Coming Full Circle

Welcome to my first post on this blog in nearly ten years. Please pardon the dust. I was  actually surprised to see that this blog is still even accessible.  I guess nothing really dies on the Internet.  

A lot of life has been lived and lost in the past ten years.  When I last posted in 2014, I was living in Brigham City, Utah, working full-time as a missionary in multimedia production. Things were moving along, there were engaging projects to chew on, and I was enjoying a sense of forward motion. There was not a lack of things to hold my interest.  And so it went for several more years.

Then in 2017, life shifted. 

My 80-year-old father began to experience serious health problems. For the first time I really came face-to-face with my parents' mortality. I began to divide my time between Utah, and my family in Washington State. But it soon became clear that Dad's health was more than Mom could manage on her own, so I relocated indefinitely to Washington in 2018, bringing all of my multimedia equipment with me so that I could continue my work remotely.

So in those days, my primary "ministry" became accompanying my parents through their ever-increasing health crises.  As an only child, and with no other family entanglements, this fell to me.  It was a ministry that I embraced and treasured, difficult though it was. I was grateful that I had the kind of work that allowed me to do this, and the support from colleagues back in Utah that made it possible.

My father passed away suddenly in April of 2019. The universe was torn apart violently, as death tends to do. But...Mom and I were re-oriented to the new reality, as life tends to do. She remained relatively stable health-wise for a time. Then we both contracted Covid in early 2020--even before the shutdowns began to happen. She recovered from the infection, but from that point forward, her health took a steady downard turn. A year later, in February of 2021, she too passed away. I didn't know if I would be able to take this again. But I didn't have much choice. Scraps of the torn-up universe floated around. When the second parent falls, there is such an overwhelming sense of finality.  My orphanhood was complete.

That was three years ago today, February 16.  

The pandemic years were difficult ones for all of us, for sure. For me, it was the filling of a cruel  tragedy sandwich--stuffed between the deaths of my parents. And life on the other side became a completely different beast.

As the pandemic wound down, and the sharpness of grief subsided to a dull ache, the strangeness of existence began to settle heavily around me. It was like I was waking up in someone else's life. My caregiving ministry was gone; my multimedia ministry had shrunk in scope to a handful of administrative and routine duties.  I wondered if all the good juice had been squeezed out of me. 

I had much to be grateful for. I had good friends, a home, enough work to keep me occupied and enough to pay the bills. My external life was generally free of any real drama. Nevertheless, I was treading water in a sea of malaise. Depression rose and fell with the swells--a shark that picked at my heels regularly, and occasionally chomped hard and pulled me under. In those darker moments, my sense of aloneness and isolation was almost physically suffocating. I was now a patriarch of a family of one, useless and obsolete.

But I still got up each day. I was never suicidal, but neither did I have any strong motivation to stay alive. The future did not look appealing. A solitary life with diminishing purpose, waiting for ailments and old age to overtake me. I'd just recently had a front-row seat to that show. What else was there to do, but submit to it with quiet resignation?

It all sounds a bit maudlin now, as I look back on it from a more hopeful vantage point; but this was where I was at. Some people knew I was having a rough go of it, but very few really knew the depths of it. I'm not even sure I did. I was collapsing in on myself like a black hole, while trying to figure out how to wear an ill-fitting mask of contentment. (Because we're taught to be content in all circumstances, aren't we?)

God became the main audience to my complaint, and I imagined that even he seemed to grow weary of me, aloof and far-off. It was my own quiet desperation, my private dark night of the soul. Desolation, in the Ignatian sense of the word.  But I still prayed.

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Back in 2018, shortly after I'd moved back to Washington, I was given a book called The Spirituality of Wine written by Gisela Kreglinger, which I devoured, and after I was done, I passed it on to my parents to read. I think it was the last book my Dad read before he died. He actually contacted the author, and through that exchange he learned about an annual "wine pilgrimage" through France and Germany that the author organized and led. I remember seeing Dad wistfully leaf through the itinerary he'd printed from her website. Ever the lovers of travel and life-long learning (and wine), this was exactly the sort of experience my parents would have enjoyed in their younger years. 

A decade before, as they were approaching and entering their 70s, they realized their traveling days were numbered, and so they squeezed all the juice they could out of the time that remained. They invited me on several occasions to accompany them. It was a great opportunity for me; in exchange for running interference, handling baggage, and doing the driving, I got to experience a safari in South Africa, a cooking tour of Italy, a riverboat cruise in Portugal, and crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II to go exploring in Ireland. These became treasured memories. And as their traveling days finally came to a close, they  began to admonish me, "travel while you still can!"  This wine pilgrimage was, by now, clearly out of their reach. But they offered to send me, on my own, so that they could experience it vicariously through me. I appreciated the offer, but wasn't willing to head off to Europe when their health was so fragile. I promised them that I would go "when the opportunity presents itself." Of course, on some level, we all knew that they would not live to see that opportunity.

Like most of life, the the pilgrimage was on hiatus for the pandemic, then resumed in 2022. I briefly considered it then, but the world was still a bit too Covid-y for my liking. However, when 2023 rolled around, I was running out of excuses. I wasn't really enthusiastic about it, but I remembered my promise to my parents, and I had some vague notion that it might "do me some good" in a kick-in-the-pants sort of way. (I think my parents knew that, too.) But the thought of packing up and traveling to Europe just felt heavy and unappealing to me. The homebound years of caregiving and pandemic isolation had turned me into a Hobbit; I now shunned the idea of leaving the quiet security of the Shire for some high-falutin adventure in parts unknown. But at the same time, I couldn't shake the feeling that my little cave of cold comforts was slowly killing me.

Around the same time I was stewing about the pilgrimage, I became aware of a short-term mission opportunity through my home church, to the Czech Republic. The church had done this trip several times before, and I had always thought, back in my more adventuresome days, that I should consider doing it someday.  Well, it wasn't going to get any more someday than now.

So this left me with a dilemma--two different options for the summer, neither of which I was particularly enthusiastic about. I could spend a posh week of food and wine in Burgundy and Bavaria; I could see the appeal, but it was really expensive. On the other hand, the more affordable option would be to spend a week in the rough, teaching English to teen-agers in the Czech Republic. But that would entail, well, working with teens in a former Soviet bloc nation. That wasn't exactly at the top of my bucket list.

But still...there was little voice in me that kept whispering that I desperately needed a shake-up...and the weird thing is, I didn't feel any peace saying "no" to either one or the other of the options.

But the jaded, cynical voice scoffed at the idea; it was hopelessly naive to believe a mere trip could be the solution to my despondency. That only happened in those sappy travel movies. I wasn't gonna Eat, Pray, Love my way to inner peace.

But for reasons I can't fully explain, I put down my deposit for the wine pilgrimage and I applied to join the short-term mission trip. And I cajoled a couple friends to join me for some independent travel in between the two.  Six weeks in Europe.  This was crazy.  Irresponsible.  Foolhardy.  And frankly, I didn't even want to do it in the first place.

As the day of departure neared, I was dreading it like major surgery. And yet I couldn't exactly say that out loud to anyone; I mean, what was I supposed to say? I'm off to France to eat Michelin-star food and drink world-class wines. What a freaking nightmare. Pray for me.

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But people were praying for me. And amazing things happened. I experienced joy. C.S. Lewis described joy in terms of an "inconsolable longing." Invasive, tantalizing flashes originating from another Realm that hint to us that there's something more out there...but not yet.  

Throughout those six weeks in Europe, I experienced these stabs of joy, these shards of hope, as both pleasure and pain. It undid me. It's embarrasing how many tears I shed. It awakened something in me. It stirred in me that deep, inconsolable longing that Lewis wrote about.

Ironically, I actually did sort of Eat, Pray, Love my way to--well, not inner peace, but rather the inner turmoil brought on by daring to hope again.  The wine pilgrimage taught me to eat--to revel in the good gifts of a generous Creator.  The in-between time gave me opportunities to reflect and pray. And finally, on the short-term mission trip in the Czech Republic I experienced love in unexpected and beautiful ways that grew in me an affection for this potato-shaped country in central Europe.

When I first arrived in Prague, even before getting off the plane, I felt inexplicably drawn to this place--which, I remind you, was heretofore not on my bucket list. As a child of the Cold War, my visions of this part of the world were bleak and dismal. But I became intrigued by the ministries I was exposed to there, and their vision to make Jesus known in a land that has been famously obstinate toward religion in general and Christianity in particular.  I got to experience real friendship and fellowship and worship with real Czechs.  And then shortly before leaving, a chance conversation with a missionary there alerted me to the possibility that someone even with my rusty skill set might find a way to be useful there.

I returned home with new thoughts I'd never thought before, new dreams, and new imaginations that sent my neurons buzzing into overdrive and kept me up at night for weeks. It was physically exhausting and emotionally painful. In relatively short order, I had gone from resignation to the life of a dull homebody to the insatiable urge to break out and experience something new and wild. I was blowing dust off of long-abandoned neural pathways, and working muscles that hadn't seen any action in a long, long time. Things that I had presumed were relics of my youthful past--living and working abroad--were suddenly staring me back in the face, demanding my attention.

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A few days after returning from the Czech Republic, I was sorting a shelf of books, and out of an old Bible from my youth fell a missions commitment card.  I looked at the date.  I had signed it exactly 40 years ago, almost to the day.  Way back in 1983, I had participated in a high school short-term mission trip to Mexico.  At the end of the trip, the youth pastor handed each of us index cards on which was printed three "levels of commitment" to cross-cultural missions.  We were invited to turn these cards in, if we felt so led.  I checked level 3--that I was fully committed to serving in cross-cultural missions, and that God would have to convince me otherwise. I signed my name, and dated it. I kept one copy, and the other I turned into the youth pastor the Sunday after we returned.  When he took it from me, he looked down at it, and then looked me in the eyes and said with an unnerving gravity, "Wow. Wow.  Thank you, Scott."  

I gulped, and suddenly wondered what I had just signed up for.

I had signed it with all the well-meaning sincerity of a 16-year-old, but generally didn't give it much thought afterward.  I graduated from high school with my eyes on a career in medicine, which had  been my ambition from childhood. It's not that I forgot about missions; medical missions was a thing, right?  I could see myself volunteering cross-culturally for a month each year or something like that. Surely that would count, wouldn't it?

But two years later, on one July day at church camp, God called my bluff. I didn't hear an audible voice, but it was loud and unmistakable. It stopped me in my tracks. I knew, in that instant, that I was not to pursue medicine, and instead I would be going to Latin America and working with children. This was not on my radar at all.  Yet the surety of it in that moment was undeniable. And over the next year as I unpacked it, prayed about it, and sought counsel from trusted mentors, I came to embrace it as a genuine calling, and six years later, I was in Costa Rica with the Latin America Mission, serving with Roblealto, an organization that worked with children at risk.

I did that for four years, and began to get exposed to multimedia as a potential ministry calling. It intrigued me enough to return to the United States to get my master's degree in communications in 1995.  Some time after that, I went on to serve another two and a half years at LAM's headquarters in Miami, Florida. From there, however, I was invited to embark on yet another adventure, and what I only half-jokingly called the most cross-cultural of any experience I've ever had--small town Utah. I spent 15 very interesting years there developing a media ministry with a small church doing outreach to Latter-day Saints, before being "called" back to Washington to accompany my parents in their final years. 

So here I stood, holding the yellowing commitment card in my hands and smiling at the symmetry. I had come full circle. I had done some interesting things in far-away places. I had fulfilled my commitment that I marked on the card. I had "served my time." Now, with substantially fewer years ahead of me than behind me, it was time to tuck the card back in the Bible and put it back on the shelf. It was a souvenir of a bygone era.

But then I sensed God's gentle whisper, once again calling my bluff: Not so fast. 

Was it conceivable that after 40 years, I was once again being "enlisted" in overseas missions?  Answering this question then became the subject of much prayer, soul-searching, and discerning. Over the next few months, I began to have conversations with people in the Czech Republic to more seriously explore that possibility, all while shaking my head at the absurdity of it all. Here I was, in my mid-50s, contemplating moving halfway around the world to some place I never thought I'd go, where I'd have to learn one of the most difficult languages in the world.  Was I completely insane?

Well, that remains to be seen, I suppose. But here we are. I've just returned from a second trip to the Czech Republic to lean into this very question. In contrast with my first call to missions as an 18-year-old, which felt like God hit me with two-by-four, this time was much different.  As I wandered through a quiet old cemetery in Prague, just a couple weeks ago, it was a gentle conversation. I poured out to God all my angst and fear and uncertainty about what this next step would entail, and then I sensed God saying, "You know, you can go back to Richland, and stay there, with your home and your friends and comforts and your familiar community. I'll still be with you. I can still work in you and through you. But...why don't you come with me on a new adventure?"  In 1985, I was called. In 2024, I was invited.  

The next day I was sitting at a cafe near Prague Castle, warming myself up with a hot ginger lemon tea. The U2 song With or Without You was playing, and I chuckled to myself.  God seemed to be saying to me in that moment, "I'm going to do my work in the Czech Republic, with or without you. So which is it going to be?" And so I sighed deeply, and finally said "yes" to his invitation. And the desolation began to dissolve into consolation.  I don't know what the future holds, but my soul is at rest, and my face is set like a flint toward the Czech Republic.

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Epilogue:  When I originally created this blog--fifteen years ago, I called it "Among the Saints"--a reference to my life among the Latter-day Saints.  But a couple weeks ago as I walked across Karlův Most (the Charles Bridge), a medieval bridge in Prague lined with the statues of many saints...I realized that I was, once again, among the saints. So I guess the blog title still holds.