I have absolutely no shame in admitting that at least once a week I find myself wishing my life were a musical.

It makes no sense at all. I like dramas and comedies and books about education or journalism. But I love High School Musical. And Hairspray. And Hannah Montana. If it is cheesy, people break into song when doing everyday tasks and there are choreographed dance routines, then I’m in.

I don’t know when I first discovered that cheesy teen musicals made me feel better, but I tried to hide it as long as possible. Surely, a grown-up with a real job and college loans to pay off should not be so engrossed in Zac Efron’s major high school dilemmas.

Until last night, I hadn’t been able to defend myself when others figure out my silly obsession. I just chalked it up to my one weird thing that has no rhyme or reason. Teen musicals simply make me feel better. I don’t understand it. I told people. Then I finally got my answer.

Each year for work, all of the schools in the charter network I work for gather at a national conference for a week of professional development and mingling. On the last night of the conference we have a banquet to celebrate the successes the teachers, students and schools have had in the past year. Students from one of the schools attending the conference always perform at the banquet. I love the performances because I love seeing talented kids who have been given confidence in their artistic abilities.

And it’s the closet to a musical my life ever gets.

Until last night.

In the middle of the second dance performance, the sound cut out. One minute we were listening to and enjoying the flamenco. The next, the room was silent. To their credit, the students kept dancing. To our credit, in 15 seconds nearly every person in the room was humming, singing and clapping. By the end of the song we were all on our feet in all-out sing-a-long.

It was exactly what I always hope will happen when any error occurs in my day. I dropped my coffee? It would be better if the people around me broke into song about how the day could only get better from there. The wind whips my skirt all around me just before a rainstorm? What if we all broke out umbrellas and danced? My crush walks into the room? It’s definitely time to sing.

The sound goes out in the middle of a performance? Four hundred teachers in cocktail dresses should break into a rendition of Marc Anthony’s “I need to know.”

Silly high school musicals remind me not to take the world too seriously. They take things like rainstorms or coffee spills and turn them into something to laugh about. So why not? Life gives you lemons? Coordinate a dance move or two.

As I stepped onto the elevator after the performance, I was confronted with a gaggle of giggly 14-year-old dancers, still ecstatic about their performance.

“Did you hear them all singing?” a curly headed girl asked her friend. “It was like being in High School Musical.”

“It was so awesome. I wish more days in my life were like that,” her friend sighed.

Me too.

Sometimes I forget the power that stories have on us, but the other day I was reminded that in some ways they are even more important here in Africa, where the oral tradition is still so strong. I was speaking to one of the African translators named David, about a specific crew member who spent much of her free time visiting patients. These patients were staying at a warehouse that Mercy Ships has converted in to a hospitality center for patients to stay who need frequent follow up. He was telling me about how much the patients and their families loved having her come and play with them or teach them a simple craft of some sort.

Then he started talking about a story that she would read to the patients. It’s a children’s book written by Max Lucado called You Are Special. As he began relating the story to us, his whole demeanor changed, and I could tell that the story had made a lasting impression on him.

Here is an explanation of the story as best as I remember it, but I would suggest you read it for yourself if to get the chance…

It’s a story about Punchinello, a wooden person called a Wemmick. The Wemmicks spend their days putting stickers on each other- gold stars for “good Wemmicks” and dots for not-so good Wemmicks. Punchinello has dots all over him, because he doesn’t have any special skills and is clumsy.  Because of his dots, everyone makes fun of him and he begins to feel like an outcast.

Then one day he meets a girl who doesn’t have any stars or dots on her, and he asks her why she is different from all of the other Wemmicks. She explains that she has met Eli, the woodcarver who made the Wemmicks, and she suggests that Punchinello go to visit him.

Punchinello goes to see Eli, and Eli explains that the stars and dots only stick if you let them. And that it doesn’t matter what the people in the town think of him, because Eli, his maker, made him and he thinks Punchinello is special.  Punchinello finally understands where his true worth lies, and as he leaves the house, the dots that have caused him so much pain start to fall off.

After David told the story he spoke of how much it meant to the patients who heard it. Our patients that stay at the hospitality center are people who have dealt with an immense amount of physical and emotional suffering throughout most of their lives. Many of them have disfiguring tumors, burns, or conditions that have caused them to be ostracized and sometimes completely rejected by their families.

In a culture that is deeply rooted in superstition and voodoo, their conditions are thought to be a curse, and therefore those around them pull away in fear. I could see it in the way that  David told the story, that he and the people listening understood the message behind the book.

— — —

Olivia Roberts currently lives on a ship in West Africa, and spends most of her days putting casts on cute African kids and thinking up new amazing puns to tell all of her friends. When she’s not in Africa she can generally be found playing outside and staying as far away from work as possible.

Olivia is a guest writer for This Ordinary Day. If you would like to be a guest writer, please click here.

Piano music has a way of transporting me completely into moments of the past. I don’t know what it is about the melodic and lyric-less, but it can take me back to another place and time in my life.

Recently I was studying for an accreditation test for work. It was 3:30 in the afternoon; right about the time the afternoon begins to grow tedious on a flawless early summer day. I study best to piano music, so I had put a Lorie Line station on Pandora and played it softly as I read.

A song came on that caught my attention. I am not sure if it was the chords or the sad slowness with which the pianist played, but after about 10 seconds of it, my pen frozen above my paper, I glanced at my computer screen to see what the song was.

“Nothing Left to Say” by Jim Brickman. I had never heard of him or the song. But I loved the title, because that’s how I felt when I listened to it. Memories began to flit in and out of my mind. It might be described as nostalgic but I prefer to call it poetic.

For some reason, I thought of the day Cody broke up with me eight years ago, two days after we graduated high school. I was 18. Now I understand that that was such an odd time to get dumped. You are on the verge of jumping out into this world (kind of… I guess college is still kind of a fake world) and you’re trying all these new things and figuring out who you are. But then suddenly, your best friend just isn’t around anymore.

He had been my very best friend and love for three years. And though we had only been in high school, our relationship had changed me deeply. To be dumped by someone like that is to take a sucker punch to the gut.

I remember staring at him, eyes wide, mouth open, not knowing what to say. I knew that turning away in a rageful huff was not with in my realm of abilities. I loved that sweet face.

Ironically enough, the song also made my mind drift to wedding day. There was something so moving about that day, and not just because I was getting married. I remember looking into his face and feeling such a sense of relief, as if I had been on the verge of a close call, of missing out on this guy forever.

A year and a half into our marriage, it makes me smile. We are young but the canyons and valleys of our story make me feel older.

The story is a good one, and any music that takes me back to the middle of a good story is music I love. If my life had a soundtrack, not only would more of it be instrumental than I care to admit, but Jim Brickman would definitely make the cut.

When I became a Jesuit Volunteer three years ago and first saw a picture of the house where I’d be living in Raleigh, I immediately thrilled to the fact that it had a porch, complete with a colorful woven hammock and two wooden rocking chairs. Not being from the South, I imagined chair-rockin’, banjo-pickin’, drawl-perfectin’, sweet tea-drinkin’ afternoons on our Southern front porch. I dreamed of lemonade in bell jars and the scent of bouganvillea.

What my fellow volunteers and I didn’t expect were the massive — and occupied — spiderwebs strung across the porch ceiling that we had to attack with a hose (for web removal) and broom (for long-distance spider elimination). We didn’t expect the mosquitoes that would swarm as soon as you found a comfortable spot in the hammock, or the giant palmetto bugs that lurked at night and scuttled out to greet unwary visitors.

But we also didn’t expect that it would be the perfect place to sit on a rainy night and talk about jobs, relationships, life in general and in the specifics. We didn’t expect that it would be a refuge for the Indonesian trafficking victims who lived with us for a week while they smoked cigarettes and called home. Or that the neighborhood kids would use it as their personal hangout between basketball games, and play with our hammock so much we thought it would break. Or even that the neighborhood cat, Night-Night, would decide that we adopted him and lounge on the porch like he owned it. Our porch was dirtier, prettier, noisier, busier, quieter and more peaceful than we expected. It was, in short, a centerpiece and a gathering place for what was a transformative year in my life.

“You can’t go home again” is the tired cliché used to speak the truth that time changes places and people, softening edges and filtering memories. What it doesn’t get across is the beauty of experiencing a familiar place as a different person, using it as a yardstick to measure the change that slowly creeps on life’s latticework.

I thought about that as my Raleigh volunteers and I drove toward that familiar porch last Saturday, together again for the first time since we ended our volunteer year. It had been two years since I had seen some of them, and the intervening time had brought new jobs, lost jobs, new paths, live-in boyfriends, breakups, and even an engagement. We all had agreed that it was time for a reunion and descended upon Raleigh, where two of my former housemates were still living.

That year was probably the most challenging and rewarding year of my life thus far, and I’m still trying to process all the ways it has shaped me since then. Our community of four women had been incredibly close, but had also been beset by some deep challenges — work difficulties, personal clashes, mental illness. I looked toward our reunion with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Would all of our rough edges stand out, or would we click like we had in the past?

The answer is a little bit of both, of course, and as we stood in the living room of our old house chatting with the current volunteer community, I think we all felt a wave of nostalgia for our own memories of the space. I remembered Elyse’s extra-long prayers of grace before dinner that walked through her entire day, spooning with Claire on our sagging futon, Elisha’s gourmet meals, and baking granola that cooled in the afternoon sunlight in our kitchen. The house even still smelled the same: a combination of damp mustiness and old wood and people who don’t bathe very often.

We stopped to take a picture on our old porch, the scene of our many conversations and reflections together. It looked mostly the same, with the addition of some tomato plants and a sign advertising the house as a Jesuit Volunteer community.

As we spent time together that weekend, I realized that we remained the same in the essentials — the easy, playful relationships that belie the depth of our care for one another. The details of the conversations have changed: we talk about Elyse’s upcoming wedding, Elisha’s job search, Claire’s preparations to be a nurse midwife, my new boyfriend and impending move to grad school. We still have our rough edges, but there is grace there, and grace’s courier, laughter. Our volunteer program talks about being “ruined for life.” Three years later, we are walking ruins, and new growth is sprouting in the cracks.

Before nightfall the echoes will be heard.
Whispers of young men turn into barks and cries.
Their brash mischief leading arrogance without home.

Jawing and jawing and jawing.

Their desperate hearts, a furious crescendo.
A fracas of hands and lips and indecipherable grunts.
An army of undeveloped men.

A once survives myth, a gold themed aura of ego.
The ashes flutter deep within a furnace.
Bellows heave and sigh, sending them skyward
in a buckshot spray of calmness.

Hackneyed arms. Crisp and delicate.
Worn like old leather and creaking with every step.

Do not flirt with forgiveness. Do not ask your enemies to allay.
Held down and branded with a chaser of salt.

The smell of melted flesh. Scar tissue after scar tissue.
Still harping. Still taunting. Still waiting.

A wave of strength beyond the breath of youth. Age remembers a
cure for inequality. It sharpens worn ends and mends brittle armor.

Sweetness. A taste of glory. Bitter at first, but memory brings back
the flavor. It nourishes like mother’s milk. It reminds with a brimstone kiss.

Rejuvenated. Reborn. A hard day with good reason to sleep. The dreams
are punctuated by the sounds of comeuppance. 


I grew up in Phoenix and have fond memories of summer “monsoons” in the desert. Each year was so dry and arid; winter was practically non-existent (in fact, I distinctly remember running out to meet the ice cream man wearing shorts and a t-shirt one Christmas Eve). The summer rain represented the only visible marker of a change in seasons.

I really used to enjoy those summer storms. The warm rain offered reprieve from the hot, summer sun. Most of the time there would be a blackout. My mom would light candles when the power was out for any extended period of time, and I would crawl into bed in my pajamas and listen to the thunder. I was always amazed at how even when it was rainy and stormy outside, the sun would never stop shining.

When my family moved to the Midwest when I was in high school, I became acquainted with a different type of storm. These storms were ominous and dark. The sky opened up in a torrential downpour, sometimes raining down golf ball sized hail. Choosing to go to the University of Kansas for undergrad meant even more scary storms. I woke up one Sunday during my junior year to watch the Lawrence “microburst” of 2006 pass over my bedroom window and wreck havoc on the rest of the city, as my sorority sisters and I ran for cover on the first floor. Another summer I almost nearly got swept away in a flash flood when trying to make my way back from errands in Kansas City. It took 45 minutes of white-knuckled driving and lots of prayers muttered under my breath to drive just a few miles to safety. Midwestern storms quite literally blew Arizona monsoons out of the water.

I am now more than halfway through my first summer as a resident of Scotland. I have quickly learned the weather is quite predictable in Scotland: rain is a daily occurrence no matter what the season. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many umbrellas I’ve surrendered to the harsh northern winds, and I’ve given up carrying one altogether. I had just about reached my limit of this weather last week. I was frustrated that my summer was almost over without ever really getting much of a summer at all (with the exception of a few days in Croatia and a week in Tuscany, where luckily the sun was shining with the temperatures to match). The gladiator sandals I bought in April, with dreams of breezy summer dresses and picnics in the park filling my head, lay pretty much untouched in the corner of my room. Instead, I’m wearing boots and leggings to combat the cold wetness that has permeated most of my June and almost all of my July. I was mourning the loss of warm weather and sunshine last Friday, locked up inside, hunched over my laptop working on my master’s thesis (which I’ve unfortunately put off as long as possible).

A rain soaked morning finally gave way to sunshine, while I was stuck inside cursing my own procrastination. But then, while the sun was still blazing in the sky, the rain began to come down in torrents and light cracks of thunder filled my ears. All of the sudden it struck a chord in me. I was taken back to my 7-year-old self, relishing in the sunny desert rain. I stood at the window for a few moments admiring the lush, wet greenery on the outside, wondering why I wasn’t more thankful for the refreshing rain. All at once I realized how really blessed I am. All the stress of my thesis and the mountain of tasks in front of me dropped away. I took that much needed moment to spend in gratitude.

And then just like that the rain stopped. With the sun still shining I threw on my sneakers and went for the first rain-free run I’ve had all summer.