Growing Up and How My Life Started in Oregon

 

Every spring, the earth is renewed. . . .

I think about the changing faces of beauty and the changing beauty of places. . . .

After a couple rainy days, the sun comes out and the air is fresh and open, vegetation continues taking root and gets ready to push at dirt and leaf-fragments into blooming blossoms and intricate, diverse foilange.

I’ve spent my whole life in Oregon; no doubt it is—as people say—a beautiful area, full of natural wonder.

How was this place settled? 

Why did people come here?

—It depends on what time period you are talking about. . . .

But coming back to recent history (which the beginning of my life, I guess, is), my parents (as they say) came here because they loved the natural beauty, which was blossoming at the time they came.

 They came in May or June, in the early 1970’s, a period when families were focusing on their own—their own communities, their own homes and circle of friends—back to the things that mattered.

It seems the intent was to provide a safe and interesting, and educationally solid foundation in which their kin could flourish. 

And so my parents, like so many other settlers, moved from Boulder, Colorado, where they had met at Campus Crusade for Christ at University of  Colorado, to Portland, settling in a nice house—one of the bigger ones on our dead-end street.

They came with their first-born daughter, my sister A, at about 1-2 years old.

And so life began on a street named Stephens, including church groups, school, summer and family camp, and “Young Life” retreat center.

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Everything’s smaller when you yourself are small—when you are a “kiddo.”

So our house, which doesn’t seem or look that big to me now, was full of interesting finds, spaces, cubby-holes, places I could “crawl into”—places that felt like safety, that made our house a place where I belonged. . . .

I remember . . . 

Our table—with little cubby-holes underneath—places to store my action-figures and play dolls, like Gumby or Pokey. . . .

And the door in the ceiling, just above my head looking up, leading to dusty rafters and old boards, low ceilings and the singular light-bulb which illuminated the space, places that would fuel a young kid’s imagination like Lewis’s “Magician’s Nephew.”

Then there were the dozen-or-so bushes and trees in our back-yard, and the next-door-neighbor lady, who seemed a bridge to another era, with her big lawn, garden, and times when we interacted over the fence, all of us enraptured at her stories of when the busy street next to ours was a two-lane dirt road; and how she called me “In-jun’” when she saw the eczema on my face. 

And somehow the trees held adventure, and we kids who loved and climbed them there would reach high up in them, and survey the views of far-away streets and billboards, signs of “civilization” beyond our “haven-of-a-home.”

Growing Up

“Bright Lights, Big City”

In these spring days of youth we live it up, together, just coming into our own skin, hanging out at Taco Bell, the ice cream parlor, or the burger joint. . . .

The future seems wide open. . . . 

We were young, living, experiencing the freshness of our lives together.  

Only for some, trials and difficulties had led us to reach out to God, for serving Him somehow—He who had made Himself known in our lives. Experiencing the timelessness of imbibing His presence, of seeing Him in our friends, in the children and youth whose job it was for us to help, to serve, to lead and to guide.

Somehow the fear of God got into us. . . .

And I wasn’t the only one.  A whole host of friends and comrades were growing up together.