Turn of the Decade

I remember the first time I clicked over a decade in my life. It was December 31, 1969, and the church young people had gone on a campout to an uninhabited island, taking me along. Our youth group was very tolerant of the missionary kid tag-alongs.

As I recall, I was sharing a tent of some sort--we didn't have much available in the way of camping gear in Malaysian stores--with a girl named Suelina, from the youth group. I recall a tropical downpour on new year's eve as we laid in our tent, and talking about 1970 and what it meant to be entering, YIKES!, the Seventies.

The turns of the decades have been significant years in my life. In 1980 I graduated from high school in Singapore and made that memorable flight across the Pacific Ocean to start college in the United States. In 1990 I made the transition from teaching in multigrade classrooms to team teaching in two sixth-grade classrooms, and published my first children's book. In 2000 I received my first e-mail from Husband, and that summer we started dating; a life changing journey was underway and it wasn't long until I was in love!

So here we are in 2010. I started this day in sunny southern California and am blogging this on the way home via rainy, cold Seattle. It's a long way from that tropical downpour on an uninhabited Malaysian island on January 1, 1970. And I suspect the coming year holds just as memorable experiences as have happened in the preceding turns of the decades. Stay tuned for what that might be. It's still shrouded in mystery.