Hearing Heart Blog

Magical stuff, scotch tape and rubber boots. Well, with scotch tape you could attach just about anything to anything, was my thinking. And rubber boots enabled you to walk home any route you'd choose after school - right through the puddles! Before I took my mother's scotch tape to school and hid it in my desk, I was just like everybody else. But with the tape, friends came to ME to ask for a piece. We thought tape could hold the world together, if we could just have enough of it! And before my first pair of boots? Well, let's just say my knee high socks had trouble even hugging my ankles when I decided to have a little fun in the rain. They dragged on the ground after taking on puddle water and with all my tugging on them to repeatedly pull them up! No amount of elastic could handle that much abuse! The pink pearl eraser. Now that was magic! Now I could change my mind and make my drawings disappear, like the one of my teacher. Call it redemptive, I had "do overs!&q

When our little family of six moved to our little rural town about 18 years ago, we tried to keep our ties with our home church in Eugene. However, it didn't take long before we began to drift. The drive to get there was long. We didn't see our friends during the week any more. We were adjusting to a new school and lifestyle. Then my husband began not going. That was hard. Hard not to give way to the fear that I might become one of those Sunday widows who sat in church alone, taught the children alone; her absent husband watching a football game, or something… A gentle, refreshing breeze blew into our home the day we visited our new home church. We kept going back. The kindness and friendliness of the people, and the love for God demonstrated, was just too hard to resist! To familiarize myself with my new "family," I offered my domestic services to the pastor's wife. I told her I would clean, scrub, arrange chairs. My intent was to observe the goings-on in