To Kazakhstan and Back Again

In the time since I returned from Kazakhstan, I have thought a lot about all that led me there.  Even though I felt called to ministry when I was six years old, I didn’t feel attracted to missionary work until perhaps fifth or sixth grade.  And it wasn’t really just the stories of missionaries that fascinated me.  I had a deep desire to learn more about what people believed about God.  I was fascinated with ancient cultures and religions a long time before I felt led to share the Gospel overseas. 

For one thing, it always seemed strange to me that not everyone believed in God.  And I had a hard time believing that Jesus wasn’t as well known to everyone else as He was to me.  In contrast to friends I have made recently who came to believe in God as adults and who have very inspiring stories of their conversions, my earliest memories include a knowledge of Jesus and God and angels in almost the same way I knew the people in my family.

I know that seems strange if that is not your reality, but it was mine.  I remember watching light streaming in from the windows as I crawled around the house as an infant. Little specks of dust danced in the light and I was fascinated with it.  I can remember somehow talking to the angels in the room about the light and the dancing specks and laughing with delight – and with the angels.

As I wrote above, I have been thinking about what brought me to Kazakhstan, but maybe that is going too far back in my life.  As real as Jesus and God and the angels were to me, I can remember being told I was too old to talk about things that were part of my imagination as if they were true.  We still lived in the house on Wentworth in the very southernmost part of Chicago, so I know I was less than eight years old when I was told that.  We moved to Barrington when I was eight and a half.

I can remember being full of wonder and questions when I was told that I shouldn’t talk about the things of my imagination as if they were real.  Did that mean that what I knew about God and Jesus and angels wasn’t true?  Did that mean I was the only one who knew them that way?  I decided that I was being told that grownups did not want to hear about certain things they had forgotten about.  Somehow I got the impression that I was looked at as someone with a good imagination, and therefore what I considered true about God and Jesus and angels really wasn’t true or real.

So, I stopped seeing the angels, or at least I stopped talking about it – and then stopped paying attention to them.  I no longer spent time with Jesus in my imagination.  I became indoctrinated into the rituals of religion and removed myself from conscious interaction with all that seemed to be unseen by adults.  This was a great loss, but I found ways to stay in touch.  I think I must have been what people still called “fey” when I was growing up – a bit too much not quite in touch with the “real” world.

Psychiatrists call it dissociation when it is diagnosed as a chronic condition, but there are too many conditions the psychotherapeutic community calls abnormal and chronic.  I think each one of us every night experiences a state of dissociation if we are blessed to sleep well.  Our spirits require it.  And as Hamlet says to his good buddy, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  That smacks of rationalization, I guess, on Shakespeare’s part as well as mine, perhaps.  But the point is that whatever you call the “unseen” can be seen and experienced with the eyes of your heart and spirit.

There is no doubt in my mind that all things spiritual are more important than what we think of as physical and material.  I mean, after all, come on!  When you get down to it, looking at it from the perspective of quantum physics, nothing is really all that “material” anyway.  There is more energy than there is matter, isn’t there?

The philosophers and the physicists can duke it out.  I don’t really want to answer that question.  But it is fun to think about it!

Back to the task of trying to explain how I got to Kazakhstan.  Where was I?  I guess about the age of eight so far.  The next defining moment was during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- that early phase of the Nuclear Weapons Era and the Cold War.  While sitting cross-legged on the chilly tiled floor of the hallway in our grammar school, our hands on the backs of our heads, staring at the lockers, I wondered again.

Why couldn’t they just talk to each other instead of scaring little kids half to death with the threat of complete death and destruction?  After all I had heard about World War II, it just didn’t make sense to me.  And when they broke us up into groups and gave us name tags while preparing us to walk home in case of nuclear attack, they never explained to us where the buses that normally took us back and forth to school would be.  If it wasn’t safe for the buses to be out there, why would they have little children wandering around the countryside?

It was one of the only times I wished we still lived backing Chicago where we came home from school for lunch every day and never had to take a bus.

Somewhere along the line I made a pact with myself not to be afraid of anything.  I put on a brave face and tried to think of ways to help other kids not to be afraid, either.  I think I learned that while helping to take care of my sister and my cousins when we were little.  Anyway, it’s part of how I try to look at things if possible.  It’s not that I am never afraid.  I just find that song, “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from “The King and I” very helpful.

My Mom used to play the recordings of a lot of Broadway Musicals when we were little, so I suppose I first heard it at home.  The disciplined practice of trying to think of positive things encouraged in the lyrics of the song from “The King and I” went along with a Pollyanna-esque philosophy I seem to have developed very early on in my life.  Maybe I got it from the angels.

As I have already mentioned, I was enamored of ancient cultures and mythology, and very interested in how people interacted with God.  Around fifth or sixth grade, I wanted to be an undersea archeologist and rediscover Atlantis, though I also loved reading about the ancient Egyptian and pre-Columbian cultures.  And even though I began to study French in eighth grade, as soon as I could I studied Latin.  I hoped it would help in the studies necessary to become an archeologist.

How strange that you can do something for your own supposedly very good reasons and find out that the Lord in mind something completely different for it all the time.  By the time I was a sophomore in high school, the US had been militarily involved in Southeast Asia for quite a while, but that was the first opportunity I had to study anything about it.  I was confused, as many of us were, concerning why we were involved in another war in Asia.  Sure, they explained to us that Communists were trying to take over Viet Nam and there was that whole “Domino Effect” theory being put forward.  It all seemed to have gotten way beyond, “Why can’t they just talk to one another?” 

Though I was already studying both French and Latin, it seemed more urgent to me than ever to be prepared to help out some way.  I no longer wanted to delve into ancient cultures.  Trying to be part of working for peace seemed to be much more urgent.  That year our high school began to offer Russian again after a short interval between teachers.  In order to convince them that I should take a third language, I worked on my parents and guidance counselor all summer and talked everyone I could into taking it with me.  We had great fun.

Of course at the same time the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam outside the confines of our privileged white existence.  As best they could, our teachers encouraged us to have open minds and to try to find out what was happening in our world.  We are Baby Boomers, so by the time we were half way through our senior year, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.  Every boy I knew was subject to the Draft. 

One of my cousins became a Marine forward air controller, and the son of some friends of our parents was in the Navy on a patrol boat on the Mekong River.  I met the nephew of a neighbor who was sent to Viet Nam as a MP in the Army, and I wrote to him during my senior year in high school.  The letters he wrote back ended up full of some of the horrors he lived through over there.

By the time they all came back I was studying Russian and French on the campus of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.  The previous spring students had vandalized the Armory and taken over the President’s office as student protestors were wont to do in those days.  There were sit-ins during our first year, too, but they didn’t have the same following or enthusiasm.

Having been involved in Brownies, Girl Scouts, and 4-H I was really not war protestor material.  I was not only afraid of getting in trouble, I still was hoping the government was not involved in everything the protestors loudly said it was.  In the early 70s, Detente with the Soviets came on the heels of the end of the Viet Nam War, and I got married to my college sweetheart. 

We came to realize that maybe the government had been even worse than we thought.  As young mothers in Married Student Housing, one of our major occupations was watching the Watergate hearings while the kids napped or played on the floor nearby.  We only turned it off in favor of Sesame Street when the kids made a fuss.

So I had some more questions:  What were our government leaders really like and how did they make decisions?  Were they and our military leaders as bad as the protestors depicted them?  What was the truth about the Soviets?  Who and what kept the Cold War and the Arms Race going?  Because I got married and had our kids, it took me 8 years to finish my BA degree, and by that time we had Soviet exchange professors on campus every year all over the country.

I had a chance to meet some the last year I was in college.   It was very interesting.