Bonbons from Heaven

The height and depth and breadth of parables happen around us all the time. But sometimes, you must wait a lifetime to realize the significance of the moment. Kernels of truth dropped in mundane soil will bear fruit only when given space in your memory. My parable starts with a sticky preschooler I knew well and was trying to raise …

Going Metron

The bakery started as a small hole-in-the-wall, hidden behind a single glass door along a narrow Taiwanese alley. This mom-and-pop shop smelled of freshly baked bread the moment you opened the door. Joint-owned by a Kiwi chef and his Chinese wife, Chef Dereke named it Finga’s, for everything within was handmade. In time, Dereke and his wife Lily were no …

Wet Market Fears

The early morning wet market was mostly dry by nightfall. Housed open-air under a corrugated tin roof, the stainless steel display tables and wire shelves stood chained together and ready. Except for a night breeze, an eerie silence was the only sound awaiting the coming day.  Sometime before sunrise, generations of market vendors hosed down their stalls in preparation for …

The Day I Lost the Key

There is an exhaustion so absolute that you find yourself counting minutes before you can crawl between the sheets. In my experience, that overload usually involved an overseas flight and jetlag. No matter how we adjusted our flight schedule, crossing the international date-line always depleted our reserves. I suppose any continual twenty-six-hour trip will do that. Our plane trip had been …

The God of Laughter

Some things cannot be duplicated with words. I can’t adequately describe the experience of moving internationally, for all adjectives for the sights, sounds, and smells fall short. Suffice it to say we uprooted our family from rural America to metropolitan Asia.  And we took along a two-year-old. Suddenly, the following will make perfect sense – no matter where you live. It …

Lost

Some specifics are lost to me now. The name of the street. The month of the year. The amount of time I wandered. What was lost to me then was the placement of our car. In a day before locator pins, this farm girl from a town of ninety-eight parked in a city of three million. Since arriving on the …

The One Thing

I was twenty years old when I spent my first summer in Asia. Afternoons in sub-tropical heat forced me indoors, so I retreated to the third floor to spend solitary time before the Word of God and a single rotary fan. All summer, a long-distance relationship remained at the forefront of my mind. He was tall, tan, and good-looking, with …