Clueless Abroad
My daughter Sarah in the window of an English castle, sometime in 1990. "There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign." --Robert Louis Stevenson In 1988, I became an expatriate. It was a temporary condition. I traveled to England with my wife Brenda for a one-year "post-internship," to gain a year's experience serving a British church. Our first child, Sarah, was born there, free of charge thanks to the fantastic National Health Service. We were supposed to return to America after one year, but then serendipity struck: the pastor who was to take our place (we were in an interim appointment) resigned from the ministry just a month before our departure date. We volunteered to stay another year, and what had been a students-abroad experience became a true chapter in our lives, probably the happiest time in our eight-year marriage, and a touchstone for judging every subsequent event in my life. Britain was a whimsically foreign land ...