Gorbichoff

There comes a time in everyone's life where their mom tells them that it's getting time to get their old boxes out of the house where they once grew up. The other day, my mom casually alluded to this semi right of passage, so later that day I found myself rummaging through my old stuff to figure out what I might want to throw away. After deciding that my montrous valedictorian trophy, arrayed in gold, silver and red chords, would probably be a bit too obnoxious and Dwight Schrute-esk to addorn my NMSI desk with, I started looking through old school notebooks, and found a good read in my fifth grade journal. Here is my favorite entry, the words of which I have left in their original miss-spelled splendor. All I can say is, what normal eleven-year-old thinks this way?

Journal Entry
3-19-91

Dear Mr. Clements,
Poff! A genie appears and says, "Your wish is my comand." At first I don't know what to say, but then I decide to see if this is real or am I just dreaming. So I say make me invisible. Poff but nothing happened. I asoom that it's all a joke so I take my chemistry set to the living room. "Ahh!" screams my mom, "Angela's chemistry set it floating in mid air!" so I reliese t hat I really am invisible. I go to my room, then the genie reapears and says, "Your wish is my comand." So I say, "I want to go to Russia." Poff! I look around and I find myself in Gorbichoffs house. I hear them plotting to attack the U.S.! So I tell the genie to get me to Washington D.C. and to make me visible. Poff! I'm right outside the presidents ofice. I knock and he lets me in. I tell him about Russia's plan, so he gets all the troops ready and Russia is completly suprized and we defeat them.

Angela Nelson

Cheryl

You know how when it's raining, and you need to go somewhere but you don't want to get wet? You try to wait it out to see if it's going to stop, but as the time rolls on and it doesn't let up, you have to eventually run out in the midst of it anyway? That happened to me today. I got wet. I suspect there's a theological application in there somewhere. It's been raining a lot lately.

I have no intentions for all my blog posts to be melancholy. I much prefer my charming wit anyway. But I thought it would be good to explain one of the reasons for my tears lately. The death of my friend Cheryl prompted this recent wave of writing for me. Here is what I typed a month ago when she died.

August 8

I found out today that my friend Cheryl was one of the aid workers killed in Afghanistan a few days ago. Cheryl had mentioned the opportunity to go on this medical trip in her last month’s correspondence. How tragic to discover its ending. The story of her death is all over the news and Hillary Clinton has spoken out against the culprits for this atrocious act. Never would I have thought that my dear friend Cheryl’s life, or death rather, would be known throughout the world. What must have been going through her head as they were ambushed. Was she scared? Was she peaceful? Did she feel Jesus with her, holding her as she went down? It all seems so surreal—like a bad dream. Stuff like this doesn’t happen to people we actually know.

Cheryl was one of those people who you can’t think of a single thing negative to say about even if you tried, and there are very few people who fit into that category. We lived in the same house together for about six months at a time that was incredibly life-shaping for me, and watching Cheryl’s life played a huge role in some of the changes God did in me that year. Cheryl was full of life, laughter, deep faith and humility. I don’t really have the words to describe her accurately. We spent Christmas 2001 together on the farm. We had to wait to go home to our families that year because someone had to stay behind to do the chores. I’ll never forget how peaceful that Christmas was. We woke up together, did chores, sipped coffee, ate our homemade biscotti and exchanged the gifts that were under our illegally chopped down Florida Slash Pine. I don’t remember what I gave her—a journal, perhaps—but she gave me a cookbook that I still have entitled “A Little Meat Goes a Long Way”. I pulled it out today just so I could see her handwriting. She had written on the inside cover “just one more step towards being ‘ready’!” which was our way of referring to skills generally thought needed for marriage. We also attempted to make a dish for a potluck dinner that afternoon. Since we only had cucumbers on the farm, we consulted the Mennonite cookbook and found a recipe for cucumber salad. Unfortunately, our cucumber salad was really more like cucumber soup. Needless to say, it really didn’t get eaten and neither of us ever got married.

The last time I saw Cheryl was a few years ago when she was in town for a conference. We got to spend nearly a whole day together. Even though we hadn’t been keeping in touch with our daily lives, we picked up right back where we left off and talked passionately and deeply about everything God had been doing in our lives the last few years—about singleness and missions and our friends and about God. I don’t remember details of our conversation, just that we were at Starbucks and that it was amazing to see her again. It’s moments like those that are the most beautiful to me in life, and I think of them as “communion”. Getting to enjoy God and weep together with a dear brother or sister is one of the sweetest gifts that I think God gives to us, and Cheryl was a person who God allowed me to share in Him together with. She was also a fellow lover of pumpkin icecream, and I remember late night runs to get a pint of heaven at the 136—an icecream shop so small that we knew it only by the numbers in its address. I think God Himself might have enjoyed some pumpkin icecream after he created the world…and I imagine that He and Cheryl are enjoying it together right now.

Thank you God for my dear friend who loved you and the people you gave her to serve. Thank you for using her to dramatically shape who I am today and for the communion that we got to share together with you.

Words

Would you believe that "Where have all the cowboys gone" was already taken as a blog name? Hence, my need to break the rules of grammar and add a preposition to the end of my title. Shane helped me in this big decision and then promptly played Paula Cole's song for inspiration. I've never blogged before, but I do journal and occasionally even write poetry. If I'm doing either, it often means that I am sad. An old college boyfriend is to blame for nearly half my poetry (thanks Billy). These days have been a bit more sad than others, and the words have been flowing from my fingers in an attempt to ease the pain in my heart. I feel like all that I can cling to is the name of Jesus. I can't even think anything intelligent about Him or about any of His qualities—just His name. Somehow that in itself has been comforting enough....