by Roger Bruner
More stressful and more impossible. Only God could make my luggage fall upward, and I wasn’t counting on that kind of miracle today.
If only I’d thought to remove the largest and heaviest items from my suitcases and put them in the trolley by themselves, leaving the luggage manageably light.
But I didn’t, so I spent ten frustrating minutes searching for a porter. One who looked strong, compassionate, and disinclined to be sarcastic. I didn’t even care what his teeth looked like.
“I can’t lift these, sir,” I said to the mostly-bald, upper-middle-aged man who’d appeared out of nowhere and was now walking toward me as if God had divinely appointed our meeting. He didn’t look like a porter, though. He wore faded jeans, a short-sleeved plaid shirt, and a baseball cap that said GRANDDAD. In one hand, he held a clipboard, a marker or ink pen in the other.
“No?” he said in a restrained tone. I didn’t know if there was such a thing as a California accent, but if so, he had one. He flipped through the papers on his clipboard before making what I assumed was a check mark on a sheet somewhere around the middle. “You must be Kimberly Hartlinger, our team’s late, latest, and last to arrive.”
Hallelujah! I’m not too late!
I threw my arms around his neck and broke out crying—tears of joy and relief mixed with tears of guilt and regret. I didn’t care that he didn’t hug me back, pat me on the shoulder, or do anything else a Christian grandfather might have done to reassure a youthful damsel that she was no longer in distress.
“My name is Rob White. I’m the senior project director on this mission trip to Mexico.”
He handed me a photo ID—his passport, actually—and insisted that I examine it closely to make sure he was who he claimed to be. He was all business, that man. And cold enough to make me feel like shivering.
“Mr. White, am I glad to see you, sir. I was sure you’d leave for Mexico without me.”
“We wanted to. We’ll discuss that later.”
He reminded me a little of my dad the way he said that, but Dad wouldn’t have waited till later to talk about it.
“You overpacked,” he said with a straight face that was already red from trying to lift the first of my suitcases. It was still on the floor, and he didn’t smile at the prospect of having to bend over and try again.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen him smile yet.
We struggled and strained together then—I’d heard them call it a team lift at my favorite Target Store—to get my bags into the trolley. I hoped the strain wouldn’t give him a boardgame card reading, Go DIRECTLY TO HEAVEN. Do NOT PASS SILVER CITY. Do NOT BRING KIM HARTLINGER.
“What do you have in here—bricks?”
No! Not two Millie Q.s in one day. Please.
He left me with the carts—we had to rent another one—in the passenger pickup area and returned six or seven minutes later driving a well-worn but otherwise immaculate, boring white passenger van. My arms, legs, and upper body started screaming
“No!” at the thought of having to repeat our team lifts.
But I could have hugged God right then. He had blessed the van with a lift.
Mr. White didn’t say one word on the eight-minute drive to the hotel, and I sat on the passenger side looking straight ahead, sweating over what he might say once he unleashed his honest feelings.
chapter four
When we arrived at the hotel, orientation was about to start. I didn’t think about the fact they might have been waiting for me or I would have felt worse than I already did.
I took a seat in a vacant row halfway back.
“Welcome to San Diego, my young friends.” I hadn’t seen this guy before. “For anyone who hasn’t met me, I’m Charlie, the second-in-command on this trip. Since we’re all on a firstname basis here, I won’t burden you with my last name. It’s so convoluted I can barely pronounce it myself.”
I smiled politely, thrilled to be surrounded by this group of Christian strangers who, I assumed, would soon be closer to me than brothers and sisters. I giggled once. How would I know something like that? I was an only child.
“I’m an experienced builder from Santa Barbara, California, and I’ll help organize and oversee your activities. I hate to disappoint you, young ladies, but I’m happily married.”
All over the small ballroom, I heard girls groaning in mock disappointment.
The boys cheered, though, perhaps relieved at having one less competitor for the girls’ attention. Of course, as an awkward thirty-something, Charlie couldn’t have competed with these guys, anyhow; but that wouldn’t have kept them from worrying about it. From the hungry looks on their faces, they’d come on a dual-purpose mission trip: evangelism and finding Miss Christian Right.
Several of the boys started eyeing me. I wasn’t surprised. Boys usually noticed me.
Many—maybe most—of these girls were on the prowl for mates as well. I could have told them why their search would probably prove fruitless in the long run, but I didn’t normally impose my opinion on others without being asked. Especially not strangers I would be in close contact with for the next two weeks.
“This other fellow up here is Rob White. He’s our senior project leader. You can thank him for spending the day chauffeuring you to the hotel rather than making you hang around the airport. He also suggested you might prefer spending these past few hours getting to know one another to listening to me preach a sermon.”
Applause broke out all over the ballroom. I clapped as hard as anyone. Rob had been my savior with a lowercase s, no matter how he felt about it.
“Rob hails from San Francisco, farther up the coast from me. He’s a builder, too, but he has experience working on a greater variety of projects, including some that are similar to this one. He’s a bit older, as you can see from all the wrinkles he got raising a houseful of teenagers. But he survived that, and he’s a great sport; he can dish out the teasing as well as take it.”
Yeah? Show me.
“I’m fairly certain he won’t put his pet rattlesnake in my sleeping bag for joshing with him.”
Sleeping bag? Didn’t Pastor Ron say we’d be staying in church members’ homes? “In homes” implies “in beds,” doesn’t it?
Charlie’s comment must have been a slip of the tongue or maybe a figure of speech. I dismissed it.
“Rob isn’t available, either, ladies. And would you believe his beautiful wife married him just for his hair? He looked exactly like one of the Beatles when he was younger. Ringo, I believe.”
He circled his own head with one finger to denote that Mr. White had only a gray ring of hair left. Although he chuckled at his own joke, nobody else seemed to be laughing. Even Pastor Ron would have found this audience tough. I giggled to myself, wondering if he would have recognized any of himself in Charlie.
I giggled again. He would have found Charlie’s humor just as tedious as we found his.
“But if you really want to get on Rob’s good side, ask him about his grandkids.” Rob waved his Granddad cap and smiled. I was glad to see him smiling.
Mock “ooo’s” and “ahhh’s” came from all over the room at the prospect of having to look through a wallet full of family photographs. I wanted to see them, though. I may not have spent much time around little kids growing up, but I was a sucker for them now—especially after my brief time working with migrant children at the House of Bread.
And if showing a sincere interest in the photographs of Mr. White’s—Rob’s—grandchildren would help mend our nonexistent relationship, more power to them.
I probably should have wondered why two highly qualified builders were leaders on an evangelistic project, but I didn’t. It’s not like we needed to have preacher types along.
After all, the purpose of this trip was lay evangelism. Since a Protestant church in Ciudad de Plata was going to coordinate our activities, their minister would serve as our team pastor.
Rob took the microphone from Charlie.
“It’
s great to see you here today, excited and primed for practical action in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
I must have had a strange look on my face. As important, as essential, as I thought evangelism was, I’d never heard it described as “practical” before.
“One thing Charlie failed to point out is that neither of us has ever led a mission project before. We got pulled into this one at the last minute. We haven’t been trained to do anything like this, but we’ll do our best. We’ll make mistakes; you can be sure of that. Please be patient. We’ll do our best to correct them.”
Heads nodded throughout the room, and I felt a tad better about Rob. I hoped that feeling would soon be mutual.
“It’s miraculous that all 144 of the young adults we expected today showed up, even though one of them made a wrong turn at Dallas/Fort Worth and arrived a tiny bit late.” Although he’d smiled and used a humorous tone on tiny bit, he’d placed a conspicuous emphasis on late.
Then he looked me straight in the eye—now I understood how I made Dad feel when I did that to him—and I examined the legs of the chair in front of me with equal parts of shame and self-defense. I was roasting from the heat of a hundred and forty-five pairs of eyes searching intently for America’s Dumbest Traveler as if I were a dangerous fugitive. I should have been easy to spot, though, for I was the only one in the room not searching for the criminally careless culprit.
I’d spent my whole life in Georgia; and my parents, teachers, neighbors, people at church—everyone—taught me that staring and pointing were rude. Most of these kids were apparently just “Dratted Yankees” who didn’t know any better.
I was proud of myself for not even thinking the common wording of that epithet.
I was also criminally crimson by then. As red as my face felt, nobody would’ve mistaken me for one of the 143 youth who’d arrived on time. Missing my connecting flight had been bad enough, but being totally at fault was worse. My original itinerary had me arriving in San Diego last, anyhow. So my avoidable delay threw the whole day’s schedule off by nearly four hours.
That wasn’t something to be proud of—and a lot to feel embarrassed about.
Charlie cut in, leaning toward the microphone. He was obviously comfortable speaking before groups. “Because of the delay in starting, we’ll cut orientation short—shorter, anyhow—so we won’t be too late getting to the village.”
I didn’t take time to ponder Charlie’s reference to “the village.” Probably just the name of a Silver City suburb.
I wished I could be that comfortable addressing groups. But instead of having Charlie’s fluency, I suffered a form of disfluency that made me repeat my words or get so tongue-tied they came out super tangled. The problem only showed up when I was nervous.
Like when I had to address too many people at the same time. My salutatorian speech took twice its allotted time, even though it had only half as many words as it was supposed to have.
Rob tapped Charlie on the shoulder and took over at the microphone.
“Sorry to interrupt, Charlie, but I saw some nasty looks out there a minute ago when you mentioned the delay in starting.” Some? “We’re all pretty exhausted, but we need to show our late arrival a little bit of understanding.”
I had to give Rob credit for trying, but as uptight as I was by then, he might as well have been a judge pronouncing sentence. “Guilty as charged. Take her to the gallows and hang her by her long wavy hair until it’s permanently straight. But first brand a humongous Ion her forehead with a red Sharpie: the personal pronoun I to signify her self-centeredness. Then make a crossbar with another I for Irresponsible. Together, those brands form a cross. After all, she claims to be a Christian. And may she spend her earthly life remembering that Jesus was on time for His crucifixion. He didn’t dawdle over a chocolate milkshake in the upper room.”
I glanced down at the sweatshirt I’d bought at DFW and realized I hadn’t removed the price tag. Millie Q. must have meant to pay me back by overlooking it—or had I bought it yet then? After pulling the tag off, I looked at it again and snarled. That woman! She took the tag off my watch and stuck it on my sweatshirt when I wasn’t paying attention. After starting to think a four-letter word, I made myself switch to something shorter and safer.
Oh, man.
I’d only cursed aloud once today—once that I knew of, anyhow. I prayed I wouldn’t give in to the temptation to do it now. Getting here had taken too much effort. I wasn’t going to let them send me home before the end of orientation.
But self-control was more challenging after I noticed several places on my sweatshirt that looked like humongous, ketchup-soaked sponges. Why had I insisted on buying a white shirt instead of a red one?
Wait a minute. I haven’t had any ketchup today. This is pizza sauce.
I’d gobbled down two good-sized meals of pizza at DFW to store up memories of the taste for the two weeks I’d be in Mexico without it. But the sauce on my shirt served as a filthy reminder that I’d grown sick of pizza—oh, so literally sick! —for the first time in my life. Even though pizza was nature’s most perfect food, enough was enough.
The stains might come out eventually, but would my face ever return to its normal color? My blush probably matched the dried stains closely, and I imagined going to the cosmetics department at Macy’s and asking for lipstick in Papa John’s or Pizza Hut red. Maybe they’d stock slight shade variations for other well-known pizza chains.
Charlie took the microphone again.
Huh? What, Charlie? Why are you looking at me that way?
chapter five
The room couldn’t have been much quieter if everyone else had been off in la-la land, too. Charlie was looking at me expectantly. I guess he’d figured out who I was. The people sitting in the front rows turned around to face me, and I felt my blush deepening—if that was humanly possible.
But the question I couldn’t answer was whether he’d asked me a question, so I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be answering a question or not.
As if certain he had, I felt like shouting, “I’ve never flown before. I tried doing the right things, but I did them all wrong.” I wanted to scream, “What kind of Christians are you to be looking at me that way?” in my most accusatory tone of voice.
Maybe there’s no defense like a good offense, but I didn’t dare to attempt one. I’d already been offensive enough.
I could have been a blind, crippled dog lying in the garbage heap, covered in pizza sauce and unable to resist a stranger’s beatings. But human laws prohibited things like that, and any person in the room would have called the authorities if they’d seen such a thing happening.
But I didn’t have anyone—not a human, anyhow—to fully intervene for me in my pizza-stained embarrassment. And to make matters worse, I still had no idea why Charlie was staring at me and saying nothing.
So instead of reacting offensively, I played dumb and closed my eyes to avoid the stares. After all, this was America, and nobody was going to make me testify against myself. It’s not like I was a secret-laden terrorist.
I couldn’t close my ears to the growing number of snickers from team members in my section of the ballroom, though. I half-expected them to stampede toward safer, more hallowed ground at the front near Rob and Charlie.
At first, Charlie indirectly condoned the negative buzz by failing to acknowledge or shush it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ignore it. Once the murmurs calmed a little on their own, Rob took over.
“I must not have made myself clear earlier. We claim to be Christians. Let’s forgive and forget what’s happened and move on.”
Good words, Rob. So are you going to …?
He glanced at his wristwatch and frowned. Not a casual “Whoops! Better keep this short!” frown, but a booming, “this stupid girl wasted all of our orientation time” scowl.
Although Rob had said the proper Christian thing and probably had the best intentions, I wasn’t sure I trusted his abili
ty to completely forgive me. I might have to settle for his spoken forgiveness for the time being.
If the kids believed in Rob’s forgiveness, they’d probably follow his lead, too. But they’d be apt to ignore his plea for my amnesty—it’s called mercy in Christian lingo—if they didn’t.
Even though nobody had said anything unpleasant to me, my untimely mistake obviously hadn’t endeared me to this group. I didn’t expect instant forgiveness, but a drop—a single atom—of tolerance and understanding would have been so … reassuring.
So Christlike.
Maybe they’d let me evangelize by myself for the next one million, two hundred and nine thousand seconds (give or take a few). Unless the attitudes behind those cold, staring faces warmed up, no one would want to team up with me. I didn’t want anyone to be miserable having me on his team.
Just give me a translator, and I’ll be fine on my own. The spiritual needs of Silver City are too important for me to waste time taking a little rejection too seriously—not as long as I’m still free to witness for my Lord.
A gentle hand touched my shoulder, and a whisper reached my ears. “Don’t worry about it, gal. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.” Although I didn’t think the Holy Spirit had a gender, God had just spoken to me through the decidedly female voice of someone sitting immediately behind me.
I turned my head just far enough to identify my Barnabus. I smiled, and a dark, African American face smiled back. I wanted to thank her for helping calm my storm with her own “Peace! Be still!” while everyone else looked like they wanted to rock the boat and do whatever else they could to make me seasick.
Slightly reassured, I faced front again and settled back into my chair. Rob and Charlie changed topics, and Christian love reigned again—at least on the surface.
But I couldn’t be sure what dangers lurked beneath.
