Every summer, my father would give me a green towel with a tall, curly B on one side, one of a set of four that he and my mother that some distant relative gave them at their wedding. My father was and is a small, quick man with freckles and an auburn mustache. He would take me out into the yard with the towel and stand in the sun, his freckles blossoming across his face and arms, and spread the towel on the grass, saying, "Everything you want to take with you, Erin. Everything must fit on that towel."
Maybe it wasn't every summer. Maybe it was one of my brother's blankets instead of the towels that we finally got rid of last year when the tall, white Bs finally frayed. And I know we weren't always out in the yard, because more often than not we didn't have one. But in my eighteen years, I have lived in eighteen houses, some with yards and some without. Everywhere we went (my family, a tiny caravan of six nomads), we carried our possessions with us, each of us with our own bag and one extra suitcase for my mother's wooden bookends, the rolling pin we gave her years ago, and a box of Christmas ornaments.
I learned to walk in an apartment just north of New York City. But I grew up dancing and eating chocolate chips out of cookie batter in downtown Detroit, drinking hot soy milk from tin cup and eating empty-heart plant with chopsticks and saving sparrows in China, lying in the mud missing my family and watching the magpies hide in the coconut trees during the rainy season in Malaysia, talking to Mormon men at the playground and eating eel hotpot in Hong Kong, riding a pink bike with purple tassels on the handlebars in Illinois, walking past fields of poppies growing over mines and the stubble of bombed houses to buy bread for thirty cents from an old woman in a tan headscarf at the bazaar in Kosovo, shouting echoes out of bell towers and cathedral spires overlooking cobblestone cities and hopping ancient stone walls into meadows to roll down hills or skinny dip in creeks in Germany, crying frozen tears as blizzards ripped at my cheeks in Minnesota, eating apples straight out of the orchard and grapes straight off the vine and nodding to the farmers wearing suspenders near the French border, and sitting in the back of a tired Communist opera house and watching the neon glow of night clubs from my balcony in Macedonia.
When my parents first brought me to New York to live in a tiny cinderblock apartment near the Hudson, just a few weeks after I was born just outside Chicago, they brought suitcases full of books and dreams, waiting for the day that God would send them over the ocean to share Christ's love with his people. As a child, I was their mirror, carrying a picture-book Bible to kindergarten to show my Chinese friends the illustrations of Jesus, leaving my home as soon as I was old enough to touch my left ear with my right hand at age six, the age when missionary children left for boarding school.
As I grew older, out of braids and into braces, I fell in love- not with any scrawny junior high boy, but with Jesus. An Kosovar man baptized me in a white robe at a lake teeming with sunbathers and trash and my mirror began to crack. Ever-stubborn and willful as I grew out of braces and into mascara, my independence grew exponentially, leading me both to defiantly declare that "after nine years of living without my parents, I no longer needed their advice or guidance, and would in fact eat chocolate cake for breakfast if I so pleased" and to passionately pursue my own personal relationship with Jesus.
Jesus came to dwell on this earth for a short while, God in man's body, a tangible expression of God's character and love, and the Holy Spirit is his spirit come to dwell on the earth forever. Through written accounts of Jesus' life and through interactions with his spirit and others who know him, I continue to grow in intimacy with Jesus. Sometimes I pull a chair up beside me for him while we talk, often I have shouted at him, often I have sung to him, and I am never as good of a listener as I would like to be. Our arguments have left me lying prostrate, my face and clenched fists pressed into the ground, our conversations have me standing on benches with my hands in the air, stretched up towards him, and more than once I have felt the heat and weight of his arms around me.
To truly know Jesus is to trust him, and that trust is the core of my faith.
Somehow, I found my way back to the beginning, in a brick apartment between the Hudson and the train tracks leading into Harlem. But this time I came alone, just a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. As they have been since I was a little girl skinning my knees under the palm trees in Malaysia and running through patches of nettles in the Black Forest, my family is five thousand miles away from me. Six years ago my faith became more than a mirror of my parents' actions, and six months ago, my life began eerily to echo theirs as I came to the United States with a few cardboard boxes full of books and dreams, waiting for God to take me somewhere that his people needed to know his love. My own journey finally became a mirror of my parents' not because I imitated them, but because all have chosen to imitate Jesus. My mother and father went from New York across the ocean to Asia and Europe and I have crossed the ocean from Asia and Europe to New York to a place full of wealthy bearded boys and wispy vintage girls smoking pot, to a place of professors mocking my faith as lunacy, to a place heralded as the forerunner of the sexual revolution and experimentation movement, to a place of mere shells of humans having traded in their hearts for cold intellect: all symptoms of the loneliness found in a life without Jesus.
Sometimes it seems like my life has been nothing but aimless roaming across the face of the earth, with nowhere to rest. When I was younger, the seventh or eighth time we moved, I found a corner of the sidewalk outside my house broken off by a persistent oak root and carried it in my suitcase for years, determined to have a piece of a home. The sidewalk is forgotten in some house maybe in the Balkans or in France, and sometimes the wandering wind still makes me homesick for nowhere. Yet even on the windiest of days, I know that every step we made, every step I make, has had a purpose. Once in Italy, a dark, elegant woman walking tall and slim in diamonds and black caught her pale hand on her necklace, and it snapped, cascading black glass beads onto Rome's ancient streets. She walked on, stiletto heels clicking, hardly looking down, and my friends and I stood on the street corner, picking the jeweled beads out of the gutter and saving them in our pockets, watching the light glimmer or their facets. I have the earth's forgotten beauty in my pockets to treasure for myself and to share, collected from the soft eyes of an unnamed orphaned baby in Rwanda, from the clicking beaded braids of a little girl dancing in a disabled school in Kenya, from creased hands of an old German woman making kartoffelsalat, from the grin of a young Muslim man from a village in Kosovo talking about going to the university in another country, in the voice of my bisexual, atheist roommate reminiscing about riding her bicycle in Chicago. God leads me one small step at a time, and though I may have no clarity about the next place I will be, I have trust and a pocketful of beauty to move my feet forward one small step at a time.
