5 Things You Don’t Know About Me

Summer tagged me with this one, and I’ve spent 24 hours thinking and praying about what to say. How much of your inner life do you reveal on-line? Do I risk portraying enough of myself to be known, or do I come wearing a carefully constructed mask? Hhhmm.

I chose my my blog line: ‘affirm dignity, expose depravity, provoke longing’ as a baseline for what I write about to keep me from blogging about everything under the sun (like cookies!). So now I’ll apply that to my life. My life has been sectioned into two parts: the first twenty years were BC days and a disaster, the next twenty-six were AD and how God redeemed the disaster of what I had created. That work of Jesus’ redemption is so complete that when I tell stories of BC days, people have a hard time believing it. So, a couple fluff things, a couple deep things:
1) I can rebuild a carburetor and tune a car. My first car was a yellow 1973 Triumph Spitfire, and I was constantly at work on that sewing machine engine. Maintaining it cost me a years college tuition! Should’ve got the Honda, but it was a cool car for wind-surfing at the beach, and what can you tell a 17 year old?

2) I learned my first Arabic as a cheerleader for my Uni soccer team: “Bos! Shuuf! Rashid bi3amilay!”. USIU, where I attended, was half minor Saudi princes and wealthy Shah-era Persians whose English wasn’t good enough for UCSD. I shocked my parents by bringing home a TransAm full of dish-dash clad Saudis to teach them to ski. I made back that tuition money I lost on the car by typing (meaning, re-writing) papers for those guys.

3) I am dyslexic. I remember sitting in class in 5th grade and thinking “Everyone is getting this but me, I have a serious problem” and devising a way to learn to read which entailed picking out verbs I knew and creating a story in my head. I thank God for showing me I had value outside academic achievement, and for Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence”, which gave me courage to see where my greatest skills and talents where. And for giving me a husband who calls it out!

4) My former mother-in-law was a witch (not my husband’s mother, she is an angel. Meaning, you know six new things about me!) . Not just mean-spirited, that too, but a practicing one from a coven. It was through studying Wicca with her that I became a Christian, as I saw the power of evil let loose one night; it was a Stephen King novel in real-time. I cried a terrified, wordless, faithless prayer to the Jesus I only knew as a swear word, and He met me, BIG TIME as Saviour. And He never stopped meeting me where I was, forgiving, teaching, wooing, correcting.

5) I’m not a natural born mother. I never liked kids, or babies, couldn’t stand baby-sitting. That all changed when I had my own, of course, but it has definitly been an acquired skill fought hard for rather than an innate maternal ability! I still look our kids, amazed at the gifts we have been given, and just cry out to God for wisdom in how to raise them, train them, care for them, enter their worlds. Mother-love is a fearsome thing!

So, there we are. I tag Salam, Khalidah, Khalaf (since no one knows anything about you!) Batir and Khaled.