Tag: Ukraine

A Thousand Words

“Photography has nothing to do with cameras.”

– Lucas Gentry

Once upon a time, I was searching for a hobby. Graduate school alone was insufficient to sustain my attention or fill my free hours. Time spent casually on TV, reading, and exercise still left space to fill. Smartphones had also not yet made their commercial debut, so there wasn’t the persistent and often irritating distractions they encourage. I knew I could make more productive and satisfying use of my free time and wanted to learn how to do something and enjoy the effort it would take to do so.

As I circled high above the hobby landscape, I found photography as good as anyplace to land. Being a curious and conscientious reader (I was studying to be a librarian, after all), I found several old Time-Life hardbound volumes on the subject and read up on shutter speed, exposure, depth of field, etc. Unlike other topics I had made efforts to wrap my brain around, I found it simply made sense to me. I dove headfirst and chose to learn the hard way, purchasing a student camera — a fully-manual Nikon SLR — along with ample rolls of film. This was a conscious choice considering that digital cameras were just beginning to come into their own and were expected to advance in the approaching years just as exponentially as the computer processor. Even then in digital’s nascent stage, one could still validly debate whether it or film proved the better medium. I selected the latter, believing such a costlier trial-and-error method would foster a firmer grasp of the fundamentals.

We take for granted the privilege of carelessly snapping away with our digital devices at no cost to us other than loss of storage, which is scarcely a concern any longer. No such luxury with film. As I discovered, one learns swiftly the importance of precision with chosen settings and the need to document each and every shot since it requires a trip to the drug or camera store and at least an hour wait for prints to divine whether or not exposure corrections are necessary.

At any rate, opting to learn the old-fashioned way, I gained a grasp of the basics that I otherwise wouldn’t have were I to have taken digital shortcuts. Over time, I became especially skilled at and appreciative of composition, which, I believe, is one of the most difficult aspects to teach. Either you have an eye for how to frame an image of everyday life, or you don’t, which leads me to Mr. Gentry’s words above.

Photography is, among many things, about abstraction. It offers the photographer an opportunity with the easy press of a button to place a frame around a single moment in time, shutting out all other visual distractions. It is simply a way of communicating to a viewer, “Focus on this. See what I see.” The photographer’s eye and mind perceive the images before him or her long before the shutter slides open and shut. The camera itself, though fascinatingly complex, is merely a tool for capturing what the photographer already perceives with his or her own eyes.

This thought came to mind recently at, of all places, a funeral, which serves at least a couple of purposes. First, there is the obvious intent to honor formally and memorialize in the company of others the life of someone you loved, even though they are not present to receive the appreciation. Second, it provides a moment to stop and remember that we all will find ourselves at life’s end one day, and to consider how we are living ours and what kind of legacy we will leave to those who remain.

In this case, it was a man who left a positive and lasting impression on his circle of family and friends, who movingly shared their thoughts and remembrances of his fruitful 70 years. As the service drew to a close, a slide presentation of personal photographs was shared, layered over carefully chosen songs that emoted both his beliefs and the time he spent in life.

As the pictures transitioned from one cherished, frozen moment to the next, I thought of my own parents, who were seated with me, and how I might remember them once the time came. I was reminded of the quote above and a fleeting image my eyes alone captured 30 years ago without the aid of a camera, though stamped upon my mind to this day. The image speaks volumes over a critical moment in their relationship and life, and it remains, for me, one of the most indelible impressions I have or ever will possess of the two of them.

__________________

The closest I’ve ever personally experienced a genuine medical emergency was as a kid in the small East Texas town of Crockett during the late-80s. Our family spent a brief vacation there in a modest cabin next to a lake, where we splashed and played recklessly in a designated, roped area of the murky water, one side of the squared space a pier extending only so far as an average adult could toe the muddy bottom. My brother, sister, and I took turns dashing over the planks and leaping feet first into the natural pool, far too trusting, I now know, of what we couldn’t see beneath the surface. Not long into this activity came my turn. I made my way to the front of the pier, took off like a rocket, and jumped blissfully over the edge.

A jolt of excruciating pain instantly radiated from my left foot throughout the rest of my body after I hit the water, my heel having pierced deeply something sharp on the lake floor. The shock sucked the air out of my lungs as I turned slowly towards everyone behind me, my expression registering only silent horror as my grandfather, nearest to me, immediately discerned my distress and lifted me out of the water. Blood poured from my heel as an agonized howl finally escaped. Long story short, my parents carried me to a local ER, where I was sewn up with three stitches and bandaged. I spent the remainder of the trip seated on the pier, sulkily watching everyone else enjoy themselves, none now daring to jump heedlessly into the water due to the lesson I provided in risk vs. reward.

If the worst physical pain ever experienced were a competition, my mother would win the gold medal uncontested among the five of us in our family. Aside from delivering three children, of which I understand I gave her considerable trouble as the first, she’s endured collapsed lungs, shattered wrists, and a ruptured colon, to name a few. The latter bore the misfortune of taking place in a foreign country under dreadful hospital conditions unsuited to treat properly the affliction, which only prolonged and intensified her suffering. As one local informed them at the time, “One doesn’t go to the hospital here to get well; one goes there to die.”

The plight of the Ukrainian people has dominated the news over the majority of the year, but there was a time when it seemed their independent future was not about conflict and instead was bright and hopeful, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. This is where our family found ourselves beginning in the summer of 1992 until the beginning of the same season the following year after my parents surrendered to the ministry and gave up a comfortable American life to provide food for the soul and body to the poorest Ukrainians in most desperate need of it. Though they had received their freedom nationalistically, many ordinary people found themselves in dire straits as the economy tumbled rapidly downhill over the months to come, and my parents, as representatives of the faithful back home, shared what they could to ease their suffering.

After a year of living among them, we had begun to feel more at home there than in our own country, we discovered, after a brief furlough back in the States a couple of months previous. For my part, eagerly approaching 17, I had gained a decent grasp of the language and could maneuver from here to there on my own, learning to manage independence differently than most teenagers. Memorializing another year, whether it be a birthday, an anniversary, or a major life transition, in our case, should be a happy occasion, but our moment almost exactly a year since we had arrived would be marked not by celebration but a crisis of faith, wondering if we would need one fewer ticket for the eventual return home.

On an otherwise uneventful evening drawing to a close, the front door to our small two-bedroom flat swung open. It was mom, returning later than expected after shopping for essentials, a task which was carried out on foot without the convenience of a vehicle. Arms laden with bags full of purchases, she stumbled in physically anguished. While ascending the stairs at a nearby underground crosswalk, we would learn, a crippling pain in her abdomen suddenly forced her to the ground. She would labor the remaining distance merely to move, crawling on hands and knees the final stretches toward the residential high-rises with no means to communicate her distress to us and come to her aid.

Like a spent and exhausted marathoner crossing the long-awaited finish for the first time, she collapsed into the flat and found her way to the bed she and my father shared. As she lay still and quiet in abject misery, the next several hours were spent by my father and the Christians, another couple who had been our companions on this adventure over the last year, to determine our next move. She desperately needed help for whatever this was, but the poor reputation of the hospitals and available medical care loomed large in our minds. Urgency discouraged a day-long, emergency trip back home across the ocean.

Witnessing an adult in distress — one’s parents, no less — forms a deep impression on a child, even if that child is a late teen on the cusp of adulthood. As much as we’re tempted to roll our naive adolescent eyes, we nevertheless trust them and their grasp on life in general. We have to, after all, because we know we certainly aren’t confident of ourselves at our age, in spite of our efforts to conceal it. With some exceptions, they are the ones who have made us feel safe. But what happens when we observe in a moment of crisis that they themselves don’t feel safe? What changes in us in a given circumstance when there is no assurance from them that everything will be alright?

In the dining and living area, the Christians waited with my brother, sister, and me, prayed, and considered unwanted options as my father did his best to comfort my mother in their bedroom. We instinctively gave her the space she needed and kept our distance, not feeling helpful or useful under the circumstances. Restless and curious, I rose and moved toward the hallway under the guise of retrieving something from the far bedroom. As I walked past their bedroom, the open doorway functioned as a veritable camera shutter, my eyes permanently imprinting on my mind and memory, like film exposed to light, a poignant scene that spoke volumes.

Click.

What light remained of the day shone dimly through the far window. On a bed composed only of a sparse frame and a mattress wanting for comfortable cushioning, my mother lay on her left side, facing the doorway. Eyes shuttered tight, her expression betrayed only literal gut-wrenching pain. A wastebasket rested on the floor at the edge of the bed, prepared to catch anything her stomach expelled. Beside her, my father sat solemn and silent, holding her hand, offering his presence alone as he stared vacantly and uncertainly ahead.

The mental picture captured in the brief second it took me to pass, I then retrieved whatever it was I was after in the other bedroom and returned to the living room. During the next several days, she would enter one of the local hospitals, the doctors learning only after opening her up that scar tissue from a surgery years prior had shifted and created in her colon a blockage that intensified until it burst, resulting in peritonitis. The experience before, during, and after left her life in peril and deserves its own story. In any event, once able to travel following emergency surgery and insufficient treatment, we were forced home and found our experience as missionaries summarily brought to a swift and decided close with little time for goodbyes to all those we would leave behind.

__________________

I’ve revisited this bedside scene many times over the last 30 years, processed and reprocessed its meaning to me and the emotions I couldn’t adequately express then. It remains a photograph framed and exhibited nowhere but on the walls of my mind, an image I’m able to share only with the visual limitations of words. As a photograph, albeit mental, however, it has much to share.

Years of preparation, of planning, of feeling led to abandon the safety of their life in America and take the risk of a dramatic — some said “crazy” — move across the other side of the world into a country taking its first independent steps culminated in this single moment. Far from home, from the care that could rapidly be provided potentially to save a life, one wondered whether, only a year in, the decision would prove a fool’s errand, and a fatal one at that. “Perhaps it wasn’t God who sent you,” as the doubts might have stirred. “You wanted for purpose, meaning, so you left, and instead you find yourself putting God needlessly to the test. That is, if God is in it at all.”

I don’t know what thoughts may have been circling my parents’ minds in that moment, but in my mind’s eye, I still see the pain in my mother’s face, eyes tightly shutting out the world and wishing desperately for relief, even if it came in the form of death. I see my father’s vacant stare, one of the first and only times in my young life when I witnessed utter helplessness written in his expression. Nothing but faith to which they could cling, nothing but hope to assuage a sense of despair. As mentioned, my mother would spend several torturous days in the hospital thereafter, which is a harrowing story all on its own, but if I remember anything of them and this time in our lives, it is this single image that will survive.

__________________

“Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior

Habakkuk 3:17-18

I recently was reminded of this verse during a routine reading. Depending on my mood or circumstances, I either appreciate it or I prefer to be cynical about its attitude and perspective. When life isn’t living up to my expectations, when I am disappointed in myself and my sins or shortcomings, when the kids can’t seem to get it together with their ongoing issues (which can be deep, exhausting, and never-ending with adoptive parenting), I genuinely feel the urge to reject it. I just want to feel better, I don’t at the moment, and the words are of little comfort. Yet, it is for moments such as this that the words are intended. My circumstances, it infers, shouldn’t determine my posture, which, it would seem, is merely a matter of choice. It should be noted that the surrounding verses don’t suggest Habakkuk is ignoring the fact that life could and should be better than it is presently, but he doesn’t wholly blame God for it, and he chooses not to allow it to crush his faith irreparably.

This single, still image of my parents ought to instruct me more often than I have allowed it rather than serve merely as a meaningful picture worthy of a frame, were a camera available at the time. I know they felt desperation, doubt, and profound pain. While my mother languished in the hospital, my father, characteristically contained and controlled with his emotions, found himself unable to finish a simple blessing over a family meal — an observation that was the first genuinely to unsettle me throughout the ordeal. Even my parents’ faith, on which I relied up to that point, was vulnerable and could be tested.

I do wonder what might have been different about each of us had mom’s life ended. We all, ultimately, do not receive a favorable answer to prayer that we retain those we love. I do know that the experience bolstered their confidence and their faith. Remembrance of all that they endured and overcame does not always ease today’s pain, but it does inspire them here and now to choose hope over despair.

So, I will keep this picture tucked away in my mind, recalling it, if I am wise, as needed in moments of doubt or disappointment. It has much to teach me without the help of a thousand words. Yes, a camera might have been a useful tool to employ as I passed the pale doorway, but useful only insofar as it would have allowed me to share what I witnessed. In the end, this is all a camera actually allows us to do — to share what we already see and will be imprinted on our minds. If I’m honest, however, I suppose there are some things that are not to be shared, that are meant for each of us alone. If so, how rare are those moments, those memories, and, therefore, all the more precious and valuable, especially in an overshared age such as ours.

First Leg

At 15 years of age, the farthest west I had ever traveled was Colorado for a family trip to Estes Park, where I remember trail riding on horses (always a go-to activity on family vacations my mother planned) and taking in the beautiful elevated natural sights. The farthest east was Florida for one of three trips to Disneyworld, two with family and one as a high school sophomore for a band competition and performance at Epcot Center. Anything beyond these boundaries I was forced to explore in one of the sundry, yellow-spined issues of National Geographic filling out my father’s bookshelves in our living room. During my freshman year, I sat through World Geography, memorizing each and every country’s capital and discovering customs, cuisines, and landmarks around the globe, all detailed vividly in textbooks or in full, moving color on a television screen. These places existed where I had never been and might as well had been the stuff of fiction, since I was just as likely to visit the other side of the earth as I was to “explore strange, new worlds” in a starship.

On the cusp of my 16th birthday, however, that was all about to change. Here, at the edge of my 46th as I pound this out, I recently reminded my family that it had been 30 years this month since my parents took a leap of faith and brought us all across the ocean into what had been a formerly communist country only a few short months before. In the course of our text exchange, mom asked what we remembered about our exit, the first for any of us outside of the U.S., not for a mere visit but to change our residence. We each teased out snippets here and there, but a text conversation is rarely adequate for detailing personal events that deserve greater space. So, I felt compelled to take the time to stretch my own recollection of our initial departure further. What follows are my own sequenced but scattered memories of those first few days of travel.

For the sake of context, it might help to recall the world as it was in early 1992. The internet had not yet moved in to the majority of U.S. homes, and smartphones still might as well have been the stuff of science fiction. No one carried a mini-computer, much less a phone, in their pockets or purses. The average price of gas was in the neighborhood of $1.13/gallon. Johnny Carson hosted his last episode of The Tonight Show, and 60 Minutes was among the most popular programs on television. Police officers accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted, sparking riots thereafter in L.A., and Bush and Yeltsin declared a formal end to the Cold War, the Soviet Union having disbanded the year previous.

This was the general state of things as we rolled up for the first time to Houston’s Intercontinental Airport in June of 1992. It wouldn’t be renamed for the standing president for another 5 years. Dad was already making his way to Ukraine by land in Europe, having traveled with mom there the month before. She had returned after a brief visit to retrieve my brother, sister, and me. We had been staying with our maternal grandparents, who were experiencing one of the most difficult separations of their lives with our departure. We were their only grandchildren, and our mother was their only surviving child. Moving indefinitely to a country that until only recently was a Cold War enemy and taking the grandkids as well was breaking their hearts. Communication would be neither routine nor convenient; letters delayed by international postal services would have to suffice the majority of the time. We didn’t know when, or if, we would return.

As we waited to board, friends and family lingered with us at our gate in the terminal, taking for granted what post-9/11, still a blissful nine years distant, would strip away when airport and traveler security would become a priority, excluding all but passengers. Tears are what I remember as we stood by waiting for the announcement. Tears, hugs, and a deep sadness, some among us still wondering why my parents had picked this path, though they would say it was picked for them, and why they were taking us with them. The world was much bigger then, made so by the inability to connect instantly with one another in a variety of ways, as it is today due to the ubiquity and convenience of technology. When connection is scarce and limited, distances between those we love, especially physical distances, feel impossibly far away, as we would find.

The time had come, and we began the process of boarding, saying our final goodbyes and producing our tickets at the gate for the long flight to Germany, our first stop. I remember little of the flight itself, but a few details stick out. First, it was long. Up to that point in my young life, a puddle jumper to the Panhandle summed up the bulk of my flight experience as a passenger. The duration was just long enough to recognize that taking off and landing were the most exciting sections of the trip. Internationally, however, these maneuvers were a mere fraction of airtime, and, by the way, kids (and, come to think of it, adults), there were no iPads or screens to occupy us. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Speaking of, and second, smoking, though recognized even then as an unhealthy habit, still had a foothold in most public places, including flights, though with some limitations. You’re all breathing the same encapsulated air, however, so you’re bound to take it in. My brother recalls receiving more than his unwanted share of it where he found himself seated. In any event, it’s a wonder there were not the irate passenger incidents we hear so frequently about today in the news. Easy to make a case of how spoiled and entitled we are; we put up with so much more then.

At long last, we landed in Frankfurt, still a hub for European air travel, and, to this day now as a more experienced traveler, one of my least favorite stops/layovers for its confusing sprawl. Exhausted but soldiering on, we waited with our group for the following flight that would take us in to Moscow for a day or two before our final destination — Lugansk, in far eastern Ukraine. We were traveling with a party of church-goers who were on mission not simply to escort us in but conduct a couple of weeks of mission work and evangelizing. I complained to my mother of my stomach — a tell-tale sign of anxiety I would become well-acquainted with at that age. My mother, with as much empathy as she could muster in her fatigue both emotional and physical, dismissed my pains to nerves, duly so, though it was little comfort.

In due time, we boarded the next flight bound for Moscow. Strangely, I remember absolutely nothing about this leg of the journey. Maybe I slept, maybe I didn’t. I assume my brain was too worn out to make a meager effort to file away what must have been an inconsequential experience. At any rate, we landed, we exited, and whatever was lacking in the previous few unremarkable hours of travel would be compensated for with impressions that planted their roots deep and have never escaped my memory.

It’s difficult to describe what it’s like stepping the very first time out of the familiarity of your own country and into another so unlike your own, one you have seen only on a screen or in pictures. Both fear and anticipation mingle together as you move along, sharing in common only your experience as a human being. All the rest has to be felt and experienced; you’re a kid once more, learning about the world, or at least a different part of it, and everything old is new again, so to speak.

Stepping out of the plane, I followed our group down the stretch until we each were expected to pause at a customs booth. My turn arrived, and I stepped before it, my eyes meeting those of a young uniformed Russian soldier, complete with the storied hammer and sickle pinned to the front of his military-issue hat atop his stern, no-nonsense head. His expression betrayed nothing except discipline and an expectation not to be trifled with. I produced my passport in silence as he took it, studied it, looked up, and studied me. Here, now, was my genuinely first experience of someone foreign in a foreign land. I felt a mixture of dread and excitement as his gaze lingered. This soldier, who resembled an authentic version of the enemy we had been educated to believe in, stood before me now in judgment. My fate was literally in his hands as I waited, alone, one solitary thought passing my mind: “This may be the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

I’m certain I detected a subtle smirk as he returned my passport and sent me on my way, satisfied he had produced the desired and intended psychological effect. As we moved on, after collecting our luggage, we waited inside the airport for transportation to the hotel. As other travelers passed us by, none of them American, I caught not only glimpses of my fellow foreign man but also his/her odors, I’m sorry to say. This sense impression is, of course, nontransferable in a picture, moving or still, and can only be experienced in person. Near us were, I recall, a couple, disheveled but clearly traveling. Accompanying them along with their luggage was a smell I had never encountered, but was unmistakably body odor on a level I can only describe euphemistically as “otherworldly.” It was there I’m sure I learned to hold my nose without actually holding it, closing off my nasal passages indiscreetly so as not to appear rude.

On the heels of this was my first encounter with an alcoholic, ranting and gesturing incoherently, I can only guess, though I could not understand the language as of yet. At some point in his tirade, he stumbled in our direction as one of our interpreters intervened and headed him off, redirecting him elsewhere. This disease, we would learn, was, and, for all I know, may still be an epidemic problem in Russia. More than once over the course of the following year we would encounter such persons, one of them I distinctly recall belly-up in the mid-day sun adjacent to railroad tracks as we were on our way on foot into town. We had to pause a moment to be sure we were not witnessing instead a fresh corpse. Fortunately, we observed his chest rising and falling ever so slightly as to indicate signs of life, and so we chose to move on, finding him absent from his improvised grassy bed as we passed by upon our return that way.

Our pastor had joined us for this trip, and I was paired with him in one of our two-person rooms at the hotel. Waking the next morning for a little sightseeing with the group, I discovered I needed only to roll over in bed to observe the first of many new sights that day. There he was, seated at the edge of his bed, Bible in hand, marveling and remarking to me about a passage in Scripture, clothed merely in an undershirt and “whitey-tighties.” Nothing inappropriate took place, mind you, but needless to say, I was not feeling as inspired by the lofty passage as he, and I never again saw him quite the same way when stepping into the pulpit.

Red Square was my first taste of a famed, truly foreign location, and it didn’t disappoint. I’m sure I was a sight to behold as well dressed as I was, sticking out like a sore-thumb in threads one would acquire solely in the U.S. Prior to leaving the States, I had earned my high school letter as a sophomore via band, so I was afforded a letterman’s jacket, which I wore proudly on the trip. I foolishly accessorized this with a Confederate Army soldier’s cap, which I purchased in Frontierland at Disneyworld before they, and I, “woke” to the inappropriateness of such a souvenir and what it represented to many, thereby discontinuing it.

The ornate, colorful domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral to our left, we stood in the center of the Square facing the tomb of Lenin, revered founder of the U.S.S.R. Upon his death in 1924, Soviet leaders built the mausoleum soon after and laid him permanently in state, where his body remains eerily preserved to this very day. While I can’t verify it, it is rumored that nails and hair are regularly trimmed when the body is not on display.

After a brief discussion, we determined who among us was brave enough to venture into the tomb. There was no question about it for me, having heard about this very monument and having learned a thing or two about Lenin and his role in Soviet history. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

So, we queued up and began the slow, deliberate shuffle toward the entrance. As we neared admittance, we understood that we were to remain silent, were to capture no photographs, and were to remove our hats. I dutifully complied as we began to make our way past the guards, one posted on each side of the threshold. As I began to cross, the guard to my right reached out his arm in front of me, I assumed to look me over first for photographic equipment. He then lowered his arm, allowing me to pass, and so I did. Placing my hands in my jacket pockets, I proceeded to move forward only to be jerked backwards by my right arm. I turned and found the same soldier angrily address me in his native tongue. I never determined what he said, but his incensed tone communicated everything — take your hands out of your pockets. I failed to receive these instructions beforehand, but I was nonetheless allowed to pass once I demonstrated I understood. Once again, I was left with the harsh impression that there are no comedians in the ranks of the Russian military.

Recovering from this shock and reprimand, I stepped inside and wound around the inner perimeter. There, in the center of the marbled, rectangular room, was the body of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. “Lenin,” lying protectively in a glass-encased container the size of a coffin. Guards stood stoically posted at all corners of the interior, ensuring respect was maintained by all who entered. The palpable silence, armed military presence, and dim atmosphere endeavored to communicate to all exiting that you have been in the presence of a god, albeit a dead god. While a day never transpired before or after in which Lenin crossed my mind, it nonetheless made an impression on me, not for the importance of this man but for the misplaced reverence of those following who paid sustained posthumous respect to him — a man whose Revolution that birthed a “united” country fell apart in less than a century.

The following day, we departed Moscow and boarded a dual-propeller Aeroflot passenger plane, bound for our final destination and new home — Lugansk, Ukraine. The noise and jarring revolutions of the engines, I discovered, ensured that conversations were maintained at a minimum of 90 decibels and that the fuselage alarmingly creak under the strain before, during, and after the flight. Somehow, we arrived intact and made our last few kilometers into town, uncertain of the stories we hoped to tell one day to those we left behind.

The news of late has shared no shortage of stories tragic and unsettling of this region over the course of the year. The stories, however, that we have been able to tell of that year in our lives there have remained with us and became an inseparable part of our identities. This first leg of the journey, lasting only a few days, left me with more than my share of impressions. I hope and expect to say more about all that followed in the future as time an inspiration permit. In the meantime, I simply pray that peace will once again find its way to Ukraine, a place we once gladly called home.

Animal House

“Hey, I want to show you something.”

My mother whispered the words, shaking me awake a few minutes earlier than usual on a school day, doing her utmost not to disturb my brother in the adjacent bed. I never knew her to disappoint in her eagerness to share surprises with me and my siblings, so I stumbled out of bed willingly. She was notorious during our upbringing for her inability to await anything in which her children might find pleasure, even going so far as to allow us to open a gift, or two, or three, prior to Christmas, and this without any of our relatively patient, young trio begging to do so.

She led me from the bedroom through the fading darkness, past the kitchen, out the back door, and into the garage.

“Look!” she uttered softly with a wide-eyed grin.

Following her extended finger, my eyes landed on a deep, ample pot roast pan, serving in its retirement as our black cocker spaniel’s water bowl. Sissy, the family canine, did not figure prominently in this scene, at least not in my memory, which is surprising considering what I saw next. The truth was, her instinctive rage against other living things who dared to cross her territory seemed to belie a desperate need to compensate for her poorly-chosen moniker. More about that later.

In any event, swimming vigorous laps around the inner perimeter of the pot, as if training solo for the rodent summer Olympics, was a large, common, mangy rat. Clearly, his tiny arms were ill-equipped to extricate himself out of the pot and over the edge of this unlikely critter-sized pool to effect an escape. How he found himself trapped in this watery prison in the first place was anyone’s guess.

I knew not what to make of this scene, certainly not at this early hour or at such an impressionable age. My mother, on the other hand, found it uniquely amusing. There is, however, a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, including mirth and extermination, as I would soon discover. As disappointingly as this random rat’s day had begun, it was about to get much, much worse.

After a moment or two, my mother — my sweet, gentle, loving mother — resourcefully reached for one of my father’s thick-soled flip-flops and leaned over the pan. With one narrow end of the rubber foot-piece, she pressed down firmly upon its body, held it under as it struggled desperately for air, and didn’t release until the water stilled. And so, I began my day witness to the torturous execution of one of God’s precious living creatures.

Have a good day at school.

My siblings and I would be party to this scene at least once more when another rat found its way later into our backyard. My mother, now well-versed in the dark art of drowning small mammals, decided to make a memory of the moment and, in the spirit of doing things together as a family, had us dutifully empty a trash can, grab a hose, and, with the assistance of my brother, corner the unlucky animal and drop him into the waiting container. As the waters rose, the descent of a broomstick upon his tapered snout would be his last and final vision.

15 years later, having begun my first year of grad school and living on my own for several years, I decided, at long last, it was time for a pet. Perhaps guiltily remembering the misfortune of the two rodents’ watery graves at my childhood home, I settled on not a dog, not a cat, but — you guessed it — a rat. And not just one, but two. Rex and Ed, whom I acquired domesticated from a local schoolteacher, were treated to a 4-foot tall, multilevel cage and occasional forays around the apartment (I had a “thing” then about pets and space). I am certain management would not have looked favorably upon this arrangement, but I wouldn’t have them long enough to learn. In less than a year, I found them more trouble than they were worth and sold them off to another. My time living solo would see me also adopt a dog, Fred, whom I had to relinquish after a brief span due to a move, as well as a string of betta fish that managed to expire prematurely each in remarkably different and tragic ways.

We Americans love our pets. This is most evident when you spend time with citizens of other corners of the world, where such devotion is hardly lavished upon animals of any size or variety. The same year I acquired Rex and Ed, I supervised a computer lab in a medical school library while working on my library science degree. Most of the part time staff were students from India, doctors in their own country but living in the U.S. earning a simple public health degree in order to allow them simultaneously to study for the MCAT and qualify for residency here. Discussions once turned to pets, and they all shared how astounded they were not only at the time and attention focused on pets but also in the existence of superstores capitalizing on their care and maintenance.

We had no such superstores in my youth, but we had more than our share of pets. Lest I leave the impression all creatures great and small trembled at the sound of my mother’s name, to the contrary, she was the reason we learned to love them and enjoyed the privilege of caring for almost all but the farm animal variety, which was my father’s experience, though more of necessity than pleasure. In any event, there are a notable few of our diminutive companions I remember with fondness.

_______________

Snuggles the rabbit wore a salt-and-pepper gray pelt. I remember nothing of how we acquired him or how long he shared residence in our home, but he had free-reign of the backyard and was as domesticated, friendly, and trusting as any common family pet — that is, until my mother thought better and attempted to realize a version of Eden in which lion lies down with the lamb, so to speak. So, we got a dog. We “adopted” Sissy the cocker spaniel from a family in town and brought her home expecting . . . well, I’m not sure what. Amiable and happy as dogs come, Sissy warmed-up to us immediately. Snuggles, however, was not afforded such courtesy. A single glance, and Sissy flew blindly at Snuggles with murder instinctively on her mind. Alas, there would be no Edenic animal paradise here. Never before or since have I heard a rabbit scream in abject terror as he fled as fast as his legs would carry him. Fortunately for Snuggles, we found ourselves nimble enough to come between them before Sissy captured her prey.

I have no theories as to the relations between beasts prior to the Fall, but if they existed in relative harmony, such theology had never crossed our spaniel’s mind, nor was it likely to be pondered. Someone had to go, it was decided. One would think Snuggles’s seniority and status as the offended plaintiff would secure her a favorable verdict, but it was determined she would stand a better chance of survival in exile. So, in a cruel twist of fate, the defendant won the day. We carried him to the edge of an overgrown acreage of brush, set him down, and watched and waited as he cautiously wandered into the wild unknown. I long imagined that he found himself an untamed, feisty partner and raised a warren of bunnies. The more likely scenario pictures him, curiosity sated, hopping back to the recently vacated grassy entrance, wondering where we were and when lunch would be served.

_______________

Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” was among my favorite comic strips growing up. A single-frame was all he required to convey his quirky perspective on the humor he found in the world. Among the most memorable for me was one in which a professor dons his latest invention designed to interpret what dogs are, in fact, communicating through their incessant barking. As he ambles patiently through a neighborhood much like mine or yours with clipboard in hand, dogs scattered about behind backyard fences or chasing cars yip and yap, as they are prone to do. The domed machine resting atop his head tuned meticulously to receive and return understandable thoughts from the various dogs in proximity, the professor anticlimactically hears nothing but a single, simple word escaping their muzzles: “Hey!”

Our canine friends throughout the world may speak the same primitive language purposed merely to gain another’s attention, but they uniquely understand our own and only our own, especially if we have trained them to do so. We found this to be true while living in Ukraine briefly in the early 90s. There, once our family was settled into our own place, my mother once again found a way to introduce a pet into our home. “Wookie,” she called her — a small, unattractive mutt with a wispy, stringy black and white coat that traveled in all directions of the compass. Her sweet, affectionate character made up for her lack of beauty, and we fell in love with her. Her favorite places were seated atop your lap or lying down with her head nestled contentedly on your shoulder with her body in the crook of your arm.

Though she was birthed in Eastern Europe, she soon departed her litter and was gifted to us, having little or no time to learn the local dialect. Living with us instructed her ears to comprehend basic English and English only. Once we did give her over to the care of other nationals the following year after returning to the U.S. for a two-month furlough, we learned later that her most common posture soon after resembled the confused, blank stare of a Western tourist anytime Ukrainians issued commands in her general direction. She hadn’t a clue what she was being told. When we returned after furlough, we visited the village at which we had left her to attend a service. Toward the hour’s end, an animal cautiously entered the auditorium nearest stage left. It was Wookie, investigating, no doubt, after hearing her first language spoken and sung. We were greeted with wild delight once she saw us, though she was to remain under the care of her second family.

Her penchant for demonstrative affection was matched only by her generosity as a gift-giver. I never before would have imagined that an animal could express such a human characteristic, but she did so on more than one occasion, though in her own misunderstood fashion. One otherwise typical morning comes to mind.

My brother and I slept on couches that doubled as beds in a space that quadrupled in function as bedroom, dining room, schoolroom, and living room. Soon after the sun rose, Wookie would routinely wander in, hop onto each of our beds, and excitedly soak our faces with puppy licks and awful breath — the latter potent enough to knock us out a bit longer. She would trot off back to the kitchen to rejoin my mother, satisfied with a job well-done.

Now, in places like eastern Ukraine at that time and earlier, one did not purchase groceries indoors at a store but often in an “open-air” market outdoors. You brought your own bags and loaded them up with produce. A cut of meat came not in a package but was placed in wrappings after indicating to the butcher the size of the cut, in much the same way one would extend one’s hands prevaricating about the size of the fish you caught over the weekend. Chicken was typically acquired whole, de-feathered and headless but organs intact. What you didn’t use could be discarded or fed to the dog.

You may see where I’m going with this.

Mom would sometimes get an early start on lunch or dinner in the morning, and Wookie was all too happy to serve as her audience in hopes of receiving scraps, which she often did. Having the kind and generous heart she possessed, there was no question as to whether or not to share. In this regard, she was notorious for regifting.

She arrived in the morning as was her custom, hopped onto our beds to say “good morning” in her own special way, and quietly departed. Stirring several minutes later, I sat up and observed something on the blanket that could only be described as small, round, purple, and, after a touch that inspired a reflexive, disgusted recoil of my hand . . . squishy. Baffled as to what this clearly organic substance might be and how it found its way to my bed, I soon received an answer from my brother’s end of the room.

Leaping out of his sheets as if struck by lightning, my brother yelped, startled, he said, by something cold and wet against his skin. Pulling aside the covers, there we discovered, likewise, formerly living matter, though quite dissimilar to the mysterious soft sphere atop my sheets. There beneath the covers, as if slumbering peacefully beside her partner, were the remnants of an entire, intact chicken carcass.

Mystery solved, Wookie revealed the answer to yet another we had no interest in solving. If size matters, our compassionate, foreign pet had a clear favorite, though it would seem she possessed a remarkable emotional intelligence. She concealed, after all, the larger of the two gifts, I can only assume in an effort to protect my feelings. In any case, all I got was a measly purple organ.

_______________

Dad had little interest in pets. Cats, even less. So it was no surprise when my sister begged to take one in from a litter left at the stable where she took riding lessons that his first and unequivocal response was a curt “no.” That should have been the end of it, except that daughters often have their fathers wrapped around their little fingers, as we all know. That, and my mother is both persuasive and persistent. She quickly warmed to the idea of a feline — an animal we had not yet auditioned for the role of family pet — so dad never really had a chance, though he did have the final say.

“Smudge” arrived at our home in north country New York, squarely in the brief adolescent stage of his life. Solid white save the small, almost indiscernible “smudge” of gray/black hairs on his forehead, he was a beautiful cat with plenty of personality to spare.

I will admit I often treated him like a younger sibling one loves to harmlessly pester, just to get a reaction. I recall running him up and down the stairs endlessly chasing a ball made of aluminum foil simply for the pleasure of laughing at the sight of a cat panting like a dog. When I wasn’t wearing him out on the stairs for this purpose, the same ball was employed to launch him into the air like a rocket. Let me explain.

Smudge might be, say, in the kitchen, around the corner and out of sight. I would squat on the floor of the den, leaning forward with my elbows touching the floor, face forward and low to the ground, the ball held in my right hand and directly in front of my face. I would wait, still and quiet, for him to unsuspectingly enter the room. Once he did, as soon as his eyes met mine, he would quickly assume the same posture, eyes wide as saucers, eagerly waiting to pounce on his spherical prey. After a moment or two, I would throw the ball high into the air, and he would launch himself from the ground no less than five to six feet to intercept. We still have a photograph of this scene, and I swear it isn’t a doctored pic. If you didn’t know any better, you might be persuaded our cat hailed from Krypton, preferring to fly from room to room in the house.

I could tell many more stories of Smudge, such as the time he caught a mouse in the basement and, being an indoor denizen, didn’t know what to do with it except bring it upstairs and stare at it, terrified as it was to move a muscle; or when, at the suggestion of a veterinarian, my parents dosed him with Benadryl to make him a more compliant traveler as they prepared to move. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to get a cat drunk, well, use your imagination.

In the end, Smudge found himself with only my parents, long after all of us had left the house and moved on with our lives. Ironically, the one family member most resistant to form an attachment was the one he attached to most stubbornly, as if he loved a challenge. Each morning, for as long as Smudge remained the family pet, my father could barely maneuver from one place to another without tripping over him as he snaked affectionately around his legs.

The day eventually arrived — the unwelcome visit to the vet — and my parents carried him there. With no options left, the decision was made to help him pass. It remains the only pet for which my father shed tears.

_______________

These days, our kids woefully regret that my wife and I have little or no interest in pets. She grew up with none, and I grew up with all of them, enough to know that, while I enjoy them, I no longer have interest in taking care of them. We have allowed a guinea pig that goes by the name of Charlie, maintained (with many reminders) by our middle. While it has persuaded me that it may be one of the easiest pets to manage, there remain minor annoyances. Its greatest talents, I’ve discovered, are depositing innumerable droppings wherever our daughter has placed her unwillingly, or, if she manages an escape, instinctively hiding in the closest, darkest corner of the house, most often in a location impossible from which to remove her without an hour’s worth of coaxing or heavy lifting, if it happens to be beneath a piece of furniture.

Chillin’ with the G-Pig

In any event, unless our kids bring home a stray (they’d make a zoo of the house if we would allow it), I’d say my days of pet care and maintenance are done. But I’m thankful for the stories I can tell and the experiences of caring for them. I think pets can help us, especially in our most tender years, learn the virtue of compassion, and, hopefully, apply the characteristic to all living things. “Pets are humanizing,” said James Cromwell. “They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life.”

Gifted Time

Thick enough to choke a horse by the time it was finally retired in 1993, it had been in print for a century until the internet began to emerge and supplant it. It contained within its innumerable full-color pages practically all of the wants or needs of any American consumer — aside from perishables, that is — and bore enough heft to register on a common bathroom scale. It was my childhood’s Amazon.com, and you didn’t need an electronic device to access its content. When neither stored away nor browsed, its “literal” physical depth allowed it to function as an effective booster seat for a toddler at the dinner table. That being said, my generation should be the last to retain any memory of handling the massive, unwieldy paperbound object known as the general Sears catalog.

Each fall, my siblings and I would haul this beast out of our grandparents’ hall closet in anticipation of Christmas and thumb eagerly through its exhaustive, static, two-dimensional display of wares to assemble our wish lists. For obvious reasons, the pages of the toy section near the back-half received the most copious attention from the three of us. The latest and greatest Star Wars or G.I. Joe playthings, for my part, made the top of my lists nearly every year during the unforgettable decade that was the 80s until I moved on to other, more mature interests. As my childhood faded from view, so did the Sears catalog from the marketplace.

Kids live for Christmas, regardless of the tools they employ to detail their desires as scrupulously as a corporate accountant. My siblings and I were no exception. Even when Santa was ultimately revealed as merely a jolly illusion, I found renewed meaning in my parents’ offer to assist in the secret Christmas morning facade of a visit from St. Nick for my younger sister’s and brother’s benefit. On these occasions, I was permitted to stay up later, given my help assembling gifts dubiously procured from Santa’s sleigh before placing them carefully next to the tree for discovery the following morning.

As a professional adult with a disposable income, I exchanged preferences and found greater delight in giving over receiving. For a spell, I had a knack for pinning down just the right item for certain family members or friends, often nothing that was pointedly requested, making the pleasure of the surprise all the more meaningful. Such gifts are unmatched in my opinion, for they have less to say about the thing itself and more about the poignant satisfaction of being understood by another so well that words stating wishes are wholly unnecessary — I know who you are, and here’s an object to prove it.

My wife did not long have an opportunity to make the acquaintance of this version of myself, however. I don’t know when the change occurred for me, but change it did. She is much more familiar with a husband who requires a detailed list of wants for her and for others each year the season returns and who, conversely, as she observed plainly early into our marriage, “doesn’t like things.” While I wouldn’t put it that way, it is true I have been known to struggle to compose a wish list. This past Christmas, for instance, I admit for the first time in memory I lacked the wherewithal to submit even a vacant sheet of paper with my name alone at the top. There simply wasn’t anything I wanted. Not to worry, though. My wife completed my homework in my stead. She can’t bear exclusion and would make certain the tree would shelter packages for me another year.

I’m not sure it’s possible for any of us to imagine Christmas without gifts; they seem one and the same, each inseparably linked to the other. I know this to be so for our own children, as I’ve observed the last five years with them. In spite of having begun the first few years of their lives in difficult places, mention of the season almost immediately inspires composition of their wish lists, which are hardly modest, as I might have expected, and are just as lengthy and comprehensive as any given kid’s. A glance back toward relatively recent history, however, as I’ve discovered, reveals portions of this tradition were grafted in, at least in America.

It bears no mention that gift giving is a longstanding, historical human practice across all cultures and timeframes. Its association with Christmas here in America, however, notably with children, has its own unique flavor. In a 2015 article in The Atlantic titled “Why Children Get Gifts on Christmas,” Paul Ringel attempts to answer the question, noting that “no broad historical precedent exists for the link” between the Christian faith and Christmas gifts, in spite of occasional references, as I grew up hearing, to the wise men’s offerings to Christ at his birth.

“The practice of buying Christmas gifts for children,” Ringel writes, “began during the first half of the 1800s, particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home- and child-centered holiday.” Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “The Night Before Christmas,” was one of several tools utilized at this time by wealthy movers and shakers to migrate the season into the home and out of the streets. This poem was also among the first to promote the idea of Santa visiting the homes of children to distribute gifts under cover of wintery darkness and dream-filled slumber.

I acknowledge I could slothfully allow Ringel to expand my word-count and permit him instead to fill this space, though properly attributed. I’ll leave it to you, however, to determine whether or not to allow him the time to explain fully the finer points; his piece is easy enough to locate. Suffice it to say that Santa’s busy Christmas Eve distribution and the fact of kids as focal recipients of gifts here in the U.S.A. is a tradition that had a beginning not necessarily linked to the “reason for the season,” if you will. It is simply a tradition, nothing more, nothing less — a national, not religious one, it would seem, with curiously few, if any, authentic roots in the Christian faith.

_______________

“I don’t want us to exchange gifts this year.”

My mother voiced it as a request rather than a demand of my brother, sister, and me a few months prior to our plan to meet at my sister’s in San Antonio for Christmas.

“I want us all just to get together and enjoy each other’s time.”

Mom had never heard of Paul Ringel and was likely unfamiliar with his article in The Atlantic. Nonetheless, it would be a first for us. In our adulthood, the gifting portion of my family’s Christmases had always been modest by comparison, but this year, we agreed the kids would have received a wealth of presents from exchanges previous to our gathering post-Christmas Day. So, we went giftless.

In the spirit of glancing backward at “where it all began,” a look back at our own personal family history might suggest this day was destined to arrive. As I’ve mentioned before, nearly 30 years ago, our family left the shores of America for the newly-rebirthed, post-Soviet era land of Ukraine to engage in faith-based humanitarian efforts with the people of Lugansk. As with a newborn, the country found itself in many ways helpless and in need of assistance simply to survive, having recently dissolved its ties with the former U.S.S.R.

Our time there was as much about scarcity as anything. While we wanted for nothing, we lived in many ways like the people, and we learned to live as well without complaint. We stood patiently in the same lines for bread and milk, walked or rode uncomfortably in crammed public trams, and lived as a family of five in spaces smaller than many ample single-person dwellings here in the States. You learn contentment, largely due to the fact that the others around you live in much the same manner.

The following year, we were provided a ticket home to furlough for a couple of months. I remember it well since our stay was marked by both the beginning and ending of the fateful and tragic Branch Davidian standoff in Waco. While the round-the-clock coverage kept us riveted to the TV, we found time to reconnect with family and friends, share our experiences, and enjoy a few lost pleasures on home soil. One afternoon in particular still stands out to us all.

Prior to leaving the States, we would occasionally make the drive on a Saturday from our home in Texas City to the Baybrook Mall to shop and stroll. It felt like a trip to Houston proper to a kid like me, though it remains today, as then, on the southeastern outskirts of the big city. Arriving for the better part of the day, mom and dad, without fail, somehow managed each and every visit to select, by chance, the one entrance of a chosen department store designated to warmly welcome us as a family with embarrassingly sultry displays of lingerie and underwear. Making safe passage past the undergarment gauntlet, we ventured into the mall for the day. Requisite apparel purchases aside, my favorite memories revolve around B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks — neither of which exist any longer as shopping mall staples but nevertheless were all but assured that our parents would allow us to acquire from their modest shelves (by today’s standards) our latest literary interest, be it Garfield or Choose Your Own Adventure. Hours later, threads, books, and last-minute sweet treats in hand, we would pile into the van and head happily for home.

Fast forward to early spring, 1993, on furlough. Whether or not we entered through the same doors showcasing unmentionables, I couldn’t say. What we do recall is feeling unexpectedly and profoundly overwhelmed. Walking past one display window after another, we felt suddenly alienated, out of place, among the mass of fellow shoppers and surplus inventory. There were no lines in which to wait for essentials, no miles of walking in the cold, open air in hopes of purchasing fresh meat, bread, or milk. The meaning of “shopping” had been transformed for us. We felt neither better nor worse than those around us taking advantage of sale prices. We simply felt different, changed. Our values had imperceptibly shifted over the past year, and things no longer would mean what they once did.

Making a single revolution inside the mall, we spent no more than time, and this less than an hour. Pausing, we looked understandingly at one another, and left with nothing.

We would return to Ukraine not long after, feeling a little more at home there than the previous year, when we first arrived. Our stay would not last more than a couple months, however, due to a medical emergency, which is a story for another time. We all sensed, nonetheless, that something inside each of us had shifted due to the experience, many things, in fact, but notably our perception of needs and wants, what it was possible to live contentedly with or without. Re-immersing ourselves in the American way of life, we lost over time a little of the impression we felt that brief hour in the mall that day, but certainly not all of it. I have no doubt a residual shred of that impression prompted my mother to offer her request for our family’s Christmas gathering nearly 30 years later.

_______________

We arrived in San Antonio dressed for summer in late December. The weather was uncharacteristically warm, but, then again, this is Texas. “If you don’t like the weather,” they say about a state bred for overexaggeration, “just wait a few minutes.” It should have felt odd carrying not a single wrapped package into my sister’s home, but, strangely, it didn’t. For a day-and-a-half, we ate together, played together, talked, shared, and reminisced. No gifts were opened or offered, and no one was the worse for it.

Like so many other siblings, adulthood has, regretfully, splintered my brother, sister, and I through physical distance and personal obligations for many years now. While I am by no means advocating for giftless family gatherings at Christmas, ours was exactly what we needed and wanted it to be, the “reason for the season” every bit as present with us as with other families of faith. We are rarely afforded the pleasure of each other’s company any longer and recognized that most precious and fleeting of gifts — time — is the best of anything we could offer one another. No need to spend money on an item destined to be forgotten on a dusty shelf or dark closet.

Prior to leaving, albeit reluctantly, my sister-in-law offered to capture a rare photo of the three of us together once more. The last time a camera caught us assembled was nearly two years previous, so we needed no persuading. Opening the photo forwarded to each of us, I glanced at it and realized — I had received this year many incredibly thoughtful gifts, all of which I appreciate. This simple, easy picture, however, I found myself valuing more than anything else I had received. It was, in essence, the final gift for an eventful year, our posture and posing signifying that at the end of it all, here we are, still standing, still smiling, and memorializing our connection, which is infinitely more important than circumstances or stuff.

While a picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, not all pictures are identical in worth. The heaviest of catalogs, filled merely with pictures of things, scarcely register on the scale against the ponderous value of a single photo reminding us who, not what, is most important. I hope that my own children will find reason to cherish a similar perspective 30 years from now, however technology allows them to preserve their moment. Only time, the most precious of commodities, will tell.

Prelude to Risk, pt. 2 (or Final Chapter)

“We have to make a decision today.”

I’ve been stalling for at least a month. 

January 2017. Earlier in the previous year, my wife and I took in two siblings and will, in a few weeks, adopt them as our own. It has been a long and laborious process up to this point. The adjustment to parenting is the only thing, for me, that has been more trying. From zero to two is an almost imperceptible change if you’re talking about the speed of a vehicle. If, however, you’re referring to the number of older children in your home versus only moments ago, no adjustment I’ve experienced in 40 years compares.

I’ve just begun to settle into the new routines, priority changes, loss of “me” time, etc., that parenting brings with it, not to mention the difficulties raising kids from trauma. If I’m honest with myself, I’m still not sold on the approaching adoption day and terrified that this is a mistake. There’s no turning back after that.  Now we’re being asked to take in a third — their sister. While my wife’s answer was a resounding, knee-jerk “Yes!”, she dialed-back her open-hearted enthusiasm when it was clear I hadn’t yet arrived there with her. We would, instead, think about it. She would pray and hope earnestly that I would change my mind.

A month later, and the new year has barely begun, as has my day. Waking up to get myself ready for work, I answer a call from my wife, who has already begun her workday. The time to make a decision had come, our caseworker informed her. She needed an answer today. 

I do not want to do this. 

It’s been hard enough becoming an instant parent of two. More than once, I’ve felt like quitting. I can’t imagine taking on yet another, who, we learn, will bring her own set of challenges. In short, we would be the fifth primary caregivers in her brief seven years of life — a fact to which I can’t relate to any of my own life experiences.

Overwhelmed at the thought, I tell my wife I need some time. I call work to tell them I won’t be coming.  Instead, I face the inevitable and prepare to wrestle with God.

I want an answer, and I’d like it to come unmistakably from Him. 

_________________

It’s long been easy for me to read the stories in Scripture, especially those in the early Old Testament books, as if God speaks to the key characters in direct, grandiose ways just as frequently as we might pick up the phone and text or call one another today. It takes only a few seamless moments to read many of these accounts as if one divine interaction follows the next, as routine or as common as walking from here to there. Such a belief can further lead to the self-critical idea that I don’t hear quite so often as that from God, and certainly not in such grand fashion, so I can hardly consider myself as intimate with Him as an Adam, a Noah, or a Moses.

Read-time is not real-time, however. Between punctuation, paragraphs, and chapters, especially in the Old Testament accounts, there is the undocumented drudgery of the day to day; there are actual days, months, years, sometimes decades or longer, between “burning bush” kinds of moments. Instead, there is the silence of God. I would argue, in fact, that we overlook the abundance of His silence in these characters’ stories. Granted, this doesn’t mean He wasn’t acting or speaking in these segues.  The writers, inspired of God, only tell us what we most need to know. Yes, he may speak to me in many simple, quiet ways on a daily basis, if I’m attentive, but many of the monumental divine intercessions or pronouncements writ large in Scripture are fewer and farther between if you stretch them out into actual time. 

This I find reassuring, and it adjusts my expectations of God. My faith in Him and confidence that He is ever-present to me shouldn’t depend on whether or not I experience frequent moments in which He parts the clouds for a special revelation. Many, many more times than we read, I am certain, Moses, for example, got up, went about his day, and eventually retired for the night, only to do the same the following day and the day after that. On almost all of those days, I am certain water acted like water does and neither parted across a sea nor sprang from a rock. It’s not exciting, but much of the time we spend in our lives isn’t. It’s simply life as it is.

Nevertheless, God is still present in the day-to-day routines, and it’s often in these periods that our faith is most tested. He will speak to us in the manner he chooses when he chooses to do so, or He may not. Sometimes, however, we hope and pray that He does so in such an intimate and direct way as we read in Scripture so that we are forever changed, our life altered. 

Sometimes, He may give us just that, even when what He has to say may not be what we want to hear.

______________

I decide to change my surroundings and venture to a local park. I turn off my phone. Maybe a little dose of nature and evasion of distractions will persuade God that I’m serious, that I’m holding my calls for Him, so to speak. 

I find a picnic table and sit down, read a few verses here and there, meditate, journal, say exactly what’s on my mind. I wait. I listen. I repeat.

Nothing.

After what feels like an eternity, I impatiently get up, move around, and take a walk. A few scattered times in my adulthood, I’ve imagined Christ by my side on one of my strolls, keeping pace with me, just being present, if for no other reason than to be a comfort, a reassurance in a world characteristically more chaotic than ordered. After a while, though, I sense it’s just me. 

Dejected and impatient, I change direction and walk to the van. God may have nothing to say to me about this. What’s more likely is that I’m simply not very good at listening to Him.  I shouldn’t expect Him to speak to me as He has in so many ways to my parents. I need to accept it, make a decision about this, and move on with life.

I get in, decide to clear my head, and just drive. I head south on the freeway. About 20 minutes in, I drift off the exit towards my childhood hometown. I’m soon coasting past old familiar places down the main thoroughfare. The car eventually makes a left turn, then another left. It stops along the curb behind a park where my siblings, neighborhood friends and I often played.  I don’t know why I’ve come here.

Across the field in the park, I see our old backyard at my childhood home. The architecture hasn’t changed after 24 years, but the paint and landscaping have. Someone else calls it home now. I wonder what memories they’ve made there.

I get out of the car and stroll to a bench. I take nothing with me.  Arms stretched across the back, I just sit and take it in. I stare at the back of the house across the short distance. I’m not sure I’m really listening for anything anymore. I relax, sit back, and remember what was, back when life was simpler and I was blissfully unaware. 

After an hour or two, a little bored and unenlightened, I get up and head back to the car. I don’t know what I’ll do or where I’ll go from here, but it seems God doesn’t want to show up. I’ve invited Him, but He has no interest in offering even a meager shred of advice on how to proceed. Forget it, then. I’ll figure this out on my own.  Maybe He did, after all, just wind this universe up at the beginning and casually amble away to pursue other interests, leaving us with the mess we’ve made. 

I sit down and shut the door. Reaching for the ignition, I press the button and start the car.

______________

“It’s time.”

I’m 15 again, sitting on the floor of my empty room. My mother’s words echo as the tears start to flow. She sits down beside me and wraps her arms around me. I’m saying goodbye to my home once more, the only home I’ve ever known.

Then I hear Him.

“You left your home once at 15. Your family left with you. I brought you to this place specifically to remember that. 

“This child is the fragile age of 7. By the time she makes her way to you, it will be her fourth departure in her brief life from places that only resemble a home. Her family is not with her. She doesn’t understand it all, can’t process it, and is otherwise alone. I’m giving you this opportunity to change her reality, to give her a home that’s truly a home, one that she will never have to leave again.

“It’s time — time for you to take a risk. Your parents had theirs, but this is uniquely yours. I’m not asking you to venture to the other side of the world; that was for them, not for you. 

“I will not promise you that taking this child — these children — as your own will be easy. In fact, you know it won’t be. I will not even tell you how it all will end, whether it will seem worth it. It is, however, what I want you to do.”

______________

Scripture tells us that God is sovereign. If I believe this, then I know His purposes will be accomplished. Moreover, I believe He chooses to use us as vessels to do His work. With or without us, He will do what He says. 

Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder — what if my parents had said “no”?  What if they had turned their backs to their call, though doubtless about what they had been told and who had spoken to them?  

What if they stayed?

Would God, as with Jonah, have bore down on them to any and every corner of the earth to which they fled, using whatever means at His disposal to exhaust them until they obeyed, albeit reluctantly? Or would He have simply changed His mind, searched, and found another to finish the job, leaving them to puzzle in their final remaining years, filled with regret about what might have been?

Maybe, just maybe, after all, they had a choice even then, notwithstanding God’s sovereignty. I can’t search it out, and it isn’t long before I find I don’t want to. Of all for which I have to be grateful in my life, I’m relieved I do not have to linger or obsess on what would have been had they remained where they were.  As with Frost’s less-traveled road, their choice to go has made all the difference. 

___________

I’m back in my car, tears streaming down my face, just like the 15 year old about to leave his home on a journey not of his choosing. I now know what I have to do, but it doesn’t feel inevitable. I have to choose. 

I’m afraid and uncertain. I feel inadequate, unprepared, and ill-equipped. My parents once felt this way as well, on the edge of a risk, but much greater than this. This time, however, I’m in the driver’s seat as I prepare to leave this place once again.

“Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

I think it is no accident that the story of Abram has found itself placed near the beginning of Scripture. It is a simple yet relatable story to which many thereafter found and still find themselves directed by God as an encouragement to take the first step. As one author put it in his own famed, world-building story, “It’s a dangerous business . . . going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Abram’s faith journey begins anew each time we receive a call from Him and choose to obey. The call isn’t the same for each of us, but He calls us each to something. Reflecting on this, I make my decision.

I put the car in gear.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.”

Prelude to Risk, pt. 1 (or Chapter 1)

May 1992. I sit down on the floor of my empty bedroom, legs in front of me, arms folded across my knees. I’ll celebrate 16 years in roughly a month’s time, but it won’t be here. My mother, brother, and sister are somewhere else in this imminently vacant house. It is, at this moment, the only home I’ve ever known. The next one is waiting for us on the other side of the world.

The late afternoon sun pours through the window ahead to my right. I see the west side of Mr. and Mrs. Woody’s house. A couple of years earlier, my siblings and I raced outside in the night through a category 1 hurricane and sought shelter next door with them to escape an appliance fire in our home after a power surge. From there, wet in our bedclothes from the rain, we watched the fire trucks roll up to our driveway in the darkness and heavy wind. We lived to tell the tale of a house that didn’t burn down, which, admittedly, would have been a far more interesting story.

I look to my left through the long, narrow window running along the upper quarter of the wall, an architectural oddity seldom featured on any current home improvement show. The inner shade of a tree my siblings and I named “The Jungle” years ago is all that’s visible. We and our neighborhood friends spent many afternoons hidden inside its branches, concealed from the world outside, imagining ourselves in any number of places but here. 

Life is said to flash before your eyes in a moment that may be your last. As I sit here still and silent — house empty, memories full —  my brief life flashes before me in a matter of minutes. I’ll still be breathing in a moment, but it feels like an ending, and I’m not prepared for it. I don’t know it yet, but this moment will indelibly be seared on my mind in the years to come. 

“It’s time.”

I look to my right and see my mother leaning against the doorframe. Until I entered the bedroom for the last time, I thought this departure would be uneventful and gave it barely a second thought. Few of us, however, especially the youngest among us, have the foresight to anticipate a moment that will impact us for the rest of our lives. 

Her words land like a gunshot. Without warning, the tears start to flow like a bleeding wound and express what I won’t be able to in words until years from now, after the maturity of hindsight — this place, this home, has unwittingly been a sixth member of the family. Within it, I’ve felt safe and secure. Now I have to leave that safety, these memories, and the only life I’ve known.

My mother walks toward me and sits down on the floor. She puts her arms around me as I sob. She will tell me years later that until then, she didn’t know how hard this change would be for my siblings and me. 

I soon collect myself and we get up to leave. I take a few last looks at the empty rooms before we exit and pile into the car.  Many years from now, I will have the opportunity to revisit this place, without understanding why, to find the guidance to make a decision that will impact a child, much as my parents’ decision now impacts me. 

As we drive away, I find myself unable to imagine what lies ahead of us thousands of miles away in what was long a Cold War country until only months ago. For our family, the wider world is a place we’ve seen only in pictures or on TV.  The farthest east we’ve traveled is Florida; the farthest west, Colorado. Where we are going, the news of the world describes turmoil and unrest. “Safety” and “security” are no bywords, and my parents appear to friends and family to be recklessly abandoning both, along with their sanity. They’ve quit jobs, sold the house and our possessions, and have prepared to move themselves and their three older children to this place in faith that God spoke and commanded them to do so.  

“Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

They are taking a leap of faith, and time will soon tell if these words spoken to another sojourner thousands of years ago are, for them, deeper and more direct than a mere inspiration, as they believe, or if they are out of their minds, taking a desperate mid-life gamble that will, in the end, leave them more confused and uncertain of their purpose in the world God has made. 

“So Abram went, as the Lord told him.”

Visiting our former home with my sister years later.

Screen Time

I don’t recall the precise reason, but it became eminently clear it was no longer a living room accessory. It had silently departed the house in our absence, and we never had a chance to say goodbye. As our parents drove my brother, sister, and me from our grandparents’, where the three of us had spent the weekend, and we made the hour-long trip back home, one of us must have expressed a screen-starved eagerness to play our game system — an Atari 2600 — as soon as we would set foot in the door. Upon hearing this, mom pounced from the front seat with a ready reply. Our anticipation was summarily extinguished by her unwelcome news.

“It broke.” “It messed up the TV.” “The dog chewed it up.” Whatever the reason, all we heard was, “It’s gone.” In the history of parental excuses, whichever mom chose was likely as common as they come. The subtext, however, was, “You were spending too much time on it.” So, with the cold-heartedness of a hitman, she offed it. Even dad, I expect, quietly mourned while simultaneously presenting a united front with our mother. No more heavily-pixelated “River Raid” bombing runs after we were in bed. Cue single tear.

It would be the only game system our parents would purchase themselves for the family while growing up in our single-screen home, and it came as quickly as it went. Even in the 80s, long before the advent of iPads, smartphones, and the conscientious parenting term “screen time,” it was still possible for one’s kids to oversaturate on the latter, my mother believed. As I matured, I inherited a similar belief and learned to approach screens and what they deliver with a measure of caution.

A few years later in June of 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, our family migrated to Ukraine to engage in charitable mission work supported by churches in Texas. Among the wealth of experiences we collected over what would culminate in a full and very meaningful year in our lives (about which I intend eventually to write more), we had the opportunity to live screenless. We rarely encountered a television. Moreover, smartphones and tablets wouldn’t make their introductions to society at large for more than a decade. We were strangers disconnected in a strange land, where even a brief, poor-quality, long-distance phone call literally required scheduling with the phone company ahead of time. While such conditions sound primitive and unacceptable by today’s standards, we found ways to keep ourselves occupied. When a screen simply isn’t anywhere, it ceases to be an option, so attention naturally shifts elsewhere. We learned to live comfortably and happily without it.

Fast forward nearly 30 years, and here I sit tapping out these very words one character at a time with my thumb on a modest rectangular screen that never leaves my side. I find it hard to remember any longer what day-to-day living was like prior to constant connectivity and endless entertainment in our palms. We obviously made life work without this technological privilege and have for century after century of human history, but it only took a meager year or two of the current 100-year span to change us forever. We all take for granted that each of us now carry in our pockets a tool far and away more advanced and complex than the earthshaking machines that sent men to the moon. With that kind of personal power, we all know there’s no going back, regardless of the extremity of any downsides discovered since.

Among this technology’s vast number of advantages — and there are, indeed, too many to name — there is really only one familiar disadvantage that matters: we seldom have the willpower to put these devices down as often as we should, turn them off, and interact with the real world we inhabit instead of staring endlessly into a carefully edited and framed projection of it.

Very early in his work with Apple, Steve Jobs once said dismissively of market research, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The later success of his products would seem to have proved him right. While he wasn’t the inventor of the smartphone, per se, his “i” devices found themselves in the impatient, hungry hands of the majority very soon after their introduction to the market. Apparently, he alone knew what we really wanted, judging from the volume of cash we appreciatively threw at him. Once software/app developers got a hold of the iPhone and similar devices, they found further ways to keep us hooked until this “want” gradually morphed into a “need.” Whether we’re at home, at work, dining out, or even driving, we feel the itch every inactive moment and impulsively silence reflection by reaching reflexively for our phone. Few of us know any longer how to sit still and quiet with our thoughts.

Ironically, many of the developers of these breakthrough devices and apps see their way differently through the distracted digital fog and distance themselves and their families from what they’ve wrought. Bill Gates is said to have established very strict limits on his kids’ use of technology. Jobs himself stated shortly after he released the iPad that he would not allow his children to make use of one. Many of the movers and shakers of social media platforms shared in the cautionary Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” that they significantly limit when their children are able to visit the sites they curate, if at all, and some even go so far as to enroll them in low- or no-tech schools. Jaron Lanier, an early pioneer of virtual reality and well-known voice in Silicon Valley, published a few short years ago “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” among other works in a similar vein counseling caution in the technological universe we now inhabit. All in all, it appears very telling that these creators are not the strongest advocates for their creations.

A closer look, though, reveals it’s not the technology itself they’ve rejected but its overuse, abuse, or misuse. Any technology, like any tool, is fashioned for a specific function; but I can use it for different ends if I or others so choose and the functionality affords it. A hammer’s designed purpose is to drive or pull a nail, but certain individuals have been known to employ it effectively as a weapon.

Our middle is currently in a months-long process of demonstrating she is mature enough to acquire a phone (and use it as intended). Good grades and behavior are the criteria. While it’s a great motivator for her, I admit mixed feelings about what waits for her at the end. This new rite-of-passage we Gen Xers and earlier never experienced; we transitioned as adolescents just fine without it, so, naturally, we harbor concerns about what it should signify and when they have earned the right to carry, so to speak. They’ve never known a reality that wasn’t populated with a personal device for every person, so they feel less cautious about the change than us, who remember a time when our attention had vastly fewer interruptions and was more consistently present with the world around.

While she stands to gain, I can’t help feeling like something will be lost. Given the option, we’ve found, kids will almost always pick a screen over any other available activity. It’s clear, consequently, that it takes a great deal of vigilance to monitor, educate, and, most importantly, model how to handle joining the ranks of the connected. If my kids observe me glued to this device, they will naturally assume the same posture.

In 1984, William Gibson published the seminal, critically-acclaimed science fiction novel “Neuromancer,” which, in a nutshell, envisioned a future in which we essentially plug our conscious brains into digital reality. The story directly inspired the later box office blockbuster “The Matrix.” While we aren’t precisely there yet (and I hope and pray we never are), reading the novel 25 years after its publication, I couldn’t help but observe that I lived in a version of Gibson’s vision. There is no need to physically “jack-in” if we can’t pull our eyes from our screens. In a way, even then, we were already there.

The best science fiction, in my humble opinion, does not merely spin a fun and adventurous tale of gadgets, lasers, and spaceships. To the contrary, the greatest among them, I would argue, closely scrutinize the present to a purpose. These stories presciently trace out causality and utilize the platform of the unknown future, wittingly or unwittingly, to describe where we’re headed if we do, or don’t, change course. The visions are often extreme and imprecise, making it a challenge to recognize if we’ve arrived at said dystopia. I once expressed to a roommate incredulity about the likelihood of Bradbury’s future tale of the temperature at which books burn. He replied thoughtfully, “Why burn books if no one is reading them?”

I don’t know where we’re all headed with our screens, but I know there are times I think back to that disconnected year in Ukraine and realize their absence is rarely woven into the stories our family recounts about our life there. We didn’t miss them. Nonetheless, at the same time I appreciate the facility to instantly send pictures to my parents of their grandkids, pull up a detailed driving route to anywhere in the world, and post my ramblings online to someone like yourself (whose attention, incidentally, is still intact enough to see these thoughts to their conclusion; and I thank you for that), I wish sometimes I could return to a time when I wasn’t burdened with the task of monitoring my kids’ online presence and activity or paying responsible attention to my own.

But this is the world we now live in, and we take the good with the bad. So, perhaps we should blame neither the tools nor the toolmakers. They simply give us what we want.