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When we returned from our epic, four-month road trip, things didn’t line up. I felt so different, so changed, yet there we were, biding our time in my parents’ basement, looking for writing projects to pay the bills, and squirming back into our somewhat normal lives. It seemed like nothing at all had changed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t yet understand the concept Terry Pratchett writes about so eloquently:

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Because I didn’t understand this, I started to feel like I had never left. I started to feel like the whole trip, and its huge bundle of amazing experiences, may have been unnecessary. 

Then I got a text message from Matthew Paul Turner.

I had met Matthew in Nashville during our trip. He and I had grabbed a coffee just outside the city, and immediately I felt a connection. He’s a writer with a beautiful family, and our backgrounds share a lot of similarities. We talked about the projects we were working on. We stayed in touch as Maile and I continued around the country in the big blue bus, and he has been a huge source of encouragement in my writing life.

Three months after Matthew and I met, and about two weeks after Maile, the kids and I returned from our trip, I got this text message from him:

Well…I MIGHT have an open spot on my August World Vision trip to Sri Lanka…I’ll more than likely be inviting you to travel halfway around the world with me. :)

* * * * *

There’s this thing I’m learning about adventures.

They usually have a start date: the day you leave for college, or start that new job, or step on to the plane. The moment you say “yes” or “no” or “I do” or “Let’s give it a shot” or “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” The minute you sign the contract or the check. Sure, there’s a lead-up time, but there’s also usually something marking the date when the whole thing will kick off.

But what I didn’t understand about adventures was this: they don’t end easily. If you’re haphazard enough to embark on one adventure, and you’re not careful, another one will follow after it. The reason for this is rather simple: adventurous paths have many more off-shoots than the normal paths, because the pounding steps of most of humanity have worn the normal everyday paths into deep ruts. Deviations are difficult. Believe me. I know.

But adventurous paths, so rarely trod, are smooth and slippery and wind into the most unlikely places. Once you set off on one, your footing becomes rather unpredictable. In order to continue, you’re forced to lean on something other than your own strength.

* * * * *

So I’m slipping into another adventure. In about four weeks, from August 23rd through September 1st,  I’ll be flying to the other side of the world with a small group of bloggers, all of us guests of World Vision. We’re traveling to Sri Lanka. I’m eager to share what World Vision is accomplishing there and also to introduce you to some of the communities benefiting from their child sponsorship program.

There are so many different opportunities for you to be part of this trip. Consider helping out in the following ways:

1) Sponsor a child through World Vision. If you would like to sponsor a child in the area I will be traveling to, email me as soon as possible at shawnsmucker@yahoo.com. I might be able to meet them in person and deliver a gift, have a picture taken with them, or give them a hug for you. But this kind of meeting takes a lot of planning, so let me know as soon as possible.

2) Help me spread the word by sharing my World Vision blog posts on Facebook, Twitter or by telling your friends about it. Stories change the world – if one of the stories I tell in Sri Lanka resonates with you, please share it.

3) Read the posts by the other bloggers traveling along with me on the trip, and share those as well.

4) Pray that our trip would be productive, informative, and that our presence would encourage those we come into contact with.

You all were such a huge encouragement to Maile and I while we journeyed around the country. I can’t wait for you to join me on this next adventure.

Which of your own adventures has had the biggest impact on you? How did you feel when it was “over”?

Returning from the dust of Laredo, Texas in 1982, we moved into one half of an old farmhouse. We were poor then, I guess, by any standard measurement of wealth, but I felt rich with newly discovered cousins, and aunts that teased me, and uncles that wanted to wrestle or play basketball. I was six years old, and in the timeline of my memory it feels like the birth of my existence, shining and aware and filled with the happy chaos of hugs in rooms filled with too many people.

And my father – I often wonder how he felt, nearly a decade younger than I am now. Not only was he a poor pastor – he was a poor assistant pastor. So my mom sat in the chair at night while we watched television, a needle tucked between her lips, her fingers moving moving moving the thread, first piercing the needle, then weaving like a stream, binding the loose edges. Her quilt money bought us new school clothes each fall.

This is what we did for one another: as a family, we gathered the material of our lives and bound the loose edges together.

* * * * *

For three or four years we lived in that old farmhouse. It was a treasure trove of a place for a child, like a theme park, but one that usually smelled of manure. There is the story of the bull that jumped the fence, and the time I caught the monster carp, and the lightning that struck the oak as my mom walked beneath it. There was the storm that somehow messed with our well, bringing shitty water up through the pipes for a day and a half.

After school I often helped my friend Daniel with his chores (his father worked the farm, so he had responsibilities, real ones, and sometimes I envied him for that). We used wide brooms to sweep the long smooth cement walkways in the dairy barn – swishing bristles – then enjoyed the fruits of our labor by racing on Hot Wheels tricycles over those same walkways.

The cows stared sullenly at us, swishing their tails. Their long tongues, like bright pink snakes, frightened me. I pedaled faster.

* * * * *

The news that we were going to move didn’t affect me one way or another, although by then there were three of us kids, and the news that we would each have our own room seemed inconceivable. What I didn’t know at the time was that my father had walked down to an Amish neighbor to see if he could borrow the money to build the house – no bank would take us in, not on his $15,000 per year, not even with my mother’s quilt money thrown in for good measure. The Amish man agreed, and for the next ten years or so my father would drop off the mortgage check on the first of the month, and the Amish man’s wife would write it down in her little notebook, and I don’t think anyone ever signed anything.

When my parents sold the house, they paid off their debt with the Amish family, and that was that.

It’s too bad, really, that this doesn’t happen more often. You know it’s a good world when someone will loan you a significant amount of money because they know who your parents are, and you will pay it back no matter what because you care about your standing in the community.

It’s a good world, when people reach out their hands to others.

* * * * *

On Sunday afternoon, with a 10-hour drive looming on Monday, Cade turned to me with tired eyes.

“Dad,” he said, “I’m tired of moving.”

I feel the same way. After four months on the road, and a few months in my parents’ house, then a few weeks at Maile’s parents’ house, it is time for us to put down roots. To put the parking brake on this crazy life and find a place.

But a few weeks on the road remain, and we’ll be away this week with spotty internet coverage, so there won’t be much going on here at the blog. But please come back next Monday – I have a huge announcement that I can’t wait to share with you. Or you can like my Facebook page; the announcement might show up there sometime this week.

Today’s compelling post was written by Sonya Judkins. We met Sonya and her husband Kevin while living in Virginia, and the heart they each have for the least of these is simply unbelievable. Please leave a comment if you can – Sonya and Kevin will enjoy reading them when they return from China with their second adopted child.

When Shawn asked me to write about a powerful moment in our experience with adoption, my mind immediately went to the fall of 2009. My husband, Kevin, and I had been waiting for a year for a referral from Ethiopia. Our home study was about to expire and so we had started the process of renewing all the mountains of paperwork.

There was one document that we were struggling to fill out: The Health Questionnaire. It is a document listing every medical issue imaginable.  Next to each condition are the words “yes”, “no” or “maybe.” Our answers were to help our adoption agency match us with a child.  The first time we filled out the paperwork we went through each condition thoroughly and then decided which conditions we thought our family could handle.

But that was a year ago.  That was before God started us down a journey of learning that adoption was less about us and more about God’s amazing love for orphaned children.  That was before we learned about all children waiting with no one pursuing to adopt them for reasons beyond the child’s control.

Once God begins to open your eyes to the reality of the world, you can no longer pretend not to know.  Our hearts began to break for these children.  The kids who would give anything to be a healthy baby so that a loving family would take them in and love them forever.  Children who instead found themselves too old or too sick for anyone to consider adopting them.

So this time when we looked over the checklist we were torn.  While our hearts broke for these children, we questioned whether we were really the ones called to take them into our family.  This decision could drastically change the way our family spent our time and resources.  Every reason we could find to say “no” just sounded disgusting when we said it out loud.  And yet we were so scared to take that leap.

Then one night I had a dream.  In this dream, Kevin and I were sitting on our couch watching T.V.  and we heard a knock at the door.  We peeked through the window to see who was knocking.  Outside stood two little girls in old, tattered clothes.  Somehow we knew they were both sick and they wanted to come inside.  We faced a choice – open the door and let them in or go just go back to watching our television program.  It was one of those dreams that was more than just a dream.  The kind of dream where you wake up shaking and feeling like it was so real you could smell and feel everything that happened.

Even though I was scared, I didn’t want to miss out on those girls outside the door.  My husband agreed.  With trembling hands we filled out the health questions, but this time checking “yes” next to every one.

At the same time, on the other side of the world, a little Ethiopian girl was being relinquished to the care center in her home town.  As we signed our papers, another paper was being signed in Addis, placing her at our agency’s orphanage.  There were many, many families waiting ahead of us in line.  We shouldn’t have received a referral when we did, but our paperwork was the first one that said “yes” to a child with spina bifida.

We are so thankful for a dream that called us to move off of the ledge into the unknown.  A dream that led us to our precious Ethiopian flower, Faith Shetu, who today has no health problems at all. A dream that stays ever close to our hearts and helped us to find the other little girl standing at the door.  Her list of medical issues was very long and at 5 years old she is definitely past the baby stage, but we knew from first glance at her face on our computer screen that she was supposed to be part of our family.  And in just a few days time, Eliana Hope, is going to come home to a door swung open wide for her to enter in.

* * * * *

To follow the Judkins’ story, please head over to their blog. If you’d like to submit a post telling the story of a poignant moment that occurred during adoption or foster care, please email your 500-word submission to shawnsmucker@yahoo.com. Thanks!

Prior adoption and foster care posts include:

Because Someone Has To: Adoption Stories With Shar Halvorsen
Momma For a Moment: A Foster Care Story, With Tamara Out Loud

Today’s post is written by Emily Wierenga, and it broke my heart, perhaps in a way that hearts should be broken because I find myself wanting to randomly hug my four children all the time (but especially my 8-year-old girl). Let down your walls, inhale these words, and then please, please, please pre-order her book (there’s a link at the bottom of the page). These are the things worth writing about and speaking about but they need your financial support if they’re going to get off the ground.

So I Stopped Eating, by Emily Wierenga

We were moving, for the tenth time in seven years, and I’d seen a bad word on the side of the grocery store wall (but had no one to ask about it) and Mum didn’t tell me I was beautiful and I couldn’t go to public school and Dad was never home, so I stopped eating.

I chewed pencil, tasting lead. Our heads were bent over textbooks, together at the kitchen table, and Mum’s back was turned, while she rolled dough on the counter, and I wanted her to look at me, tell me she loved me, over and over, give me a mirror and trace my cheeks and help me believe I was worth something, but she didn’t know how, having never known it herself, and so I broke my pencil pressing it into prose and tried to find myself in the lines of the page.

I heard the sounds of girls going to school, ran to the door, and saw they were wearing pink backpacks and I wanted to run with them, but my legs were too fat; no one likes a fat preacher’s kid. Besides, we were home-schooled in case we should move again. Also, I had cried when I’d gone to kindergarten, so Mum had brought me home, ordered books, and vowed to teach me. That kind of thing was supposed to tell me she loved me, but I didn’t feel it. Because, to me, love was words and gifts. So I sat down to do my math and tried to forget.

I tried to forget the way Dad laughed with strangers in their pews, listened to them, as if their stories were more important than mine. And the way he closed the door to his study and sighed when I knocked, timid to ask him a question. I tried to forget the way he spanked me not knowing what I’d done wrong, only that Mum told him to because she was too angry to do it herself, and scared of that anger. It didn’t hurt me anymore, not even when he used his belt, because I refused to let it.

A neighbor saw me on the carpet, toy-playing, seven-year-old oblivion, and said, “What a big girl,” and I carried those words around like a bird in a cage, until one day the bird got loose and I stopped eating. Soon I would run on thin legs with the girls next-door.

It was a slow-stop, one that began with saying “No,” and the “No” felt good. I refused dessert. I refused the meals Mom dished up for me. I refused the spreads on my bread and then the margarine and then the bread itself. And it felt good, like the ribs on my fingers, as I practiced my counting.

 

I was nine and I felt 109. Mom let me go to school again, but I wasn’t allowed to do English class, because the books were too risqué, and she still didn’t say I was beautiful. The days were long and I was tired and no one could hear me, so I starved harder and the teachers couldn’t see me, so I shrunk my words making them smaller, smaller, until the teachers were forced to pull down their glasses and study the prose I’d made, the winning prose, and I aced class and I flunked recess.

At night, I dreamt of food. Mum found me, hunting for chocolates in my bedspread. I wanted her to hug me and make the fear go away, but then I was worried I’d eat real chocolates, because my guard would be let down with the soft of her touch, so I stopped hugging her for two years. My legs were getting thin, and that was what mattered, but I dreamt about her arms, and woke up hugging myself.

God didn’t care. He made me recite names each night before bed and I couldn’t go to sleep without reciting, because then people would die, and I wanted to die but I didn’t know it until the day everyone tried to force me to eat and I refused it all, and now it was clear to the world and maybe to God too: I was in control.

It was supper and we were seated and Mum was dishing, dishing, dishing and the macaroni and cheese piled orange and white as she handed them, plates plunking against old wood table, and I’d already decided, it tasted like straw, even before I took a bite.

Tonight, I would eat only half, and she’d threaten me with no dessert and I’d tell her point blank, that’s fine. Maybe it would make her worn sweaters unravel and her straight-lined school schedule smear and maybe then she’d take me into her arms and tell me she was sorry.

Sorry for praying that prayer when I was in her womb, the one I learned of later on, the one she said with good intentions not knowing how it would hurt me, the prayer which uttered God, don’t make my baby beautiful, in case she becomes vain. (I can see Mum’s hands trembling on her abdomen in the night as she offered her baby like Hannah did with Samuel, and it makes me love her, yet, despise).

In my own dark nights I worked to reverse that prayer. I’d train as though for war, to see food as nothing but a trap. I’d lie there feeling ribs, measuring wrists, planning the next day’s meals. And if there was to be a party somewhere, soon, I’d eat less in preparation, allowing myself the freedom to snack for then no one would know the difference.

By day, I’d peer into the mirror as if into my soul and imagine myself skinnier, beautiful. I’d creak onto the toilet seat after bath, spend half an hour turning this way and that, analyzing naked bones. Sucking in and pulling skin and strategizing how to become invisible.

 

Salvation came through imagination.

The apple grew a face which mocked me, and so I didn’t finish it, for every time I defeated the food, I gained points against Mum, and maybe God, and I was winning. The food had nothing on me. Sometimes I’d trick it, making the piece of bread think it would fill me up then rip it into halves and eat only one, and there was a thrill in leaving food on the plate, as though I could disappoint it. Even the raisins in the tapioca seemed to stare holes, and I would push it away, feigning fullness.

But food was everywhere, and it never slept. It would beat me in my dreams—the cakes, the pies, the sandwiches. In my mind there would be a buffet, high-calorie. I’d gorge, drool, and crumbs would spill over into daytime and I’d wake feeling bloated, spend the next day getting back at food by eating less.

I’d suck in my cheeks in the mirror; I’d suck them in for photos and I’d try not to talk so I could suck them in day-long. It was tiring, this looking like a model, but I was determined to be beautiful. I would weigh myself every time I ate, every time I went to the bathroom; I’d take off my shoes, my socks, my pants, just to see the numbers drop.

And I wept through the pain, wept behind closed doors with my arms wrapped tight, but I couldn’t stop.

 

Emily Wierenga is an author, artist and freelance journalist from Neerlandia, AB. Please pre-order her book, Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder, to donate to your libraries, churches or the family down the street in need of hope and healing. Thank you.

 

(Repost; originally appeared at The High Calling, November 2010)

There are four chairs, like four points on the compass, one in each corner of the room. An old man reclines in one, his thick glasses magnifying his closed eyes. I’ll be honest – he doesn’t look like he’s alive, but when his machine beeps, he stirs, and the nurse goes over and changes his bag.

In the chair in the opposite corner, a young man is told he can’t receive his treatment for one reason or another. He takes it in stride, runs his hands through his hair, and shrugs.

In the third chair, a middle-aged man falls asleep watching the news. He doesn’t have a port like most of the patients do: a long needle hangs awkwardly from his arm, a massive mosquito, not sucking blood but injecting poison. Some strange kind of poison that will hopefully save his life.

And in the chair beside me, my aunt. Her bald head somehow proud and distinguished. Her kind eyes flit from person to person, willing them not to give up. From a clear bag her own brand of medicine drips. In previous weeks it stood out, ruby red, and nurses injected it slowly through her port – they wore rubber gloves so as not to expose themselves to the chemo. But this week it’s a clear bag. It could be vodka. Or water.

* * * * *

It defies all odds, the quiet hope clinging to that room. It is like a soap bubble that just keeps rising. You wait and you wait and you wait for it to pop, but higher it goes.

* * * * *

We talk for hours. Hers is a unique regimen that takes half a day to leak into her body. We talk about life and cancer, friends and future plans. 4:30 comes quickly. Nearly finished, she has one last request, so I walk down to the guest shop and come back with Heath bars and Snickers, Rolos and Twix. She savors her Heath bar slowly. I devour my Snickers in an instant.

Then a young man enters the room. He looks lost, disoriented by grief, wavering like a wine glass that’s just had the table cloth yanked out from under it. He walks towards the nurse and she greets him warmly. In the quiet room I cannot help but hear snippets of their conversation.

How is she?

…turn for the worse yesterday…

…she seemed fine during chemo!

…kidney failure…stroke…intensive care…

Tears leak slowly from the man’s eyes, a saline drip. Suddenly my aunt whispers tersely.

“This isn’t right. Put the chocolate away. Please. Here. Put it away.”

It didn’t feel right, our celebrating the end of another treatment with chocolate, at least not in the presence of such eroded hope. I pushed the candy bars into obscurity, then sat quietly, our own eyes stinging.

After he left, my aunt turned to me and said quietly.

“Every time I leave this place, it is with a grateful heart.”

* * * * *

And this is it, I suppose: the things most necessary for life, things like hope and courage and thankfulness, spring up from the most unlikely places. I leave the hospital with a certain appreciation for life, and it spreads from me to others, slightly diluted but moving outward nonetheless. Then I wonder, if I traced back all the thankfulness in the world to its original source, would I find that it comes from these places we label as dire? Could hardship and struggle and even death somehow be the catalyst for good? The launching place for healing and redemption, hope and gratefulness?

Do our responses to situations such as these determine how high the tide of hope will rise in the world?

My uncle looked at me.

“You know, to live this life you’re living, make these kinds of decisions, you have to be a little bit crazy,” he said. The worrying thing is, his face showed no sign of amusement.

I nodded and smiled.

“I know.”

* * * * *

It’s been one month since we returned from our four-month trip around the United States. It’s been one month since the tachometer turned over its 9800th mile, we crossed through the 31st state, and we pulled our big blue bus named Willie into my parents’ driveway.

One month. Sometimes it feels like we never took that trip – it feels like it happened in a dream, or underwater, or in a book that I read.

But here we are. We returned to empty bank accounts and not a major project to be found. I realized it was time to scrap for work, so I took anything I could find: working at a farmers’ market, writing SEO articles, and driving Amish people from one place to another.

And, with the help of family and friends, we inched along.

* * * * *

“People thought I was crazy when I quit my job and took out a second mortgage on my house so that I could start my business ten years ago,” my uncle said, shrugging as if to say, And who could blame them? “And maybe it was. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe what you’re doing is crazy.”

I nodded. He sold his business two years ago for a substantial amount of money.

“Yeah,” I said. “It feels that way sometimes.”

“I see a lot of people think about chasing their dreams,” he said, looking off into the distance. “You see them go up to the edge, but security draws them back in, and I shake my head. But I can’t blame them.”

He shrugs and says it again. “I can’t blame them.”

* * * * *

Last week, thanks to a wonderful reference by a friend of mine, I landed my first big project since we’ve returned from our trip. With more in the pipeline. A lot more.

I feel like, finally, I’ve turned the corner. After almost three years of digging and searching and striving, I get a sense that I’m making headway. My mindset has changed, and I’ve learned so much.

There were a lot of times along the way when I wanted to give up on trying to make a living writing, telling other people’s stories. But here I am. I made it this far.

* * * * *

You could do it, too, you know. You could start that business or plant that church or make that move. You could begin the process to adopt or provide foster care. You could create that non-profit. You could live a different life than you’re currently living.

Sometimes you just have to be a little bit crazy.