It's a Love Story

After multiple days of coughing, sneezing, sleeping, fevering, and more nose-blowing than I thought possible, I was finally out of my house and among the living. It was tournament day after all, and I had committed to driving the Middle School teams to Bern. (Of course the coach said he could find an alternative driver, but I reasoned that my task would mostly involve sitting and either driving or cheering, so I’d be fine.) And what a first day back it was.

We started with back-to-back games for the girls and then immediate back-to-back games for the guys. After months of practice for these teams and only a sprinkling of scrimmages up to this point, it was fun to see them get to run strategies they’d been planning and put their trust in one another to the test. By lunchtime, the girls were undefeated, and the boys had 2 wins and 1 loss. It was beautiful to watch them rotate back and forth between the two courts, either fighting themselves or cheering on their classmates with loud rounds of “F-A. F-A-L. F-A-L-C-O-N-S! Let’s go Falcons!”

At one point in the afternoon, as the girls were heading into the playoffs, I noticed that the usual leading point scorers weren't shooting as much. Rather, they were passing the ball off to the younger, shall we say less experienced/skilled players and shouting “Shoot” at them. Diligently the younger ones always responded with an attempt at the basket, usually a bit short. But when 6th grader EW’s shot circled and dropped through the net, the entire bench lost their minds. When AW did it a few minutes later, the eruption was so loud that even the boys’ teams all had to look over to see what had happened. All they saw was the ear-to-ear grin of the shortest player on the court.

I teared up a little bit. The relentless way they spent the next game tossing it to ED and CD so that they could also count a basket among their successes of the day, the enthusiastic way the boys cheered for the girls’ 1st place trophy even though they themselves got the raw end of the three-way tie-breaker rules, the countless offers I got this week to drop off meals and tissues and ginger ale - it all spoke to me of the beauty when community lives as it should. When it seeks to lift others up, not tear them down for personal gain. It is a love story, a reflection of the greatest love story.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Look at that love

And yet more love

Fitting In versus Belonging

I’ve been listening to an audiobook by Lauren Wells, the founder of TCK Training and Unstacking Company. She has multiple books; this one is called Raising up a Generation of Healthy Third Culture Kids and is targeting mainly parents or those who work with TCK’s. So, as both a TCK and someone working with TCK’s, I thought I might as well give it a read.

Wow, have I been humbled. I still have so much to learn. As I listened this weekend, she touched on the differences between “belonging” and “fitting in.” Informally, she asked some TCK’s how they see the difference. Some answers included the following two ideas:

• Fitting in can be done anywhere or with anyone, but belonging is only in some places or with some groups.

• I change my behaviors and words to fit in, but I’m free to be myself when I belong.

It might be easy to look at those and think, “Okay, I know where you’re going: fitting in = bad; belonging = good.” But, that’s not the case. Fitting in is absolutely necessary. It’s a survival skill, and it often benefits not just the TCK, but others as well. Friends have commented that I’m really good at navigating transportation whenever we visit a new place. Honestly, I think it’s just a survival skill I’ve picked up along the way: the reading of maps, watching others to see how to buy or validate tickets, the hyper-awareness of every stop, etc. Fitting in is about more than avoiding the stares, about joining the natural flow of pace. It’s often a validation of how things are done, an appreciation for the differences with a willingness to learn and adapt to them.

Belonging isn’t automatically better, but it is a layer beyond, deeper. It’s connected to identity. If fitting in is your way of validating the new place, belonging is when you yourself feel validated, accepted. To belong somewhere is to know how a certain place impacted who you are have become, even if it's merely one aspect of your personality or character. You get to taste the notion of putting down roots in a place, of finding yourself to be wanted. You're adding to the beauty, not just navigating the chaos. Here in Kandern, for instance, fitting in was subtly learning that the most acceptable time for putting out your garbage can is between 7:30 and 8:00pm the night before. Belonging was being told that our neighborhood was having an evening grill-out and that I got to pick the date to make sure I could be there.

Of course, there’s a sadness in knowing I won’t ever have a place where my roots go deep, where I’ll belong forever and happily spend all the rest of my days. And I’ve come to peace with that. It’s why so many TCK’s find their belonging in relationships rather than in geography anyway, why I believe in this transitory-permanent place we call BFA in which our students’ roots become tangled with each other for a season before flying off again. We witness a lot of fitting in and hopefully also some belonging, even if it's temporary. But we hold to the hope for that one day. One day fitting in and belonging will both come easily because we'll all be home. Forever.

the day my team accidentally all wore the same hoodie