New Year: Departures

We boarded a ship

    for ports along the coast. (Acts 27:2)

Our daughter Jen and her family, departed on the Ruby Princess from the Embarcadero in San Francisco for a ten day cruise to Cabo San Lucas and “ports along the coast.” The sad part of the story is twofold: 1) We were not able to join them as we had hoped, due to my upcoming Deep Brain Stimulation surgery schedule; and 2) We decided against accompanying them to the ship to see them off. We didn’t want to risk the City—too much trouble. This second sadness stirred memories of such departures.

From time to time, my parents would take us to The City to bid farewell to a missionary family, like Bill and Doris Berg and their about-our-same-age children Mitzi and Billy. They boarded a freighter bound for the Philippians—no cruise ship partings to Cabo. We were free to board the ship with them. For a twelve year old, the whole adventure was filled with wonder. Mitzi and Billy showed us their quarters, and together, watched the ropes and pulleys and burly longshore man load up the ship’s holds. As we left the ship, we were handed streamers from the ship to hold on to from the peer—Billy and Mitzi holding their end from the ship; and, Janlyn and me on the other end holding on from the peer. As the ship pulled out our streamers would stretch taunt. We held on tight until the streamer broke.

It wasn’t over yet. We drove from the peer to the Santa Rosa side of the Golden Gate Bridge where we waved one last good-by as their ship passed under The Bridge towards their four year missionary stint somewhere far away.

I phoned Janlyn just to make sure this wasn’t some sort of dream. She adjudicated it all and added some, like when we meet Mitzi and Billy four years later at the Home Peace in Oakland— a place provided for missionaries coming and going. “Yes, I do remember that,” I told her. And how we had changed. When they departed, we were children; and, when they returned, we were teenagers. I couldn’t help but notice.

The next time the Bergs departed it would be from SFO—not the same. Older missionaries would tell how they missed the voyage—it gave them time to prepare for their arrival in another land; and, coming home, it gave them time to decompress and think about their days on the field and how they would share it all with us. MKs and PKs—Missionary Kids and Preacher Kids; we were an odd bunch. They, the adventuresome ones; we, the home bodies. Today, I think of that oddness as blessing—who else participated in such departures and homecomings?

Maybe we can think of departing the old year and sailing into a new year as something of voyage to ports unknown. As the Bible likes to say, “Who knows?”