grey. Staying fully present and focused is a struggle and it is easy to have my mind travel to places far away where I hung my heart, places that are now carried within my chest. My mind goes to Cairo and Karachi, Erbil and Ranya. I carry the sights and sounds of places that will never leave me, the call to prayer, the street vendors selling molasses and bananas on the road below my fourth-floor apartment, the smell of bread baking at dusk, the sunset’s burnished gold and deep pink- benedictions to my days, and the people still there that continue to mark these places on my heart.

In truth, I’ve come to be grateful for these times. They are reminders of the richness of my life, reminders of the gifts that these cities and places gave me. As I surrender to the melancholy, I find comfort. Surrender comes easier with chocolate and a cup of strong, sweet, milky tea. Revisiting memories through photographs that remind me of these lives I lived before are also gifts to accepting the pensive sadness of missing. I’ve learned that surrender can make me stronger, resolute in my desire to make each place count and committed to living well in the present.

To all of us border people, living between the here and there, the now and not yet, the familiar and the foreign, may we carry our places within our hearts and be the richer for it.

“Always border people – caught between citizen and alien, silence and disruption, here and there.”

Enrique Garcia Naranjo

Baby Showers and Belonging

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My younger daughter is having a baby! We have known for months, but as is usual in this space, I don’t often share specifics about my children. As people who were initially formed in my womb, I don’t go a day without thinking and praying for my adult children multiple times, but I created an unwritten rule for myself a while ago that I would not share my children’s stories. Some of them involve me, some don’t, but either way, there is a sweet, humbling, and critical connection with adult children that must not be severed by any writing ego.

But today’s thoughts are bigger than Stefanie or me, or the beautiful new life that is every day changing inside her.

Yesterday I had the honor of hosting her baby shower. The walls of our small city house expanded to fit two distinct generations of women – my generation and Stefanie’s generation. It was a brilliant, beautiful mix of wisdom and exuberance, of sweet naivete and humorous reality, of skin free of wrinkles and age spots and skin that is marked by time, of bodies that have set into older maturity even as we try to cajole them into something less squishy and young bodies that bounce back from childbirth like Winnie the Pooh’s Tigger.

Because we know her baby is a girl, every one of us opted to go against the trend of genderless beings by reveling in ruffles and pink, bows and the sweetest little socks and shoes imaginable. Why are little girls’ clothes so much cuter than little boys, I ask you?

The food was a an equally beautiful mixture of savory and sweet with chicken salad, hummus, cheeses and dips sharing space with thick, chewy brownies made by Stef’s husband Will’s Aunt Carol, and the most beautiful lemon, raspberry layer cake with the inscription “April showers for a May Flower.”

Beyond the surface was a reality for Stef and Will: they are deeply loved. They have people who surround them with love and appreciation for who they are and what they will bring to this little baby’s life. Over and over, friends and family spoke of the combination of exuberance, kindness, love of life and love of sports that they will bring to their little girl. I loved reconnecting with, as well as meeting for the first time some of Stef’s girlfriends as they surrounded her with beauty and love, as well as a good deal of laughter for her sense of drama and her husband’s calm. They are in the delightful stages of early marriage, pregnancy and forming families of their own. There was an unspoken sense of belonging and security that I could see in my girl, belonging and security that she will be tasked with bringing to the baby that is coming.

Like so many of us third culture kid mamas, I often feel guilt and sadness for the way I have moved my children from the proverbial “pillar to post.” They have picked up and moved multiple times, leaving behind the tangible in dolls, books, dollhouses, Playmobil, friends, schools and more, as well as the intangible gifts of belonging and security that we get when we love a place and people within that place. We moved Stefanie to this area in the middle of her sophomore year of high school. She exchanged the sun of Arizona for the worst winter the Northeast had seen in five years. Thinking back, I feel a bit ambiguous about that decision. But then I think about yesterday and the circle of love that surrounded this couple. Had we not moved, yesterday’s event would not have taken place. I felt the goodness of God in the land of the living, the goodness of God in giving Stef, Will, and their baby a place to come home to and place to share with others.

The cynical may push away the idea of things like baby showers, opting instead for Amazon deliveries to bring the essentials to our doors, but these events are perhaps more important than we realize. In life we need markers and milestones, times of stepping back to welcome a new stage or event, times of being surrounded with belonging and realizing what we have. In a fractured world, it becomes even more important to know that there are places where we belong. Perhaps baby showers are one place that can be, not about gifts or cake, savory and sweet, but about publicly announcing that a new stage of life is coming and that a baby is entering a world where she belongs.

Something is Always Leading Us Home

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The window of our plane showed a grey sky and light rain, leading me to sigh inwardly. We had just arrived in Boston after six days in Savannah, Georgia. The weather in Savannah could be described as – well, perfect. Light breeze, no humidity, and between 65 and 70 degrees every day. The old oak trees that are quintessential Savannah were magnificent, their Spanish moss (which we found out was neither Spanish nor moss) gracefully draped across branches.

Coming home to a place where your body and soul don’t always feel like they belong can be a challenge. When I look out the window as I fly into Boston’s Logan International Airport, I think ‘why are there so many trees?’ It is a disconcerting feeling, a sense of alienation instead of belonging. As I make my way through the airport to ground transportation, I go into another space between – that space between the airport and the home we have made in Boston. I walk through the chain-link gate of our small city house and through the door. I know from experience that I have to immediately do something tangible, something concrete that says to me “You’re home. Rest. Breathe.” Sometimes it’s arranging flowers, other times it’s baking bread, still other times it is just getting unpacked as quickly as possible and removing suitcases from view. Once I have done that, my soul begins to settle – at least for a time.

What I have come to know is that my struggle for home is not unique. I have also come to a greater understanding of a spiritual reality that I have known since I was a small child, but that has grown in its theological significance through the years. And that is that no matter what home I have or find here on this earth, there will always be something leading me farther up and farther in, something always leading me to my true home.

Heimat is a German word with no English equivalent. It is described as “the first ‘territory’ that can offer identity, stimulation and safety for one’s own existence” and can only be found “within the trinity of community, space and tradition; because only there human desires for identity, safety and an active designing of life can be pleased.” I think that the only humans who ever truly experienced heimat are Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, that perfect place designed by God for his creation. Only in that space was a perfect trinity possible. In a broken world something always disrupts the trinity of community, space and tradition.

Our entire lives can be taken up with the quest for home, the longing for home. And yet, once we think we have found it, something interferes with the perfect trinity we think we have and we find there is something more.

Something is always leading us home. I thought about this as I watched my mom enter her final journey this past fall. Her yearning for home was both spoken and unspoken, a longing fulfilled on a cold November night as her breath stopped, and she entered eternity.

My mom’s longings find an echo in my own heart and soul, a poignant reminder that throughout life’s transitions, moves, stages, and travels something perennially leads us home, not to a physical shelter but to a place of secure identity and complete belonging. My inward sigh is replaced by the deep comfort of knowing that this longing is woven throughout the human story, ultimately guiding us toward that place where the trinity of community, space, and tradition are perfectly restored in the presence of God.

Finding Place

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The city of Boston is ushering in the day, traffic winding its way through the labyrinth of streets and tunnels that make up the city. To the left of the Bunker Hill Monument, the sun rises over the Atlantic Ocean, shades of pink, orange, yellow, and red casting joyful reflections on steel and glass plated buildings. Snow is on the rooftops, a bright white contrasting with the colors of sunrise.

I know these streets and I know this neighborhood. It may seem odd to say this with the sort of pride I feel, but knowing these streets is a hard-earned achievement. I’ve lived here for four years, and this section of Boston has become home. I know its rhythm, the bells tolling on the hour at Saint Francis de Sales Parish across the street with Christmas Carols during Christmas Tide, Easter hymns during Easter, and God Bless America and Amazing Grace in between. I know the schedule of the 93 bus as it stops outside our house throughout the day, its automated “Route 93 service to downtown Boston,” echoing in the early morning hours. Best of all, I know all of my neighbors and some of their extended families. We are sometimes known as the Clarken Court Troublemakers Guild, a title I couldn’t be prouder to belong to.

Those of us who have lived in multiple countries and places are keenly aware that discovering and learning to find your way through streets, alleys, buildings, and businesses in your neighborhood is a wonderful thing. To turn right or left, knowing that even if you take a wrong turn, you can find your way back to the road you were on is an accomplishment worthy of recognizing. It’s all about finding place.

Perhaps also this is the first step in learning to love a place – knowing its streets and buildings, becoming familiar with the tempo of the place, what makes it move and live, what gives it life and personality. Knowing that if you get lost or take a wrong turn, you can always find your way back home.

Finding place isn’t always about instant love. More often, it’s about living life day in and day out, living through the things that make you want to give up and the things that make you want to live forever. Knowing that you can point someplace and say things like “I remember when we went there! We were with so and so and we laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe!” “That restaurant closed? That is so sad! We loved that place.” “Remember when the Martinelli family lived there? It was such a happy house!”

And then one day, when you least expect it, you realize that you’ve found a place, a place for you. A place that you have learned to love, and it has loved you back. You know it is not permanent, for nothing ever is, but that doesn’t stop you from settling and calling it home. With some fear and hesitancy, you hang your heart and as you hang it, you breathe a sigh of wistful longing and settled peace. Your global soul has found another place to call home.

Identity as Performance or Participation

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September in the Northeast is a month of warm days, cooler nights, and the lingering magic of summer. The last several evenings we have spent at the ocean, taking long walks during low tide, reveling in the wide-open expanse of beach where those of us fortunate enough, get to stay far longer and later than tourists who have left for homes farther away. It is glorious. There is no other word for the beauty, the rhythmic sound of waves against the rocks and sand, and the light and shadows dancing across the ocean front. “We are so fortunate,” we keep on saying to each other and to strangers with whom we exchange a few words before continuing on our way.

During these last restful, stress-free days I’ve thought a lot about identity. This is not something that would surprise any of you who are familiar with my writing. Identity and belonging and processing those two big ideas and concepts and how they work themselves out in our everyday lives have been a huge part of my child and adulthood. The lonely privilege of living between creates an identity crisis at different points in life, where you struggle to know who you are, and to where and whom you belong. As I’ve written publicly, I have met many others who are on the same journey. Since early in life, many of us have been exposed to diverse cultures and languages; to many different patterns of living and ways of being in the world. Along with this, we live in a world where it is possible to spend a large amount of time curating and cultivating an image for public consumption – performing for a crowd of strangers as it were.

I was recently listening to a talk given by Jonathan Pageau called The Role of Art in Identity. The talk was given at Princeton Theological Seminary for a conference hosted by the Scala Foundation. If you are not familiar with either Pageau or with the Scala Foundation, they are well worth checking out through following the links. They are not, however, the focus of my thoughts here, rather they are the inspiration for wanting to think about identity in this way.

There were many points made by Pageau in the talk, but what stood out to me in particular was the idea that identity and art can be either about performance or participation. This point hit me deeply and I’m searching to figure out why. As I search, I think I am finding some answers. As I listened to the talk, for the first time I felt I had words to describe my discomfort in curating a public image in the way that social media pressures us to do. Too often it is all about performance. Instead of being able to participate in connection and conversation, there is a pressure to perform with the performance directed at people who are strangers, people I don’t know who I subconsciously want to impress. When I fall prey to this, I act and write in ways that are inconsistent with who I profess to be, inconsistent with the loves I have and the values I claim to hold dear. Just writing it makes me see the craziness of it, and yet I don’t think I’m alone in this identity as performance problem.

As I contrast different forms of social media and the pressure I may feel to conform to them, I also search for places where I know my identity is not about performance. One such place is in my Orthodox community where the focus is on the Eucharist and our striving towards Christ and another is here, on this blog.

Early on I think I had conflicting motivations about writing. On the one hand I wanted to become a better writer and to participate in life with others through my words. On the other hand, I found myself drawn to performance, drawn to getting attention through this medium. But at some point, my writing changed. It changed slowly, imperceptibly, but profoundly. It became about the connections I was making. It became about the emails that I received from strangers and friends telling me that they knew exactly what I was talking about. That I had put into words that which they were feeling.

What a profound privilege! Almost every time I wrote, I would hear from someone whose heart resonated with what I was writing. The words and descriptions that I used to convey what I was thinking and feeling became avenues of connection.

This has continued through my writing process. Instead of being left with the hollow reward of likes and shares, I am continually offered an invitation to hear the heart of someone who has read and relates with my words. I contrast that beautiful sense of connection to other times when I am glued to social media and envy floods my soul because someone (often a stranger) I follow is performing better than I am. Someone got a book deal that has me filled with jealousy. Someone is gaining followers and accolades, and I am left wanting. And this I know: Performance will always leave me wanting.

Identity then can be a way of experiencing continuity and community, or it can be fragmented, exposed and vulnerable to whatever performance is popular at the moment. If my identity is about performance, then it changes by the day, sometimes by the minute, depending on who I want to please and on what I desire. The opposite of that comes when I see my identity connected to my interactions with others and my participation within a community. In other words – identity as participation.

Maybe that is why so many third culture kids who are raised in cultures where value is placed on community and collectivist thinking find it difficult to adjust to their passport countries where their identities are suddenly reduced to something as boring as their individual likes and dislikes, desires and wants. But that loaded topic is for another day!

I know I will be thinking (and perhaps writing) more about identity as participation, but for now I am grateful to be in a place where I know what performance looks like because I have experienced the opposite. For I have discovered great peace through writing, and through connection to my faith community and my Creator. I am growing to love the author of my story far more than the story itself, and that is making all the difference.

What about you? Have you ever thought of identity as being about performance or participation? I would love to hear from you in this space or through messages!

Saturday Musings on a Sunday Afternoon

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I’m deep in Saturday musings at a coffee shop, wondering what I’m doing coming on a Saturday, that time when tourists flock to the two coffee shops that Rockport has to serve thousands of customers. From one point of view, it is a depressing look at our society. Crowds waiting in a line that stretches out the door for coffee, food, donuts, and Norwegian coffee bread. I learned they are out of the Norwegian coffee bread some time ago. Since that time, every customer has wanted it and every customer has been disappointed. In their defense, everyone is patient. They are mostly on vacation and there are no emails to write, meetings to attend, or deals to broker.

I think perhaps I’m the depressing one – perhaps I’m the one who, alone, waits in line deeply envious of the groups that are here, wishing I was in one of them as I have been so many times before. Instead, I’m alone – my kids all over the world busy with lives that have their own joys and complications. Perhaps I’m the only one that feels the overwhelming sense of consumerism and the great American pastime of waiting in lines, whether it be in late July in a tourist town or on Black Friday at a Walmart. Perhaps I’m the only one in the coffee shop who feels the loneliness that one sometimes feels in a crowd.

Experience tells me I am wrong about being the only one. My head knows that inside every coffee shop or other public space there are the lonely, the angry, the happy, the disappointed, and the apathetic. Amidst the crowds of happy vacation goers, I am not alone in this place. That’s what my head says. I will it to go from my head to my heart. In truth, I’m not in a great place. I’m angry at small things, I am restless, I want to run oh so far away. I want to know that my life will get better. I am off track spiritually, physically, and emotionally. The only thing going well is my work.

When I was younger, I would blame these times of being off track on my “between worlds” status. How could I possibly be on track when I was living so far from where I belonged? Like so many of us, I learned the hard way that you can be in your favorite place on earth and still get completely off track. You can lose your physical and metaphorical way anywhere in the world.

How does one “get back on track?” How does one move through the world in gracious acceptance and gratitude when one is off track? Even as I write this, I know there are many good examples of this. There are so many who walk tall, accepting each day as it comes despite pain, sorrow, difficult circumstances and more.

Part of it is just discipline and pressing forward. So much of this is a choice. Choosing acceptance. Choosing good. Choosing hope. Choosing to walk in faith.

Today I have a choice. I choose to walk tall. I choose to relax when I can, to rest when I can, to seek help when I need, to breathe in ocean air and walk on sandy beaches or navigate busy city streets and impatient drivers, to take in blue sky and a horizon that stretches to infinity or a horizon that stretches to the next building, to read the Gospel lesson of the day, to pray in faith that there is one who listens, to read and listen to words of others that remind me of a world beyond this. A world beyond trauma and pain, a world beyond tears and bruises, a world beyond conflict and wars, a world beyond restless longing and anger at the small things, a world beyond huge crowds in small coffee shops on a Saturday morning. A world beyond, where tears are captured in a bottle and then they will be no more.

Longing for Places Beyond

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Ahwatukee is an area of Phoenix that backs up to South Mountain. Some jokingly call it the “world’s largest cul-de-sac,” and they aren’t wrong. If you get lost in the depths of Ahwatukee on a street with the word “desert” in the name, you could drive around for hours. Large cul-de-sac aside, it is a beautiful area of Phoenix. Rose and clay-colored homes back up to hillsides and large bushes of fuchsia, coral, and red bougainvillea provide bright pops of color.

We lived in Ahwatukee during our years in Phoenix and it was a good place for us. We left the cold of the Northeast behind us for a few years, trading hot tea in winter months for cold smoothies, and boots for sandals most of the year.

One way of getting to our house was by way of a hill. The top of the hill provided breathtaking views of the valley below. While daytime views were beautiful, it was that time of twilight, when the sun is setting and all the world is magic, that offered beyond this world beauty. It was indescribable. Fiery shades of coral, purple, red, blue, green, and yellow brought colors of an ever-present Phoenix sun going down and making its way to the other side of the world. I would always hope that a car was not behind me while I was driving so that I could take extra minutes to inhale the view and all the feelings it evoked. I longed for that feeling to continue as I drove away, even as I knew it couldn’t, knew that all would grow dim as darkness consumed the fiery beauty.

While longing is a good adjective for what I felt during those moments, it didn’t, and it doesn’t describe the depth of my feeling. It was this week that I discovered a word that gives an explosion to the longing I would feel in those moments. It’s a much-needed word in a world where our own language so often fails us. The word is “sehnsucht” – a German noun loosely translated as longing, desire, yearning or craving. One writer described it as an “inconsolable yearning or wistful longing for something one cannot explain or does not know.” The word is also used to mean thoughts and feelings about life or experiences that are incomplete while what is longed for is an experience that one can hold on to, one that will last forever. This, then, is what I experienced during those moments on the hilltop.

As often happens when I discover a word, I began to see this word everywhere. From articles to books, I found others who wrote about and experienced this reality.

If saudade is one of the perfect words for third culture kids to give voice to their experiences and longings, then sehnsucht is another. Saudade emphasizes the longing for what no longer exists. We experienced something and long for it, even as we know it doesn’t and cannot still exist. The people are gone, and the places have changed. Nostalgia is another word where the Greek words of return and suffering combine to create a word that has the essence of suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. As we come to peace with our saudade and our nostalgia, sehnsucht emerges as a word that brings life to the indescribable longing that we feel within and outside of our passport countries, a yearning for places beyond our current reality, for places we’ve actually never been and that don’t exist on this earth.

Author CS Lewis seems to understand this when he writes “Apparently, then, 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.” [The Weight of Glory]

Many might feel sadness that “inconsolable yearning” is at the heart of this word. I do not. I see this as a window to my faith; an understanding that the only thing that will ever console my ultimate longing is eternity. Of all the beautiful sunsets I will ever see or experience, an eternity with the creator of the sunsets is the only thing that can satisfy this yearning.

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 visited.”

CS Lewis in The Weight of Glory

I have decided that far worse than the longing or the sehnsucht would be its absence. Indeed, its absence would be a type of hell, breaking us off from contact with an ever-present God who delights to surprise his children with glimpses of glory, embedding in us a longing that can only be satisfied in an eternity beyond.

 

Friendship Forged of Steel – In Memory of Jean Buker

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At nine pm on October 11, 1954, as tugboats slowly pull a freighter away from the docks in Brooklyn, seven passengers stand together on the deck, watching the lights of the city and the Statue of Liberty fade into the distance. Four more are sleeping peacefully below deck in their bunks and portable cribs, blissfully unaware of how the events of this day are shaping their lives. On the dock where our family members and friends had waved their last goodbyes, a lone man walks to the end. His voice echoes across the harbor waters, over the noise of tugboats as they move the Steel Recorder out towards the open Atlantic: “Grace and peace…Pray without ceasing…Preach the Word.”

Pauline Brown in Jars of Clay

My mom called me yesterday and left a voice message. It was about a dear friend of hers from Pakistan days who was dying.
“It’s not that I’m sad for her,” she said through tears. “It’s that I’m sad. Just so, so sad.”

Mom’s friendship with Jean Buker goes back to early days when the two young families were embarking on a journey that would affect them and their children in unquantifiable ways. Their first forays into friendship began at Hartford Seminary where the two couples, along with a few others from my parents’ mission were enrolled for missiology classes. Those early days of dreaming and planning for their life overseas propelled them forward onto the Steel Recorder – a freight ship that left out of New York Harbor.

I picture my mom and Jean, both in their mid-twenties, beautiful with not a wrinkle on their skin, dressed as one did in that era – in skirt suits with hats and perhaps a strand of pearls at the neck. Jean and Ray Buker had three children while my parents had my oldest brother. The journey by sea to this newly formed country was four weeks long. Four weeks of walking the deck to get exercise, keeping tight rein on their toddlers so they didn’t fall through the huge gaps on the railing of the ships deck, trying to make it through seasickness and the beginnings of homesickness, playing scrabble with a competitive edge in the evenings, singing and praying to a God they loved, then at last seeing the shores of Karachi Harbor in what was then West Pakistan.

How young and naive they all were! And yet – how very brave! They watched as their family members became little dots on the shore, finally looking at each other knowing this was it. There was no going back.

Then those first months in the Sindh region of Pakistan, three couples and six children sharing a two-bedroom house in a questionable area of the city of Larkana because no one else would rent to these foreigners.

Those early days built a solid foundation of friendship. Friendship forged in shared language learning, learning how to cook with unfamiliar ingredients, and all that comes with a cross-cultural move to the other side of the world.

The friendship continued through the years, made stronger as more people joined them. Websters, Roubs, Addletons, Pittmans, Johnsons, Dobras, Salmons, Elkins….names that I don’t think I could ever forget, so much were they a part of our family’s srory.

The Bukers moved back to the United States at one point, Jean’s husband Ray taking a job at the mission. And though the proximity of their friendship changed, every time my parents were in the U.S. they visited the Bukers. Updating each other on life in Pakistan, their kids, what was going on in the mission and sharing joys and discouragements continued to be a part of their friendship.

Jean Buker didn’t stop with my parents. She was Aunt Jean to us, more a relative than any blood could possibly create. Her friendship and love continued on to us kids as she extended her table to feed us too much at every Thanksgiving so we knew there was always a place where the turkey and pumpkin pie would be offered up with friendship and understanding. She provided a home base where we and other members of our family and TCK tribe could stay. Aunt Jean was the one who hosted a graduation party when I graduated as a proud nurse. Aunt Jean was the one who gathered people from all over the Chicago area to shower me with gifts a week before my wedding.

I knew where my mom’s tears were coming from as she cried over the phone. They were coming from a place of sweet saudade, that wistful longing for what no longer exists, no matter how much you mourn or long for it. They were coming from a place of memory, where young hearts and bodies with the world at their fingertips go out to the unknown, and friendship is a necessary ingredient. They were coming from knowing that earthly loss smacks of pain and grief because our hearts are created for eternity.

They were coming from a place of a beautiful, God-ordained, orchestrated, and formed friendship and they reflected the heart of God.

“The shifts of time unearth our longing for a permanent residence, unshakeable, immovable, wholly given and wholly ours. Scattered across this great globe, now and then, we stumble across gifts of happiness from a God who, kindly, with an absolute patience that the trees themselves were taught to imitate, guides us up into the security of his own life”

Laura Fabrycky

This post is dedicated to Pauline Brown, Bettie Addleton, and Grace Pittman – the remaining originals from CBFMS.