A Torch for the Journey

“All right, Kayla, the word is ‘ham.’ How do you spell ‘ham’?”

A thousand eyes drilled into the back of my head. Oh, for a thousand tongues to drown out what each eye was saying! Yet my one lonely tongue remained trapped behind my teeth as I balanced on the edge of a wooden folding chair. The July sun streamed through the tall windows, hot on my head like a spotlight. My friends sat in the front row as well, trapped with me in the humiliating battle of a Bible spelling bee at our first Family Convention. Meredith sat on my left and Daniel on my right, her wide green eyes and his darting blue ones carefully trained away from my face. Only they understood the weight a roomful of eyes could bear on eight-year-old shoulders, like a cloud ready to dump rain or shoot lightning bolts.

“The word is ‘ham,’ Kayla,” Mr. Demme repeated. “Would you like to spell that?”

I stared at this man, towering behind his lectern as he gazed at me. While he might have founded his own math company, this was the man who tugged my pigtails and gave under-doggies that flung me over Mt. Monadnock. His smile might have cheered me now, but I couldn’t see it through the cloud resting on my shoulders.

“That is too easy,” I told myself. “It can’t be h-a-m. It must be a whadyacallit—a homonym.” I wracked my brain for any alternate spellings I had learned in third grade, but all I could see was a blank gray chalkboard. I don’t know this word! The legendary butterflies were slamming their fragile bodies against my stomach lining, threatening to rise to my chest and come soaring out of my mouth on the wings of a whimper.

I looked at Mrs. Kathy Demme, Mr. Demme’s sister-in-law, who sat across from me to hand Mr. Demme the cards with the spelling words. Watching me, she had the eyes a doe has when she looks at her fawn tottering to walk. Our gaze held for a moment before I shook my head.

“Are you sure?” she asked, speaking softly like she were at a funeral and I had lost my best friend. “If you don’t try, you’ll be out.”

I shook my head again and stared at the floor. I wasn’t going to fail spelling a word I didn’t know, not in front of all these people. On signal, Daniel rose from his chair to my right. “Ham,” he said, his eyes flitting like a fawn’s when it’s caught in a trap, “h-a-m.”

As he sat back down with a Demme bouquet of congratulations, heat flared upwards in my face, breaking free from my body and streaking like a flame through the cloud until it hit the ceiling and formed into a rabid little creature that bumped around in search of escape. The higher my shame rose, the harder it pushed me into the ground until my two M-sized feet made an indent in the wood floor. I couldn’t take it any longer. Unneeded for the spelling bee, I rose and slipped out of the dining hall to the wide paneled hallway. With the silent laughter of my audience giving chase and nipping at my heels, I broke into a run for the open door which beckoned with the sunshine of freedom and release—release for the furry, saw-toothed creature of shame that bobbed along the ceiling over my head.

I wasn’t upset because I was a pastor’s kid who couldn’t win the Bible spelling bee. I was upset because I had known the right answer, yet I had still failed to achieve the perfection I strove for and the acceptance I craved.

As I burst into the sunshine and undammed salty rivers, my shame broke free too. Yet as the scent of fresh-cut grass hugged me, the little beast failed to self-destruct. Instead, he soared higher, feeding hungrily off the air.

I was born into a long line of spiritual Einsteins. My great-great-grandfather founded our church and led the building construction with nothing but a few cents and the power of the Holy Ghost. When my great-grandfather was a little boy, he circumnavigated the globe on his knees. My grandfather was recognized by many as a genius who could figure out how to design a perfect staircase without even having to scratch his head. And although my daddy never went to college, he possesses all the human skills that Jesus had except walking on water.

Descending from this brilliant line, three brothers and a sister saw the light of day well before I did. All of them graduated at the top of their respective homeschool classes, and they leaped forward into colleges like academic cheetahs who outran their classmates and embarrassed everyone for even trying to outstrip a Sandford. They did all this with the utmost grace and poise, like any member of the feline race, so they couldn’t help but win friends as every project they pawed sprang into life.

Following this wake of life, I became known as “Kendra’s sister,” or “Chad’s sister,” or “Craig’s sister,” or “Clyde’s sister.” I wore each title like a duchess, but it was still a lot to live up to. As my cub heart purred with pride for my siblings, I turned to win my own conquests; I started at Vacation Bible School.

“I can’t get it,” I whimpered. I scrutinized my carefully selected pile of seashells and the blue picture frame they were supposed to stick to. Panic rose in my chest as I watched the other children rise from their finished crafts and dash outside to play, leaving lopsidedly decorated picture frames, puddles of glue, and a showy dusting of glitter behind them, as if to proclaim that they had worked their artistic magic with pixie dust. No fairy dust or puddles congregated near my work site, but the seashells swam mysteriously before my eyes as my fingers froze to the table, too frightened to execute the brilliant plan I had drawn in my mind for decorating this future masterpiece.

“There, there, Kayla,” my teenage brother said. Craig wasn’t the stereotypical I-don’t-care-whatever-get-over-it teenager. He volunteered as a leader at Vacation Bible School, and he was my guardian angel, minus the halo and wings. His dark eyes didn’t reproach his six-year-old sister for being too pathetic to do a simple craft. Instead, he gently descended over my sterile work station and became the fingers I was too paralyzed to move.

“You have a plan?” Craig asked. “Tell me what to do.”

Sniffling, I directed his big piano-player hands. Under my direction, they glued one neat row of sea shells around the frame and then swirled a single stream of glitter glue around them so that it looked like the outline of a giant butterfly. His hands performed this task as calmly as if he’d been playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. My smile beamed through the fog of tears: the frame was even better than I had imagined! Maybe perfection wasn’t possible on my own, but with such divine intervention, perhaps something even better was attainable.

Yet if I couldn’t reach this ethereal standard in this lifetime, raw survival and endurance was the only alternative. Or so I thought. A few years after that day at Vacation Bible School, I rode my first roller coaster at Disney World. My older siblings all raved about how much they had loved Thunder Mountain Railroad when they were kids, so I prepared to embark on a journey of a lifetime with them. If they loved it, so would I.

I buckled myself in to the plastic car next to Craig, tucking all of my arms and legs into the vehicle, and prepared to enjoy the ride. It was the journey of a lifetime, all right. Riding that thing was like being thrown into a black bottle and tossed into a raging sea. Darkness engulfed us while rain pelted our Mickey Mouse slickers from every side, and as soon as I gasped for air at the top of a wave, we plummeted downward and jerked in another unforeseen direction. Unable to see and scarcely able to breathe, I gritted my teeth as I waited for the nightmare to pass, drowning in the knowledge that riding roller coasters was one skill I couldn’t share with my siblings. The furry creature of shame was a monster leering over me now, and I lay down to block out his snarls.

“It’s okay, dear,” Craig’s voice broke over the snarls and cradled my head in his lap. “We’ll make it through—” Sudden lurch to the right—“Don’t be afraid—” My stomach dips below my feet—“I love you—” Speedy ascent that slows to a crawl—“We’re going up a little rise and are about to go down again—” We plunge into a gaping abyss—“Now we’re about to turn left. That’s it. It’s okay, dear. Up another hill now.”

In this manner, Craig talked me through Thunder Mountain Railroad like Sacajawea soothing Lewis and Clark across the wilds of the frontier. By the end of that trip, I knew two things: I hated roller coasters, and my brother loved me anyway. And I decided that I could survive any journey if such a torch burned by my side to light the way, and if that were the case, perhaps the torch was there to help me do more than survive until I reached my destination. Perhaps on this journey I was meant to thrive.

Yet even Sacajawea’s journey met some rapids in her canoe, and so did Craig. When he was almost nineteen, one of his friends drove off a sixty-foot cliff in California. Her quirky smile had been a torch in his canoe, and when he heard that it had been extinguished, he immediately went for a walk that winter morning. The New England chill breathed into every walker’s nostrils and froze every hair huddled inside, and it would have paralyzed every limb if they didn’t keep moving. As Craig’s tall, dark form wandered up the road, brooding in his own black bottle, a strange dog (he never told me what breed) came bounding up to him and followed him to our local lake. Winter had crusted the surface of the lake and then polished it until it was as smooth as an eggshell, except where the shell broke to reveal water churning under the surface.

Meditatively, Craig stooped to pick up a piece of ice, wondering what it would look like to see it skidding over the glass and into the water many yards from the shore. As soon as the ice flew from his hand, the dog at his side flew after it without hesitation, legs flailing as she danced across the ice and landed in the water with a soft plop. The dog hadn’t stopped to consider the wisdom of the journey. She hadn’t paused to check the temperature of the water at her destination. She had just leapt after it, twirling on the cracking floor like she was a ballroom dancer thirsting to try extreme sports. Why? Because she was a dog, and dogs “fetch” things. Responding to the chase was as natural as panting to her, so she simply lived out her identity on this short journey. Frolicking on the ice was just part of the fun.

Naturally, Craig didn’t see the dog’s response as fun. He responded with a quick rush to the neighbor’s house for a 911 call, and soon the fire truck wailed in and Craig had to apologize to the owner of a very wet dog. Yet this wet dog had distracted him from the tragedy at hand, and Craig found a tiny torch glowing in his own black bottle on the stormy sea.

Still, the storms of growing up as the youngest in a long line of geniuses weren’t over for me. When I was fourteen, I entered one more Bible contest, but instead of spelling short words with my peers, I re-enacted a lengthy passage of Scripture before college-age competitors and a handful of judges. This contest was part of a larger team event, and I had poured five weeks of feverish energy into preparation for the fateful night when I would once again stand with a thousand eyes upon me.

“When Gideon came, behold, a man was telling a dream to his comrade. And he said, ‘Behold,’” I imitated a British accent, “ ‘I dreamed a dream, and behold, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian and came to the tent and struck it so that it fell and turned it upside down, so that the tent lay flat.’” (Judges 7.13, English Standard Version) As I said this, I slapped my thigh and turned a somersault, becoming that upturned tent. This tent lay flat for a moment, heaving slightly. Surprised laughter rippled through my audience as their eyes bore into me, but I didn’t cower under the cloud this time. I was older now and I was a Sandford, settling into my identity of excellence. I leaped back up and was soon blowing imaginary trumpets and smashing phantom pitchers as I roared, “A sword for the Lord, and for Gideon!” (Judges 7.20)

The cloud showered its applause, louder than a downpour on pavement. Most of my competitors shook their heads, certain that this youngest player would take first prize, or at least second or third. And, as I watched other competitors falter over their verses or recite them like limp fish, I had to agree. Yet when I collapsed in the brown recliner at home, I held a bouquet of congratulations labeled “4th place.”

It doesn’t matter how that label got there. Yet the number stunned me, and because I had only won fourth place instead of placing with my teammate brother Clyde, our team had lost the whole event. I sprawled in the faded chair like a wilting vine, my lifeblood of Sandford confidence draining away. I had striven for perfection again and lost. I had tumbled and yelled word-perfect passages to please the judges and failed. I had stood before an audience, unafraid to perform and shine like every other Sandford. Yet in every way that I had sweat and stood on the scales of public opinion, like proud Belshazzar, I had been found wanting (Dan. 5.22-27).

The rabid monster was now devouring a hole in the ceiling above my head, and I was sinking far into the floor, too white and bloodless to resist its oncoming attack.

However, just then, Craig came through the front door, arriving back from the Bible memory contest. No longer a Vacation Bible School leader, he still hurried in my direction. As he hovered over me, his tall frame momentarily blocked out the monster gnawing on the ceiling.

“I thought you were wonderful!” he exclaimed, and like a dove, he descended and folded me in his wings. At the sound of those words, I heard the monster choke, and just before the wings blocked it out of sight, I glimpsed it cowering and shrinking like an ice wolf before a torch. I closed my eyes to the vision and nestled in those wings for a few moments, drinking in the truth that I didn’t need to earn this love. And it would light the rest of my journey.