Mallorca

There's something about you. I can't put my finger on it.

Off the eastern coast of Spain there are three islands clustered in the Mediterranean like they’re in conversation with each other. Menorca, small and quiet. Ibiza to the west — the sin island, the what-happens-there-stays-there island. I never went to Ibiza. And Mallorca in the middle, the largest of the three, which is where Master Sergeant Calvex and his wife took their flock to celebrate their anniversary.

That’s the kind of people they were.

I’d met him through Rafi and Jamie — he was essentially the pastor of the little home church they’d found on base. The first time I was introduced to him he looked at me, tilted his head, and wagged his finger slowly like he was trying to locate something he couldn’t quite find.

There’s something about you, Lynette. I can’t put my finger on it. But there’s something about you.

I didn’t know what to say. I was deep in the Word during that season — praying constantly, the kind of girl who wrote scripture on index cards and carried them places. There’s a prayer by Cardinal Newman that Mother Teresa prayed every day with her sisters. Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus. I wouldn’t fully memorize it until Kuwait, but I was already living it without knowing the words. I think that’s what Calvex saw. Something that wasn’t mine to take credit for.

Mallorca was his anniversary. His wife was beautiful — warm and steady, the kind of woman who holds a room together just by being in it. They brought their people to an island in the Mediterranean and celebrated by feeding us and praying over us and eventually walking us all into the sea.

He baptized us in the Mediterranean.

I want you to understand what that means physically. The Mediterranean in summer is warm, smells like salt and something ancient and it goes on forever in every direction. Standing in it up to your waist with the sun beating down and an ordained Master Sergeant placing his hand on your back and saying the words — there is no American church baptism tank that comes close. God knew what He was doing when He put us in that water.

One of the girls broke out in hives the moment she came up out of the water. Full body. Immediate. We stood there in the surf staring at her and then at each other and then back at her.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. She was fine.

The photos don’t do it justice and I took a lot of photos. The water at the coves was a color that shouldn’t exist in nature — turquoise shading into sapphire, clear enough to see the seafloor from the clifftop. Rocky cliffs dropping straight into that water. I stood at the edge of one overlook and took a picture and knew even then that no one back home would fully believe it wasn’t edited.

We hiked those cliffs. Ate at outdoor restaurants with stone walls and checkered tablecloths and glasses sweating in the heat. Sat on ancient walls with the whole coast falling away below us. Rafi and Little John and Mike and the girls whose names I’ve mostly lost to time — all of us young and sun-brown and alive in a way that had nothing to do with effort.

The air carried salt and something I didn’t have a word for at nineteen. I have one now.

Grace.