King and Queen of our World (dedicated to Kimba - yes, you!)

In 1993, I led a team of missionaries from my church in Long Beach, California, to the recently de-Communized nation of Hungary. This trip was one of the most personally and spiritually impacting events of my life.

Someone had the foresight to pack along a camcorder on the trip (one of those early technology ones that was roughly the size and weight of a cinderblock). This camcorder was used by myself and my good friend Kim as we wandered through the streets of Budapest on our second and third days in the country, following unwary Magyars around, quoting Beavis and Butt-head and Ren and Stimpy to each other, and generally making fools of ourselves. We burned through an entire videocassette doing this, but, alas, that tape is lost forever. I do, however, have the second tape, which was made with our students at the camp at Lake Balaton. I found that tape in a box of videos in my garage, after promising Kim months earlier in an e-mail that I'd dupe it for her and drop it in the mail.

Watching a decade-younger version of yourself can be a bit unsettling, I imagine, but I didn't find it as such. I was on camera about half the time, and was behind it the other half the time. What I saw on the tape was myself at the age of 24 - brash, cocky, and full of the life and vitality that comes with little to no personal responsibility. Kim reflected a feminized version of what I was experiencing. Our relationship was always platonic (despite an abortive attempt of mine to get her to go out with me several months before we departed for Europe). As it turned out, Kim was my twin on the trip - probably my best friend at the time, certainly my best friend on the team. She, a year younger, was in the same place - full of that crazy sort of abandon that comes before careers and children and mortgages. In short, we looked good, felt good, and took no prisoners.

Until the day I die, I will never forget hearing Kim call our from three tents over, "Oh, Re-hen, are you SLEEPY?!?" and answering back, "Steempy! Be quiet! I'm trying to get some shuteyes!" and "Steempy, there's someone there. Go answer the flap!" And the fact that one of our stodgy teammates (chronological age, 25, grumpological age, 79), tried to rebuke us for "setting a bad example for the Hungarian students by not going right to sleep." As Ian used to say, "pshaw."

One would think that ten years and 25-30 pounds later, I'd feel a bit morose, but I didn't, and still don't a year later. (Although I'll never forgive Hanna, our exchange student/adoptive daughter we hosted for a year, who came downstairs in the middle of my viewing of the tape and remarked, "Is that YOU? You look so...small!!" Grr...)

No, oddly enough. To be honest, it filled me with a profound sense of joy of what God had blessed me and my good friend with - an experience of a lifetime. Watching the younger me cavort and flirt with Hungarian girls and joke around with my teammate Paul and the Hungarian guys, and playing, yes, playing with Kim - it was like rereading a favorite passage in a favorite book, and in returning it to the shelf, realizing that all it would take to reexperience it would be to take it down off the shelf again.

I'll never again be the person I was in 1993, but I'm not so sure I'd want to be. Sure, I'd love to weigh what I did then (who wouldn't?), but, well, I guess that time is done, and the future lay stretched out in front of me. My children (two daughters? A daughter and a son?) await me somewhere in Ukraine as I write. And, someday, I will show them the videotape of their father at the age of 24, when he first fell in love with Eastern Europe, and to tell them that the wonderful experience he had there helped to open the door for him to be their papa so many years later.