Maybe I am crazy...

for looking into flights for Paris.

No, not the one in Texas, but the real one. The City of Lights.   The one - 20 years ago - whose "gare" (train station) I spent 3 hours in waiting for the train I should have been on to take me from Belgium to my first city on my mission: Dunkerque, France...about 4 hours north of Paris and full of people I loved and served and taught and have never seen since .   

Oh yes - La gare: I had taken the wrong train from Bruxelles, Belgium thanks to 2 young men who claimed that they knew what they were talking about and that it would land me where I needed to be.  I had been in Bruxelles for exactly one day, and I was sleep-deprived but enthusiastic; nervous but confident; overwhelmed but awe-struck.  I was going to share my religious beliefs with a culture who had decaes of Catholicism deeply embedded in their strongly convicted hearts; ones that aren't very open to new ideas or loud Americans who eat and drink while walking on the streets and who (GASP!!!) wear wool socks with Birkenstocks.   The horrors!

But, you see, I didn't know then on that afternoon in the Paris gare what I had ahead of me. I didn't know that I would be stared at for my ugly footwear (I don't blame them at all!) or for my grating accent. I didn't know that the French are more "honest" than our culture and that I would get asked why I don't speak as well as other Americans I was with, nor that I would be told by people that I had put weight on.   (FYI - patisseries and bread will do that to you. Quite quickly. Merci for letting me know how good it looke on  my cheeks!)  I didn't know in that Paris train station that I would knock on enough doors for a lifetime in just the first few months of being a missionary, and how very few people would let us it. I had sweaters, coats and winter boots; but I didn't know that the coastal winds blowing from England's Cliffs of Dover across the Atlantic - straight up my skirt -  in December on a bike could feel a million times colder than any snowy day I had endured in my college days of Utah.  I didn't know that 3 weeks after arriving there I would spend my  first Christmas homesick beyond words and missing my family and the 21 years of traditions and memories we had together.  I didn't know how hard it would be: to be up at 6 am every day. Every.Day. Even on our "days off."  To think I was going to have such an advantage with 7 years of French, only to be misunderstood so often and have no idea what a person just said to me.  To want so badly to be able to give people what I believed so strongly would bring them happiness, yet to have so few people interested in what I came there to do.  

But I also didn't know sitting in that train station how much I would come to love the people of France. That I would fall in love with the way they puffed out their mouths when they didn't know the answer to a question the way that we American shrug our shoulders.  How they shut down every business, school and bakery in order for children and parents to reunite everyday at noon for a 2 hour lunch together.  The way they rarely let a stanger in, but when they did they served you mint-flavored "sirop" or juice from a box, rarely cold.  But with love and kindness.  That the members of the Dunkerque Branch would become as dear to me as family, and that almost 20 years later I still think of so many of them with a smile...wondering where they are and if they are still in that little building that smelled of Frere Derripon't B.O. as the French's shower (and laundry) schedule is just another difference between the US of A.   I didn't know I could pray so hard for people I barely knew, or that someone I had just met could break my heart.  I didn't know then that there could possilby be so MUCH to challenge my faith, and it never once wavered.  Not once.  Or that 20 years later I could be surrounded by more daily blessings than challenges and have my faith waiver on a daily basis. 

I only knew then that I was in Paris.  The city I had dreamed of as a  teengager - each nite looking at the poster of The Eiffel Tower hanging in my blue bedroom, with only Madame Clark encouraging my desire to be a foreign exchange student there.  The city where I wasn't allowed to go as a teen, since I "had enough problems following the rules a HOME!"  The Paris I had seen in movies, read about and planned on visiting someday with the boy of my dreams.  

That day I was in Paris...not with my dream boy but with 2 19 year old boys who were confused missionaries wondering how they had gotten us there. And since obedience is of the utmost importance in missionary life, we stuck to the rules of missinaries, which was to stay in your mission. Which didn't include Paris.  So, at 21 years old, I sat in a Paris train station and never ventured up the stairs.  Never saw the lights twinkle on the Seine River or climbed the Eiffel Tower.  Never sat at a cafe and listened to the most beautiful language in the world spoken only like true Parisians do. 

I think it is time.  

Who the heck looks into going to the world's most romantic city...ALONE??

Thankful for:
1) beautiful talks at church today by my sister and brother in laws on being modern-day Pioneers
2) Jocelyn sharing little tid-bits about EFY..even if it's that the food was good
3) home-aid gauffres for the fam.  I did not parkake but they smelled delish.
4) one day of no sugar without too much pain.  (weighed myself at...Oh, i can't even write it. But more than I have weighed since last year at my very heaviest. Since I was with child. Geez Freakin Lousise)
5) WILL POWER
6)  spontaneity..am I really gonna do this???  looking at tickets. Just waiting to hear if the main childcare provider - AKA "DAD" of the 4 chillin' - will be able to take his last week of vacay to hang here with them.  Who wants grumpy Mom around anyway....Surely Paris is a WIN-WIN for everyone...