WHO AM I, FEELY?

Gentle Reader,

Before I tell you what God said when I finally asked Him, "Who am I if I'm not a writer?" I want to say that losing my identity as a writer was not the only identity He took from me.

When Eric (Rick) and I married in 1967 and I became a Shaver, I had no idea who I was. (You men probably wouldn't understand.) "Reynolds" was a known quantity. I was part of a family with well-defined edges. We wrote, we read, we sailed, we argued about issues, we loved word-play and had our own in-jokes. We only had to say the punch line: "You must have oinked her into it!" "I'd like you even if you were French or turquoise!" We knew why we called our grandmother "DiggyDee" and why Mum called me "the tragic mouse."

We all wrote. Tim, my hero at 18 when I was ten, had chosen to go back to the States for college instead of going around the world with us. (It had to do with peppermint pudding; if you'd like to hear about that, you'll have to beg me to tell you.) Later he wrote too, wrote seven books of poetry, but he wasn't part of the Phoenix writing projects Skipper (Dad) invented.

On a calm day at sea, Skipper would say something like, "Write a story beginning, 'John Smith is not a common name.'" Then we'd each go off into our own corner (since the yacht was only 50x14 feet, those corners weren't very far apart) and when we all had something on paper we'd come back together, usually over dinner, and read them aloud. Mum would have put the words in the mouth of Pocahontas. Ted would have set his story on another planet. (Almost all his works are science fiction; his first publication was a story, "Just Imagine." The editors of Beyond thought it so good they didn't even mention that the author was only 13.)

We all read, everything from Lewis Carroll to Tolstoy to The Diary of Anne Frank to Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. (There were always copies of The New Yorker in the head, too. I read every cartoon and could hardly ever figure out what made them funny.) And we talked about what we were reading, holding our place in our own book and interrupting someone else's reading to share it aloud. It was a marvelously stimulating intellectual environment.

I'm not saying Rick's family weren't interesting or didn't have animated discussions on all sorts of topics. They were wonderful people and very gracious to me. But it wasn't the same. They talked about TV shows, none of which I had seen (even the names Barney and Lucy meant nothing to me--are there any other third culture kids out there who can identify?) and when we discussed politics we didn't start from a common given.

We were all Bible-believing Christians but they supported the military and I was a pacifist. I told them I couldn't see Jesus carrying a bayonet. (When I'd stated this in one of my classes at Multnomah Bible College, the teacher had come back with, "Ever read the book of Revelation?") Their enemy was the United Nations and one world government; mine was the military-industrial complex. My parents were secular humanist, edging toward socialism. The Shavers belonged to the John Birch Society so they were not above crusading for a cause they believed in, but that wasn't the same, either.

The first argument Rick and I had was over the graduated income tax.

When Rick and I were visiting his parents in their gated community facing Catalina or (later) on their 280-acre ranch beyond the paved road east of Redding or (even later) their home overlooking Lake Tahoe, relaxed conversations always took place around the kitchen table after breakfast, while we were all still in our robes and slippers. When we discussed social issues, we could get pretty "het up," but nobody talked over each other in their excitement. It was nice and civilized, even when we didn't agree.

I remember one morning we had been discussing a moral issue and we actually all agreed on what needed to be done to make it right and agreed somebody should do it. I left the table all charged with righteous indignation and by lunch I'd written a letter to the editors of a couple of newspapers and in my mind had mobilized a march or sit-in or riot or something. Still in the mindset with which we had parted after breakfast, I presented this to them at lunch and everyone looked at me strangely. I kind of sank into my seat mumbling, "I thought we all agreed something ought to be done so I--never mind."

In that way I was so like my mother. It wasn't that she and I didn't think things through. It's that we just thought them through really fast. And then acted.

That's what Reynoldses did, maybe not all of us that impulsively. Skipper would say, Hey, you know, I've always wanted to build a boat and sail around the world. And we'd do it. Or, Nuclear weapons keep killing people long after a war is over and even the radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons causes an increase in cancer which kills people, so let's do something about it. And we would. We'd sail into the American nuclear testing zone in the Pacific or sail to the USSR in protest.

I am getting WAY off track here. I just meant to say that after being identified as "the little girl who grew up on a boat" and "the 14-year old who sailed with her family into the nuclear test zone," having been written up in newspapers and interviewed for radio and TV all over the world and having two books under my belt, I felt by the time I was walking down the aisle at 23 I'd already lived a couple of lifetimes and I knew exactly who I was.

But who was I as Jessica Shaver?

And who was I if I wasn't a writer?

When I finally brought my question to Him with the puzzled pieces of myself, God answered me as clearly as if I'd heard Him. He said, You are a writer but that is not your primary identity.

"Then what is?"

Child of God.

That day He laid a new foundation. That was many years ago and He's been building on it ever since.