Marilyn R. Gardner's Blog, page 53
September 23, 2016
A Short Correspondence on the Issue of Feeling Trapped
Dear Robynn, I enjoyed your “Friday’s with Robynn” post (A Hidden Pearl. January 29,2016). It really resonated with me, so thank you for posting it. It was very thought provoking for me. Earlier this year I experienced a very similar feeling to the one you had having returned from Thailand. My friends and I arrived [...]
The Loneliness of Immigration
My husband and I repatriated to this country many years ago. We came from the city of Cairo, Egypt and arrived at Dulles Airport with five children, 26 suitcases, and an Egyptian Siamese cat. It was the sum total of everything we owned. The first two years were excruciating. We didn’t know anything about living [...]
September 22, 2016
#Hashtags and Relationships
It’s difficult to write today, but it would be worse to keep silent. “I don’t want to become a #hashtag. Becoming a #hashtag is a very real fear in my community.” Yesterday at the end of a long and good meeting, a few of of us began talking. The conversation was around race and privilege, [...]
September 20, 2016
Liesl Lives On
The first movie I ever saw was The Sound of Music. I was young – not more thanseven years old, and our boarding school had obtained the movie from the Canadian Embassy to show to students. From the first notes of “The Hills are Alive” I was enthralled; at “Do Re Mi” I was smitten; [...]
September 16, 2016
Get a Life
“Oh, for God’s sake…get a life, will you?”–William Shatner Connor left nearly a month ago to return to the University of British Columbia. As he and Lowell pulled away from the house I felt the bottle of grief shaken within me lose its scarcely screwed on lid. Before I knew it I was drenched, [...]
September 13, 2016
Exploring Third Culture Kid Bigotry – A Repost
“It’s one thing to criticize a culture. It’s another to see that the culture being criticized is formed partly in response to other cultures, and that those cultures are, in turn, worth criticizing. This is why explaining human behavior is so difficult: the buck never stops. The explanations don’t come to an obvious, final resting [...]
September 12, 2016
Approaching the Holy
Our first task in approaching Another people Another culture Another religion Is to take off our shoes For the place we are approaching is holy Else we find ourselves Treading on another’s dreams More serious still, we may forget that God was there before our arrival. We have to try to sit where they sit, [...]
September 10, 2016
No Easy Answers – A Life Overseas
Readers, my mom and dad were in the country of Pakistan and raised five of us in that context. Yesterday on A Life Overseas my mom shared a poignant story on children, choices, and ultimately learning to trust God with our kids. Would you join us there? I have included the beginning of the piece [...]
September 9, 2016
This is my Body–A Repost
when Jesus proclaimed, “This is my body, broken for you,” it makes me wonder if in some sense Jesus himself had to come to grips with his own body and its impending brokenness. He was about to endure the profound breaking of his own body. He leans into it and he accepts it. That has implications for me accepting my own body and my own brokenness.
September 8, 2016
In Memory of George
George was one of those guys that I saw early morning. As I would wander up Tremont Street from the Park Street T Station he would be setting up in front of the Granary Burying Ground. This cemetery is Boston’s third oldest cemetery and the final earthly resting place for the likes of Samuel Adams, [...]
