Category Archives: Journal

Seeking and Finding

Back in 1986, I wrote in answer to a letter from a family member:

“I seem to be suffering a lot of the same things you are, i.e., periodic depression, wondering what I’m good for and other cheerful things like that. . .

“I feel wasted. I have so many blessings, and feel I’m not doing much with them . . .I go every day to work in front of a little computer screen instead of using my writing, somehow, in this world.”

Then I mentioned the many ways I had searched for a more interesting job but had not found one.

Finally, I talked about what comforted me at that moment. In the New Testament book of Acts (chapter 16), Paul talks about how he and his companions tried to carry their missionary work to two places, but had been prevented from doing so. I commented: “They must have wondered about this time what in the world they were supposed to do. Then Paul had his vision of the man from Macedonia, and they concluded that they were being led to Macedonia. They went there and had a very fruitful ministry, albeit a challenging one.”

I continued: “I have decided to make the most of my time while waiting.” I mentioned tasks I was finishing to get ready for when I would find the work I was supposed to do.

Eventually, of course, I was able to become an officer with the U.S. Foreign Service and was able to travel and live in the Middle East for several years, which had so interested me earlier. I’m now able to use those experiences in the writing I do.

God may answer a person’s prayers in many different ways than God answered mine. Perhaps some may find a renewed interest in tasks that earlier bored them. They may find renewed possibilities, new attitudes.

The point is, I kept preparing, studying, learning. If I had died without my new vocation, the time would not have been wasted, but would have produced growth.

Jesus told his followers: “Ask and it will be given you. Search and you will find, knock, and the door will be opened for you.” (Matthew 7:7, NRSV.)

 

Sisterhood: Faith and Uncertainty

As an adolescent, I struggled with questions many young people face. What vocation was I going to choose? What kind of man did I want to marry? And, as a daughter of a church-active family, when did I know I was a Christian?

I was blessed with loving parents and an older brother, but my father, to whom I was close, died when I was thirteen. I don’t remember questioning God about why he should die. Part of my family’s life had included going to “funeral homes” and staying for a while to comfort the grieving. Visiting wasn’t particularly scary. The adults visited and reminisced and laughed a lot. Death was just a part of the community’s life.

What I missed was certainty. I wanted to know I was a Christian. Yes, I remember a time when I was nine or ten when I had a quiet but sudden “quickening,” a feeling of knowing God’s presence. Probably God comes on many of us that way.

No doubt I was influenced by growing up in an age of revival meetings. Perhaps I assumed a coming together with God had to be through a revival type experience. We Christians, believers in a future life, nevertheless are sometimes victimized by ways that moved mightily in the past but may be past their prime. We forget that Christ’s religion is forward-going. Past ways fit some but can, if we aren’t careful, close us to new ways.

Jesus met so many different people. All of them were individuals. They chose the way he preached, then went on to help others know Him. Mary and Martha, Peter and Paul, missionaries and, later, food bank operators, food servers and teachers—the list is endless, and it’s all individual in the ways we meet and serve. As Christians, we have this forward life—we have never arrived, but that is good. If we understand that we’ve never arrived, we are wary about giving complete allegiance to any human movement or allow ourselves to be stuck in past gear.

I Owe It All to Boredom

As a child, I was frequently bored. School was especially tiresome. Not all of it, of course. I enjoyed recess and music. Also lunch.

However, much of the time in my elementary school days I was bored: Listening to a rehash of things I’d already learned. Having to sit for long periods. Working out long division (without a calculator.)

I coped by daydreaming. I invented stories and went on adventures to desert islands and galloped on ponies across the prairie.

Once in a while a teacher caught me up short with a question suddenly directed at me, but most of the time they were lenient. Since my grades were okay, their wisdom must have included letting a bored child grow her imagination by drifting.

My ability to drift, to imagine, has served me well in adulthood. Working on a storyline for a novel? Just start writing, even if I have only a faint glimmer of the story, and eventually the process is likely to kick off an aha moment.

I don’t think my imagination would be nearly as developed, including my fiction, if I hadn’t often been bored as child.

Dark days of December 2023

A light can run out of fuel or electricity or the fuel can be cut off. You can break a light so that it no longer works. Light can be obscured as by a fog.

Yet, darkness never extinguishes light as long as the light is burning. Indeed light always extinguishes at least some part of darkness.

For these dark days of December 2023:

“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”
Psalm 139:11-12 (NRSV):

Christmas Isn’t Canceled

Somewhere I read that Christmas celebrations in the Holy Land will be canceled this year, due to Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. With armed incursions into Israel, not to mention bombings and terrorist events, holding mass celebrations at the usual sites of Christian remembrances may indeed be unwise.

Of course, Christians long ago burst the bounds of the Middle East. First throughout the Roman Empire, then spreading to Europe, then to newer nations and continents and to older ones in Asia, Christians have grown in number.

But the growth in numbers happens alongside the different cultures that are influenced by the lessons Jesus taught, then spread by his followers. Though coming slowly at times and threatened by human sins, slaves have been freed, the status of women improved, the poor fed, prisoners visited, and children better protected.

Surely no one can claim that we have arrived at the society Jesus wishes for, but, despite setbacks, the ways championed by Jesus long ago in Galilee, when chosen by his followers, have contributed to miraculous changes.

Bread for My Neighbor

“Bread for myself is a material question: bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.” (Nicolas Berdyaev; The Fate of Man in the Modern World,; translated by Donald A. Lowrie (London: SCM Press, 1935)

We all have certain material needs in common, such as water, food, and basic shelter. In most industrial nations, these basic necessities could be provided for all, whether the economic system is a form of capitalism or socialism or a combination.

The economic system is not a barrier to meeting basic needs of a people. The barrier is an unconditional acceptance of accumulating wealth without a corresponding concern for the left out.

Who are the left out? Any child who does not have adequate food and shelter and access to basic education. Also: those struggling with conditions not of their own making: the handicapped, those affected by natural disasters, and those who lose jobs because of changes in technology.

The Old Testament championed a “year of jubilee.” Those with the ability to earn wealth were not condemned, but every so often, they were asked to return their excess accumulation back to the original families.

Wealth is not a sin. Unrestrained wealth may be.

A Little Humility

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, generally liberal, asks: “What if anti-Trumpers are the bad guys?” (Published in The Seattle Times, August 6, 2023)

Obviously, as he says, he mostly identifies with the anti-Trumpers and those who fight discrimination. However, he cautions that the anti-Trumpers tend to have benefitted from privileges denied to many of those who champion Trump.

Brooks writes: “This story begins in the 1960’s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments.” He mentions continuing class shifters, like school bussing into working class neighborhoods of Boston but not into more upscale communities.

As Brooks points out, the system of meritocracy favors those whose parents can afford to send them to the best schools, who tend to marry those from the same social strata, and who tend to find well-paying professional jobs. They tend to fill “leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

The causes they support tend to be, for example, liberal immigration policies, which may impact the working classes but seldom the upper classes. “Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China,” writes Brooks.

The more educated in society upended social norms, like those supporting marriage before pregnancy. Yet, “Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do do that.” Thus, out of wedlock births most often happen to those with less resources.

Brooks concludes, not with supporting Trump’s policies, but suggesting that those who oppose them “stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”

The Neighborhood

They gathered—my parents and our neighbors. On hot summer evenings, the neighbors would walk over and chat with my mother and father while they all relaxed on the open porch. As a small child, I sat on a step and listened to them sharing bits and pieces of lives. They joked a lot and told stories.

In the winter, they still stopped by. We moved inside to the living room. Our house, built just before the Great Depression of the thirties, had no “den,” just a small living room. Again, my parents and the neighbors crowded around a small coffee table and shared and laughed a lot. I don’t recall any kind of formal organization. Neighbors simply stopped by.

I don’t claim a particular righteousness for that time. After all, our society knew plenty of ills, like racism. Nevertheless, we’ve lost things, too, like that simple neighborhood sharing.

New inventions worked to change us from those earlier times, and some of them gave us new insights. We relaxed before the television and watched different kinds of shows. We learned more about other countries, including wars in far off places. For the first time, we watched political conventions choose candidates for public office.

Eventually we bought portable phones that allowed us access from anywhere to home and friends. We could use the phones to ask for help when we needed it. They also allowed us to connect with friends, even when on public transport or when driving in our cars. People began to carry them everywhere all the time, sometimes constantly consulting them.

Despite the sometimes goodness of those older days of my childhood, though, I wouldn’t want a return to them. I don’t deny that we could profit from more face to face sharing, and from more putting down of our cell phones, and from more reading of newspapers. However, we’ve also profited from the changes. We’ve discovered cures for diseases, built safer airplanes and highways, and enjoyed more accurate weather forecasting. We are more aware of society’s failures that we need to address.

What we lack are the old neighborhoods. We would profit from better arrangements of our housing to encourage a return to neighborhood sharing. What could that involve? Perhaps housing clusters rather than large suburban plots–neighborhoods that we can walk through and where we greet our neighbors.

Especially after the isolation of Covid, we might consider lessons from the neighborliness I knew as a child.

Fourth of July in an American Embassy

When I worked in U.S. embassies and consulates overseas, the Fourth of July was not a relaxing holiday for us. Embassies have national days, like Bastille Day on July 14 for the French, or a royal birthday for the British. The embassies and consulates usually celebrate their national days by inviting guests for some sort of feasting and perhaps entertainment.

Typically, we staged a formal gathering the night of the Fourth. The staff, American and national employees, worked on preparations—lists of the invited, the invitations themselves, security, parking, menu, program, and so on. Our guest list included former enemies, now staunch allies. I doubt any U.S. official mentioned to the British ambassador anything about 1776 or talked to the German ambassador about Hitler.

Invitations went out to other foreign embassies, as well as the host country’s high ranking politicians. We tried to include as many American citizens as possible who lived in the country. Obviously including everyone is easy in a country with few Americans, but not possible, say, in London or Paris.

American and national employees met guests, guided them to meet the ambassador or senior official at the entry, then guided them to tables or to the refreshment center. Then we mingled and talked with the guests. Drilled into the head of every new diplomat from orientation on is that embassy entertainment is for the guests, not the staff.

After an evening of meeting, greeting, and conversing, the introverts among us went home exhausted, hoping to be in the States on vacation for our next 4th of July.

Reading as Fundamental

Provided the world goes somewhat as it always has, my children will have to decide what to do with all the books I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s not only that I read a lot and have read a lot for years. It’s that when I began reading, all books were print books.

I began my career with the U.S. Foreign Service in 1989 and was stationed in various countries, retiring in 2004. All books were in print when I began my first assignment in Saudi Arabia, and a lot of heavy boxes followed me there. Since I didn’t have access to a public library, I bought enough print books through the mail to fill several more boxes while I was there and throughout my career.

In a sense, my career paralleled the development of wide internet use, including email, but even when I retired, most books were in print.

Now settled within walking distance of our public library, I continue to walk over and check out print books, as well as add library eBooks through my iPad. I also subscribe to several periodicals, most in print and digital format.

Looking around, however, I notice a lack of deep reading by many Americans. Yes, cell phones are a wonderful invention for keeping in touch, checking on products to buy, and finding quick information about whatever we want to know. It doesn’t require much thought, however, and it’s open to just about anybody, with few checks as to their credentials for what they present.

For our communities not only to flourish but simply to survive, we require knowledge. We are no more able to grow beyond mental babyhood if we depend on internet offerings than a child will grow into a healthy adult on a little pablum and a lot of junk food.

We cannot overcome the myriad problems that threaten us, from nuclear weapons to political lying, without hard thinking and a disciplined approach to taking in knowledge.

If you haven’t already, grow your mind through a bit of dedicated reading and mental roaming and deep thinking. Your country will thank you.

Writers and Faith

“Where faith and poetry both work is in getting people to accept that things don’t line up in an easy way. And by learning that, ideally, we learn how to be with each other and how to be in a relationship with God.” (Shane McCrae, “Obliqueness and Extravagance; A Conversation with Rowan Williams and Shane McCrae,” Image, Winter, 2022)

As I remember, I was not a particularly early reader. Somewhere, however, as the alphabet came together in words, I discovered the joy of story. I read, and I mimicked by writing stories myself. I wrote all kinds of stories: children having adventures, solving crimes, righting wrongs.

Through stories, as I continued writing them into adolescence and adulthood, I dealt with everything from boredom to the wrongs in the larger world. My ability to right wrongs might be limited, but I could call out the wrongs and show how the characters of a story dealt with them.

I learned that a struggling individual has need of the “serenity prayer.”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference. (First publicized by Reinhold Niebuhr)

Writing is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad—to build up or to tear down. Not everything built is good, nor is everything torn down bad. As the prayer says, we need, not only talent or opportunity, but wisdom.

And so some of us who are Christians, humbly asking God’s guidance, begin to write what we are given.

Strange Meetings and Grace

People called to some task when they were not expecting it have changed the world: Moses discovering the burning bush as he leads sheep in a desert; disciples of Jesus who don’t even recognize him when he meets them on the road to Emmaus; Paul meeting Jesus on the way to Damascus even while he is intending to arrest Jesus’ followers.

Some may at first resist the calling and the changes it requires. Commenting on Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Caitrin Keiper notes the time it took for Valjean to change from thief to benefactor of those in need. In the beginning, after Valjean is caught stealing and brought before the bishop, the bishop not only pardons the man but even gives him more silver. Valjean, however, leaves only to steal again—but then he realizes what he has done, and the redeeming process begins. (“Masterpieces of Impossibility,” Plough, Autumn 2022)

At some point, a calling is answered or a debt is forgiven or a gift is bestowed and accepted. The results, Keiper writes, are a “contract with grace.” The contract stretches “to infinity as it is passed on from one person to the next.”

Somewhere today, even among political hatreds or attacks on defenseless civilians or misery caused by selfish oligarchs, those usually small but called ones are working. They are the ones we search for, to join our callings with theirs.

The Out of Step Jesus

The writer Philip Yancey (www.philipyancey.com) in his book, Soul Survivor, says he often feels like the most liberal person among conservatives and the most conservative person among liberals.

This statement resonates with me. I was raised in a Southern evangelical church. Fortunately, unlike Yancey’s childhood church, this church was a loving congregation, led by a pastor both caring and intelligent. The lower middle /working class church forgave him his sometimes scholarly sermons because he loved and cared for them.

Thus, I had no need, as I grew up, to rebel against a die-hard fundamentalist culture. For me and the other young people, the caring of the adults allayed the path of rebellion sometimes chosen by young people in less loving churches.

In my adult years, spent in myriad cultures and regions, my politics became more liberal. Because of my fortunate childhood, this liberalism was one of growth, not of rebellion. It is not rebellion against the childhood-taught faith I continue to practice.

I remember a song we children sang in loud abandonment: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white; Jesus loves the children of the world.”

On the wall of our Sunday school room was a picture of Jesus walking joyously with those children—red, yellow, black, and white.

My childhood church no doubt included people we would call racist. Certainly the majority held, I’m sure, quite conservative beliefs. Over time, Jesus’ teachings, if taught sincerely, may not necessarily lead to political liberalism. They certainly will result, however, in a repudiation of hatred.

August 1991

From my job at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched with millions all over the world as a coup attempt played out in Moscow. Were the efforts to finally install democracy in countries of the Soviet Union doomed to failure? Were similar attempts in Russia itself to be overcome?

Mikail Gorbachev had become leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the youngest member of the Soviet politburo. He had attempted a loosening of the Soviet system, allowing some Eastern European countries to begin breaking away and forming their own governments. He also began instituting changes in Russia’s governance.

However, for a few days in August 1991, while Gorbachev was away from Moscow, hardliners placed him and his family under house arrest and attempted to wrest power away from him.

Countries in eastern Europe, having begun steps toward their independence, watched in horror, afraid that their new freedom would be taken back.

George Krol, a U.S. diplomat serving at a U.S. consulate in Russia was especially concerned. He had traveled into the Baltic republics as they began throwing off the Soviet yoke. Awakening now to the news of the attempted coup, he drove across to Riga in the Baltic republic of Latvia.

He found government officials there watching in horror as Soviet armored personnel carriers threatened their own country. Krol then met with leaders of the Latvian parliament. As they thanked him for being there, he realized, he said “what it meant to truly represent my country.” He was standing with them, as a representative of America in their darkest hour.

The world watched as resisters under Boris Yeltsin eventually overcame the attempted coup, a victory to be savored as former Soviet nations continued steps toward democracy.

No one, however, should think that some sort of ultimate victory was won. Not all Russians were happy to see their empire fading away. Economic hardships ensued for many.

This stage was part of an ongoing story, still being written, as Putin’s attempts in Ukraine attest.

It was, however, a most important step. As Krol wrote, “On that beautiful summer’s day, as I drove with the windows down through the idyllic Baltic country-side, I thought: I represent the United States of America; I can’t believe they pay me to do this.”

Different Rules for Outside the Box

A religious group once intended to trap their nemesis, the Jewish teacher Jesus. This particular group disagreed with another religious group over resurrection of the human body, taking the stance that resurrection violated what we “know.” As indeed it does, if one looks merely at what we know in a physical sense.

They purported to prove that Jesus’ belief in resurrection was untenable according to the laws of this world. If a woman is married, then is widowed, then is remarried and widowed six more times, with no children, whose wife is she in the resurrection? That question, they thought, should settle the idea of any resurrection.

Jesus replied that the inhabitants of heaven don’t marry. Marriage, so important in this life, isn’t a part of the heavenly kingdom. His questioners judged the future by present rules, but they left out the possibility that the future may operate by different rules. They left out the power of God to set up different rules for another time and place.

As science has increased our knowledge of this physical universe, we know things our ancestors didn’t: that the earth is round, not flat; that tomatoes are not poisonous; that bleeding the body during illness does not cure, but causes harm; and so on.

We live in a closed universe with set rules. We suppose that is all there is. From our little box, we presume things about what is outside the box. We judge the outside of the box by what we know of the inside of the box.

We are giants in the physical realm but pygmies in the spiritual.

 

Christmas: Jeddah Saudi Arabia 1990

Other than a few hours in Mexico and a few days in Canada, I lived my entire life in the United States until December 1990.

Exactly one year before that date, I was happily living in north Georgia, working as a historic preservation planner. Then in the spring, I received a telephone call from the U.S. State Department. A position was available in a State Department’s orientation class for the U.S. Foreign Service. I had applied a couple of years before, but lawsuits within the State Department over hiring practices had put most applications on hold. I had gone on to other interests. Now hiring was beginning again.

After thinking it over a few days, I accepted and spent several months in primary training in Washington, D.C.  Then, in August, 1990, as I went into the second phase of my training, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein conquered the country of Kuwait and threatened the nearby oils fields of Saudi Arabia.

I completed my training in December as the United States considered sending troops to protect Saudi Arabia, our oil ally, and I began the journey to my first foreign assignment. I found myself wheels down in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, just as the Christmas season began back home.

I was jet lagged, had picked up the wrong luggage while exchanging planes in Riyadh, and was soon to come down with a throat infection. Nevertheless, I immediately became part of U.S. consulate Jeddah’s team. What can I say? It was physically taxing but the most marvelously exciting time of my life.

I found friends in neighborly get-to-gathers and home church services. I was tossed into adjudicating visas of those wishing to go to the U.S., my official job, but the buildup to the war effort for what would be the first Gulf war thrust me into other positions.

The consulate organized a 24-hour control center in a nearby major hotel. I worked night shifts and performed other duties, including laying out briefing materials for news people arriving from major U.S. networks. I watched senior U.S. officials welcomed in the hotel lobby.

We, the working stiffs, established rapport known only to those joining together in crisis conditions.

Unfortunately, peace efforts failed, and war would come, though quickly over as Saddam was pushed back into Iraq. Eventually, a whole new age would begin, known as the post Soviet era, with its own difficulties and shortcomings.

Nevertheless, that Christmas, thrust into instant dependence and friendship with people I had never known before, remains possibly the best Christmas I have ever had.

Breaking the Cycle: Hope

My mother’s father came down from the mountains of east Tennessee to the big city of Nashville and began working in an iron foundry. My father’s father also moved from rural Tennessee to the big city and found employment as a policeman.

Something happened in the next generation. By the time my brother and I came along, our parents were solidly middle class. They sidestepped aimless lives that trapped some of their brothers and sisters.

Both my parents underwent a spiritual transformation when they were in their teens. Something happened to them that shot them away from ruinous personal choices. A sense of hope gave them meaning and purpose and a sense of responsibility.

My parents were disciplined with their money, saving from modest salaries so their children received the college education they themselves were unable to enjoy.

Except for buying a house, my parents never went into debt. We had health insurance, which kept medical emergencies from overwhelming us. When my father died at the age of fifty-three from a heart attack, his provision of life insurance kept us going, along with our paid-off house, the social security my mother received as a widow with two children, and her modest job as a school secretary.

All these programs benefitted my parents, enabling them to give their children a good start in life. Today’s generational poor need access to jobs that pay a living wage. They need health insurance that stresses good health habits and prevents medical emergencies from ruining family finances. But it may be up to families, ministers, and teachers to instill hope and purpose.

Community Fails

The Covid pandemic has shown us how dangerously shallow are our community connections.

Several decades ago, Americans transformed from generational living to the nuclear family: mother, father, and minor children.

In the more recent past, community often disappeared altogether, becoming a collection of one-person units or single parent families. Singles and studio apartments and temporary live-in romantic relationships proliferated. Some apartment dwellers didn’t know the name of a single neighbor.

The pandemic saw many single Americans working from home with few ways to connect, given the danger of catching Covid from physical proximity.

Parents, especially single parents, may have lacked grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins to help them through the pinch of forced home schooling.

Obviously, a family doesn’t automatically make for healthy living. Some families, unfortunately, are toxic. However, closer connections require overcoming our propensity of the past few decades to equate freedom with singleness. Families, it seems, are actually necessary.

While avoiding too much dependency for young people who need space and time to spread their wings, rebuilding family and community relationships is a task for our times.

Nomadland: This Land Is Your Land

I watched the movie Nomadland the day before it won the 2021 Academy Award for best picture.

Merely watching the picture was itself a momentous event—the first time I’ve publicly attended a move in more than a year. Our local movie theater recently re-opened to masked, socially distanced audiences. I attended a matinee exclusively for those patrons vaccinated for the Coronavirus.

Frances McDormand, who won best actress in the awards, played a widow, living a fairly normal life until the main employer in her small town shuts down, and the town begins to die.

An employment official says her best choice is to go on early social security. McDormand says she can’t make it on the reduced benefits. “I only want to work,” she says, voicing the cry of so many of today’s unemployed.

So McDormand, in her small van, joins other rootless men and women who, for one reason or another, cannot find a place in mainstream America.

The movie did not have a villain, so far as I could see. Not Amazon, where McDormand finds seasonal employment to help her get by. Not the woman who nervously tells McDormand that she can stay the night in a store parking lot and mentions that a nearby Baptist church offers food. Even a policeman ordering McDormand off a public space, is I suppose, merely doing what he’s paid for.

McDormand wants to support herself. She works seasonal jobs and travels in between, sometimes stopping for a while to stay with other nomads, sometimes seeming to enjoy the solitariness of camping alone.

I was touched by the precarious existence of so many in America, no matter whether they remain stationary or travel around.

Bank accounts? Medical emergencies? Vehicle breakdowns? The simple need for bathroom facilities?

Others with more expertise perhaps can offer solutions. I only know that simple human kindness requires that we seek ways to help the non-belongers find a place in their country.

Foreign Service Officer: What’s That?

The call from the Marine on duty in the U.S. consulate in this Middle Eastern country came late in the evening. I was the American consular officer, responsible for, among other things, being available for American citizens with problems.

“There’s an American lady here who says she wants help. She’s had some kind of fight with her husband, and she left him,” the Marine said. “ Her baby is with her.”

I hurriedly dressed and made my way from my house to the Marine’s post. The young American woman waited with her months old baby. I took her into the consular section where she could nurse her baby and we could talk.

She was one of many American citizens who show up, sometimes literally, on the doorstep of an American embassy or consulate asking for help. Working as a Foreign Service consular officer for the U.S. State Department, I was privileged to know some of them.

Writes one Foreign Service officer: “The most urgent calls rarely came during embassy business hours — the wee hours of the morning were much more common, no matter the country. ‘We found the body of a young American male at the airport hotel. It appears to be suicide,’ one caller reported. ‘I’m 14 years old,’ pleaded another. ‘My parents brought me here on vacation to visit family. But it turns out they want to marry me off to a 50-year-old man I don’t even know. Please help!’”
—Matthew Keene, “For Americans in Trouble Abroad, a Consular Officer May Be the Only Hope,” Washington International Diplomatic Academy,” March 21, 2021

Some of my own experiences as a consular officer included the following: An American killed by an apparent terrorist. Americans arrested for making booze in a country where any alcohol consumption was forbidden. An apparently mentally ill American showing up at the consulate needing money.

Oh, yes, we used to say. Consular officers have the best war stories, better by far than our colleagues working at more rarified heights. They visit the jails. They make welfare checks on American children of divorced parents when the child lives with the foreign parent. They check the bodies of dead Americans at the morgue before calling a relative in the States with the sad news of the death.

Working for our country is a noble occupation: A soldier serving in a foreign land or one setting up hospitals for victims of Covid-19 in the U.S. A diplomat working out an agreement for free trade or one visiting an American in a foreign jail. A U.S. Supreme Court justice deciding between differing views on the Constitution or a judge seeking the best outcome for a juvenile offender caught shoplifting.

Easy work? Often not, but justifying the honorable title of “public servant.”

The young woman with the baby I mentioned earlier? Her husband, a young man who seemed to deeply love his wife and child, came to the consulate later in the evening, and the two made up. Sometimes we witness happy endings, too.