⋙ Read Gratis Between Worlds Marilyn R Gardner 9780983865384 Books

Between Worlds Marilyn R Gardner 9780983865384 Books

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Between Worlds Marilyn R Gardner 9780983865384 Books

One of my favorite quotes from Eugene H. Peterson (a writer whose work I devour) comes from the foreword to a book he didn’t write, called Sidewalks in the Kingdom. “I find that cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is even more difficult than persuading men and women of the truth of the message of Jesus,” Peterson, a longtime pastor, writes. “God’s great love and purposes for us are worked out in the messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, daily work, working with us as we are and not as we should be, and where we are… and not where we would like to be.”

I’ve resonated with those words ever since reading them a decade ago. At the time, I was living and working in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a city I had come to love. I was that guy who walked everywhere he could, including work – noticing cracks in the sidewalks, graffiti on the backs of street signs, potted plants on stoops. I was the guy who hung out in locally-owned coffee shops and stopped by the farmer’s market on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I was that guy with the “I Heart City Life” bumper sticker on the back of his car. I belonged.

But I was simultaneously also an outsider, similar in certain ways with the refugees I served in my job as a caseworker. While one of my friends from Lancaster can trace his family’s roots in the area back 13 generations, my family had only settled there in 1998. We were transplants, newbies. And although we could speak the language and look the part, we hadn’t come from a neighboring county or somewhere like New Jersey. We had come from Guatemala, a land so utterly mysterious that stories from our life there tended to draw blank stares.

When I eventually got married and moved across the country to Arizona, I sensed in some of my Pennsylvania friends an attitude of inevitability, the idea that Lancaster was more or less just a layover for me (albeit a 13-year one), between Guatemala and wherever I was off to next. Perhaps in some ways, they were right – more so than this nomad realized at the time.

Needless to say, the idea of place is a complicated one for people like me. And by people like me, I mean third culture kids – those of us who have spent formative years in a culture other than that of their parents. It’s for that reason that I feel an immediate connection to others who have grown up between cultures, even if I know virtually nothing about the specific context of their upbringing and they know little of mine. That’s also why I so appreciate reading the stories of other TCKs, like the ones Marilyn Gardner shares in her book, Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging.

“Third culture kids have stories. Their stories are detailed and vibrant. Stories of travel between worlds, of cross-cultural relationships and connections, of grief and of loss, of goodbyes and hellos and more goodbyes,” Gardner writes. “Every good story has a conflict. Never being fully part of any world is ours. This is what makes our stories and memories rich and worth hearing. We live between worlds, sometimes comfortable in one, sometimes in the other, but only truly comfortable in the space between. This is our conflict and the heart of our story.”

Gardner herself grew up in Pakistan, spending formative years living far from her parents at a boarding school. As an adult, she finds herself feeling nostalgic about the taste and smell of chai tea, shopping for a shalwar kameez at the bazaar, and waking up before dawn to the sound of the call to prayer – just as I experience nostalgia for the taste of tortillas and tamalitos made over an open fire, the intoxicating/nauseating smell of dust and diesel (looking at you, Bruce Cockburn!), and family visits to Lago de Atitlán, the most beautiful lake in the world.

Gardner captures the importance of sharing these memories with anyone who will listen:

The more I hear from immigrants, refugees and third culture kids, the more I am convinced that communicating our stories is a critical part of adjusting to life in our passport countries. We have a lifetime of experiences that when boxed up for fear of misunderstanding, will result in depression and deep pain. As we tell our stories we realize that these transitions and moves are all a part of a bigger narrative, a narrative that is strong and solid and gives meaning to our lives. As we learn to tell our stories we understand not only the complexity of our experience, but the complexity of the human experience, the human heart. So we learn to tell our stories – because your story, my story, and our stories matter.
Between Worlds may not be a book for everyone. It will certainly resonate most deeply with my fellow TCKs. Then again, we all live in an increasingly mobile, uprooted age. Few of us will spend our entire lives in one place. Whether it’s for school, or a job, or a relationship, most of us will move, and moving from one place to another means learning to live between worlds.

None of this, it should be said, diminishes the importance and value of place. The places we live matter – all of them, even if we carry many places with us in our hearts. With Peterson, I can wholeheartedly affirm that the place where we are, right now, is the “exclusive and irreplaceable setting” for becoming the kind of people we were made to be.

Being able to trace your family line 13 generations back in the place you were born and raised is a beautiful thing, and it’s natural to envy a story like that. But that’s not my story; it’s probably not your story either. That’s why, rather than seeing my life as a story marked by deprivation – deprived of one place and one people to which I unambiguously belong – I’ve chosen to see my life as one enriched by a kaleidoscope of people and places, each one beautiful, each one irreplaceable in its uniqueness.


Tags : Between Worlds [Marilyn R. Gardner] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. In the hall of an old Inn by the ocean is a sign that reads 'Home is Where Our Story Begins.' But if home is where our story begins,Marilyn R. Gardner,Between Worlds,Doorlight Publications,0983865388,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs,Biography Autobiography,Essays,Memoirs,Personal Memoirs,RELIGION Essays,ReligionEssays

Between Worlds Marilyn R Gardner 9780983865384 Books Reviews

I LOVE this book! As a TCK now living overseas again as an adult, I could relate perfectly to almost everything the author says. Even though I've never lived in the particular places where she has, there's just something about the overseas experience that we all share. If I knew Marilyn Gardner personally, I would have called her up several different times to say, "Yes! You nailed it! I know EXACTLY what that's like!" A number of times I was moved to tears as I read, just because her stories resonated so clearly with me. I really think every adult TCK and parent of a TCK should read this. Actually, it would be particularly helpful for teenage TCKs in the process of transitioning back to their passport countries. I wish I had read it back then, myself - it would have made things a little easier, just to have a clearer understanding of what I was going through and to know that I wasn't alone in what I was feeling.

I've recommended this book to my whole family, and several of them have bought it and read it already. I plan to recommend it to expat friends in my community, too. Thank you, Marilyn, for putting into words what we all go through!
Between Worlds Essays on Culture and Belonging by Marilyn Gardner was a very interesting read. The author speaks transparently about her life as a missionary daughter in Egypt and Pakistan and her cross-cultural adjustments, especially when coming to the U.S.A. She tells about her years in a boarding school and the differences in Eastern culture and the West. She is a “third culture kid.”

I thought she described her childhood very well, making you want to go to the places, drink warm chai, and enjoy the group friendships that you have in other countries. She speaks of hellos and many goodbyes, of fitting in and not fitting in at all. She talks about people not believing her when she tells stories—true stories—about her life.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It is well written and shows how most missionary kids really, truly feel about their lives. The author balances her quest for identity and belonging with her God-given blessings. She has a wanderlust borne out of her traveling background, and she gladly shares it with her own children.

I found this a valuable book. If you ever desire to understand third culture kids in a Christian context, this is a good book to read. It’s fun, too! I heartily recommend it to any woman in ministry, as well as military women.
My own experience and the circumstances of my childhood as a military dependent were very different from those of Marilyn Gardner’s childhood but the emotional journey she shares in “Between Worlds” is remarkably similar to my own. When Marilyn describes sipping tea with friends in a Chai shop in Pakistan her words capture perfectly the bittersweet feelings such memories hold for third culture kids and others who have lived abroad. I have never been to Pakistan or known the taste of chai but her story ignites my own journey back almost 40 years to sunny afternoons at a Bratwurst stand in Bitburg, Germany. I laughed out loud reading about how she fought off her nomadic urge to move by rearranging the furniture. She captured the confusion and fear one feels when leaving a place you know and love to go to a place where you don’t know a living soul and have never lived before; a place you have been taught to call “home.” She describes perfectly the frustration third culture kids experience when they feel the need to edit their life story to keep new friends from thinking they are bragging or being snobbish. I could go on but suffice it to say this book moved me and helped me better understand my own nomadic childhood and the role it still plays in who I am today.
One of my favorite quotes from Eugene H. Peterson (a writer whose work I devour) comes from the foreword to a book he didn’t write, called Sidewalks in the Kingdom. “I find that cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is even more difficult than persuading men and women of the truth of the message of Jesus,” Peterson, a longtime pastor, writes. “God’s great love and purposes for us are worked out in the messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, daily work, working with us as we are and not as we should be, and where we are… and not where we would like to be.”

I’ve resonated with those words ever since reading them a decade ago. At the time, I was living and working in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a city I had come to love. I was that guy who walked everywhere he could, including work – noticing cracks in the sidewalks, graffiti on the backs of street signs, potted plants on stoops. I was the guy who hung out in locally-owned coffee shops and stopped by the farmer’s market on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I was that guy with the “I Heart City Life” bumper sticker on the back of his car. I belonged.

But I was simultaneously also an outsider, similar in certain ways with the refugees I served in my job as a caseworker. While one of my friends from Lancaster can trace his family’s roots in the area back 13 generations, my family had only settled there in 1998. We were transplants, newbies. And although we could speak the language and look the part, we hadn’t come from a neighboring county or somewhere like New Jersey. We had come from Guatemala, a land so utterly mysterious that stories from our life there tended to draw blank stares.

When I eventually got married and moved across the country to Arizona, I sensed in some of my Pennsylvania friends an attitude of inevitability, the idea that Lancaster was more or less just a layover for me (albeit a 13-year one), between Guatemala and wherever I was off to next. Perhaps in some ways, they were right – more so than this nomad realized at the time.

Needless to say, the idea of place is a complicated one for people like me. And by people like me, I mean third culture kids – those of us who have spent formative years in a culture other than that of their parents. It’s for that reason that I feel an immediate connection to others who have grown up between cultures, even if I know virtually nothing about the specific context of their upbringing and they know little of mine. That’s also why I so appreciate reading the stories of other TCKs, like the ones Marilyn Gardner shares in her book, Between Worlds Essays on Culture and Belonging.

“Third culture kids have stories. Their stories are detailed and vibrant. Stories of travel between worlds, of cross-cultural relationships and connections, of grief and of loss, of goodbyes and hellos and more goodbyes,” Gardner writes. “Every good story has a conflict. Never being fully part of any world is ours. This is what makes our stories and memories rich and worth hearing. We live between worlds, sometimes comfortable in one, sometimes in the other, but only truly comfortable in the space between. This is our conflict and the heart of our story.”

Gardner herself grew up in Pakistan, spending formative years living far from her parents at a boarding school. As an adult, she finds herself feeling nostalgic about the taste and smell of chai tea, shopping for a shalwar kameez at the bazaar, and waking up before dawn to the sound of the call to prayer – just as I experience nostalgia for the taste of tortillas and tamalitos made over an open fire, the intoxicating/nauseating smell of dust and diesel (looking at you, Bruce Cockburn!), and family visits to Lago de Atitlán, the most beautiful lake in the world.

Gardner captures the importance of sharing these memories with anyone who will listen

The more I hear from immigrants, refugees and third culture kids, the more I am convinced that communicating our stories is a critical part of adjusting to life in our passport countries. We have a lifetime of experiences that when boxed up for fear of misunderstanding, will result in depression and deep pain. As we tell our stories we realize that these transitions and moves are all a part of a bigger narrative, a narrative that is strong and solid and gives meaning to our lives. As we learn to tell our stories we understand not only the complexity of our experience, but the complexity of the human experience, the human heart. So we learn to tell our stories – because your story, my story, and our stories matter.
Between Worlds may not be a book for everyone. It will certainly resonate most deeply with my fellow TCKs. Then again, we all live in an increasingly mobile, uprooted age. Few of us will spend our entire lives in one place. Whether it’s for school, or a job, or a relationship, most of us will move, and moving from one place to another means learning to live between worlds.

None of this, it should be said, diminishes the importance and value of place. The places we live matter – all of them, even if we carry many places with us in our hearts. With Peterson, I can wholeheartedly affirm that the place where we are, right now, is the “exclusive and irreplaceable setting” for becoming the kind of people we were made to be.

Being able to trace your family line 13 generations back in the place you were born and raised is a beautiful thing, and it’s natural to envy a story like that. But that’s not my story; it’s probably not your story either. That’s why, rather than seeing my life as a story marked by deprivation – deprived of one place and one people to which I unambiguously belong – I’ve chosen to see my life as one enriched by a kaleidoscope of people and places, each one beautiful, each one irreplaceable in its uniqueness.