J&T: A piece of our story

Besides a detailed account of our few weeks together, I haven’t written much about my relationship with J. It’s not because he has been pushed to the periphery of my life–he has been invading every nook and cranny! But I guess those were the nooks and crannies I once used to write on my blog.

Months ago, a reader asked me to tell our story. So here it is from my perspective…

We met at a wedding, our siblings’ wedding, to be exact. My older brother and J’s younger sister married each other in the summer of 2018.

You’d think that we both would have had romance on the brain in such a setting. Yet, he was based in China and I had just moved to Spain. Our minds were on our respective work, not romance. When I think hard enough, I remember things about him from that weekend–like when I tripped on my too-long skirt and he tried to blame my clumsiness on himself–but I can’t remember what he was wearing the first time I saw him or anything of the sort. He remembers even less than I do.

At the Sunday potluck, we chatted with each other. Our conversation was enthusiastic because, as overseas workers, we could connect in ways that we couldn’t connect with just anybody. He asked to be added to my newsletter mailing list.

I went back to Spain. He finished school and returned to China. I contacted him once about an article I was writing and he sent me some information. That was our only personal contact for five years.

His church became one of my supporting churches for two years. I was delighted because I already knew some of the congregation. I also knew his family. (When our siblings were dating back in 2017, I had made a point to travel to Ohio. Twice. And J was in China both of those times.)

In 2019, he returned to Ohio to finish his Master of Science with the intention of moving back to China. And then the pandemic happened, and he found himself planted Stateside indefinitely. Over the next several years, he made trips to Illinois to visit his sister, my brother, and our mutual nephews. I returned to Illinois as well, for a vacation or a home assignment, but our paths didn’t cross, and neither of us considered that they didn’t.

Then while I was on home assignment summer of 2023, I gave a talk at his church. J and I chatted a little that Wednesday evening, but I did a little chatting with a lot of people and nothing felt unusual. I was at the beginning of a long trip and was dealing with ongoing health symptoms I had become an expert at suppressing. Had I been a little more in tune with my surroundings that evening, perhaps I would have seen that quiet question mark above J’s head. But I continued my trip, clueless.

Still, he said nothing. Not that I was expecting him to have anything to say. In retrospect, it was as if, in my mind, he was married to China and therefore ineligible.

Toward the end of my time in the States that summer, he and his parents came to Illinois to visit his sister… the same day I left for Indiana.

It seemed that God was keeping us apart. And I think, in a sense, He was.

While in Indiana, I found a name for the symptoms I’d had for more than a dozen years, the symptoms that were getting progressively harder to suppress.

I started treatment after returning to Spain. Within a month, I recorded in my journal that I was beginning to feel better. I knew I wasn’t completely healed, but I was on my way. I had lots to be thankful for that Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was also the time that J, who had been praying for me in the meantime, sensed that the time was right. He emailed me that weekend.

I woke up at 5 a.m. to take the day’s first dose of treatment. As I crawled back into bed that Sunday morning, I saw I had an email from J. I immediately assumed that he was writing to say he was moving back to China and could I please take him off my newsletter list?

Or.

I didn’t stop to ponder; I just tapped the notification and opened the email that would change my life. Stunned, I lay in bed, lost in thought until my alarm went off.

He didn’t get an answer right away; I had a lot to think through. The truth is, as older singles, we both valued our respective single lives. Could this really be God’s next step for us? I knew I would need to mourn that first layer of loss before I responded to his email. Finally, with both trepidation and excitement, I wrote back, mostly with questions he had given me permission to ask: What about China? How did he feel about singleness?

Our initial emails were full of questions as we tried to sort out if forward were the best direction for us.

Deep down, I had a sense our relationship would work out, which was based on what I knew about him, his family, and his church. At its core, that inner sense was: “Of course. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

We wrote back and forth for a bit and then were ready to make our relationship more official around Christmas. Our families were shocked and excited. Our friends were shocked and excited. At last, these two “permanent singles” were dating!

Starting a relationship while 4,000 miles apart wasn’t for the faint of heart, but I’ll skip over those layers for now. One month after our first official phone date and just when I was admitting to myself how much I liked him, J was nominated to become a pastor in his home church. The next Sunday, one man would be chosen by lot and ordained.

He wrote to me on Monday morning, and all I could do was fall on my knees.

We both had lots of feelings that week. We tried phone calls but found we didn’t have a lot of words. Tears came at unexpected moments. I wasn’t mourning; I was overwhelmed. How could I support him when I was feeling so weak myself? What exactly was the new girlfriend’s role?

The events of that week drew us together in ways neither of us could have anticipated. Our relationship deepened to a level we would have said we weren’t ready for. We learned to trust each other.

I watched the ordination over WhatsApp, tears flowing as J was chosen to serve as a pastor in his home church.

Then we picked up and kept going, in both praise and uncertainty.

He came to visit Spain in May. We had 19 whole days on the same continent. During that time, we finished falling in love and seriously talked about a future together.

Three months later, I spent three weeks Stateside, in my home community and his. Right in the middle of our time together, J asked me to marry him. Even though I had known it was coming soon, he managed to surprise me. (Well, he surprised both of us, but that’s another story. 😉 )

Then came the whirlwind of excited decision-making in the week before I returned to Spain. Spain is where I am now. The whirlwind hasn’t stopped and likely won’t as I close down my life here, move back to the States, and plan a wedding.

But I’m surprised to find how much joy is in the whirlwind too.

This message has been approved by J. 😉

Cheese and chocolate

Hello, everyone! It’s been a few weeks. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I have…mostly because the nudge to update has been less of a nudge and more of an ominous cloud above my week that I. Just. Can’t. Quite. Get. To.

But now it’s Sunday and I have a quiet morning before our afternoon church service. So here I am, pecking away on my phone because I’ve been staring at my computer screen far too many hours this week and the idea of voluntarily sitting down in front of it again threatens my emotional stability.

First, the reason I have fallen a bit behind in writing:

FAMILY!

Yes, my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew came for a visit! Well, to be more accurate, we met up in Zurich and after a luscious week in Switzerland, came back to Spain for them to get a taste of my life.

This post is a bit of an introduction to our time together. We’ll see how wordy I get along the way. I was tempted to copy and paste the online journal we created for this trip, but as I read through it, I realized just how much it was not written for public consumption. *slight blush*

We met up on March 7 after we had all missed a night of sleep and felt covered in layers of trip grime gleaned from public restrooms and random people coughing on us. I arrived a while before my family since my flight from Madrid was more on time than their flight from London.

While I waited, I was startled by how much the people looked like me. Or I looked like them. I’m not sure which. As would soon be discovered, this caused some confusion because “Guten tag” can only go so far.

After the joyous reunion with my family, we were more than ready to leave the airport. But first, our reserved rental vehicle was a 5-seater for 6 of us. And then there were seatbelt issues that kept the car dinging at us as we wandered through the labriynth of airport traffic and had to pay 12 CHF for even daring to be there at all.

But as we left Zurich, the scenery continued to improve and so did our moods. Dad and I made the first shopping trip while everyone else snoozed in the van. Dad made a beeline for the meat and cheese and looked disgruntled whenever I dropped vegetables into our shopping basket. We may have spend a considerable amount of time in the chocolate aisle, but it was nothing compared to the time it took us to find a simple tube of mayo.

As we wound up into the mountains, we kept exclaiming over the stunning scenery…and the lack of guard rails on the narrow roads. Forget hairpin curves; winding up to the farm where we stayed was hairpinning all of the way! (My poor brother-in-law was very patient with the other 4 gasping drivers in the car with him.)

From the outside, our Airbnb looked a little dumpy. Mud. Dogs. Random farm equipment. (All of which we would eventually realize is part of small farm life in the Bern area.) But once we were inside, our place was warm, clean, and welcoming. The hostess had left us a loaf of fresh bread, homemade butter, cheese and jam.

We made ourselves at home.

green grass, fir trees, and snow covered mountains

Our first full day in Switzerland was rainy. We didn’t get a whole lot accomplished since it took considerable effort to drag everyone out of the house by 1 p.m. (Which means I don’t have to try to make a long story short for blogging purposes–the long story is short!)

We puttered along, “oh my”ing at the incredible scenery. We also snickered at the “ausfahrt” (exit) signs all along the way. My Swiss friend sent a message to welcome us to Switzerland.

“It’s so beautiful up here in the mountains!” I wrote back.

She laughed when she responded in a voice message. “These are the hills.”

close up of town with mountains in the distance

We drove to Gruyère where we strolled around around the free part of a cheese factory and then feasted on cheese fondue until I wondered if I’d ever want to eat cheese again. Our waitress spoke English, which was helpful. She also spoke Spanish, which was fun.

fondue pot with fondue dripping off of piece of bread

Side note: The prices took us a while to get used to. Visiting Switzerland isn’t for the empty-of-pocket. Even though we had tried to prepare ourselves, at least one of us would often sigh or grumble.

We sipped hot chocolate from a shop across the the street from the cheese factory as we wandered back to our van. We tried to get a peek at the local castle, but we would have had to park and walk through the rain to even see it. So we started for home.

That was pretty much our day besides a quick Aldi stop and two liters of fresh milk on our doorstep when we got back to our Airbnb.

I’ll write more another day. We really did do more than eat cheese and chocolate, although those two reasons alone are enough to warrant a trip to Switzerland!

Have you ever been to Switzerland? What sorts of things did you do?

Ireland- part 5

I am determined to finish writing about my trip to Ireland today. I doubt it can be as much fun to read as it is to write because it is I who get to relive all of the memories. And with time, the bad memories fade–the exhaustion from a missed night of sleep, the grimy cottage, and so on. (Although, for the record, there aren’t many “so on”s.) It is the good memories that grow and blossom and put a little burn in my heart: that marriage of pure happiness and incredulity.

So, where did I leave off?

Saturday. I will skip over the morning escapade with the washer and the dryer and our hostess because I already wrote enough about our experience. We arrived downtown during a morning drizzle. My friend stopped to ask directions from a group of jolly men sipping their foaming Guinness outside of a bar. She did it for the experience, I think. For the kicks and giggles. It turns out the men weren’t Dubliners and couldn’t help us despite their trying. But they fit well into the friendly Irish stereotype we had already formed in our minds.

We managed to find a market after studying a map and then trailing someone with a market cart. We paused at one of the stalls for some mouth-watering paprika almonds and a free sample of creamy mozzarella balls. The drippy weather and the live music made the tiny market charming, although we probably couldn’t find the place again if we tried.

wooden buckets with savory market goodies

We meandered to the Chester Beatty Library, but when we stepped inside, we both decided we’d rather not do the tour. We may never know what we missed, but it was nice to decide to miss it together. We caught a bus to Phoenix Park, where we picked up free tickets to tour the President’s house and then crossed the sunny lawn–yes, the sun was beaming by then!– to a picnic bench under a tree. It was there in that slice of heavenly greenness and almost-warmth that I was able to say a prayer for our Airbnb hostess and my own attitude toward her. The residual irritation of the morning faded and stopped marring the day. We ate our picnic lunch. Without trying, we had planned the perfect amount of time to eat a relaxed lunch and then meander down to the tour bus.

We were about 15. A very small tour. Our guide was amazing, explaining the obvious points of interest in the house as well as the lesser noticed nuggets that mortalize history somehow. Some of the other people on the tour added a layer of excitement, like the elderly gentleman who decided he was thirsty and went over to help himself to the bottled water on the president’s desk. And his wife, as composed and sweet as a queen, continued to look composed and sweet in her darling hat even as her husband raided the president’s personal stash. We admired the ceilings–I especially enjoyed the Aesop’s fables one–, the artwork, and the vast back lawn.

After the tour, we refilled our water bottles and headed back downtown. For the first time, I managed to nab a seat in the front of the upper level double decker bus.

Our next stop was a Luke Kelly impersonation concert on the lawn of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. We had thought we’d like to tour the cathedral as well, but nope. That was another tour that we both decided wasn’t something we wanted to add to our afternoon. (Is it any wonder I came home with a stash of travel money still in my wallet?) So we sat on a concrete lip of the edge of the sidewalk and watched the concert and grew chillier.

concert in lawn of St. Patrick's Cathedral

Then, at my friend’s insistence, we decided to use the free hot drink vouchers we had been given upon entering the concert. We stomped into an elegant hotel restaurant in our winter gear and backpack… maybe looking a little homeless at this point. And we almost lost our nerve, but my friend wanted a cuppa badly enough that she summoned her courage and soon we both had steaming to-go cups of milky Irish tea. We meandered down the street and then stopped to sit on the pedestal of a statue just across the street from the Christ Church Cathedral. We talked about life. People may have looked at us oddly, sitting there on a statue at a busy intersection with our cups of tea, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t notice.

After our tea, we were hungry. We walked to Lundy Foot’s, a restaurant that offered a traditional beef stew. In retrospect, it may have been more of a tourist attraction than a real Irish pub. And the musician was playing Jonny Cash. But the men at the bar (my sneaky and blurry photo below) seemed Irish enough and animated the atmosphere, especially after a couple of “jars” and a goal or two in the soccer game.

The beef stew was amazing. So was dessert. We left, flushed from the warmth of the place, and wandered home, happy.

I have very few pictures of Sunday. We had decided to take one day of the week where we would not plan anything. Originally, it had been our “curl up in front of a fireplace” day, but since that was no longer an option, we walked down to the bay. We spread our rain gear on the grass and held a mini church service, ending our time by praying for each other. It was a special time, minus the dog poo on the bottom of my friend’s shoe. We ate our picnic lunch and then strolled up to Insomnia, a coffee shop, and picked out some comfortable chairs. I ordered tea with tea brack, which didn’t end up being my favorite, most likely because it was packed with raisins which I don’t especially like.

We read and journaled in perfect together-solitude. I even crocheted. Then we returned to our Hairy Haven to pack up. We said our goodbyes before bed and I left the house by 5 the next morning.

The bus app directed me to a stop. When the airport coach came, I held out my public transit card hopefully. The driver asked if I had a ticket. Instead, I asked for directions to a Dublin airport bus that would accept my card, but he didn’t know. I finally nodded and decided to pay the extra money to save myself the hassle of finding the right stop. I pulled out my wallet.

Then he asked, “Is this your last day in Ireland?”

I nodded. “I’m going back to Spain today.”

He pushed my money away, patted my shoulder, and quietly said, “Get on board and make yourself comfortable.”

And with that, beautiful, wonderful Ireland sent me back to Spain.

From a family of writers

It was 2:30 a.m. and I was wide awake, when suddenly it struck me: I’m from a family of writers!

My mom, my siblings, and I all enjoy writing. Of course, we’ve had our share of mishaps. Like the time my mom sent a cheerful email to her siblings proclaiming “Hell to you all!” (she’d forgotten an “o”). Or the time when I was a child making a birthday card for my aunt. The card contained a hidden message cleverly concealed under a square of paper on which I had inscribed “Open the flab.”

Despite these unfortunate skeletons, we continued writing and continue to this day.

Mom comes from a family of unusual vocabulary, a vocabulary which still seeps into her everyday speech and writing. Before having children, she used to write poetry and keep a journal. Since children, she exchanged writing time for reading aloud: tales of Ira, Francis, Ichiro, and a little later, Narnia. Now her main writing occupation is optimistic emails to missing family members.

My older sister and I have stacks of journals. Hers go way back, to when she recorded observations from our childhood such as “Tricia eats like a horse and looks like a string bean.” Even now, she writes captivating emails recording events and people that waltz through her married life.

My older brother is the nerdy, theological writer of the family. When he asked me to help edit his Bible school thesis, I read a bit then stuck to editing grammar, not content. Instead of “This deep point of doctrine would be more indisputable if…” I was penciling in things like, “Maybe this sentence structure needs help???” Of late, most of his writing seems to be going out from the mailbox to a certain Ohio address.

My younger brother kept a journal of our family trip out West. The several pages, which gave a snapshot of the vacation in that moment, also gave some humorous insight to the workings of a 12-year-old mind. It was delightful to find his journal in my stash of papers years later… and give a copy to his wife to read! Now he gets to write sermons rather than record who is eating candy and what music we are listening to.

It was on another vacation long ago that my little sister, wrote an adorable note: “Dad, why do you let your whiskers grow?” Her thoughts have run down deeper lines since then. She maintains her own blog now and is more dedicated to her writing than any of us other family members.

At 14-months, even my nephew scripts his feelings quite clearly (see photo above).

Why do we write? Maybe it was due to those years when our parents instilled in us a love of reading. Those evenings that Mom would take us to the library and we would walk out with 40+ books that we started to read on the way home. The librarian told Mom that we were “good for circulation.”

Regardless of the reason, I’m thankful to be from a family who expresses through writing. For one, it makes living overseas more possible.

Living memories

People
Are living memories of all you’ve
Seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt
With them.
You wake up one morning
And find you married
The reality you love.
And before you go
You must have that
Last walk to school
Last taxi ride
Last cup of tea.
Then you close the door behind you,
Taking only lifeless photos
And stale words in worn journals.