Thursday, May 14, 2020

Longing for a familiar sight or sound or smell


Our first day in Lomalinda had held some high highs and low lows for me. (Click on those links.)

It had started before dawn in the crowded, noisy, air-polluted capital city, Bogotá, high in the Andes Mountains. We’d spent all morning in a taxi, careening around steep curves, gasping at drop-offs, and begging God to preserve our lives—grasping barf bags and trying not to throw up.

Then, from the eastern foot of the Andes, we had flown in a custom-made little plane to our new home, Lomalinda, a mission center in the middle of nowhere.

The day had been challenging and exhausting, physically and emotionally and mentally. And all day, I had subconsciously longed for an anchor, a familiar vista or sound or smell—the sight of towering evergreen trees or the call of a foghorn or the fragrance of salty sea air.

If I were still back home in the Pacific Northwest, apples would be crisping, and I’d have been making applesauce by the gallon, chunky and cinnamony and buttery.

Sweet wild blackberries by the hundreds of thousands would hang heavy on vines, and my fingers would wear purple berry stains for weeks, my hands and arms scratched from thorny vines.

Peaches would be ripening, and I’d have been making pies and cobblers.

But I lived a continent away and everything told me I stood on foreign soil. I had no familiar sights or sounds or smells to comfort me, no anchor to steady me.

That evening, I stepped outside into Lomalinda’s still blackness. Neither smog nor city lights nor skyscrapers competed with night skies, and the brilliance of the stars took my breath away. I’d never seen them shine so clearly.

Then I turned and spotted the moon. The moon! I’d found that familiar something I yearned for.

And then—!

And then I realized, with a start,
that our loved ones back home
could look at that moon at the same time we did,
not only at that moment but every night—
a tie that bound us.
My heart lurched, and then soared.

(from Chapter 6,






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