TED Sophal Ear: Escaping the Khmer Rouge

Nampa/Boise to Redding

After 5 years of driving very little I've about reached my quota. In seven days I've been in a car over 30 hours. 8 western states in 7 days. Enough! Tonight I'll sleep in yet another bed. However this one is familiar. I'm home with my family in California. This morning I started out from Boise. I set off wondering if I'd opt for a hotel half way through. But 9 hours later I arrived in Redding. 9 hours alone in a car. I enjoyed it way more than I thought. I listened to NT Wright's "Evil and Justice" book on my ipod. Good thought provoking stuff! It is good to be home and good to be in a familiar place.

Driving cross country sure has reminded me of how vast our country is. There is so much land that seems empty. Wide open space.... So diverse... Mountains have their own character in each region. What beauty and barrenness. Interesting that the two can comingle. I don't care to drive cross country again for a while but I'm grateful to have seen new places in the USA. We have so much to be grateful for.

Serendipity: Shopping, Fireworks, and Zip-line

I love serendipity and the trip to Nampa is proving to be full of serendipity. Yesterday MaryAnn and I drove from KC to Cheyenne. 4 states in one day--Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming. We stopped at the Sierra Trading Post Outlet Store just as we got into Cheyenne. Serendipity. For two non-shoppers this was a special treat. MaryAnn was so excited. Only we thought we had 10 minutes to browse the store before it closed at 5pm for the July 4th holiday. When I was asking the clerk some questions about the store in Boise (hoping to tell MaryAnn she could do her shopping there) I learned we had crossed over a time zone and gained an hour. We had an extra hour of shopping on an already extra long day!

At our hotel in Cheyenne we just so happened to have a view of the Cheyenne city fireworks. I had hoped to get a glimpse of something "4th of July-ish". After all this July 4th is the last major holiday rounding off my first year of living Stateside since returning from Korea. It was so cool to see the fireworks after a long day of driving from our hotel room and then head right to bed.

We had a slow start this morning but eventually got on the road towards Salt Lake City. Today would be a shorter day of driving. As we got closer to Utah MaryAnn asked me to find something we could stop and "see" or stop and "do". Eversince Friday she has been talking about "ziplines". July 3rd was her Birthday and on that evening MaryAnn's friend recounted a story about riding down a series of zip lines in South Africa. The idea "stuck". So when I was searching for things around Salt Lake City on MaryAnn's Blackberry I searched for a "zip line". Surely it was a long shot but why not try and see if we could find one?

It wasn't so long of a shot after all. In fact I found that Utah Olympic Park had one! The Olympic park just so happened to be on our way into Salt Lake City. We wouldn't even have to change course or drive more! I called the place to be sure they were open. They were! Our GPS told us we'd get there just in time to make it before closing time. (this time we had the right time zone) What serendipity! On Friday MaryAnn had said of zip-lining, "I want to do that someday". On Sunday she and I did it together.

Olympic Park was great. We watched a team from Australia practicing ski jumps. They were jumping with water gear and ski's into a swimming pool. We rode the a lift up the mountain and did the X-treme Zip Line. What a thrill! We then rode the Alpine Slide. We were like two kids at a theme park. When we were done we drove 20-30 minutes into Salt Lake to find our hotel. A fun day!

Tomorrow we are going to check out the Mormon Temple in the morning. How can we not, I guess... On our way into Nampa we are going to stop on Jerome, ID to visit a Benedictine Monastery. I'm really looking forward to our second stop tomorrow!

Ordinary Miracle in the Holy Mundane

Tomorrow is July 4th and I'm leaving Kansas City to head west. Holy Moly! Tomorrow night I hope to be in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I'll be on the road with my good friend MaryAnn for the next 3 days. I've said so many goodbyes but saying goodbye to MaryAnn next week will be the hardest one of all. Two summers in a row of goodbyes is enough!

I told a friend this week, "If I didn't make so many great friends this goodbye stuff wouldn't be so hard." She said, "If you wouldn't have made so many friends, this year would have been miserable!" She is right! Real LIFE is made up of friendship. Friendships don't happen overnight. In American culture we are so quick to "make friends". Yet true friendship doesn't just happen it is worked out though ordinary and even mundane encounters on a regular basis. As I prepare to sleep my last sleep in KC (for a while) I can't help but be amazed and hugely humbled again by God's incarnate presence in the people I've lived with this year. We've experienced an ordinary miracle in human connectedness. There have been Holy spaces in the most mundane events.

Almost every night MaryAnn, Malcolm and I would convene in the living room with popcorn or ice-cream. We'd talk about our days, share what we were reading or what we'd heard on NPR. We'd share about our encounters with people. It wasn't anything to write about. Yet God has been in the small things with regularity. Popcorn and ice-cream led to connection and the building of family. We shared our hearts. Sometimes it was for 5 minutes and sometimes it was for hours.

Today as I spoke with MaryAnn and Malcolm, my KC family, I felt overwhelmed by their gratitude towards me. I'm thinking, "I should be the doing the thanking!" I have. Malcolm began the morning by sharing how sad he feels to see me go. For a moment it reminded me of a conversation I had with my father shortly before my parents drove me off to college. MaryAnn and Malcolm don't have any kids of their own. Yet I glimpsed a father in Malcolm today. Fatherhood comes with great sadness. It must be hard to let a daughter go even if it is an "adopted daughter". Later MaryAnn shared, "God must be letting you go because he knows I've learned what I've needed to learn from you." I felt stunned. This from a woman who has mentored me in so many areas of life. This from a woman who has walked with me as I have grown into listening to LIFE. This from a woman who helped me find the courage to take a year long sabbath! It is amazing to realize how mutually blessed this trio--MaryAnn, Malcolm and I--have been through a year of living together. We've laughed, cried, worked, played and ate together. We've learned something about God and his compassionate love from one another. As sad as it is to leave yet another home I'm so full of gratitude. God has been at work in us. God has been real to us through us.

So often as a Christian I've hoped for God to show up in the special signs and wonders. "God show up in a special way at church today!" "Give us some writing on a wall that you are here." How often have I thought that the real God-work was in that spectacular moment of "the spirit"? In that "moment" everything changes! But that isn't the story of this particular year. In fact this isn't the story of my life in God at all. So often we highlight the climactic God events of life. I wonder, what little, ordinary, mundane, human events and relationships are taking place before those "moments"? And isn't God just as miraculous in the ordinary moments as he is in the "extraordinary" ones? Isn't God holy in the mundane of life? If I didn't think these things to be so before, I know they are true now!

God has been in the un-noted noticeable human exchanges. I'm reminded that God is in the humanness of us all! This is the ordinary miracle we all experience everyday. The "signs and wonders" taken one at a time could be passed off as nothing more than just a mundane and ordinary life. Yet taken all together there is a spectacular witness of God at work in people sharing life together. This year I've witnessed an ordinary miracle through daily connection with people I love more now that I did a year ago. I'm already missing the Holy mundane! I imagine I will have ample opportunity to notice ordinary miracles in the Holy mundane in the next adventure.