Found in Translation (17 page)

I wasn’t talking about construction, either.

How was I ever going to plant the first gospel seed in Santa María? The communication gap was impossible to bridge. No matter how I might try narrowing the breach, it wasn’t going to happen. That realization was an acid eating away at the joy I should have been experiencing.

I’d learned the importance of evangelism earlier in the summer. That was an integral part of every House of Bread ministry.

Although relief work in Santa María was crucial, what would we accomplish of an eternal nature unless we could explain why we, the affluent, cared enough about the welfare of impoverished strangers to give up part of our summer to help them?

Trust and obey. Wasn’t that what the old hymn said? I knew all about flexibility, trust, and obedience now.

So when would God give me an assignment to obey? He wouldn’t have brought me to Santa María just to sort nails and carry water, no matter how necessary those tasks were.

Or would He?

O
n our San Diego “ambulance” ride, Rob made things so right that he became my dad away from home. Much to my amazement, amusement, and mild irritation, he started calling me Kimmy shortly after our return to Santa María. I wouldn’t have tolerated such a nickname from anyone else.

Dad would’ve had a bigger cow about it than me, though. And if he’d named that cow Elizabeth, he wouldn’t have let anyone get away with calling her Lizzie, Libby, Bessie, or Beth. If he named his cow Elizabeth, that’s what he’d expect people to call her.

I giggled at the thought of my dad and a cow coming within fifty yards of one another.

Rob was thoughtful about Kimmy, though. “Do you mind if I call you Kimmy, Kimmy?” he asked several hours after he started doing it. His tone of voice told me the question was a mere formality. He’d assumed agreement.

I didn’t answer his question. Not directly, that is. “Call me anything you like,” I said. Of course, if I’d guessed that the whole team might call me Kimmy, too, I might have expressed my objections.

Might have. But probably not. This seemed important to Rob.

I was probably more gracious about Rob’s nickname because Dad didn’t have a pet name for me. Although Mom frequently called me wiggleworm, Dad never addressed me once as baby girl or sweetie, much less princess, munchkin, or kitten.

Betsy Jo’s dad still called her doodlebug, although it embarrassed the daylights out of her. She didn’t understand why I’d envied that when we were younger, and I didn’t tell her I still did.

Of course, when Dad was angry about my carelessness, he didn’t hesitate to address me as Kimberly Leigh. Ugh. Why had he insisted on an “l-y Leigh” name? That sometimes made me feel redundant.

I still remembered conversations from my youth when Mom and I attempted a verbal Mission Impossible.

“Dad, would you please call me Kim instead of Kimberly? My friends do. My teachers do. Everybody at church does, including the preacher, the choir director, and Pastor Ron. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but Mom has called me Kim since I was little.”

“You can’t fight a tidal wave.” Mom smiled at Dad.

That’s what Barbra Streisand said to Ryan O’Neal in that great old movie
What’s Up, Doc?
Mom may not have been an actress, but she could come up with a movie line for almost any occasion. She was even better quoting relevant scripture verses.

“But Kimberly is your name,” Dad said, as if those five words settled everything.

His response had to start with
but.
That’s how he was. I wasn’t sure he’d even listened to Mom.

“We named you after your great-aunt Kimberly,” he said, as if he hadn’t belabored the point a million times already. “She didn’t go by Kim. She insisted on Kimberly, and you should, too.”

An old-fashioned response like that from an intelligent, well-educated, forty-four-year-old didn’t fit.

Or maybe it did. Dad acted older than his years, especially regarding life in general—that meant most of the time.

Maybe rearing me had aged him faster than it did Mom.

“Dad, I understand about Great-Aunt Kimberly, and it’s wonderful you named me after her. What a tribute to her long years of missionary service in South America. But it’s such a, uh, formal-sounding name for a teen today. I’ll bet even Aunt Kimberly would prefer Kim if she were part of today’s generation. Things are so much faster paced now. People don’t have time to say Kimberly anymore.”

“She’s got a point, Scott,” Mom chimed in.

I admired her fearless, straightforward yet nonaggressive approach. Mine was generally full speed ahead through the china shop.

“Several points, in fact,” Mom added. “Times change.”

Then she dropped the subject. Although she was still on my side, she knew when to stop. She would back off and try again—often successfully—at a more appropriate time. If I ignored the danger signs and forged ahead—as I tended to do—I was apt to lose both the battle and the war.

But teens are supposed to be impatient. When we’re patient, grown-ups think we’re either sick or trying to pull something over on them. And if we’re patient several times in a row, we risk having them think we’ve matured so much they can expect us to act like that all the time.

I’ve learned over the years that people aren’t apt to respond the way we want when we badger them. Not oldsters or midlifers. Not teenagers. So maybe Mom’s tidal wave quotation was a warning for me to back off and not just a hint to Dad that continued resistance would be useless.

Changing my dad into a periodic Kim-ist took a number of years. And a number of additional tidal waves.

When Dad said Kim, he sounded like someone butchering an unknown word in an unfamiliar language. Although he’d made progress, Kim didn’t roll off his tongue as naturally as Kimmy from Rob’s. Maybe I was making too much out of it, but I’d prayed about it more than once in Santa María.

At least Dad had called me Kim when I phoned him and Mom from San Diego, and he’d sounded comfortable doing it.

O
h no! Here he comes again.

“Geoff, how do you always manage to be where I am?” I smiled and tried to be pleasant, but I knew that mathematical probability wouldn’t explain his constant appearances. That kind of maneuvering required premeditation and plenty of advance planning.

“You’re just lucky, I guess.”

Not “I’m just lucky,” but “You’re just lucky.” He didn’t sound like he was trying to be cute. Oh, well, a little conceit didn’t make him a terrible person.

Although his frequent appearances flattered me at first, they soon grew unsettling. I’m a hugger by nature; but after that earlier incident, I got in the habit of rebalancing my load so he couldn’t hug me every time he saw me—not without my bashing, mashing, or puncturing him.

“Fancy running into you here,” I said with a giggle after knocking him breathless with the plank I held precariously under my good arm. My left one. I’m right-handed. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I said as insincerely as I could.

“Here, let me help you,” he said, reaching out to take the board from me. “Your hands are too soft to carry something like that.”

“No, Geoff, but thanks for offering,” I said with polite determination as I swung the board out of his grasp and hit him in the arm with the other end. “If you do my job for me, I won’t accomplish anything in Santa María. I’m Scarlett O’Hara after the Civil War, not before.”

My allusion went right over his head. Maybe he was a Yankee.

“I’d feel pampered and useless if I weren’t doing something worthwhile, and I didn’t pay all this money and fly three thousand miles from home to sit around and be lazy.”

He didn’t say anything, but his face had one of those “then why didn’t you say so in plain English?” looks that are so cute on some guys. But his wasn’t cute.

Only guys who accepted
Gone with the Wind
as the best portrait of human nature—after the Bible, of course—fit my mold. Maybe I’d accept a GWTW nonbeliever some day if he was at least a Christian Rhett Butler, although I doubted it.

But he wouldn’t be Geoff.

He didn’t catch on quickly about my not wanting help. He made a similar offer every time he saw me, which continued throughout that morning. He always coupled it with a compliment about one or more of my body parts.

Although he never said anything overtly improper, I couldn’t miss where his thoughts were. Pretending to be tolerant about that was hard enough, but I was also concerned about the amount of work Geoff was shirking by spending the lion’s share of his time prowling for me.

Surely that disgusted and perhaps angered his teammates, too.

The only positive thing I could still say about Geoff was his great looks hadn’t changed. Even in my less mature years, though, I cared as much about the internal as I did the external. The revelation of Geoff’s true colors had spun my opinion in a one-eighty away from him.

He wasn’t a rainbow, but an ugly shade of gray. If I’d ever considered him quite a catch, I now wanted to scramble out of the water before he had any more illusions about catching me. He was too small-minded to be a catcher or a keeper.

I noticed the other girls eyeing him with interest, but he appeared to ignore them. Under other circumstances, I might have felt flattered that he wanted me and not them.

But I could live without any more of Geoff’s attention.

I’d learned some tough lessons during my tenderer years. One of the most important was that mission-trip romances distract the guy and the girl and interfere with their involvement in the mission activities. They spend as much free time together as they can and fail to bond with the rest of the team.

Although mission trips should be a time of spiritual and emotional growth, hormones—even properly disciplined hormones—can block the way to more eternal goals. To poorly paraphrase a famous evangelist: On a mission trip, kids are apt to fall in lust, not in love.

And that’s not counting the impracticality of maintaining a long-distance relationship afterward. How many missiontrip romances have died from the truth of the song that says something about loving whoever a person’s with when he’s not with the person he loves?

If Geoff understood the dangers of mission-trip romances, he ignored them. Nothing kept him from using a contemporary version of the caveman-with-a-club method to attract my attention. If I’d met Geoff closer to home; if he’d been slower, subtler, and more subdued in his approach; if he’d shown some genuine interest in me as a person, he would have been irresistible.

Regardless of his low GWTW quotient.

If I had one reason to believe I meant more to him than fresh meat, I might have ignored my observations about mission-trip romances and fallen hard.

But he didn’t meet any of my most essential criteria, and I needed to make him understand I wasn’t the least interested in him. Until he accepted that, he’d keep misunderstanding me—just as Millie Q. had. He would never believe I wasn’t just playing hard to get.

I was impossible to get. For him, anyway.

I might just have to use that caveman club to make him accept my lack of interest. As troublesome as this issue had become, I needed to say something sooner than later, and I already dreaded it.

Boys, especially boys who are as outwardly sure of themselves as Geoff, are still sensitive about their feelings—even if they keep them hidden most of the time—and my Southern belle friendliness had probably encouraged him at first. I hated to admit it even to God, but I’d probably wanted it to.

But that was then. At our initial meeting. Not now, just hours into my first real workday in Santa María.

I hadn’t done anything else to encourage him. And now I needed to discourage him without rejecting him as a person. I was probably hoping for too much.

A club blow to the skull would make any guy feel rejected.

W
hen’s lunch?” I asked Aleesha later that morning in passing.

“You missed hearing that? We don’t have set mealtimes around here. When we get hungry, we stop and eat. There’s plenty of food. Just not plenty of variety. Same menu morning, noon, and night. Probably the same every day, too.”

“And nobody complains?”

“Everybody’s too tired to.”

“Even—?”

“Well, no, not Geoff.” She chortled. “At lunch yesterday while you were in San Diego enjoying pizza,”—I smirked—“I heard him say, ‘Not this stuff again. We just had this for breakfast.’ Of course, he doesn’t seem to get worn out like everyone else.”

We giggled.

The snacks inside the so-called church apparently never changed, either. I’d never thought of flexibility as a willingness to endure the unchanging. Not until now.

By midmorning, I discovered how hot the mess tent tables got. I wouldn’t have to do without hot food altogether. Just at breakfast when I most wanted and needed it.

I ate beef jerky like it was going out of style. I couldn’t get enough of it. Why didn’t Mom ever buy any? Then I remembered Dad’s often strange attitudes and dismissed my question as both irrelevant and unanswerable.