Birthday Musings - Second Decade

I remember being overjoyed when I turned two numbers old - ten years old. I loved thinking that it would take more than my likely life time to make another digit. It was a complicated decade starting in 1966 - we moved out of the high rises and into a row house with a postage stamp front yard adorned with a large forsythia to which we added a Japanese split maple tree. After sixth grade I left the little Lutheran school I had attended since kindergarten for a girls' preparatory school in Brooklyn and learned to navigate the daily commute via two subway trains and about a half mile walk on either end. The academics were advanced but the social life dwindled because of the distance I lived away but I fell in love with theater, started directing plays, spent two summers in Vermont where my uncle ran a summer stock theater and where I got to be the gopher, substitute stage manager and general grunt. Girl Scouting was an important part of my life and for a brief time I was on the junior editorial board of the American Girl Magazine but that never made my resume. Maybe it should have. I found myself running from the Hound of Heaven until I was 17 and an exchange student in England, engaged-not any more to an American who was about to enter seminary. Fully aware that to become a Christian in the full born-again, no turning back sense of that word, would cost me everything (and it did but it also made everything good about who I am today possible) I stumbled snotty and exhausted into His kingdom a few months before entering college in St. Louis where I gained more understanding of God and His ways thanks to classmates, a former nun, now deceased named Barbara Ann Chase, and a few amazing mentors - Bob Canfield, Kathy Woodard, Diane and Jack Binnington. Urbana '73 was pivotal - I met Elizabeth Elliott and there connected my destiny with the nations of the earth. Following that - and my passion for languages, I thoroughly enjoyed attending the Summer Institute of  Linguistics in 1975 thinking that I would join Wycliff as a Bible Translator. But that goal post moved when I got married in 1976 - six months prior to the end of my second decade.