God told me my friendship with Tat would be special.
She was seventeen-years-old the first time I met her. I can’t always remember the first time I meet people — first impressions don’t generally stand out in my mind. But I clearly remember the first time I met Tat. I’ll always be grateful to God for baking it into my memory.
It was the beginning of staff training at the end of June when I saw her. I was twenty. I hadn’t worked at camp for a few summers, so I hadn’t met Tat before even though she’d been a camper for awhile. But in 2015, I felt God calling me back to work at camp — and now, with eyes of hindsight, I know why: God wanted me to meet Tat.
Someone at camp told me I should meet her before I ever did, commenting they thought we’d get along because of our shared love of international travel and mission work.
At lunch on the first day of staff training, I plopped down at the table across from her and introduced myself.
She said, “I know who you are.”
“You do?”
“You’re a blogger.”
I was shocked. “You’ve read my blog?”
She laughed nervously. “You wrote an article about not feeling enough, and I bookmarked it on my laptop and read it over and over and over.”
Later, I called my mom and told her. I could not get over the fact that a seventeen-year-old girl read my blog. I thought only my mom read my writing. A few days later, Tat bought me a graphic T-shirt from Walmart that said, “I am not a blogger.” I laughed so hard when she gave it to me. It fell apart after one wash, but I loved that shirt because she bought it for me.
There was something so alluring about Tat. Despite not feeling enough, she was unbelievably compelling. I wanted to ask her a million questions (and I did). There was something about how she carried herself — with such natural confidence. Now I know it was the Holy Spirit working in her, even then.
She hardly wore makeup that summer, kept her long hair untamed and cascading over her shoulders, and often wore camp T-shirts and the same pair of faded black slip-on sandals. She never seemed to care what she looked like, and yet, I always thought she was beautiful. There was something extraordinary about her.
It was the final night of staff training when I felt God tell me our friendship would be special.
We always had a campfire on the last night, taking turns praying over our staff, commissioning them to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the children that summer. I don’t tend to bargain with God, but I told him that night, “If Tat comes up to me and asks me for prayer, I’ll take her under my wing and I won’t let her go.”
Her parents were in Peru, and she was in Canada all alone that summer. I knew she wasn’t lonely — she had a million friends — but after our first lunch, I felt a kinship form immediately. I felt a fierce sisterly protection over her, and wanted her to know I always had her back.
That night at the campfire, each senior leader took a spot to pray. The prayer I’d said earlier echoed in my mind when they dismissed the staff to find a leader to pray with. Immediately Tat was beside me. I didn’t even think it was humanly possible for her to get to me so quickly.
“I think God wants you to pray for me,” she said breathlessly, her eyes shining in the campfire light.
Tears pricked my eyes. “Yeah,” I laughed. “He told me that too.”
I placed my hands on her shoulders and I prayed. I didn’t stop praying for her that entire summer.
My parents moved to a new house that summer, but Tat and Brianna needed a place to crash one weekend so they stayed in my parents' new basement. We went to Grandma Willie’s Breakfast Diner, and it was terrible. You smelled like diner food even after you showered three times. But when Grandma Willie’s shut down a year later, a pang of sadness went through me.
We spent that summer hanging out as much as possible. Somehow I convinced the main staff to let Tat help me in my department often. I prayed for her, wrote her letters, and talked to her late at night. I’d sit on her cabin’s front steps and she’d French braid my hair and tell me about Peru, or her parents, or her fears, or her dreams.
We’d go to Booster Juice on the weekends. We ate a lot of candy from the Tuck Shop. Once, I convinced Tat to let me pluck her eyebrows after midnight. She was always such a good sport. At the end of that summer, we snuck out to send off paper lanterns into the sky. We laid on the camp trampoline for hours afterwards, staring up at the dark sky.
When that summer ended, my heart broke knowing Tat was going back to Peru for the year. So a few months later, our friend Danielle and I boarded a plane headed to a small jungle town in Peru. I remember standing in the Blackburn’s Peruvian kitchen with Tat and Danielle as we planned our next adventure. We dreamed of going on a worldwide trip — first to Haiti for a week, then Cuba for another week. Then to Europe to visit friends in Italy, as well as to do some sightseeing in France, England, and Poland. Then to Uganda, then Zambia, then Israel, then India. And from India to Thailand and finally, Australia. We talked for hours about the dreams we had, making very serious plans together. Back then, anything seemed possible.
We spent almost two months in Peru together. We had inside jokes, like “Operation Cielo”. We went to Machu Picchu and felt like we were on top of the world together. We played guitar and sang for hours until our fingers and voices ached. We made Tat’s dad cheesecake for his birthday, and I smeared cheesecake batter all over Tat’s face to make her laugh.
We wrote silly songs about a boy being in love with Danielle, ate slugs in a market, helped at a youth group, painted rooms in the girl’s home, and once couldn’t find a taxi to get home so we fit four people inside a small motokar and laughed the whole way home. We played a lot of Dutch Blitz, and Tat beat me every single time.
We talked about Jesus, about boys, about women being in leadership, and about loneliness. We laid in bed under our mosquito nets and dreamed big dreams — thinking up stories about what we wanted to do someday. Our young lives were sprawled out in front of us, wide and gaping, a blank canvas. None of us had a clue we only had three years left with Tat.
I’ve now known life without her for as long as I knew life with her. I knew August 17 was coming — I can always feel it coming — and this year it hit me like a brick wall. I feel like I’m kicking and punching my way through the brick. You can’t go over it. You only go through it.
Six years years ago, God told me my friendship with Tat would be special.
He was right.