Praise for
English Lessons
“Luminous patience and insight lights these uncommonly thoughtful pages. Andrea Lucado is a winsome, wise, and unwaveringly honest companion for the wonderer and wanderer, and the lines on these pages offer a tangible lifeline to every God-wrestler. These are pages that are hard to put down, that you will want to return to and reread. Andrea not only offers a genuine way to love the questions themselves, she offers an authentic way to love the Answer Himself.”
—ANN VOSKAMP, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Broken Way and One Thousand Gifts
“This book brought me right back to a younger self—a bookish pastor’s daughter living abroad, making sense of her faith, of the world and her place in it. Andrea is a lovely writer, and this story will make you ache for the feelings and memories and experiences of your early twenties—both the wonderful ones and the challenging ones. And it will make you want to go to Oxford, of course.”
—SHAUNA NIEQUIST, New York Times best-selling author of Present Over Perfect and Bread & Wine
“English Lessons is positively paradoxical—both mature and youthful, entertaining and challenging, full of light and full of depth. Written by a pastor’s daughter, it is the perfect book for those trying to own a faith handed to them by someone else. Whether you’re a spiritual seeker or a hardened skeptic, this book will both honor your doubts and open your heart to grace. A wonderful paradox, indeed!”
—JONATHAN MERRITT, contributing writer for The Atlantic and author of Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined
“To have a strong faith we can stand on, we all need to wrestle well with hard questions and come face-to-face with our gut-honest feelings. Andrea does this in such a tenderly beautiful way that will leave the deep parts of your heart feeling comforted and understood.”
—LYSA TERKEURST, New York Times best-selling author and president of Proverbs 31 Ministries
“In English Lessons we discover an honest voice exploring life and love, finding that it’s okay and even common to not know where the journey will take you. Andrea Lucado’s memoir is a story of love and friendship, saying goodbyes, and seeing yourself in a mirror to find out more of who you really are, perhaps for the first time. Her year in Oxford was a wide-open space for a life of grace.”
—SCOT MCKNIGHT, Julius R. Mantey Chair of New Testament, Northern Seminary
“English Lessons is one of those beautiful books that you can just fall into. Andrea’s story, her retelling, her insight, her heart—it all shines. I love this book, I learned from it, and I cannot wait to read it again.”
—ANNIE F. DOWNS, best-selling author of Looking for Lovely and Let’s All Be Brave
“In this vivid and vulnerable memoir, Andrea Lucado allows readers to experience both the charms and the challenges of living in a foreign place. Andrea’s story gives readers permission to have faith like a child, questions like a teenager, and steady trust like an adult. If you want your own faith to grow and to grow up, this well-rendered story is for you.”
—KATELYN BEATY, editor at large, Christianity Today, and author of A Woman’s Place
ENGLISH LESSONS
All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are taken from the ESV® Bible (the Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Details in some anecdotes and stories have been changed to protect the identities of the persons involved.
Hardcover ISBN 9781601428950
Ebook ISBN 9781601428967
Copyright © 2017 by Andrea Lucado
Cover design by Kristopher K. Orr; cover and interior illustrations by Hannah George
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by WaterBrook, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
WATERBROOK® and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lucado, Andrea, author.
Title: English lessons : the crooked path of growing toward faith / Andrea Lucado.
Description: First Edition. | Colorado Springs, Colorado : WaterBrook, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053341 (print) | LCCN 2017010225 (ebook) | ISBN 9781601428950 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781601428967 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Lucado, Andrea. | College students—Religious life. | Oxford Brookes University.
Classification: LCC BV4531.3 L78 2017 (print) | LCC BV4531.3 (ebook) | DDC 248.8/34—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053341
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
English Lesson
Chapter 1: Field Crickets
Chapter 2: The Babel Effect
Chapter 3: My Front Light
Chapter 4: The Atheist Society
Chapter 5: The Faith of Our Fathers
Chapter 6: A Spoon in My Tea
Chapter 7: The Road More Traveled
Chapter 8: If I Forget You, O Jerusalem
Chapter 9: English Gardens
Chapter 10: River Conversations
Chapter 11: The 0.1-Mile Pilgrimage
Chapter 12: Pillars
Chapter 13: Good-Byes at Kazbar
Chapter 14: Tumbleweeds
Acknowledgments
For my parents, and always for my parents
English Lesson
Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:
I’ll tell you how the sun rose,
A ribbon at a time…*
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
—Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts
* * *
* Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Part 2, Nature.
1
Field Crickets
Church was not a part of my childhood. It was my childhood. Church, growing up—they twine themselves in my memories. They are the same color, indis
tinguishable. From my younger years, I remember more about the building itself than the words said within it. I remember the pews were classic, sturdy ones with rough blue cushions that fit nicely and would give you carpet burn if you crawled along them for too long. I remember the communion table from a vantage point underneath it, looking through the wooden slats and holding on to them, demanding my friends “let me out of jail.” I remember where the communion grape juice and yeast-free crackers were stored, in the closet to the right of the stage in the auditorium. Sometimes we shoveled the crackers into our mouths while our parents had postchurch, prelunch conversations with fellow church members for what felt like forever.
Many Sundays, when I finished stealing the communion crackers, I was off to find my mom so I could tug at her, pull her arm in the direction of the door, and make it perfectly clear I was ready to leave. She was so good at not budging, standing her ground and remaining in conversation with whomever it was, as if a child were not yelling, “Mom! Mom! Mooom!” over and over at her side.
The church was built in the 1950s. Not beautiful, in a strange octagonal shape on a road called Fredericksburg. Home is what it felt like most of the time. So many people knew my name there. I didn’t know their names, but I wasn’t expected to. They heard my dad talk about me from the pulpit each week. I never heard their dads talk about them. Their faces were enough for me. Synonymous with the building itself. For me so many members existed only inside that building, as if they emerged from the walls on Sunday mornings and melted back into them afterward.
My neighborhood streets were the back hallways and classrooms of that octagonal-shaped building. My neighborhood friends were the daughters of elders and staff members. We got to know each other lingering outside our fathers’ offices, playing hide-and-seek. We did church-league basketball together and popped gum during Sunday school together. When we reached the sixth grade, we decided, together, that we had outgrown the church playground and developed the habit of forming circles to talk and gossip with our arms crossed, our weight on one foot, hips out to one side.
Church determined my social life as well as my weekly calendar. Sunday mornings were busy; therefore, Saturday night was early curfew night, a rule I openly hated and disagreed with until the day I left home for college. Sunday nights were for small-group gatherings called life groups. Wednesdays were for midweek service. Spring break was the youth ski trip to Colorado. Christmas was always spent at home because of Christmas Eve service. Summer was for church camp. This is what I knew. This is what deep down, beneath my teenage angst and complaining, I loved. I grew up in church and church grew down into me, as if my body housed a tree of church lessons whose limbs grew inside me and rooted my feet into the church’s ground itself.
This is why when people talk about how wonderful their childhood church experience was, or how terrible it was, it’s difficult for me to understand why they don’t simply say growing up was wonderful or growing up was terrible. How are those two things not twined for them like they are for me?
When your father has been a pastor at the same church in the same city for three decades, people come to recognize your family. At school, everyone knew I was a preacher’s daughter. At church, I was Max’s, the pastor’s daughter.
For some, faith and belief are learned over time, understood and accepted. For those like me, faith and belief have been written into your name. Your family’s profession is, in a way, Christianity. It makes “owning one’s faith” an impossible and confusing feat. For how could I own my last name more than I already do?
Considering my background, you can imagine how I relate to someone with a completely unchurched childhood. That person might as well be from a tiny island off the coast of nowhere near the edge of the universe. This is why when I found myself one day in the early fall of 2008 sitting in a classroom surrounded by tiny islands off the coasts of nowhere near the edge of the universe, I marveled. Nothing about us, our pasts, or our backgrounds braided together. We were from different countries and different continents with the common goal of achieving master’s degrees in English Literature. Now we have all returned to our respective origins, but then we had landed mere blocks from each other in a city called Oxford in a country called England.
Oxford. The place that makes you want to write books about it. It sucks in students from various nations on this earth, plops them together into graduating classes, and then either promptly shuttles them back home or loses them in its dark office corridors forever. I got out. Though it would have been magical to stay.
It was orientation day at Oxford Brookes University when I first met them all, the tiny islands. I left my parents waving at the bottom of a hill as I climbed up toward campus. Mom and Dad had flown over with me to help with the transition, and walking away from them that afternoon felt harder than it should have for a twenty-two-year-old. I left too early, worried I would be late, so I walked slowly as I neared the building.
I had been to Oxford before. As a junior in college, I participated in a study-abroad program there. My three best friends and I made the journey from Abilene Christian University in West Texas all the way to England to spend four months living with fellow American students and traveling on the weekends. We clutched our Rick Steves guides and felt very grown up as we sat in pubs at the ripe, legal age of twenty. We drank espresso and red wine during a memorable weeklong trip to Italy. We learned how to buy train tickets and book hostels, and we often huddled together on our bunk beds and listed the things from home we longed for: our cars, Mexican food, big grocery stores, Sonic. When we landed at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in December, we felt relief and triumph. We had survived a semester overseas. And I vowed quietly to myself that one day I would return.
I don’t think two more opposite cities exist, Oxford and Abilene. One is in the Cotswolds, known for endless waves of countryside at the cost of endless waves of rain. The other is in the part of Texas known for tumbleweeds, oil, more wind and dust than rain, and, of course, the occasional dreaded cricket infestation.
I call it The Summer of the Crickets, and I can still feel its heat. Thick, consuming heat that settled and lingered over Abilene adamantly for three months. I had stayed in Abilene for my last summer before my senior year. I took summer school in the morning and worked in the afternoon, and then at night, when it was finally safe to go outside without absolutely melting, I would run around campus. Even though the sun had been down for hours, I still dripped all the way. Hot and humid—the ideal environment for cricket reproduction. Every few years Abilene and other regions in Texas are overrun by crickets that hatch in warm, moist environments. That summer they took over. In the building where my summer class met, an entire wall fell victim to crickets. Thousands of them spread out among the bricks, claimed their space, and held on until fall. I don’t think they moved for months. Each morning the wall of crickets remained. Class was canceled a couple of times due to the smell. Decaying crickets, I learned, have a distinct smell, similar to the aroma of stale Mexican-food leftovers with a little fresh fertilizer mixed in. Pleasant. Intoxicating.
One morning I showed up at my Latin American Authors class to find that my professor, who was also a decent artist, had drawn a picture on the whiteboard of a giant cricket with bulging red eyes and a gas mask. The picture remained on the whiteboard for weeks. I stared at it each day while he lectured. I hated those crickets. They left us alone in the classrooms, but the moment we entered the hallway, they hurled their bodies from one wall to the opposite one, creating an obstacle course between us and the exit. To make it from one building to the next was to run a cricket gantlet. I rarely made it through without getting hit. I think hell might be an eternal summer of crickets living, multiplying, and dying. There is nothing worse than your world being overrun by an insect you can’t control. Kill one, turn around, and there are thirty others. You have no choice but to coexist with them until the cooler weather kills them off.
I’ve since lear
ned that this particular cricket infestation was one of the worst Abilene had seen in years. The crickets we were stepping on and running away from are known as field crickets. This name sounds inaccurate to me. I think they should be called “field, road, building, bathroom, inside-your-own-freaking-car crickets.” But I’m not the expert here. I started to do more research in order to understand this species better and why they came out with such a vengeance that summer in West Texas, but I decided the creatures that ruined my life those few months were not worth the time and effort to be fully understood. I don’t care about their biological origins, and I certainly don’t care about their benefits to our ecosystem. So my cricket knowledge is limited. I do know they can lay up to four hundred eggs at once—a fact that both terrifies and annoys me—and I know they shed their skin up to nine times before becoming adult crickets. The process of shedding skin is called “molting”—an appropriately gross-sounding word, I think. Moooolllllting. It takes about six weeks for the molting process to be complete and the cricket to reach full-fledged adulthood. Then they mate and lay trillions of eggs. Then, they die. Well, some live for three or four more weeks enjoying their molted state, but most of them die.
One lifetime, nine layers.
I should probably explain that Oxford Brookes University is a separate university from the one I like to call Oxford Oxford. It is more recently established—though I suppose everything is more recently established than a university where teachers were already teaching in AD 1096—and it uses lecture-style teaching rather than the intimate tutorial style used at Oxford Oxford. To distinguish between the two, most refer to Oxford Brookes as simply Brookes. Heaven forbid I should claim to be an Oxford Oxford student, when really I was just a normal old Brookes student. The Brookes campus is mostly concentrated in one place, on top of Headington Hill. Headington Hill boasts a city view I rarely saw. My classes were at night, so the view I remember best is distant blurs of lights, spires, and fields asleep in the dark. The daylight hours revealed lush mounds of grass playing leapfrog down the hill, a hill that was always damp from rain. Sitting at the bottom was the city center of Oxford—a dignified gathering of sixteenth-century buildings. Lined up and standing so close together, they formed one brilliant, cream-colored stone mass. Strong and old.
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