Morning Cuppa

I have a morning routine, as most people do. It goes like this: wake up, go downstairs and make my mug of coffee, come back upstairs, settle into my rusty-dirt-colored wingback chair and have my devotional time while the sun comes up on the hills across from our home. It's a perfect combination--view, focus on faith, coffee and sunrise--that fortifies me with a sense of well-being and hope before I walk out the door into my day.

It has not always been so. I grew up in a church that was quite conservative, frowning on the use of stimulants. "Your body is the temple of God." And so it is, and I know from experience that my spiritual well-being is enhanced when I'm living healthfully. So when I was a child, coffee and black tea were on the no-no list, and I got rather judgmental thoughts when I saw someone drinking a caffeine beverage. Such is the viewpoint of a child.

I still remember the first time I had coffee to drink. I did it on purpose. I was 13 years old and we were in the Rome airport, in transit to somewhere on a furlough. I had gotten desperately thirsty, and those Italians didn't believe in drinking fountains. I'd obtained some lira from my mom and went wandering the terminal, looking for a drink to buy. All I could find was a vending machine, and in that machine--coffee. So I got some.

As I expected, it tasted nasty. But at least I wasn't dying of thirst anymore. I confessed my actions to my mom, she looked mildly disappointed. And that was that.

Image from http://www.reelsmillbank.com/reels-blog/2015/8/18/what-makes-a-great-cup-of-coffee

Years later, in my mid-twenties, I moved to Southern California for graduate school and found that those "liberal church members" in California were drinking coffee. (You'd have to know the deep cultural suspicions in my church about Southern California church members, I suppose.) I had some coffee occasionally, and eventually built up a habit of my morning cuppa. By the time I got married and Husband viewed my love for coffee with some consternation, I was not to be dissuaded. When you marry someone you don't try to control them, Mister Man, and this is one of the areas where I am going to be a holdout.

Coffee does have its benefits for me. I have a milk allergy--not lactose intolerance, but an allergy that makes me feel like I have the flu if I have too much milk product (milk, cheese, cottage cheese, etc.). I have found that if I have a cup of coffee when I feeling the milk headache and fuzzy-brain coming on, it clears it off again. Additionally, coffee does the same thing for me that all hot drinks--tea, hot chocolate, etc.--do. There's a comfort factor that comes with drinking something hot, akin to how you feel when you get a warm hug from someone who esteems you highly.

So here I am: blog post written, sun up on the hills, ready to head out for my morning exercise, and cheery and glad to have once again started my day in my rusty-dirt-colored wingback chair and gratitude journal ... with my morning cuppa.

More Blessed to Give

Awaiting the offering plate

"By working hard in this manner you must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" Acts 20:35

When I was a little girl, my mom always handed me a dollar to put in the offering pouch as it came around. Whenever there was a collection, I put a dollar in. Always a dollar.

Now the tables are turned. Mama is weak and I am strong. She has no money to keep with her because it might get lost or stolen, and I look after the finances for her. She loses memories and I keep them. The tables are turned, and I am doing things for her that she used to do for me when I was a wee one.

More recently I hit on a new thought: when I take my parents to church with us each week, I hand my mom a dollar or two to put in the offering plate. Always a dollar or two, because that's what she remembers giving from long ago. A dollar or two held carefully in her quiet, weakening hands until the plate comes by, when she solemnly places the bills in the plate and then, ... lets go and pulls her hands back, as if holding on would burn her fingers.

I've realized that placing the dollars in the plate is meaningful to my mom because of this: giving is a human act. And giving is a humane act.

As long as you are capable of giving, as long as you can help meet the needs of others, you feel that your existence is meaningful. This my mother taught me. She can no longer deliver babies, no longer play the piano or the cello, no longer sew or cook for guests or write letters or drive people from here to there as needed. A few years ago when she was capable of verbalizing it, she stated time after time in a tone of quiet desperation: "I'm not useful to anyone. I'm not doing anything to help anyone anymore."

Putting a dollar in the offering is an act of defiance in face of obsolescence. It says, "I can still help." It says, "I have a part to play in this community of believers, even if it's paying for one minute of lighting or a few bulletins." It says, "If I were not here, giving my dollar, you would be a dollar short."

Putting a dollar in the offering says, "This dollar represents the investment of my time, the investment of my education in medicine, the investment of my lost sleep when babies were born at night, the investment of my faithfulness at showing up in time to deliver babies. This dollar represents my gifts to missions and evangelism over the years. And it represents my investment in my daughter who now has a dollar to hand me because of the dollars I put into her education."

And putting a dollar in the offering says, "This dollar represents my heart of responsibility and gratitude to my Savior, passing along in some way the gift of His goodness in creating and caring for me."

A dollar in the offering is symbolic. It not only symbolizes a blessing my mom gives away, but it symbolizes the blessing she receives by the act of giving. A dollar in the offering reteaches the lesson she taught me long ago, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. And so, each week, I slip her a dollar as I remember being a wee girl, and she participates afresh in the holy act of giving. It is indeed a rich and precious moment.

Hands in the Pharmacy

Picture from here

My very first job was to count pills in the mission hospital pharmacy. To be sure, it was not my very first paid job, because as a non-Malaysian I couldn't legally work for pay, but if I could have legally been paid for my work, I would have been. That would seem to count as a first job, I would think.

I was bored, fourteen years old, and needed something to do in the summer after 8th grade graduation. I'd grown up prowling the hospital hallways. Everyone who worked there, plus a smattering of the patients, knew me. As I was a generally magnanimous kid, they didn't mind my being underfoot. When I asked if I could work somewhere for the summer, one of my parents put out the word, and the pharmacy took me on.

The place smelled--naturally--"mediciney." The walls in the windowless pharmacy were lined with open shelves stocked with well-organized pill bottles. There wasn't a lot to do in a place where paperwork was minimal and there weren't computers available to make our lives more complicated. We just got the slip with the doctor's prescription and signature, counted out the pills, put a paper on the bottle with the name of the medicine and the instructions, and then we went to the window and called the patient to come get their meds.

Mister Timothy, the chatty Indian pharmacy tech, trained me in and hovered a bit to make sure I understood what I was to do.  He was pleasant enough, and his kids were my peers and friends from church. But the chatter wasn't all that interesting, especially not for a whole summer.

Mister Ranjan, the director of the pharmacy, was a more interesting person, but I didn't know how to hold a conversation with him. He'd at one time had leprosy, and although his face looked fine, his fingers were shortened and disfigured by the disease. This didn't seem to hinder him from doing his work, even in working with the twist-off caps of the bottles, counting pills and writing notes for charts.

It kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies, watching Mister Ranjan work with the pills and bottles. My mom assured me that he was clean of leprosy and there was no threat, but something inside me still flinched and wanted to withdraw when he would work nearby me. It didn't matter that he was the nicest man. He was different, and I was uncomfortable with that.

And so I experienced the parable in my first job, of how disease disfigures, how some things can never be healed or regrown, how we react when someone is different from us, how easy it is to want to distance ourselves from someone that is not beautiful.

These are the lessons left unlearned when one is a thoughtless, thick-headed youth. They come back and take root, to take on second and third meanings only when the heart has grown large enough to accommodate them. That may be far, far down the road,

Miss S

Miss S entered my life when I was a 2nd grader and didn't leave it until the end of my 7th grade year. I won't use her name because it's so very unusual, both first and last, that anyone doing an Internet search for her name will find this immediately.

I admired her.

Miss S had grown up in the country, in Willamina, Oregon. That's said, "WILL-uh-MY-nuh." Her family's recent heritage was from Friesland, Netherlands, but she didn't speak Dutch. My Dutch dad commented to us privately that people from Friesland were known to be particularly stubborn. (He thought she embodied her heritage.) It sounded as if the S family had been pretty simple folk. What provoked Miss S to strike out into the world, first teaching in Lebanon and then in Malaysia, I don't know. But I was the beneficiary of that.

Miss S was a bastion of knowledge, a provoker of curiosity, a crusader for academic excellence, and a role model for both breadth and depth of learning. She was extremely structured in her curricular expectations, her teaching style and her classroom management. That suited me well both in personality and in developmental level. Miss S was a woman who was interested in everything from electronics to leathercraft to travel to Bible study to culture to history to classifying birds, flowers, dogs, shells, and whatever else was interesting in the natural world. Pretty much anything Miss S was interested in, she took us along with her literally or figuratively, and we learned it, too. If NASA had had their teacher space shuttle program back then, Miss S would have been clawing at the door to get into it.

You didn't get away with much when it came to Miss S's expectations of you. With a small one-room school of no more than 11 students, you would not escape Miss S's high goals, demands and assessment of your learning. She had her eye on you, and you were not getting off easy. We'd learn a memory verse a week, and don't let that fool you; memory verse could mean a whole passage of Scripture. As the year went along we got quizzed on our verses. She would randomly cite a text, and we would have to recite the verses found there. I remember being sent out to walk around the school and practice my verses, written on 3X5 cards, rehearsing as I walked so that I could pass the end-of-year test. (Try it; it continues to be the method I most believe in for memorization--reciting while you walk around.)

Bible wasn't the only subject for which there were high standards. We learned phonics as the path to decoding and then reading. I doubt she would have stood for whole language, had she heard of it. Miss S approached things analytically. Put the pieces together and then practice it. Read-alouds to our classmates and with her were a required part of the program. Get your body and your ears involved. Skill and drill, and don't sniff at that. It works. In Math we'd better know our facts and show our work. There were individual flash card drills. And Miss S used competition to good effect as she regularly refereed a rousing classroom game of "Around the Word" with flash cards.

In Social Studies we not only had to learn all the usual facts about the United States (and you had to do this even if you were Australian or British; no apologies from the American teacher), but we also had to be able to recite the 12-word-long name of the King of Malaysia. Yang di-Pertuan Agong Tunku Ismail Nasiruddin Shah Ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Zainal Abidin. See?  I still remember it, including how to spell it. Unfortunately he wasn't king for life; in Malaysia the king is a figurehead and the position rotates every 4 years to the sultan of the next state in line. So you could get stuck learning another 12 names, depending on where we were in the rotation.

Miss S was a stickler for Handwriting. We learned the Zaner Bloser way of forming our letters, following the pattern set by the green letter cards affixed to the wall across the top of the blackboards. Thanks to the daily practice, I developed pretty good "schoolteacher handwriting" compared to anyone else in my family.

Miss S was also a stickler for character development, more than anyone I knew, even my parents. Telling the truth was of the highest value, as was sticking up for what you knew to be right. Bible stories and morality tales--none with talking animals, though--were brought to bear in morning worships and Bible classes to make sure that we would be the kind of children who would "dare to be a Daniel," who would stand up for our faith though the heavens fall. Miss S did a series of worships that I still remember, with felt bees placed on the flannel board to illustrate the concepts: Be(e) obedient, be pure, be true, be kind, be helpful, be cheerful, be thoughtful, be reverent." One a day, each with an illustrative story. And yes, we memorized them. In order. After that it was the Lettuce garden.  "Let us be... " Again we were off into positive qualities of character.

Although the she never held up creativity as a positive character trait to be developed, Miss S fostered creativity in her own way. Although the conservative in our denomination frowned upon drama back in those days (and Miss S was conservative), she knew the value of drama and used it unapologetically for Christmas and Thanksgiving programs. I fell in love with storytelling of any sort, including storytelling through drama. When I was in the sixth grade I wrote a whole Christmas play, a rather hackneyed thing with an unbelieveable storyline that intertwined the Christmas story with a tale of an open-hearted (and impulsive, apparently) family adopting an orphan who wandered into their lives. Miss S didn't blink. She typed up my play, we practiced it, and it was the play used for the Christmas program that year. You know what that does for a budding scriptwriter?

The other bug that Miss S instilled in me was the love of travel. Of course, my parents already had planted it in me both genetically and through nurture, but Miss S fostered it further. At the end of each school year, during the last week or so as we finished our book assignments and met all the goals she had set, she would pull out her slides from her travels in the Middle East and her trusty projector and screen, and we'd settle onto the floor to travel along with her as she told us about Beirut and Joppa and Damascus and Petra and Cairo and... All these wonderful places to explore in our big wide world! When I eventually did get to Petra four years ago, you know who virtually traveled on my mind's shoulder? Miss S.

As I recall Miss S, so many pictures, sounds and memories come back to mind: her homemade dresses, which were all of cotton print and followed the same basic pattern with modifications, her slow and dignified way of cycling to and from school, her long and graceful fingers, her cat-eye glasses, her rather large teeth often displayed in a smile, her wavy Dutch-blond hair, the arc of her hand as she underhand-pitched the softball to us at recess, the way she sat in church and looked out the window to her right, her face inscrutable about the thoughts she might be thinking. I can hear the tone of her voice, medium-pitch, as she instructed us in clearly enunciated words. I remember the field trips where we visited rubber plantations to see how they harvested the tree sap and made it into raw rubber, where we visited the sugar cane factory and the ceramic pot-making factory. There was always something new to find out about, and Miss S was a curious person who took us along with her, sooner or later, if it was local. She never discussed being single, that I remember, but I heard what she said without words: Singleness is not limiting for any woman of adventurous spirit and giving heart.

I would love to tell you that I pleased Miss S greatly, but I don't think I did. In retrospect I think she was fonder of other kids, but I never caught on. She was the center of my scholarly universe. If she said it, of course it was true. Looking back at my report cards from those years, you would conclude that I was a rather mediocre child who had a lack of affinity for Social Studies and Math, and who tended to be a bit sloppy in my learning. "Sloppy." It's a word she would use. When I've opened up the old report cards kept by my mom, it's been a surprise to see that my character and my weaknesses were evident even back then, in Miss S's written evaluations of me. I remember her saying to me once, "Ginger, you are the kind of student who puts all ten fingers in when only one is needed." Yes indeedy. I'm still that girl.

Which brings me to the biggest influence Miss S had on my life: teaching. I adored Miss S and wanted to emulate her. When I was a little second grader, I came home from school one day to where the family industry, so to speak, was medicine, and said to my mom, "Mommy, would you mind very much if I became a teacher instead of a doctor?" My mom told and retold the story as I went through college and started my career as a teacher: "I told you that of course you could be anything you wanted to be," she always said.

"Except a hair dresser," I said.  And she laughed. She had indeed turned up her nose at that passing fancy.

My first teaching job was in a two-room church school on the Oregon Coast, just a 45-minute drive from Willamina, Oregon. By the time I started teaching, Miss S had returned to the United States, taught for a while longer, and then got out of teaching altogether and was working in her own secretarial and court reporting business in Corvallis, Oregon, not too far from Willamina. I think the dynamic that brought her time to a close with us, had reared its head again for her after she returned to the U.S. She didn't do so well with the upper grades students once they began to challenge and to question her. It became a power struggle and she didn't handle power struggles well in her small school placements. It made me feel sad.

So as I was about to start my first year of teaching I drove over to see Miss S in Corvallis, and we chatted about my being on the cusp of my own teaching career. "Do you remember those phonics cards?" I asked. "I wish I had some of those for teaching my new little first graders."

"As a matter of fact, I have them," said Miss S. "I have boxes of my teaching materials. You're welcome to go through them and take what you'd like to have." She started hauling out the boxes, and it was like Christmas and "This is Your Life," all at once. There were the phonics cards I had learned from, including little Mr. T and his Mexican hat. There were the plays we had put on for our parents. There were worksheets and math facts cards and craft lesson plans and worship talks and ...oh, such richness!  I loaded my selections into my VW Rabbit and headed back over the coastal range to my new little apartment, glowing about having scored the very teaching aids that had worked so well with me.

And they worked well for my students, too.

They say you teach like you were taught. I think that is true. I have been formally recognized for my teaching at the K-12 level and in higher education, as well. It feels like having a knack, a precious gift in my possession to use with respect. Students have come back and told me stories of their memorable experiences and education in my classroom. They can quote me word-for-word from things I said years ago and have completely forgotten. They can quote me regarding things I told them about themselves, most of which I can survive hearing related back to me. They can repeat details of the stories I told as I taught their classes.

It would be great to take the credit for the teaching success, but really, I'm primarily a footprint of the teaching of Miss S. (And yes, I've thanked her.)

And she was probably a footprint of the teaching of her teacher before her.  Because that's how it goes, in this profession. In a most wonderful way you are the recycler of the best in learning across the generations, opening up the universe to curiosity, promoting excellent habits of thought, shaping minds and characters for the future. It's satisfying, meaningful work. And what you do will long outlast you.

Ode to the Hammock

While on vacation in Belize, I have gotten reacquainted, in a whole new falling-in-love kind of way, with the hammock. Oh, what a delight!

The best hammocks here have been the ones under the thatch cover of the palapa, out on the dock that goes out into the sea. Every self-respecting hotel on the beach here has one of these docks with a hammock or two strung out between the center pole and one of the outer supports. It puts you out there beyond the reach of those pesky mosquitos, out over the waters where the never-ending breeze makes it hard for those little guys to find you and mistake you for food. We tourists head out there, grins on our faces, to find respite and the spa experience for the mind and soul.

I had forgotten how a hammock feels like a cradle of life. Unlike a bed that reflects heat back onto your body, the hammock snuggles you in with an even cuddle to your whole body, curling around you so that you have a limited view mostly upwards. I suppose it's a bit like the focus provided a horse by the presence of blinders on its harness, not that I know a lot about that. You can focus on what really matters, think about where you're going.

Then there's the gentle rocking, when there's a breeze, which there always is, here at the Belizean beach. Oh, that is sweet, the breeze making its way through the netting of the hammock. Husband and I have remarked about how, even here in the heat and humidity of Belize, we can get to feeling a bit cold when swinging gently in the hammock. Something about the breeze wicking away the humidity, I suppose, similar to sitting under a fan that is chilling your sweat or shower water off you warm body.

"I find myself sorely tempted to get a hammock when we get home," I told Husband yesterday. "But I won't. It just wouldn't be the same as here. It's dry heat there, and I would have work waiting for me just inside the house, if not right on my lap in the hammock. It just wouldn't do the same thing."  No, I think the hammock is part and parcel of vacation--limited to the deliberate experience of leaving home, slowing down, and letting your mind dabble along in a glorious excess of rest and the simple joy of being.

The Best of Times

[The view from my hammock, right now]

It's been a strange and difficult school year for both of us educators in our household, a year in which puzzlement or frustration have reigned at times despite our years of career experience (Solomon was wrong; there's always something new under the sun). Workdays have been long, and people both beloved and difficult have come and gone from our daily environments. Battles have been lost and battles have been won. We've been loved and we've been despised. These things have not been a surprise; they are part and parcel of the lives that school administrators live.

A year ago one of my faculty retired, looking forward to spending her retirement years with her husband who retired at the same time from regional church administration in a very difficult conference near us. Just as they moved into a lovely house right across the street from their three grandchildren in Ohio, he began to feel ill. Doctors were puzzled and ran a plethora of tests. They said it wasn't pancreatic cancer, ... and then they said it was. By March he was gone, she was a widow, and she hadn't even unpacked everything from the move. We who had worked with her watched all of this with great shock and deep sadness. "We've seen this too many times," some of us said. "People retire, and then they get sick and die."

I wondered whether our friend had given his life for his church, out of all the stress he had borne through his many years of administration. I am quite clear by this time in my life, having been a missionary kid and then a church worker and then an administrator in a denominationally affiliated university, that this giving one's life for the church is not a noble thing, in general. People should sacrifice neither spouses and children nor their health at the hands of those who call themselves Christians but hold completely unrealistic expectations of their leaders. People should not have to bear an ongoing high level of stress from shepherding institutions that are chronically slowed down by dysfunctional people. Giving your life for Jesus, yes. Giving a short period of your life to get through some stressful situation, yes. Giving your life in general for the church, No. Absolutely not. That's just where I am right now.

So when our friend's husband died soon after retirement, leaving her alone and trying to swim through her grief, I told my husband, "We can't wait until we retire to do our fun things together. We didn't get a vacation last summer, but just ran pell-mell through the whole summer, from one responsibility to another. We need to take a vacation this summer and go to somewhere relaxing. Maybe we'll spend some of our savings, but I'd rather be healthy and together in our retirement and not be able to afford travel, than to experience what our friends experienced after working so hard without much relaxation for so many years."

Nice thing is, Husband agreed with me.

So I write this from a hammock hung between a coconut palm and a sea almond tree on a beach in Belize.  The waves of the Caribbean are driving in to shore, whitecaps curled by a gentle and persistent wind. A rainstorm swept through in all of 5 minutes this morning and then was gone, and the afternoon is muggy and bright, feeling just like it did on the Malaysian island where I grew up. Looks like it, too, with similar flora and the architecture of the former British colony (British Honduras) making me feel right back at home. I could not be happier. Ten days of this is just what the doctor ordered, not just for relaxation, but for thinking, recalibrating, writing, and connecting with each other through our shared experiences as we learn a little about the country.

The past 15 years have held the gamut of Dickens' times: best and worst, wise and foolish, belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. Our next 15 years together will likely dish up more of the same, life being what it is. But for now, for today? We've found a piece of the best of times. And it is very good.