Guest 2: NY and Thoughts

Kent here again.  As far as impacting blog entries go, Kimberly’s New York chronicles in March 2012 also hit me hard because of a dichotomy: the postings are mostly light-hearted and really focused on the work and antics that the team was doing there from their Queens Borough base; however, our text messages back and forth really painted a different picture, a dark one.  I wish I still had some of the texts, but on second thought, I'm glad they're gone, erased from memory.  As an aside, and a little humorous now that the bills are square, there was a miscommunication between our cellular carrier and ourselves before that trip, such that when the next month's bill arrived, it was...nearly $700!  After some fight, they agreed to knock it down by several hundred, but it was still a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, knowing how preciously essential that back-and-forth had been for us.  That's another reason we are glad those texts are gone.  Only Bell Mobility knows the suffering they have caused.

Kim really is in her element in the Big Apple.  She loves everything about it, down to the last little rat-infested, windblown-garbage-strewn piece of chaotic asphalt and all the labyrinthine underbelly known as the subway.  Yes, it is amazing to me that the whole metropolis hasn't just come to a screeching, grinding, rusted-out halt one day, but instead somehow keeps lurching along, courtesy of patches and fixes half-heartedly applied at the last possible moment by city work crews.   It truly is a living organism - it has soul, and when you look beneath the bravado and the crusty exterior, you find the heart of the people.  Inexplicably, in a short time it grew on me almost as much as it grew on her.  Victoria is great, but I believe we would be living in the city that never sleeps if the opportunity arose and the choice were solely in Kimberly’s hands.  I think it is because of the amazing characters she has met and events that she has been a part in on multiple visits to the city, while sharing it with and seeing all the wonderment again and again through the eyes of a new batch of students and leaders from Emmanuel Church in Westbank. 

But in the 10+ days of this trip, the fears began to snake their way through her optimism and faith as she was no longer sleeping and her body was badly misbehaving.  From our home in Victoria, the picture wasn't looking promising, and I began to allow myself to think I was seeing the beginning of her end, and I wept.  And I heard songs that made me weep.  And I thought of her children without her, and I wept.  Thinking back to those weeks is still very painful for me; I was terrified, and I can't imagine what it was like for my outwardly tough but inwardly soft Kimberly.