by Jamie Wright
Here was a random stray cat dropped on our doorstep by a tropical storm (probably sent to us by the Devil in a bolt of lightning), and I had a suspicion that Steve would not be on board with keeping it, but Steve wasn’t home, was he? So there was no one around to stop us when the kids and I fell madly in love and named our new little buddy Knives.
The name started as an homage to the girlfriend, Knives Chau, in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which we were watching for the seventy-fifth time that evening. And when the claws made their first appearance, slicing through the air like Wolverine, we knew we had chosen correctly.
For the record, I swear I told the boys we could keep the kitten only until the animal shelter opened on Monday, and I really meant it. But I’d never dealt with cat sorcery before, so I had no idea that keeping a kitten for a weekend and then dropping it off at a shelter is actually an impossible thing to do. Like, it cannot be done by mere mortals.
Needless to say, on Monday we became Knives’s forever family, and a few weeks later “she” grew balls and we had to switch pronouns. Mr. Knives Chow Wright has been tripping me on the stairs, attacking my feet from under the bed, spying on me from around corners, slashing at my hands, kneading my belly fat like bread dough, staring at me without blinking, and planning my ultimate demise ever since. He quickly established his lordship over the dogs, who, though much larger and more physically powerful, learned to obediently make way for His Highness, the cat.
I don’t mean to brag, but Knives is a hellion if ever one lived, and when he was a stranger, I welcomed him. When he was hungry, I gave him something to eat. When he was thirsty, I gave him something to drink. I’d be hard-pressed to claim his arrival on my doorstep that night was God’s idea, but I will say that when I met his basic needs by the most practical means, it changed both of our lives in tangible ways (he eats more; I bleed more), and I suppose that makes Knives my greatest success.
In the spirit of practical magic, I trust that God can redeem even this. Five years as a missionary, and the only thing I really saved was an asshole cat.
* * *
One day I came downstairs to find Knives curled up in the centerpiece on the dining room table. He had made himself comfortable by scattering its contents all over the place—that way he could use the wooden tray as a chaise longue. The tray had been filled with coarse sand, pebbles, and sea glass—now strewn across table, chairs, and floor. It was the kind of mess I normally would have swept up and thrown away. But this was no ordinary stuff. Every particle of it had come to Costa Rica in a gallon-sized ziplock bag, given a place in our limited luggage space like rare gems.
Originally the makings of that centerpiece came from a beach in northern California, where the city used to dump everybody’s garbage right into the water. Like, they would just back the garbage trucks up to the bluff and launch their shit into the sea. Household trash, old dishes, busted jars and bottles, broken appliances, logging refuse, old cars—it all went over the cliffs. Eventually someone realized this was a terrible idea, so they stopped, but by then the area was so polluted it had to be temporarily closed as a public safety hazard.
Nearly fifty years later, Steve and I hiked down to that same beach at low tide, carefully picking our way past fly-swarmed piles of rotting kelp, smelly deposits of dead fish, empty beer cans, and layers of mucky brown foam. It was still super gross, and everything about the trip toward the water screamed, Dump! You’re walking in a garbage dump—for funzies! The smell alone made me wonder if the sand filling my shoes was toxic enough to kill me, but we’d heard rumors that it would be worth it, so we trudged on. By the time we got to the water’s edge, and the sun glistened and danced across the wet surface of the rocks, I had to agree they were right. It was worth it.
It was a remarkable sight—a whole entire beach covered in bits of tumbled glass.
Green and brown and red, with bright blues and bits of turquoise nestled among the cloudy white beads, all of it roughed down and rounded off like smooth stones from so many years of rolling along in the surf. It was stunning—one of those crazy, beautiful moments in life that catches you off guard and takes your breath away, because you never, ever expected garbage to be so…I don’t know…perfect. We stayed for hours, looking for treats in what used to be trash, amazed at how the sea could turn a community disaster around and serve up a national treasure.
It was practically magical.
Since that day, I’ve kept a trayful of Glass Beach on the dining room table as a centerpiece of sorts. What started as a few handfuls of rocks and sand that Steve and I scooped up and brought home in an empty McDonald’s bag became a monument to our loved ones over the years. All of our best and dearest people have sat with us around the sea glass at one time or another—sorting it, swirling it, searching through it with distracted fingertips, looking for the right words to talk about life. That little pile of rocks has been privy to incredible stories and agonizing secrets. I would swear those bits of tumbled glass have some sort of therapeutic quality, except I know they don’t. The truth is it’s not the rocks that have drawn us back to the table to share. It’s an altogether different centerpiece that calls us to sit with one another and talk awhile.
The first time I stood on Glass Beach, I remember thinking, This is what God does!
God takes our crap offerings, our messed-up lives, our garbage, and turns it around on us. He makes it beautiful somehow. Against all odds, God redeems what seems hopelessly trashed and broken and refashions it into something different. And somewhere along the line, this God who will make all things new had become the centerpiece of our lives. So I brought my ziplock bag of Glass Beach all the way to Costa Rica to serve as a reminder.
This is practical magic.
It was around this very centerpiece that we were sitting after dinner one night with some of our favorite football players, Tomás and Eduardo, and Ed’s smart, gorgeous fiancée, Juliana, when she smiled and said, “Hay algo que tengo que decirles.” There’s something I have to tell you.
She explained that after our many talks about life and faith and Jesus, she and Ed had decided to go to church. In fact, they’d been attending a church near her house for a few months, she said, and it had changed her life. Juli and Ed told us it was in part because of our honesty regarding the messiness of church that they were able to walk in with fresh eyes and realistic expectations, unafraid to ask questions or offer their opinions. They’d found a community they loved and felt part of, and there they’d met Jesus. But the reason she was bringing it up was that she was planning on being baptized by her pastor and they hoped we could be there for the special occasion.
On a bright tropical morning just a few weeks later, we prayed for Juli and cheered with joy as, surrounded by her family and friends, her local pastor dunked her for Jesus.
Three days later, we left Costa Rica for good.
We spent our last Sunday in the country the same way we’d spent our first, at a swimming-pool baptism, celebrating one person’s hope-filled commitment to a lifetime of giving and receiving unconditional love. And it was the same, but so different.
I mean, talk about coming full circle—to end like that, the way we began.
It was like God wanted us to see how much we’d learned and changed and grown throughout those tumultuous years abroad. It was a painful reminder of how arrogant and naive and stupid we had been when we arrived—jumping in like we had any right—and it was a grace-filled affirmation that it was time for us to go.
In the end, we were simply too practical to stay, and God was too magical to let us.
The decision to move back to the United States did not come to us quickly or easily.
With the end of our five-year commitment looming, Steve and I spent approximately three and a half million hours talking, praying, and searching for the best way forward. We were begging God to show us what to do, and with each pass
ing day, it became more and more apparent that we could not continue to live as missionaries with any sense of conviction. That’s not to say we thought it was all for nothing, only that the line between the good and the bad had grown too blurry.
There was a healthy way for us to stay in Costa Rica, if that’s what we wanted, but we agreed that the only responsible way to remain would be to find “real jobs,” pay our own way, and fully integrate like normal immigrants or expats. We believed that if we stayed it would be time to love our neighbors and invest in the community apart from both the agenda and the safety net of the North American church—and free from the relational guillotine of the title “missionary.” Steve was getting paid to coach football, but when we crunched the numbers, we decided our family probably couldn’t make it work on his stipend of 17,000 colones (about thirty-five dollars) a week.
The thought of saying good-bye to our players and the rest of the football community was truly gut-wrenching. There was so much love and life and, like, spirit-filled Jesus juju surrounding the team, if we could have found any way to reconcile our hearts with staying on as missionaries, I think we would have. It would have been a relatively easy transition too, since all I’d have had to do was write one blog post about how we felt “called to redirect our energy to sports ministry,” and boom, it would be done. I have no doubt that most, if not all, of our incredibly kind and generous supporters would have continued to give to our work. I also have no doubt that, had we stayed, God would have done what God always does and made it worthwhile for somebody. But that wasn’t reason enough.
During our last year in Costa Rica, amid mounting frustration, Steve and I continued to grow passionate about calling attention to the problems that plague Christian missions. We felt inspired to explore new and better ways for flawed followers of Jesus to engage the world, to love their neighbors, and to make an actual difference in the lives of people around them. I could continue to write on the subject from wherever we lived, but neither of us could do much to instigate change directly from the mission field, especially while we were still dependent on the system financially.
After months of scouring Internet job postings, our home church offered Steve a role as the director of outreach and missions, and it seemed like a golden opportunity to take everything we’d gained from our experiences and pay it forward. To be able to share the painful lessons we’d learned with a community of people we already knew well and loved dearly felt like a gift. If we couldn’t change missions from the mission field, we thought, why not try to do it from within the church? Steve accepted the position, and I booked our family on a one-way flight that would take us back to California a week shy of our fifth anniversary in Costa Rica.
* * *
Sometimes I think my whole life could be summed up by a long list of things I never wanted to see, or do…or eat. (Chicken feet come to mind.) Well, at four o’clock in the morning on July 11, 2012, I added “Carry an angry black cat through airport security with bare hands” to that ever-expanding file.
For the second time in our lives, we sold, tossed, and donated nearly all of our material possessions, packed the precious remainder in ten familiar duffel bags, five carry-ons, and four backpacks, and set off to start over in a faraway land. But this time things would be different. This time our kids knew exactly where they were going. This time we spoke the language and knew the culture. This time, when we pulled up to the departures curb in front of the airport for an international move, our baggage would include a ten-foot surfboard (which hasn’t seen water since and probably never will again), two rescue dogs, and the Devil’s cat.
Since they weren’t service dogs (apparently eating used toilet paper out of the trash isn’t technically considered a service), Osita and Gringa had to be crated and flown as cargo. At the check-in desk I showed all the necessary paperwork, paid transportation fees, and gave each dog a good scruffle behind the ears before nervously handing them over to the airline. They started to bark and whine as they were wheeled away on rolling carts, but I could hear the baggage handlers crooning back gently and making little kissy noises to calm them, so it seemed like they were in good hands. With a sigh of relief, I turned to join my boys in the growing line that snaked its way through the gamut of airport security. I was about to find out, the hard way, that getting the cat on the plane would not be so easy.
Poor Knives was not at all happy about this move to the United States, and I could hardly blame him. Costa Rica was the only home he’d ever known, the only place he’d stalked geckos, terrorized small birds, and collected the dead bodies of rodents to show off like he’d actually won them out of a claw machine. He knew nothing of the world but hunting in coffee fields, dominating packs of stray dogs, and scrambling in out of the rain. But leaving him behind was not an option—he was stuck with us, and we were stuck with him.
Knives was curled up in the cat carrier as we approached the airport metal detector, and everything would have been fine if he’d been allowed to stay that way. I set him down, walked through the scanner, and reached back to take the carrier from a security guard who held it out toward me. But she didn’t hand Knives over. Instead, she instructed me to remove him from his cage and walk him through the metal detector in my arms. I looked at her in sheer horror like You know this is a terrible plan, right? Have you seen The Silence of the Lambs?
But she insisted. So against my better judgment I opened the cage door, stuck in a sacrificial arm, and brought forth nine pounds of biting, clawing, moaning, hissing, tail-whipping psychopath.
Knives is not the kind of cat you hold, or even really touch, when he doesn’t want you to. But I knew there would be absolute carnage if I lost control of that animal in an airport packed with vacationing families, dirty hippies, and drug dealers. Fortunately, he seemed to be pretty certain that I alone was to blame for this disruption of his comfort, so he sank his teeth into my hand, wrapped his body around my arm like a boa constrictor, and went to work on my flesh with those mutant claws.
And I let him. Because I’m pretty much a hero.
Once everyone was satisfied that Knives wasn’t concealing a belt buckle, bobby pins, or a loaded revolver in his fur, I went to pry him off my bloody stump and return him to the safety of his carrier. But the agent stopped me again and waved her explosive-sniffing wand to point us toward the next station of the exam.
“I have to swab the cat,” she said with great authority, as if she catches cat bombers, like, all the time. I don’t know why, but on our way over to the desk, I started to plead Knives’s case, saying, “He looks kinda shady, but I can honestly say I’ve never seen this cat make a bomb. Not even once!” And then I remembered who we were dealing with, and how at that very moment he was skinning me alive, and I was like, “Okay. Yeah. Probably better to check.”
Sweaty and bloody, I did eventually make it onto an airplane, along with Steve, our three incredible sons (all teenagers now), two dogs in the pressurized cargo hold, one very unhappy cat under the seat in front of me, and the shredded remnants of my pride. Thanks to Knives, my arm looked exactly how my spirit felt.
Just as our plane lifted off, the sun came up over the horizon, and a heart-sized lump leaped into my throat. With tears threatening to spill, I pulled out my phone and snapped one last picture of the emerald-green country my family had called home for five years. Was I disappointed? Grateful? Relieved? Happy? Heartbroken? I didn’t know how to feel as we climbed into the sky, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I wished I had done differently, the stuff I wished I’d known sooner, and the people I wished I’d loved better while we were still there.
But it was done. All I could do was watch through a little oval window as Costa Rica and my missionary life disappeared behind me.
* * *
Just like that, we moved back to our little beige house on the same beige street in a boring beige suburb, and Steve started w
ork at a great big beige church.
On Steve’s first day in the office, the boys were out catching up with their grandparents, so I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down alone on the floor in the middle of a house with no furniture (just a coffeemaker, because priorities), and the space felt empty and still and uncomfortably quiet. No noise filtered in from the street. There were no roosters crowing, no dogs barking, no shouting salesmen, not even the racket of a security guard on a bicycle chasing a couple of loose cows out of the neighborhood with his trusty whistle. There was just…nothing. I sat there for the longest time in the weird suburban silence, wondering, What the hell am I supposed to do next? The problem was that I was completely overwhelmed by both the felt needs of the world and the brokenness of the church, and I didn’t know where to start, or what to do, or how to really help.
Just as I was about to get up off the cold bare floor, Knives strolled over and curled up in the warm nest of my crisscrossed legs. (He has a gift for knowing exactly when I’m about to get up and deciding that is when he wants to be petted.) I was now effectively trapped, unable to leave that spot, because once a cat is on top of any part of your body, some kind of kitty mind control forces you to stay put until they’re done napping. I can’t explain it. I just knew I was gonna be there for a while, stuck with Knives. Which was actually kinda fitting, because I had just been telling God how on the heels of this big move back to California, which should have built momentum into my life, I felt more stuck than ever.