by Roger Bruner
“But it took the first time, didn’t it?” Aleesha said, grinning.
Throughout the rest of that day and well into the evening, I heard bits and snatches of team members humming, whistling, and singing “When God’s People Come Together” and “Wherever There Is Need” while going about their construction chores.
Tears filled my eyes every time I heard it.
chapter twenty-eight
I was on my way to worksite #2 with some requested bottles of lukewarm water—I was at full capacity with three under my good arm and one in my hand—when one of the girls stopped to talk to me.
“Hi, Kim. How’s the arm? You don’t know me, but I’m Judith and I’m so sorry about how I’ve acted the past few days.”
She was right. Not only did I not know her, I couldn’t remember her from the endless procession of make-righters who had greeted me before breakfast.
“Don’t worry about it, Judith. All is forgiven.” For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the motion the pope makes when blessing people. I tried to sound convincing, but that was especially tough when I didn’t know what I was forgiving her for. What specifically, that is.
Maybe I should have asked, but dredging up details about something I thought was completely behind me didn’t seem right.
“Just don’t let it happen again,” I said with what I meant as a mischievous grin, never suspecting that anyone could be sensitive enough to take an obvious, smart-aleck joke like mine as a serious reprimand.
I didn’t notice my blunder until I saw her face turning beet red. She barely managed to squeak out, “Oh, I won’t,” and then her tears started flowing.
Had I just shot Bambi’s mother? Or maybe Bambi. I felt awful. Maybe worse than Judith, if that was possible.
Some people sob. Others weep. And some …
A product slogan says, “When it rains, it pours.” Well, Judith’s tears were in danger of putting even the highest sections of Santa María—they didn’t appear to be more than a foot higher than the lower sections—under salt water. She just kept on raining and pouring, pouring and raining.
I felt horrible about my insensitivity and wondered whether offering to amputate my tongue might make things right again. No, she might take that literally, too, and I wasn’t ready to sacrifice the most important organ in my body. She’ll get over it, I told myself. She’s too sensitive. It’s her fault for over-apologizing.
But no matter how I tried rationalizing my thoughtlessness, I couldn’t escape the fact I’d hurt the poor girl’s feelings and needed to make things right.
I wanted to form a time-out sign, but I didn’t have enough hands and arms to do it. I probably wouldn’t have done it right, anyhow. I’ve never been fond of sports.
“Joke, Judith,” I said. “Horrible, tasteless joke. I can be so thoughtless. Can you ever forgive me?” As far as I was concerned, I was prone on the dry, hot ground kissing her dirty, stinky shoes. I couldn’t get more humble than that.
Although the tears stopped and a slight smile came to her lips, her blush didn’t fade. I’d never seen one last so long. The longer her face stayed red, the worse I felt. I’ve seen permanent markers come clean faster. Had tears affected her makeup in some weird way that altered her skin color?
“Oh, Kim, how wonderfully Christian you are to forgive me so easily that you can joke about it.” Her sincerity was as scary as her awkward-sounding sentence.
How could I free myself from this girl’s naive adulation? I didn’t want to be overtly offensive, and I didn’t want to make her cry anymore. I just wanted to climb off the pedestal before I fell off.
It was taller and scarier than any ladder I’d ever attempted climbing.
I decided to try something extreme. I looked around to make sure nobody would overhear me. I purposely let a mild vulgarism escape. Surely hearing me talk that way would deflate her opinion like dropping a basketball on the point of a nail.
“Kim? You have problems with your language, too? You are so human.”
Her over-the-top sincerity made me want to say a much worse word, but I couldn’t. Maybe this habit-changing thing was working better than I’d realized.
Lord, what …? Huh? Okay, thanks.
“Judith, you give me too much credit. I’m not mostly saint and slightly human. I’m all human and a weak one most of the time at that. If I were as wonderful as you think, I wouldn’t have acted the way I did at orientation, and I would have forgiven everybody on the team without waiting for apologies. Jesus did that when His enemies weren’t sorry for their actions. Don’t expect me to do that. I can’t keep from being hurt and angry when people wrong me.
“Speaking of ‘hurt and angry,’ Bamb—uh, Judith—I need to beg your forgiveness now. I shouldn’t have embarrassed you so thoughtlessly.”
She might have been sipping drops of water from the crevices of a wet sponge with a straw the way she appeared to take in the nuances of everything I said. When I finished, she threw her arms around me.
“I don’t care what you say, Kim. I still think you’re the finest Christian here.”
I turned red then. Lord, please don’t let anyone else be under the delusion Judith is under.
Judith was just one of dozens of team members who, freed now from Aleesha’s threat of sermon reruns, stopped to say hi whenever they saw me. Some of them hugged me, and a few apologized again, but most of them said how great it was that we could put our mutual sins behind us.
And nobody else—thank You, Lord—tried putting me on a pedestal.
We worked hard that morning, but we spent much of the time building good relationships.
I kept my permanent marker with me at all times. Everybody wanted to sign my cast, and nobody else in Santa María had a marker for that shade of purple.
Thank goodness for my thoughtful emergency room nurse, who’d even given me a spare. She must have had a teenage daughter.
Geoff stopped to hug me, but his embrace wasn’t the gentle, innocent, sideways kind Christian males are known for using on their Christian sisters. He clasped both arms around me as if trying to keep me from escaping and squeezed tight, holding his hands flat against my back for a moment.
I was afraid he was going to kiss me. I honestly believe I would have bit him as hard as I could if he had. I had nothing against kissing boys, but …
He seemed to enjoy taking advantage of my temporary incapacitation. Although his overly friendly embrace had made my skin crawl, I was too busy with construction activities to dwell on it once I wiggled out of his grasp and giggled as if that’s what he’d expected me to do.
I spent most of the morning dividing a barrel of nails into eighteen equal portions—Rob finally came along and told me I didn’t actually have to count them. Then I started carting bottled water and small supplies as needed. If I couldn’t lug more than five pounds of anything one-armed (three pounds if the load was breakable), at least I was doing something useful.
The other team members agreed.
“Good show, Kim. You’re right on time.”
“How’d you know we needed that right now?”
“I’m glad we have somebody like you we can count on.”
“I can’t believe how efficient and responsible you are.”
I jotted that last comment down word for word and asked Martha—the girl who’d said it—to sign it.
“Martha, I want to show this to Mom and Dad. They’ve never said such a thing about me. Not once in their lives. They probably won’t believe it.”
“Here’s my phone number, too,” she said with a smile. “If they question you, have them call me.”
I wouldn’t get a reputation for dependability by accident. I’d have to work hard to earn it. But this was a start.
“As far as the east is from the west …”
That’s how different today felt from the preceding couple of days. I felt good about being in Santa María. Great, in fact. I hoped the villagers could see the improvement in my attit
ude—and in everyone else’s.
Yet I seemed to wrestle with God every time I prayed, and I prayed a lot while carrying out duties that required no thinking. I humbled myself at the beginning of my prayers only to start complaining about the things God wouldn’t let me do.
I wasn’t talking about construction, either.
How was I ever going to plant the first gospel seed in Santa María? The communication gap was impossible to bridge. No matter how I might try narrowing the breach, it wasn’t going to happen. That realization was an acid eating away at the joy I should have been experiencing.
I’d learned the importance of evangelism earlier in the summer. That was an integral part of every House of Bread ministry.
Although relief work in Santa María was crucial, what would we accomplish of an eternal nature unless we could explain why we, the affluent, cared enough about the welfare of impoverished strangers to give up part of our summer to help them?
Trust and obey. Wasn’t that what the old hymn said? I knew all about flexibility, trust, and obedience now.
So when would God give me an assignment to obey? He wouldn’t have brought me to Santa María just to sort nails and carry water, no matter how necessary those tasks were.
Or would He?
chapter twenty-nine
On our San Diego “ambulance” ride, Rob made things so right that he became my dad away from home. Much to my amazement, amusement, and mild irritation, he started calling me Kimmy shortly after our return to Santa María. I wouldn’t have tolerated such a nickname from anyone else.
Dad would’ve had a bigger cow about it than me, though. And if he’d named that cow Elizabeth, he wouldn’t have let anyone get away with calling her Lizzie, Libby, Bessie, or Beth. If he named his cow Elizabeth, that’s what he’d expect people to call her.
I giggled at the thought of my dad and a cow coming within fifty yards of one another.
Rob was thoughtful about Kimmy, though. “Do you mind if I call you Kimmy, Kimmy?” he asked several hours after he started doing it. His tone of voice told me the question was a mere formality. He’d assumed agreement.
I didn’t answer his question. Not directly, that is. “Call me anything you like,” I said. Of course, if I’d guessed that the whole team might call me Kimmy, too, I might have expressed my objections.
Might have. But probably not. This seemed important to Rob.
I was probably more gracious about Rob’s nickname because Dad didn’t have a pet name for me. Although Mom frequently called me wiggleworm, Dad never addressed me once as baby girl or sweetie, much less princess, munchkin, or kitten.
Betsy Jo’s dad still called her doodlebug, although it embarrassed the daylights out of her. She didn’t understand why I’d envied that when we were younger, and I didn’t tell her I still did.
Of course, when Dad was angry about my carelessness, he didn’t hesitate to address me as Kimberly Leigh. Ugh. Why had he insisted on an “l-y Leigh” name? That sometimes made me feel redundant.
I still remembered conversations from my youth when Mom and I attempted a verbal Mission Impossible.
“Dad, would you please call me Kim instead of Kimberly? My friends do. My teachers do. Everybody at church does, including the preacher, the choir director, and Pastor Ron. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but Mom has called me Kim since I was little.”
“You can’t fight a tidal wave.” Mom smiled at Dad.
That’s what Barbra Streisand said to Ryan O’Neal in that great old movie What’s Up, Doc? Mom may not have been an actress, but she could come up with a movie line for almost any occasion. She was even better quoting relevant scripture verses.
“But Kimberly is your name,” Dad said, as if those five words settled everything.
His response had to start with but. That’s how he was. I wasn’t sure he’d even listened to Mom.
“We named you after your great-aunt Kimberly,” he said, as if he hadn’t belabored the point a million times already. “She didn’t go by Kim. She insisted on Kimberly, and you should, too.”
An old-fashioned response like that from an intelligent, well-educated, forty-four-year-old didn’t fit.
Or maybe it did. Dad acted older than his years, especially regarding life in general—that meant most of the time.
Maybe rearing me had aged him faster than it did Mom.
“Dad, I understand about Great-Aunt Kimberly, and it’s wonderful you named me after her. What a tribute to her long years of missionary service in South America. But it’s such a, uh, formal-sounding name for a teen today. I’ll bet even Aunt Kimberly would prefer Kim if she were part of today’s generation. Things are so much faster paced now. People don’t have time to say Kimberly anymore.”
“She’s got a point, Scott,” Mom chimed in.
I admired her fearless, straightforward yet nonaggressive approach. Mine was generally full speed ahead through the china shop.
“Several points, in fact,” Mom added. “Times change.”
Then she dropped the subject. Although she was still on my side, she knew when to stop. She would back off and try again—often successfully—at a more appropriate time. If I ignored the danger signs and forged ahead—as I tended to do—I was apt to lose both the battle and the war.
But teens are supposed to be impatient. When we’re patient, grown-ups think we’re either sick or trying to pull something over on them. And if we’re patient several times in a row, we risk having them think we’ve matured so much they can expect us to act like that all the time.
I’ve learned over the years that people aren’t apt to respond the way we want when we badger them. Not oldsters or midlifers. Not teenagers. So maybe Mom’s tidal wave quotation was a warning for me to back off and not just a hint to Dad that continued resistance would be useless.
Changing my dad into a periodic Kim-ist took a number of years. And a number of additional tidal waves.
When Dad said Kim, he sounded like someone butchering an unknown word in an unfamiliar language. Although he’d made progress, Kim didn’t roll off his tongue as naturally as Kimmy from Rob’s. Maybe I was making too much out of it, but I’d prayed about it more than once in Santa María.
At least Dad had called me Kim when I phoned him and Mom from San Diego, and he’d sounded comfortable doing it.
chapter thirty
Oh no! Here he comes again.
“Geoff, how do you always manage to be where I am?” I smiled and tried to be pleasant, but I knew that mathematical probability wouldn’t explain his constant appearances. That kind of maneuvering required premeditation and plenty of advance planning.
“You’re just lucky, I guess.”
Not “I’m just lucky,” but “You’re just lucky.” He didn’t sound like he was trying to be cute. Oh, well, a little conceit didn’t make him a terrible person.
Although his frequent appearances flattered me at first, they soon grew unsettling. I’m a hugger by nature; but after that earlier incident, I got in the habit of rebalancing my load so he couldn’t hug me every time he saw me—not without my bashing, mashing, or puncturing him.
“Fancy running into you here,” I said with a giggle after knocking him breathless with the plank I held precariously under my good arm. My left one. I’m right-handed. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I said as insincerely as I could.
“Here, let me help you,” he said, reaching out to take the board from me. “Your hands are too soft to carry something like that.”
“No, Geoff, but thanks for offering,” I said with polite determination as I swung the board out of his grasp and hit him in the arm with the other end. “If you do my job for me, I won’t accomplish anything in Santa María. I’m Scarlett O’Hara after the Civil War, not before.”
My allusion went right over his head. Maybe he was a Yankee.
“I’d feel pampered and useless if I weren’t doing something worthwhile, and I didn’t pay all this money and fly three thousand miles
from home to sit around and be lazy.”
He didn’t say anything, but his face had one of those “then why didn’t you say so in plain English?” looks that are so cute on some guys. But his wasn’t cute.
Only guys who accepted Gone with the Wind as the best portrait of human nature—after the Bible, of course—fit my mold. Maybe I’d accept a GWTW nonbeliever some day if he was at least a Christian Rhett Butler, although I doubted it.
But he wouldn’t be Geoff.
He didn’t catch on quickly about my not wanting help. He made a similar offer every time he saw me, which continued throughout that morning. He always coupled it with a compliment about one or more of my body parts.
Although he never said anything overtly improper, I couldn’t miss where his thoughts were. Pretending to be tolerant about that was hard enough, but I was also concerned about the amount of work Geoff was shirking by spending the lion’s share of his time prowling for me.
Surely that disgusted and perhaps angered his teammates, too.
The only positive thing I could still say about Geoff was his great looks hadn’t changed. Even in my less mature years, though, I cared as much about the internal as I did the external. The revelation of Geoff’s true colors had spun my opinion in a one-eighty away from him.
He wasn’t a rainbow, but an ugly shade of gray. If I’d ever considered him quite a catch, I now wanted to scramble out of the water before he had any more illusions about catching me. He was too small-minded to be a catcher or a keeper.
I noticed the other girls eyeing him with interest, but he appeared to ignore them. Under other circumstances, I might have felt flattered that he wanted me and not them.
But I could live without any more of Geoff’s attention.
I’d learned some tough lessons during my tenderer years. One of the most important was that mission-trip romances distract the guy and the girl and interfere with their involvement in the mission activities. They spend as much free time together as they can and fail to bond with the rest of the team.
