Moving

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

We’ve lived in this house since 1985. Moving that much living, from Missouri to Washington State, would be daunting, even if my husband and I weren’t certifiable hoarders.

Husband: “I found more of your books. Why do you have so many books?”

Wife:  “After I sold a few books in our first garage sale, you told me it was a bad idea to sell books. So I have every remaining book I’ve ever owned, including that set of encyclopedias I bought at the library sale, that they gave me for five dollars if I would also take the children’s set and the yearbooks. Besides, what are my few hundred books compared to your thousands?”

But in the middle of the ridiculous, I found a bit of the sublime: an article written about my son in the school newspaper when he was a sophomore in high school. He talked about our family’s experience of living in England for a semester which whetted his appetite for travel. My geographer husband loves to travel, too, and for a while he and Chris had a running competition about who had been in more countries. But Mike gave up years ago, because he can never catch up to Chris. After our European family trip, there were Canada and Mexico, then he joined engineering ministries international, and started traveling the globe:  two years in India, and trips to Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia.

“Roark strives for the limits,” says the headline. “I don’t like being normal,” he told the interviewer. He’s now living in Laos, teaching English to Buddhist monks. What could be further from “normal”? Living as a Christian in a Communist country where most people practice Buddhism—he’s still pushing the limits.

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