Dangerously Transparent

About Lis

Chip Morgan looked out of his dorm window and asked his roommate Who’s that short, brown haired girl who Cindi’s with? Danny shrugged. I’ll find out.  We talked of marriage on our first date. People say that there’s not a one & only when it comes to love, but the two of us are meant to be. Even on the rare occasions when I really can’t stand him, I remain smart enough to know that I can’t live without him!  He found out after he married his dream girl, that she was a damsel in distress and it took unwavering courage to stay around to fight for the deeply troubled girl that he’d pledged himself to love through the good and the bad. Thirty two years later and my Chipper still rides a white horse-I LOVE him crazy..

Son, Joshua, 29, skipped a grade in school and already had a degree in anthropology by age twenty.  He’d had a life long desire to be in the medical field so with his second degree at 23, he’s following his dreams as a Pediatric ICU nurse at a top hospital.  He’s happily married to bonus daughter, Nikki Jones Morgan, an accomplished ER nurse, herself.  We could not have picked a more beautiful girl for him! Peter Pan & Tinker Bell have a room in their home that’s wall to wall toys; when I see them playing video games, snuggled on the couch with their comic books, I just giggle at this match made in Heaven!

Daughter Jena, 27, was in nursing school while leading our youth ministry when Mr. Darcy, visited at the church my daddy pastors. Mama called to tell me about this precious young man, Dove winning pianist, Scott McDowell, who’d recently left a major Southern Gospel Quartet & for some odd reason, settled at their church. I conned Jensi into accompanying me to S.C. for an event after I talked to Mama AND doing a thorough Google search, of course!. Theirs is a fairytale story, indeed.  Before they ever spoke, he played for her to sing REVELATION SONG. I knew then that I”d met my bonus son. They married a year later and she got pregnant a month after that!  Selah Annalise is the most beautiful beautiful baby girl ever according to my eyesight.

I’ll write sometimes about our foster children. Tammy, who lived with us off and on for more than 10 years,  kids of all ages who we had a week, a month, and most notably, our long term foster sons in New Zealand, Aaron and Walt.  My Chipper and I do everything a little differently than the norm. We were forty year olds when we made the decision to become missionaries.  Chip’s dad begged us to go buy a motorcycle to get through the mid life crisis, anything but sell everything we had, leave our families, uproot two teenagers, and go to that little place over there by Australia. But, we knew GOD was calling us to it and so we did within a year. We had a lot of faith and a some stupid thrown in there, too.

Anyways, shortly after we moved, GOD upped the ante. Through unforeseen circumstances, the brothers, 10 months apart, 7 and 8, needed a home. I don’t know why we thought we needed to get involved in their situation, but we did and having the boys was one of our family’s greatest adventures. We’ve been back here for six years, but their American Mum still misses her boys. I left a part of my heart in New Zealand, with the boys and the rest of our WHANAU (family) so as you read my posts, you’ll find that I still pine for our life there, just as I longed for our life here-while we were living there. Did that make sense?

You’ll read about my Mama and Daddy, my three sisters, nieces and nephews, in-laws, friends, music, books, movies & church folks. I’m a preacher’s kid turned preacher’s wife; always been in the fishbowl and known to be Dangerously Transparent. When your life is see though-there’s a tendency to disguise who you are. Pastors and their families have so many ridiculous expectations on them and there’s no way to actually reach them-but most of us feel compelled to try anyhow. Over time, the pressure has a way of making the fishbowl murky and if we aren’t careful, we start to flounder. (get used to the word plays because I can not carry on a conversation without them) Anyways, I got tired of swimming in the cloudy muck, so I set out to CLEAN my bowl. First thing I knew I had to stop adding to my bowl were all of those FAKE chemicals and so that’s what I did! I started being JUST me. 

The process began after Little Miss Perfect’s cracked life began to fall apart. Only Chipper knew about the dark years when I’d been molested by a family friend (serious oxymoron) over a span of three years. On the outside, I appeared to be an extremely confident, happy over-achiever, but when the lights went out and I lay in the darkness unable to sleep more nights than not, the other girl took over when no one was watching.  A sad, conflicted and confused child, who didn’t know what to do with the unresolved rage and a lot of  misguided guilt.  I always loved playing with Barbies and paper dolls. One day as I was talking with a therapist, she explained that those dolls had been a way for me to play dress-up. It made sense. Lots of sense.

What brought me to the point of knowing I needed a therapist, you wonder. F.E.A.R. One night, the broken girl part unleashed a fury so intense that she nearly took my life. That’s a memory that makes my blood curdle instantly even after many healthy years now. Traveling through the dark years was an excruciatingly painful journey, if I told you anything but that, it would be a lie. But, I found my healing after years of debilitating depression and today,  it is the sad story of a happy girl. Some scars don’t ever fade completely as it is with mine. But, they remind us that by GOD’S grace, even the deepest wounds DO heal!