My Great Adventures – Part 1

Kim from Rainy Day Diamonds joins us today and the kids and I begin our trek back home. Please take a minute and go visit her and say hello…

Fall 1993

My car moved left through the intersection, over Fanny Bridge and down the West Shore of Lake Tahoe on autopilot, just like my life. On autopilot.

I lived and worked in one of the most beautiful places in the country. In the winter, I watched in wonder as snowflakes transformed the hill behind my condo into a white frosted Currier and Ives print. My students and I pelted each other with powder puffs of snow and called it physical education. Summer found me waterskiing and hiking through alpine meadows with friends, yet I felt hopeless and joyless and ashamed of feeling that way. Christians, especially those who teach in a Christian school are supposed to be examples of joy and peace and fulfillment.

Yeah.

Right.

The hum of my tires rolling over the wooden bridge filled my ears and the bumps pushed a prayer of desperation up from the depths of my gut. “God, if this is all there is to the Christian life then I’m not much better of than the world, but I’m not going out there, so I’d better figure out how to deal with it. If there’s more, I’m missing it, and I want it.”

April 1995

This was not the first time Precious Friend had written me from a foreign country asking me to join her on the mission field.  I had, in fact, put her off just a year earlier.  This time was different.  I was rudderless and searching.  For the first time in my life I had quit a job with no safety net and no idea what I was going to do to support myself once the school year was over.  I just knew that I couldn’t go on teaching in the little Christian school that had been my place for four years.  I was a statistic – a burned out teacher leaving the profession. 

Precious Friend had lived on three continents over the years since college and never once had I dialed the international digits to touch her fiber optically.  The day I received her letter, I made my first international phone call.  It was the beginning of my Great Adventure.

Join me over at Rainy Day Diamonds to for further vignettes of the ride of my life – My Great Adventure.