August 2006
 Emily, Kinsey, Bruce, and Lora at their display table at a mission fair in Newburgh, Indiana. Greetings from Louisville! It’s good to be back in touch again! It’s taken us a while to accept that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) national office is just as much a mission calling as Vanuatu. We appreciate the privilege of writing this letter and letting you know what’s going on in our lives.
We still live in the Furlough Home on the campus of the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. It’s like living in a park. The deer come eat apples off the trees, the chimes sound every hour from the chapel, and we are already looking forward to the incredible display of autumn leaves. With us here, though, the campus is not entirely peaceful! Kinsey left marks on the path (the one at the bottom of the stairway down into the gulley) from crashing on her rollerblades, and I practice stealth composting, raking our kitchen garbage into the soil under the bushes, one blender full at a time.
Lora and I both work with the Mission Connections office. I help missionaries connect better with presbyteries—the local regions in our church. Lora is in charge of the planning for a nationwide effort toward better missionary support. It’s called Mission Challenge ’07 and hopes to encourage every one of the 11,000 churches in the denomination to support at least one missionary. We recognize that having work that is important and meaningful is a tremendous gift, but we are still a little rueful about working in an office. We look forward to the day when we can be back in the field. It takes effort to stay sane in a large city. Lora walks every morning while listening to books on tape, and has taken up spinning again. I exercise, bake bread, and play the recorder.
I am taking courses, a couple at a time, from the University of Louisville to update my knowledge of teacher-training. This will probably result in completion of the classwork for a doctorate in the next couple of years, but I have no plans for a dissertation yet.
Kinsey is a senior. She is thrilled to be a drum major in the marching band—she plays tuba when she’s not conducting!—and is preparing to make audition tapes for college applications. She hopes to major in vocal performance. We have always known that she had a sweet, little-girl singing voice, but after a year of voice lessons, she now also has a fat-lady opera voice. She’s a soloist for the Louisville Youth Choir, and it’s amazing to hear huge, mezzo-soprano sounds come pouring out of this little woman-child. She hasn’t grown any taller since fifth grade.
Emily, a junior now, is spending most of her life studying. She is in the International Baccalaureate program, which is a big challenge for her. She has made good progress in playing the violin after a year and a half of practice, and is the youngest member of the Jewish Community Center Orchestra. She sits way in the back of the second violins. All we can see is her bow moving, but it’s moving right along with the others!
We are grateful that we had the chance to give the girls experiences in three worlds. They know the golden plains of Montana, villages and blue lagoons in Vanuatu, and now this urban woodland.
On our summer vacation, we stopped in the badlands of South Dakota, just as the setting sun lit every bush with unearthly flame, and the girls said, “This is so cool! Why didn’t we ever visit here when we lived in Montana? It’s so close!”
The next day we visited Mount Rushmore, where we marveled at the audacity of the vision that people could sculpt a mountain, as well as the sheer, dogged persistence that made that vision a reality. The girls said, “This is so cool! Why didn’t we ever visit here when we lived in Montana? It’s so close!”
Then we visited Devil’s Tower, where an entire volcano has eroded away, leaving only the solid core. We hiked around the tower, watching the falcons soar from their nests far above the thousands of fallen boulders at the tower’s base. 2006 is the one hundredth anniversary of Devil’s Tower as a national monument and, in comparing those first photos with the ones of today, the rangers tell us that not a single rock has fallen in the last hundred years. What a glimpse of God’s deep time, where a falcon is supported on the wind but a century means nothing! And the girls, giggling, repeated, “This is so cool! Why didn’t we ever visit here when we lived in Montana? It’s so close!”
That’s a great question, and one that has been haunting me. I hope that I don’t regretfully ask myself a similar question when I’m old: “Why didn’t I celebrate the gift of God’s beauty around me every day? It was so close! How did I allow myself to miss it?”
Lora and I sense the passage of time; we will say “good-bye” to Kinsey within the next year, and Emily one year later. We try to live today in awareness, celebrating the grace of each moment as it flies, and at the same time feeling the solid core at the heart of the universe. We’re trying not to miss it.
Love and peace,
Bruce and Lora
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 261 |
