Sunkissed

The sun is beating down of my dark back; the smell of salt air is pungent around me as I dig into the course sand at my feet. My arms stick out from my body held in place by two orange plastic water wings that squeak reminding me that I have been out of the water too long. I am three and a half but the memories are seared into my mind. The shores of the French Riviera are a night and day difference to the campus housing at the University of North Dakota that had been my home until this moment. My memories are of morning glory’s opening with their royal purple faces drinking in the Mediterranean sun, the smell of salt and fresh baked bread, and the steep cobbled streets that wound up the mountainside. My parents lived on the outer boarder of Monte Carlo, one of the wealthiest kingdoms in the world. We lived across the street from the Monaco, in the morning the chickens that lived in Monaco would wake us in the penthouse of our urban apartment and I remember a Rolls Royce parked outside our flat for months because it had a flat tire. I was three plus and everything I took in was from knee level of my parents. On day I was eating an ice cream cone and my mother was recuing the “drips” that were running down the side of the cone and threatening to run all over me. Out of the corner of her eye she realized a man was trying to take a picture and hurried me out of the way. “Well actually I was trying to take a picture of her.” The man confessed, he worked for National Geographic. This was my reality, French flowers, food, chickens, Roman ruins even Jaclyn Kennedy Onassis, or at least her yacht. On Friday nights all the missionary’s would go to the beach most of the locals and the jet-setting tourists were at the world renowned casino. In a city that’s known for its exotic and expensive nightlife and besides most of the nude bathers were also not present on Friday nights either. But if you knew where to look you could sit on the beach when the roof of the casino roof opened and each major fireworks shop competed for the privilege of hosting Prince Rainer (Grace Kelly’s royal husband) birthday display. On one particular evening the sounds of Frank Sinatra could be heard, the real Frank crooning to the swank crowd and a band of missionary’s eavesdropping next to the water.
Monte Carlo was my first interaction with missionaries of which my parents had always wanted to be. It was also my first interaction with God in history. The real reason this little band of believers had landed in such a hedonist it spot on the map was actually due to Hitler. Hitler at the end of World War II had built himself a giant radio transmitter at the edge of the Mediterranean to transmit his propaganda all over the world. As the story goes, the war was at its end and Hitler was getting more and more desperate. The engineer, in an attempt to appease the Kaiser had gotten the mammoth machines up and running just enough that they could broadcast a small signal right into the heart of Berlin.
After the war about half of Europe fell into the hands of the Russians. At the same time the truth of Hitler’s gruesome exploits were coming to light and the French people who had suffered under German occupation decided they wanted to make something good come out of what was meant for evil. The gifted the huge radio transmitter to an evangelical organization. During the Cold War, Trans World Radio sent the gospel over the iron curtain where missionaries couldn’t go but radio waves could.
My three year old memories are more vivid of the ample cherrie trees out side the building than the actual marble structure itself but I heard the story from my parents mouths as I aged and was introduced to a powerful God who can move dictators and princes on his behalf. It always amazed me that God had used one evil dictator, Hitler, to build a machine that would undermine Lenin and Stalin and all of the regime of the U.S.S.R. I saw God as a strategist and my parents as integral parts of history. In my young life I was able to go to spend time in post-communist Russia and met some of the early Christians but that is another story all together. While in Monte Carlo I spent quite a bit of time with my adventurous mother, partly because I was the only one she could talk to and partly because we came late and left early just the two of us. From that time forward we were partners even more than friends and I have much of my life’s experience to thank her for. We arrived back in the states in 1983 and my brother was born approximately nine months later. The first chapter in my life had been a vivid one and had set the stage for exotic experiences with a powerful God.