The powerful bond of loving, being loved

Iwrote earlier about our spring break trip to Costa Rica. What I didn’t say was why Costa Rica. There’s a good reason besides ethereal beauty and epic adventure. His name is Hudson.

Hudson was quarterback for the Gentry Pioneers, the first school where we taught and Stone’s first place besides UCA to coach. We went there straight out of college, which made us about 10 years older than this kid, a freshman who would take us into his heart like we took him into our home—full access.

I can still see him rolled up in the covers of our guest bed like a burrito, eating pancakes at our breakfast table, on our couch with a notepad watching game film.

You can extend the same love to all kids when you are a teacher or coach, and you do, or try to. Most respond. Some don’t or can’t, at least not in the moment you have together in a class or on a team or during a certain year. But there are those rare few—like the handful of true friends you meet in life—who just get you. Who were made to receive what you have to offer and give what you didn’t even know you needed. That was Hudson. That is Hudson.

We did not have children yet, so our whole lives revolved around those kids at Gentry High School. It was like Friday Night Lights. While Stone taught civics and coached, I taught English and speech. He served as a mentor to guys on the team. He was the youngest head coach in the state at the time and enjoyed tremendous success, taking the Pioneers to the state quarterfinals, then semi-finals. And I was like the team mom, or big sister, since we weren’t old enough to be their parents. We were family. One year because of a playoff game, we all ate Thanksgiving dinner together around a big table at Shoney’s in Crossett.

I led a Bible study in our home for girls. We called ourselves the WOGS, short for “Women of God.” There were about 10 who came regularly for snacks, prayer, and the gospel of John. I look back on those times as magical now, but I knew it then too. It was one of the great privileges of my life to be trusted with their stories, their questions, their fears, their joys. To share it all.

I keep in touch with many of those girls and they are women of God. Women of love, kindness, honesty, and courage. Several are teachers themselves. One a pharmacist. One a nurse. Most are mothers. Hudson’s sister, Bethany, is a missionary in Senegal.

Even though we never completely lost touch with Hudson, he did begin to go off grid during the time our kids were little. We were pretty consumed by trying to raise tiny humans and carve out a new life in Ozark. Stone was no longer coaching but working with disadvantaged students at Job Corps and leading the youth at our church. I was a stay-at-home mom with my head and arms full of children.

There were difficulties. We knew there was difficulty in his life too, and we cared, and he knew we cared. But there was a gap that came with the distance and directions our lives took. And while ours grounded us more deeply in Ozark, Hudson landed in Costa Rica.

It was just this year that the stars aligned in such a way we could think about taking a trip to see him. He met us with arms open wide at the airport. A real hug pulls you in, squeezing out all distance. Closes the gap. The years of not seeing one another evaporated and there we were in the physical proximity our hearts never left.

We stayed with Hudson’s family in a home that blurs the boundaries between outside and in. Their dog, Django, a Malinois mix, watches over the place. One evening we sat around their table and exchanged stories of the gap years. Stone shared; I didn’t talk much.

At one point Hudson had to stop and take deep breaths as though something was pressing on his sternum. “You don’t have to explain,” I told him. But he wanted to. It was as if he physically needed it off his chest. Afterward Karina, the love of Hudson’s life, lay down by Django on a mat on the deck, petting and wrestling him. She showed me a scar on his flank where another dog almost killed him when he was a puppy. “He doesn’t like to be touched there,” she said. Django eyed her, hovering his gaze over the scar he trusted her not to touch.

Just as a house can blur the boundaries between outside and in, a body can, like Django’s. That scar, the experience of that exchange between him and Karina, stays with me. The capacity for powerful bonds between humans and dogs is a wonder and it was palpable there. So was the pain the dog associated with the scar.

I thought about how something can terrify and hurt us so deeply we don’t like to be touched there even after it is completely healed—because the remembrance is too painful. I don’t like to admit it but this is a brutal truth of some wounds. And such brutal truths can bring me down.

But again and again, beauty raises my head. As sure as the sun also rises. And the beauty is in the people God sends. Who come alongside us, who lie down where we are if need be. Who see our scars and respect the power healed wounds still may have.

It is a sacred privilege to love and be loved. The sacred privilege of a lifetime.