I've started to think of myself as one of God's wild cards. Seems to me the Presbyterian Church probably thought it knew exactly what it was getting when it spent the money to send my parents and three toddlers to Ethiopia in the mid-1950s. Perhaps it got pretty much what it hoped for from my parents: almost 25 years of committed, sensitive service. But it also got me.

I was 2 when we moved to Ethiopia. "Are you going to be a missionary when you grow up?" adults would sometimes ask. Ha! Not that I had anything against the work I saw my parents doing. No, I have memories as strong as coffee of my childhood--scrambling up the Maji mountainsides after my father as he went to fix the mill that ground grain for people from miles around; watching him inoculate struggling mules against the sleeping sickness that waited where the Ethiopian plateau sloped down to grasslands.

I even have good memories--though the mud benches were cold and hard--of sitting through long sermons in Amharic, sometimes translated into two or three other languages, and of falling asleep on my dad's lap and being passed to one of the men sitting nearby, so my dad could get up and say the benediction. I can still smell those old green hymnals we used for Sunday evening worship and hear the wheezy sound of their tunes on the pump organ.

My hard memories are of mission interpretation back in the United States. We came back twice, when I was 7 and when I was 13. "How do you like it in Ethiopia?" adults asked. Since we had been in Ethiopia as long as I could remember, I never knew what to say.

"Did you see Tarzan?" the kids in Sunday school classes would ask. I never knew what to say to that, either.

By the time I came back to the United States for college, I had no interest in talking to people here about Ethiopia. I held Ethiopia in my heart, but I listed my grandmother's Des Moines address as my home address in the student directory. Over the next 20 years, people didn't always discover I had grown up in Ethiopia. When they did, they often said, "What about the starving children?" Since there were no starving children in the Ethiopia of my childhood, I again didn't know what to say.

When the Presbyterian Church chose to send my family to Ethiopia, it had no way of knowing it was planting seeds of longing in me. A few years ago, just before I turned 40, those seeds grew into a tree of longing that bore strange fruit. The first was a non-fiction book, ETHIOPIA: ROOF OF AFRICA (1991), coming out of the research I did to learn things I felt I always should have known about my childhood home but never had a chance to study in school.

Next came a re-telling of an Ethiopian folktale, FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN (1994), with beautiful illustrations showing the Ethiopia I remember from my childhood. A year later there was PULLING THE LION'S TAIL, a story inspired by another Ethiopian folktale. Coming along in the next few years: an Eritrean folktale, a story of a street boy in Addis Ababa, a novel set in northern Ethiopia and in the refugee camps of the Sudan, and a story of an Ethiopian father and daughter in the United States. The daughter thinks of the United States as home, while the father cannot forget his homesickness for Ethiopia. It's the closest I've come to telling my story.

Two years ago, I was asked by a local church to talk about my writing. As I thought about what I could say, all those old feelings about mission interpretation flooded back. But I said yes, anyway, and as I stood in the pulpit that Sunday morning, I realized that God does, indeed, store valuable things in clay pots. I found that God's love for the world and for human beings everywhere does not wait for proper missionaries to come along. It spills out of any clay pot it can find.

When people came up afterwards and said, "I never thought about Ethiopia that way before," I thought: if we do the planting faithfully, God grows fruit our mouths have never even known they watered for.

--Reprinted from the April 1997 issue of Presbyterians Today, http://www.pcusa.org/pcusa/today