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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