The Earring

Book 4 Part 1

VANISHED

"Love sometimes does a vanishing act, like an earring lost in plain sight. "

David was a driven man, in leisure and in work. He always needed a challenge. If something became too repetitive or familiar, he bored of it. He said that was why our relationship never soured; I was mercurial enough to keep him interested. I think that was a compliment.

Over the course of our marriage, he jumped from hobby to hobby, partially because he had family responsibilities and couldn't jump from job to job. He became a chess master, a stunt kite flyer, and a dirt bike rider. He tried his hand at the guitar, the banjo, and the mandolin. He set up a woodworking shop and played with a scroll saw. He mastered chair stringing and dabbled in furniture restoration. He tried learning French, Spanish, and Apsaalooke, a native American tongue. His longest fascination was with computer photo manipulation. He learned to make photos lie. His alterations were indiscernible because he added shadows and played with coloration until it was perfect.

In some ways the pastorate was the ideal job for someone with his desire for fresh challenges. Congregations were always evolving and changing. If one no longer provided the needed stimulation, another group in need of a leader could be sought. While this sounds unspiritual, nothing is farther from the truth. God made David, personality and all. He knew of his need for challenge and change. He guided him to ministries where that need would be met. When David's visions were realized, God moved him on and brought in someone with the necessary skills to follow through and stabilize the gains.

I'm sure the Holy Spirit put words into the mouth of a member of that first pastoral search committee when he told David, "Don't expect the church to grow. We're a country church, and there aren't that many prospects around."

The gauntlet was dropped. David set out to prove him wrong. Within two years, the congregation quadrupled. At that point David might have looked for greener pastures. What provided continued stimulation was the desire to earn his doctorate. The seminary had granted him a two-year reprieve after he took his orals, stopping his doctoral clock temporarily. The church encouraged him to complete the degree and gave him the time he needed to do research. They also offered a scholarship that would cover half his tuition.

When David returned to school, as part of the readmission process he took a personality inventory, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. The inventory was not required when we worked on our Masters. When he got the results, David was excited because the description of his personality was so accurate. He came home with an MBTI for me to fill out.

"You've got to take this personality test, Syd," he said. "It's uncanny how well it pegged me. The school allows the wives to take it and they score it for free. In fact, the counseling department will give us a free consultation about how personality factors into relationships. It's part of somebody's doctoral research."

I was intrigued. I'd never seen David so animated about something that addressed relationships. I readily told him that I wanted to take the test and go for the consultation. I sat down that night and completed the inventory. David took it back to the seminary for scoring and made us an appointment to talk to the counselor.

After the consultation, I was just as enthusiastic as David about the inventory. We knew our thought processes were different, but we had no objective way to express the distinctions. The MBTI gave us a skeletal frame on which to develop a verbal picture of our differences and similarities. It helped us to understand each other and gave us the ability to comprehend why the other's mental progressions seemed so weird.

David always was incredulous that I would make decisions based on subjective feelings and values rather than on objective logic. He believed I was the only person in the world that behaved in such an aberrant manner. Imagine his surprise when he discovered that 50 percent of the world thought the same way I did. Admittedly, 50 percent of the men didn't; 60 percent of the men used objective criteria to make decisions, while 60 percent of the women used subjective ones.