The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful

So. It's been about a month that we've been here in Wheaton, IL. I still can NOT believe that we're Actually Living In Illinois. Crazy. I mean, I guess I kind of naively thought Seattle would be, well--forever. I think that since we actually own a house and are no longer living out of suitcases in a motel, it's begun to sink in that we aren't really tourists--for now at least, this is home.
"Home" has seemed rather like a comedy of errors however, ever since we arrived. It's a lovely place, with a spacious yard and copious shrubbery and trees and flowers (let's not discuss the mosquitoes right now) and a long dining room with room enough for a tremendous crowd of guests for Thanksgiving turkey, which my mom has always wanted. So all in all, it looked great. But then we realized that our oven and microwave didn't work. All we got was incessant beeping and error messages for our efforts, tears, and hours of phone calls to appliance companies. (They are still not working, though rumor has it that someone may be coming to help us with the oven next week...no reports yet on the microwave.)
Then, we spent a couple of weeks trying to get our computer to work...I'm not technically gifted enough to describe what the problem was (ok, let's be honest--my technical abilities could fit in a teaspoon), but suffice it to say that our internet was rather unreliable, crashing or freezing at the oddest of times, and eventually just stopped working. Even when we had someone out to fix it that didn't work..but it improved, we're on the right track.
And then I went to the ER, after feeling progressively worse for about two weeks. We didn't even have insurance at the time, but thankfully we were able to get that worked out soon afterwards and didn't have to pay the 4200 (!) bucks my visit would have cost otherwise.
And then...we had flooding in our downstairs den. Mild flooding. After a torrential rain storm, we woke up the next morning to find that our carpet made a "squelch squelch" sound when stepped upon and water seeped up over our toes. Ick. Apparently, this sort of thing isn't that common here, but it's also not that uncommon, either. Wet vacs and sump pumps are common household fixtures in this locale, so I hear.

So. All of the above is absolutely nothing in the Grand Scheme of Things. I should be embarrassed to be complaining at all, honestly, considering that many people around the world are dealing with tornado and hurricane and tsunami wreckage and poverty and famine and war.... But fallen person that I am, I have to admit that I was a bit, well--peeved--about all of this. For a bit.
In addition to all of those material circumstances, so long as I'm having a pity-party here, I might as well admit too that I am dreadfully, achingly, homesick. I knew it would be hard to leave, but I constantly find myself, after various sorts of life happenings like this, feeling rather surprised--thinking "wow, I didn't know it would hurt this much." And that hurts much more than all these things like ER visits and appliances not working--good health and working microwaves are nice things that we take for granted far too often and that I certainly appreciate, but they don't mean much to me in comparison to the people and places I'm missing right now.

But now, after sharing all of the "bad" I've been going through, I want to share with you some of the good and beautiful things God has been doing for my family and for me.

First of all, on the day that we had the flooding, literally 5 mins after I made the first panicked phone call to Mom telling her that "oh my gosh, we have WATER ALL OVER OUR CARPET!!", a woman from the history dept called asking me if our family happened to have any water damage in our home--apparently a lot of her neighbors had reported flooding in their basements, and she was in the neighborhood on errands and wanted to check on us! God's "coincidences" never fail to blow my mind. Long story short, she and her husband came over, bringing us the necessary Home Depot supplies, and spent the entire day cheerfully and tirelessly helping us suck water out of the carpet, move furniture, and call around until we could hire a company (that wasn't already booked up) to come and clean up the mess professionally. So sure, we had to shell out some big bucks to clean up this "inconvenience", but what really struck my mind when all was said and done was how kind and just plain loving these people were--giving of their time and energy and compassion to help us, practically strangers. They were embodying Christ's love to us in a tangible way, and it was beautiful. If I can be that sort of person someday, I will consider myself to have truly lived.

Other good things:

Margaret and I have become acquainted with a homeschooling family across the street from us, and they have 3 daughters close in age to us, and are incredibly sweet and friendly. They invited us a few days ago to go with them to Highland Park, about an hour's drive away, to an outdoor festival called Ravinia. It has outdoor concerts almost every day all summer long, and whenever the Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays it is FREE for students. Sweet. So on Wednesday night, the CSO was playing Rachmaninov (perhaps my favorite composer! I don't know, he and Debussy might have to battle it out for first place...) We spent a lovely long evening on the lawn listening to the orchestra play, with lawn chairs and a picnic (why does food always taste better when eaten outdoors?), and a citronella candle to keep the mosquitoes at bay after dusk. It was lovely, sitting there under the trees, watching the stars come out one by one, and then faster and faster, in time to the violins and piano.

And then Thursday night, we had another cultural experience: we went to a park near our home in downtown Wheaton, and listened to the Municipal Band play a set of songs with the theme "Dancing With (or Under) the Stars." They were quite talented and it was a lovely experience. Most of the other attendees were senior citizens, but I didn't care--I thought that was cool.
When we first arrived it was especially entertaining, because we got the start time of the concert wrong, and we arrived on the scene in the middle of a traveling dance studio's free beginner lesson of How To Tango. Once again, most of the aspiring dancers were elderly couples. One pair was dressed in starched black attire, with matching silver hair and roses on their lapels and dress collar (but not between their teeth). They were quite austere and impressive dancers. Another couple was much older and you could see that they were basically holding each other up, but it was so sweet and awesome at the same time that it made me want to get up and cheer. I sort of wish I'd joined them on the dance floor, but once again my fear of making a public spectable of myself detained me...perhaps it's just as well, I don't know if the world is ready for me...

And then today. I'm sitting on the "Quad" lawn at Wheaton College, it's about 80 degrees but mostly overcast (except for one dazzling sunbreak over on the right) so it's very pleasant, with a slight breeze every so often that rustles the leaves around me. I came here today feeling rather better about life in general, partly because of the music running through my head and the lovely cool evening and the fact that we discovered a used bookstore this morning in the neighboring town of Glen-Ellyn--that alone would make any day better. (I found about 10 books I wanted, but then remembered that I have approx. 15 at home that I haven't read yet, and my money must be saved for plane tickets to Seattle and Rome anyhow....)
Anyway, I've been just sitting on the Quad for the past two hours, thinking and writing and listening to an eclectic variety of songs from Cream and Broken Bells, with a little Rachmaninov thrown in for good measure. And I've been watching. I swear, little beady-eyed squirrels are peeking at me from behind every tree and bush around. I don't know why, but this caused an almost overpowering wave of happiness to surge through me...apparently, squirrels live on college campuses here in Illinois too, after all, not just at UW in Seattle. I love solidarity.
The chapel carillon just started chiming and playing songs in its lovely, calming, out-of-tune sort of way, and so I turn off my Clapton to listen.
It's amazingly peaceful. I wish it wouldn't stop so soon.

I know that life is going to have its ups and downs, its broken microwaves and occasional ER visits, its moments of panic and frustration and heartache, and I'm still going to miss so many people and places dreadfully. That won't change. But I want to learn more and more to look at life in the Big Picture. I know I can't see things from God's perspective totally, but I can see a tiny portion of it at least--like looking through binoculars from the wrong end. I can't see the whole story, but I do know that everything that happens to me--each and every day--is part of the Whole Story. And what a blessed thing that is to remember.

Don't ever forget Romans 8:35-39:

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

What beautiful Good News.

I Been Doin' Some Hard Travelin'

Soooooo…obviously it’s taken me a long time to update this—it’s been a crazy couple of weeks! (Plus, we couldn't get our internet to work for the longest time, and the wi-fi router didn't arrive till this week either.) But here I am at last...

The adventure started on Thursday, June 24th, when the moving truck came and loaded up all our worldly goods. Several dear friends (you know who you are) came and brought us cookies and moral support and helped pack the last boxes, and made our last day much more pleasant than it would have been otherwise.

The poor mover guys heaved boxes into the truck all day, and they even had to load their cab to accommodate it all. It’s truly amazing how quickly you accumulate things, even though we really “downsized” immensely when we moved a year ago from Everett to Bothell! They didn’t finish until early evening, so we spent the night in Bellevue and “officially” started our road trip the next morning. I drove our Hyundai Accent, with Mom spelling me often, and Dad commandeered the minivan, with my siblings Margaret and Robert as passengers and our dog, Maggie, in a zip-up pen in the back. (She didn't like it.)

Both vehicles were so ridiculously full that we could hardly see out the back windows, and that, plus the fact that our little car has a small engine, made it hard for me to keep up the required 75 mph speed on the highway. But it worked out fine, and was quite fun—I’d never had to do that kind of driving before, and I loved the straight, fast driving with no turns or stops. I learned that it’s a bit dangerous too, because after a few hours of straight, fast driving in sun and silence, it’s easy to get extremely drowsy. Thus the frequent, almost obsessive stops at Starbucks along the way. Also, I learned that it’s not as easy as it looks to pass huge semis on a two-lane, divided highway. My dad is a pro at this and did it easily, and I thought it couldn’t be that hard, so I attempted to pass as well one time and this nearly resulted in me hitting a truck head-on that was barreling down on me with angry headlights and loudly blaring its horn. (Ok, so I didn't mention that I apparently chose to cross a solid yellow line right then...) But thankfully God decided that wasn’t my time to go, and nothing more serious than emotional trauma occurred. :)

We drove for five days straight, passing through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin on our way to Illinois, some of which I'd never seen before. Because we had to get to Wheaton by a certain date to close on our home and mortgage (rather important), we had little time for sight-seeing along the way, and our days primarily followed a pattern of driving, rest stop, driving, rest stop, driving, lunch, driving, rest stop, driving, rest stop, driving…you get the picture. I teased my family that it was “like a summer vacation without the fun.” We did get to stop at a few places along the way, however, most significantly the site of Custer’s Last Stand and the Battle of Little Bighorn (of interest to my historian father in particular) and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. I'd always wanted to see it, but supposed I never would. Never say never.

The weather was hot and sunny, with brilliant blue skies and nary a drop of rain the entire drive, and we saw many natural wonders along our route as well. God’s creation is truly spectacular, and often breath-taking. My favorite was the Badlands of South Dakota, where bleak, barren outcroppings of rock formed the primary landscape, stone banded with red, gold, and purple. Even the name is exciting, though I pity those who had to pioneer a way through years ago. The only living green apparent was clumps of sagebrush and straggly grass embedded here and there in the rock, or growing along muddy beds where I hope water runs at certain times of year. It looked like a scene from a Western, and I expected to see John Wayne riding into sight at any moment, or a band of Indian warriors appearing as silhouettes along the cliff tops rising up on either side.

Finally…after 5 days of driving and 2100 miles (whew!), we arrived at our motel in Wheaton, Illinois on Tuesday, June 29th. Mom and Dad spent 8 hours the next day in a very stressful closing process (several complications came up) but by God's grace everything worked out well eventually and by that evening, we were the owners of a new home on Stoddard Ave.

We haven’t explored much of the area yet, but so far Wheaton seems to be a nice, well-kept, lovely town. The residential streets are wide with grassy strips between the sidewalks and the road, or medians with grass and lots of trees. It’s a very green place. No pine trees like in Seattle, which I miss, but still lovely and green. Wheaton is very much a college town, and like I said, quite small. From our house on Stoddard, it’s only 1.1 miles to the campus of Wheaton College (a 15-25 minute walk, depending on how tired and/or hot I am), and from there, you only have to walk a couple more blocks down College Ave to run into Main Street, which is the heart of downtown Wheaton. It will be an interesting change to be able to walk to school and town. The train depot is on College Ave as well, and from there it’s about a 40 minute ride into Chicago. We haven’t visited the Windy City yet, but that’s on the to-do list of the near future.

Downtown Wheaton is compact and charming. There are 2 cafes that I have found so far—one Starbucks, and a local café called La Spiaza, which Mar and I visited within the first couple of days here and prefer. They have the best cinnamon lattes that I’ve ever tasted. It has signs up inside saying “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks”, a slogan to which I perhaps should take offense (being a former barista at “The Bucks”), but I honestly love. It reminds me of the Ugly Mug café in the U-District in Seattle which also posts such signs. There are many good places to eat dinner downtown, as well as a frozen yogurt shop called Yoyo Land in what used to be the old train station, a retro soda fountain/icecream spot, and a tiny hole-in-the-wall place that is narrower than an alleyway and only a few yards deep and sells fresh popcorn and candy. I hear it’s a favorite with the local kids. I have yet to discover a local used bookstore, and will be devastated if I do not. But I think I will eventually.

Wheaton is one of the most heavily churched areas in the country, which is cool, but we have only visited two so far—The College Church—located on the edge of campus of course, and Bethel Presbyterian, which is an OPC. They were very different but both good experiences. I know we'll be visiting many more in the weeks to come, and I hate "church-hopping" so I hope we settle on one soon. Your prayers would be appreciated in that regard!

There are tons of parks in this area as well. There are two just on Main Street, a large one with fields for sports and a playground and all that typical stuff, and a much smaller one—Historic Adams Park—which has a couple of gazebos and is very lush and shady with multitudes of flowerbeds and benches, and a fountain in the center. I like this one better, and it will be a nice, somewhat secluded place to go to get away from campus for awhile once school starts. There’s another park closer to our house, which I’ve heard has water and a place to rent canoes or kayaks, but I have yet to check it out. I hope this rumor proves true.

Wheaton College itself is like the town—small and lovely. It has only about 2500 students, which is about twice the size of the entire Chem 142 class (all sections, not just mine) that I took freshman year at UW! To put things in perspective… If you count up the number of buildings, most of them are residence halls or apartments. Almost all the students live on campus, which Mar and I plan to do as well, at least this first year, and the residences sort of ring the academic buildings. My dad's building is Blanchard Hall, the home of the history department, and probably the prettiest building on campus (besides the chapel, perhaps)--it's the one that is always shown on the front of their college brochures, etc. It houses the English and Philosophy departments as well, and the office of the President. The Billy Graham Center houses the Biblical/Theological Studies dept, so I anticipate spending a LOT of time there...it also has a museum of evangelical history on the bottom floor. I haven't really been in many buildings yet, so I will be updating a lot more about the campus once school actually starts!

It feels so surreal to be here still--like we're just tourists, really. I can't believe that all the people I love (barring my family of course) are back on the West Coast, a couple thousand miles away. Though I'm pretty lonely right now and missing everyone so much, I know this will be an adventure, and God has many good things in store for me and my family here. But fyi, I'm already setting aside the money I made this summer for a plane ticket back to Seattle! :) Love you guys!!

Take care,
Callie