thoughts from february

At night I dream about my wedding day. It makes me feel like a little girl—isn’t that what little girls dream of while my imagination went in wildly different directions at that age? I remember how I felt at 8^th grade graduation when everyone turned to look at Scott and me with all their cameras. How bashful I became! Surely it won’t be as bad holding on to Dad’s supportive arm, the arms I could always turn to for strength and security and comfort, and knowing that another strong, tender arm awaits me at the end.

When I took Stephanie to show her the church this weekend, I sat in one of the chairs as she looked around. Sitting there I could hear Aunty Barbie’s voice when I called with my announcement. I felt very young, she sounded so loving, proud, happy, and aunty. I guess she always does, but it took me back to the years when we lived nearby.

I’m going to walk down that aisle, I thought to myself, and everyone will rise and turn around and see a bride. These days I’ve been looking at the world from more of a parental perspective than from a child’s, so I tried to imagine what it would be like for those who have loved me from the day you brought me home. It must be hard. For several who will be there, it will be awfully symbolic of how they feel. Before they knew it, before they had time to turn around, Catie Did had become a woman, no longer swinging her feet in the back seat singing “Home, home on the range…” My feet touch the floor now, I live where the skies are mostly blue and very close to the range Lorna and I used to sing about.

Some day that will be me in your shoes, turning around, wondering where the time went, and seeing my little girl grown into a woman. The anticipation of it, and we’re talking a good twenty-some years before I have to worry about it, grabs my heart hard. I wonder if I can bear the upcoming joys, concerns, and sorrows that marriage and children will bring? Did you ever wonder about that, or did you want a child too much to wonder? Did you ever imagine this day for me?

testimony 1

I joke that I learned how to be a Christian from a renegade Jew and a practicing Buddhist. For years I had hidden, distorted, masked, and repressed my emotions, and these characteristics were never given a chance to mature. So I was truly a toddler in Christ. As the Holy Spirit worked in my heart, I was still trapped within.

My first job was unusual in its training. The customer service training I received was based on biblical principles—but the owners and trainers would never admit it, if they knew. We were trained to think and go the extra mile with every customer. I was so excited to receive the tools to express my heart that I started talking to strangers on the street, and applying the same tools with my friends around the country. It became a lifestyle.

The company was also the first to impress the idea of giving to me. As I considered owning my own business, the 10% giving was always a guiding principle in the business plans, long before I was convicted of this biblically.

Not long after I wondered how I needed to share the gospel with those around me—I knew maybe five Christians in the small city of Ann Arbor—it was time for me to return West. I was tempted to doubt my faith because I had pretty much never evangelized, though everyone seemed well aware of my faith. (I used to laugh at this because sometimes they would mistake my nervous, reserved habits for upholding Christian values). So I was worrying that I had not upheld my obligation to share what I had learned, and packing to leave, when my co-workers started taking me aside to thank me for my faith, and recognizing that it must give me peace during the trials of my life.

It was a sad time because I knew that those who did not believe did not think them any closer to Christ, but I remembered the way God planted seeds in my life, long before I was ready to receive Him, and I smiled as I drove away. I couldn’t rely on Him using me this quietly for the rest of my Christian life, but He had answered a prayer that I be used in ways that others were used in my life. I always thought of that prayer in terms of the amazing hospitality friends and the family of my friends had heaped on me over the years, but God reminded me of other means to share His heart.

The next few months were empty months. I went some broken place in my heart from where I refused to beckon God. I walked a lot on the Colorado National Monument behind my parents’ home in Grand Junction. I was sitting on a small boulder one afternoon when I started meditating on the rock. I was impressed with the solidity of it, and started praying for God to convict and teach me about His foundation so I might have courage, faith, and the experience of Him and never look back. It took time, but the relationship He cultivated with me after that was….sweet.

I moved to Colorado Springs, was led to a church within a month, started making friends, and at the encouragement of my close friends started to dream again. What do you want to do? They asked me relentlessly. And I gave them several answers, but more than anything I wanted a family. I couldn’t make that my goal—it could lead to poor decisions or misery. That was out of my control, so I prayed with God for a month about the kind of man I hoped for, and if it wasn’t too much trouble I would appreciate it if his family were close (geographically and relationally) but in this broken world I knew that was a tough order to fill. Many, many people over the course of my life predicted that I would find my special someone. I can show you letters, Valentine cards, my autograph books where mere acquaintances pronounced my destiny, and each time I would scoff—there is no guarantee, no way to count on finding someone you would want to marry. So, having laid out my heart; asking that God not distract me with anyone except the man He wanted me to marry, I then asked Him to prepare me for His plans, fully expecting to be single for several more years. That’s when Mark started to talking to me, three months after we had been in the same church community

It was known among Bible study that I was not in the market for a boyfriend, so it surprised everyone when I responded in kind to someone’s interest, and then was smitten. And a year later God answered the desires of my heart to work in ministry and in planning to have a family.

presents

I used to laugh when you brought home “presents” for me during the summer months, presents in the shapes of push brooms, shiny rakes, sharp shovels, the weird-looking gravel rake, and more hose to snake across our property. I laughed because I couldn’t appreciate the gift as a gift. Without those tools my work would have been harder. What we accomplished in those years might not have been possible.

When Mark came back from another trip to Lowes, and said, “I have a present for you,” I laughed with appreciation and a heart full of memories. There was a pair of new leather gloves. Giving up on the idea of sharing all those memories, for the moment, I reveled in the feeling that this is what I’ve been missing.

Home is not just the place we come to rest. In the leisurely drives I used to take in the country-side of Ann Arbor, Grand Junction, and the Black Forest, I would admire the large homes. One home stands out among all others because there was a black dog prancing the edge of his property, a man trimming his hedges, and his wife rolling a wheel barrow down to him in the evening sun. To me, that looked like home.

Sometimes the extent of our project, and the un-ending problems of under-taking those projects, are plain laughable. Sometimes, for the sake of satisfaction, I will clean a window before calling it a day. When the last glow of the evening fades from Pikes Peak, and I am tired in a way I haven’t felt tired in years.

cousins

My favorite times growing up were with my aunts and cousins. They would take turns watching us four Amy, the oldest, Jeremy, her brother and the only boy, Lorna, and myself. I remember expressing my sense of the age difference between Amy and I by saying I hated her. It must have hurt to hear that, but she laughed it off.

We spent Halloween at my house. The only house I remember visiting was my next door neighbor’s. To reach the door you had to walk through a big blue tent. Teenagers, friends of their kids, hid in sleeping bags and grabbed at your ankles as you walked by. After a couple years of this, the suspense was more than I could bear. When the first person grabbed my ankles I turned around screaming and didn’t get any candy from them that year.

My cousins laughed. They laughed when I wanted to learn how to chew gum. I remember there were leaves on the garage floor, and I would spit the gum out as hard as I could to make a bubble. No luck, I would plop the pink blob in my mouth and try again. No matter how much they tried to explain how to expand the gum with my tongue and work it around my lips to create a bubble, I didn’t understand.

They laughed again when one grasped my hands, another my feet, and they swung me into the hedge at Gido’s house.

They laughed at my fear of deep water and alligators. Every time we visited the old San Francisco Zoo Lorna would threaten to throw me in with the alligators. This explains why I was scared to death the time I fell into the Lafayette Reservoir. It was an annual Summer School field trip to visit the Reservoir. The only thing I remember about those trips is feeding the ducks, which is what were doing when two older girls brushed past and I fell with a loud splash into the water. Some say they saw the girls push me, but I also remember moving out of politeness. Between the two of them I ended up going head first into the water. My first thought was, “Oh no! If my feet touch the ground I will be alligator lunch.” Somehow my 3 foot body managed to pull away from the 4 foot shallow floor without touching, burst from the water and yell for help. Scared me to death when the teachers decided that one had to jump in after me. That meant someone would step on the alligator’s nose. To my relief we all ended up alive and wet. No one could ever understand my wild behavior and words, so no one ever explained alligators don’t hide in the mud of California alligators.

Another time we were going across the Bay Bridge I worked my imagination into a tizzy. The school used a short bus to transport us on field trips. On this occasion I found myself beside the bugger-nosed reject of an upper-grade. Behind me, my friends were talking about sharks. The boy noticed that I was cowering further and further into the wall of the bus and boldly asked what was the matter. By that time I was so frightened about the thought of a shark jumping into the bus window, I was no longer afraid of him told him. He kindly told my friends to stop talking about sharks and offered to sit by the window for me. I admired him after that.

My cousins laughed yet again when I pulled a knob off the Buick and made it buzz. Mom and my aunts were beginning to catch on by that time, that I was not entirely responsible for all my actions. If my cousins were laughing while I stood looking on dumbly they would ask, “What did you guys do?” It was too fun to exploit my naiveté and youth to bother teaching me how to survive the world. How I ever has, is anyone’s guess, or the hand of God.

I doted on my cousins. In a picture you see me imitating Lorna. A picture taken a little later shows that pose was significant to me for a few months after that.