Living fun new stories with new characters

 

Given our remote setting, the Lomalinda bunch didn’t have many worldly ways to relax and refresh.

 

As a result, we created events—

parties,

skit nights,

parades . . . 

cantatas,

beard-growing contests . . . 

fancy hat contests,

office parties 

banquet events . . .

Karen and Linda on far left

surprise parties,

potluck dinners,

soapbox derbies . . .

fund-raising events,

talent shows . . . .

 

Remembering those events—

and especially those dear people—

makes me smile.

Our family was writing fun new stories,

with new characters,

in such an unexpected place.

 

To paraphrase 1 Corinthians 2:9  (CEB),

God had gone ahead of us 

and prepared good happenings

that would never have crossed our minds.

 

(From Chapter 15, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

 

God said, “Let there be critters and creepy-crawlies” and it was good

Lomalinda was home to fascinating critters and creepy-crawlies—spiders, cockroaches, moths, flies, bees, mosquitoes, grasshoppers, fleas, scorpions, and creatures I’d never seen before and had no idea what their name was.

 

(Did you know all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs? And that millipedes, centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and ticks are neither bugs nor insects? That’s why I call them critters and creepy-crawlies. (Click on Bug vs.Insect: Is there a difference?)

 

God created them, and when we recognized that, we marvel at His  handiwork—their beauty and strength and purposes and intricacy.

 

Many of Lomalinda’s boys collected them. My son Matt’s collection included a rhinoceros beetle, another beetle that looked like a peanut shell, and cicadas.

 

Lomalinda was also home to butterflies, and Matt and his friends enjoyed hunting them. Especially exquisite were Blue Morpho butterflies, with bright, shimmering blue wings spanning six or eight inches.

 

Their beauty always took my breath away and, looking back now, I’m sad the boys killed them so they could add them to their collections.

 

What can I say about fire ants? Yes, God created them, but it’s easy to question why He did.

Recently I discovered they can be beneficial: “Fire ants voraciously consume . . . fleas, ticks, termites, cockroaches, chinch bugs, mosquito eggs and larva, scorpions, etc.” reports Galveston Master Gardeners. In a place like Lomalinda, those are beneficial indeed!

They're “extremely effective in controlling plant-feeding insects and arthropods. . . . Under some conditions fire ants keep the pest populations below the level of economic loss. . . .

“Fire ants can benefit . . . crops . . . because they aerate and break up the soil, making more water and nutrients available.”

However, fire ants can inflict costly damage to agriculture, cattle, wildlife, and farm equipment. (Read more at Galveston Master Gardeners.)

 

They are tiny little red fellas—and aggressive! Before you knew what was happening, you could have dozens of them running up your legs and under your clothes and stinging you mercilessly—leaving you hopping around in misery, so desperate you might even strip off your clothes in public in order to swat them off your body. Fire ants have even been known to kill people and animals.

As anyone bitten by fire ants will attest to, “Fire ants interrupt our God-given right to walk barefoot in our grass,” say the Galveston Master Gardeners.

But in an attempt to see the glass half full instead of half empty, the gardeners also point out that “Humans are not at the top of the fire ant food pyramid as long as we keep moving.”  So true!

And then there were leafcutter ants, critters with sharp instruments for mouths. They were a common sight—long lines of them traveling to their underground nests carrying big chunks of leaves in their mouths.

Kurt Metzger photo

 

Leafcutter ants don’t eat the leaves, they bury them in order to grow a fungus, which they eat.

 

“After clipping out pieces of leaves in their jaws, the fragments are transported to an underground nest that can include over 1,000 chambers and house millions of individual ants,” according to Britannica.

 

“Deep within the nest, the ants physically and chemically cultivate subterranean ‘gardens’ of fungus that grow on the chewed leaves,” the article continues.

 

“The ants remove contaminants and produce amino acids and enzymes to aid fungal growth. They also secrete substances that suppress other fungal growth.”

 

Leafcutters can be beneficial for their surroundings. The Britannica article says “By pruning vegetation, they stimulate new plant growth, and, by gardening their fungal food, they enrich the soil. . . . A colony of A. sexdens leafcutters may turn over . . . 88,000 pounds . . . of soil in tropical moist forests, stimulating root growth of many plant species.”

 

However, leafcutter ants can also be destructive. According to the Britannica article, “The amount of vegetation cut from tropical forests by the Atta ants alone has been estimated at 12-17 percent of all leaf production.

 

“. . . One species, A. apiguara, reduces the commercial value of pasture land in Brazil and Paraguay by as much as 10 percent.”

 

In Lomalinda, we often experienced leafcutter ants’ voraciousness and swift damage to plant life.

 

Let me tell you about our first experience with them.

 

Beside our back door grew a shrub with delicate white flowers. One morning shortly after we arrived in Lomalinda, when I left for work the shrub stood five feet tall, but when I came home for lunch, I found only a few naked branches. Leafcutter ants had eaten all of that in four hours.

 

My friend Jon Arensen, working in the Colombian jungle for a few weeks, awoke one morning and found that leafcutter ants had invaded his duffle bag, chewing dime-size holes in his clothes—all his clothes—leaving them in shreds.

 

Jon said, “My underwear was so bad that I had to wear three pairs to be decent. For the rest of my trip, I looked like a badly dressed bum.

 

“Those ants even ate holes in my leather boots,” he said.

 

But on the positive side, 

leafcutter ants made great mint-tasting snacks 

for Lomalinda’s kids. 

(from Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: 

A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir, Chapters 11 and 19)

 

God said, “Let there be critters and creepy-crawlies,”

and that is what happened,

and He saw that it was good.

(Genesis 1:20-25)

 

“Happiness, not in another place but this place, not for another hour, but this hour.”

  

A sense of “place is significant—significant physically, emotionally, and spiritually,’ writes Marilyn Gardner at A Life Overseas.

 

“As humans, at our core is a need for ‘place.’ Call it ‘belonging,’ call it ‘home,’ call it anything you like. But all of us are integrally connected to place,” she says.

During my first months in Lomalinda, I often found myself picturing what would have been happening at my “place” back home in Seattle. I compared Seattle’s weather to Lomalinda’s weather. The tastes of Seattle’s food to Lomalinda’s. The way Seattle’s smells compared to Lomalinda’s. Seattle’s ease of living compared to Lomalinda’s.

 

I wrote in my memoir that Lomalinda’s odors made me long for familiar smells—the perfume of fir trees in the rain, the aromas of Puget Sound and seaweed drying on the beach.

 

I wrote: “I compared Lomalinda to everything back home—red-orange soil instead of my dark foresty earth in Seattle; heavy, humid air and triple-digit temperatures pressing down on us instead of cool, fresh Pacific Northwest air.

 

“I wished for a North American grocery store, well-known flavors, paved roads, and a warm shower. While our temps soared, I missed the anticipation of autumn’s chilly, crisp days back in Seattle. Folks back home would soon pull out wool sweaters and scarves and socks but, in Lomalinda, we were shedding shoes and as many clothes as was decent. (From Chapter 9, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

 

Later, I wrote:

 

“September turned to October. Back in Seattle, people would be inhaling familiar scents of gold-emblazoned maple leaves and hints of smoke from fireplace fires, and they’d be bundling up in sweaters and jackets to ward off autumn’s cool temperatures.

 

“But in Lomalinda, summer didn’t turn into fall into winter into spring. We had only two seasons, hot and humid, and hotter and arid.

 

“And so it was that in October, the annual five-month rainy season ended after dumping a hundred and fifty inches. Temperatures rose and muddy roads dried. (From Chapter 14, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: AFoot-Dragger’s Memoir)

 

I wrote this about turning the next calendar page:

 

“November turned to December. Back home, Seattle would be a place of swollen clouds and rain, and frost once in a while. People would be wearing rain boots and raincoats and stocking caps and gloves.

 

“Family and friends would have recently gathered for Thanksgiving, a squally season when tempests stirred up wild seas and sent ferry boats bobbing and careening, when wind storms downed trees throughout the Puget Sound region, caused widespread power outages, left half-baked turkeys and pumpkin pies in cold ovens, and drew people together around fireplaces in homes perfumed by wood smoke.

 

“But Lomalinda was into the dry season with clean cerulean skies and hardly a wisp of a cloud. Daytime temperatures rose to over a hundred degrees in the shade—cruel, withering.

 

“The green scent of rainy season had given way to the spicy fragrance of sun-dried grasses. Immense stretches of emerald disappeared, leaving grasslands stiff and simmering under unrelenting sun.

 

“Muddy paths and single-lane tracks turned rock-hard and, with use, changed to dust. Yards and airstrips and open fields turned to dust, too.

 

“From sunrise to sundown, a strong wind blew across the llanos, a gift from God because it offered a little relief from the heat. On the other hand, we had to use rocks and paperweights and other heavy objects to keep papers from blowing away.

 

“Dust blew through slatted windows and into homes and offices and settled on our counters and furniture and in cracks and crannies and on our necks and in our armpits and up our noses.  (From Chapter 16, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

 

Yes, for the first few months, I compared my Seattle home with my new home in Lomalinda.

 

Looking back on that time,

I feel guilt over my too-slow struggle

to transition out of my Seattle life

and into my Lomalinda life.

 

But, given what Marilyn Gardner says next,

maybe I should extend a bit of grace to myself.

 

“When those places are taken away, we suffer from a ‘disruption’ of place,” Marilyn continues.

 

She gave words to what I was going through—

a ‘disruption’ of place. My battle had a name.

 

“The late Paul Tournier, a gifted Swiss psychologist . . . says that to be human is to need a place, to be rooted and attached to that place,” Marilyn says. “Many of us downplay this connection to place by over spiritualizing it or underestimating its importance.

 

“We need not dismiss it,” Marilyn says, “we need not idolize it; we must only acknowledge it and recognize it as valid.”

 

Oh, how I appreciate Marilyn’s perspective.

 

 

If you plan to move to the mission field,

read Marilyn’s words again.

I hope and pray her message

and what you find here at my blog

will prepare you for a good experience.

 

I wish my family and I had had a better pre-field orientation than we did, and I wish we’d had a better orientation than we did upon arriving in Lomalinda.

 

As a newcomer, I wish I’d known it was okay to still feel an attachment to my Seattle home. I wish I’d known it was a valid feeling and experience.

 

But since I didn’t, I felt guilty and defective, and I blindly stumbled through culture shock and transition out of it.

 

Reading Marilyn’s words lifts a burden. It sets me free.

 

And now, looking back, I recognize

God was literally doing what

Romans 8:28 says He does:

“God is able to orchestrate everything

to work toward something good and beautiful

when we love Him and accept His invitation

to live according to His plan” (The Voice).

 

He was helping me survive the ‘disruption’ of place—helping me gently separate from my most significant ‘place,’ my Seattle home—and He was making a way for me to find that sense of ‘belonging’ in Lomalinda.

 

Though hardly perceptible at the time, God was helping me become “rooted and attached” to Lomalinda.

 

He was helping me feel more comfortable in my new home.

 

God was leading me into new opportunities, offering me new perspectives, helping me grasp that there were other ways to do Life than I thought. He was offering me a new attitude. New goals, new joys.

 

God was gently, subtly doing a remarkable work

within and around me

during my initial weeks on the mission field.

A lot of good things were happening

that would eventually help me discover

Lomalinda was a good place to live.

 

God was helping me find “Happiness, not in another place but this place, not for another hour, but this hour.” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)