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- Why is it that life’s turning points are elusive in present-time, only becoming clearly defined in hindsight? Why is it that no matter how many of them we experience, they never seem easier to identify? In 1985, at 27, I embarked on a journey that would bring about one of the most profound turning points of my life. This journey began in a town wedged between majestic mountains and a fertile plain in a country that was worlds apart from where I was raised. It ended on a Native American reservation, a part of my home country that might as well have been in a land as foreign as any I’d ever known.
At the time, I was married to Jim, who had dreamed of building churches in struggling communities since he was a little boy. One month after our Episcopal priest ordained us construction missionaries, I watched three men heave a broken-down car backwards on the Pan American Highway near San Jose, Costa Rica. In hindsight, this event would be seriously metaphorical for my time in the mission field, which took me to a quirky mix of communities from Belize to Alaska and Costa Rica to South Dakota.
The term culture shock was coined in 1958, the year I was born. I had heard the expression before taking up the cause to which Jim was so committed, but I had never fully grasped what a powerful nemesis it could be. I am a writer so my way of making sense of the things I don’t understand is by writing them down. Having recorded the snapshots of a part of my life I’m hoping to someday understand, I have decided to post them here. Let them act as breadcrumbs, the trail of which will make a sort of map defining my journey toward comprehension.
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