Dr. Cynical's receptionist

Now here’s something quirky about the Ontario health system. If you have something wrong with you, you go to the doctor. If the doctor can’t fix it, and you persuade him or her that you really need fixing by someone else, he or she will refer you to a specialist. But the referral isn’t a piece of paper handed to you. Instead it’s an invisible magic wand that works when you aren’t looking. My cardiologist, Dr Cynical, when I last visited him, decided that I might live after all and suggested that I get an ablation (that’s when they snake a tube up your leg into your heart, provoke tachycardia, then burn the parts that are tachycardia-ing, sealing the spots that have been short-circuiting for so long). I said, no thanks, I was fine on the beta-blocker. I like the beta blocker. It has all these cool side effects.

Then the wedding happened. That evening, since Robert and I had moved out of our house earlier to lend it to the bridesmaids, I had my overnight things packed in a bag to go home with me to where we were staying with Bob and Cayla. Unfortunately, when someone picked up Elai’s bags to go in the get-away car, mine got swept up, too. So that night I didn’t have my beta blockers. They were at a fancy hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and I wasn’t about to go get them!

No problem. Nothing happened. And even if my heart had picked just that night to start thumping away at 200 beats/second, I could have gone back to my home-away-from-home, the Niagara Health System (what a name for a hospital; no English teachers on that committee), and visited my bald doctor friend who would have stopped my heart for me again, free of charge. Like I said, no problem. But it set me to thinking. What if something like this happened in Mexico? In March I am going to Tlaxiaco for a week to give a seminar on church planting. Tlaxiaco is at 7000 feet. Altitude provokes the 200 beats/sec thingy. And it’s very far from any bald doctors with heart-stopping medicine. So then what would I do?

So I called Dr Cynical (I mean his receptionist) and explained the new plan. She said, ok, she’d get back to me, but not to hold my breath. It could be weeks or more. So off I went to Chicago to see Elai’s new home and meet her new cat and help her get her paper on an innovative Swedish Law finished. It was a great few days with her and Mikael. I got to see Julius Caesar performed by an all woman cast. I got to go to Elai’s theatre class and chat with her teacher who was a student there when I was. I got to hang out in the Stupe again. Good times.

But I had turned my phone off while I was gone, and when I crossed the border and turned it back on, it chimed and chimed and chimed to welcome me back. Several of the chimes were Dr. Cynical’s receptionist calling about an appointment with a surgeon. The next day. I called back from just outside Windsor, and the receptionist very sweetly chewed me out. “I’ve been calling several times this week with an appointment for you, and I can’t ever get through. How am I going to set up an appointment for you if I can’t reach you by phone?”

See in Canada, your doctor’s patient receptionist sets up your appointment with the specialist first, without checking with you. Once she has a date and time, she calls you to confirm, and the clock starts ticking. If she can’t get a hold of you within a certain time, well, you lose the appointment, and she has to start over. I lost the next day appointment, and she had to start the process all over again.

So then I was supposed to go visit my parents in Florida for a few days. To avoid another polite scolding from the receptionist, I left my phone in Canada and called in a baby-sitter. Janey. She carried my phone in her back pocket for four days, and when it rang, she got to talk to my patient receptionist and snag the appointment. For Tuesday. In Hamilton in the cardio wing. 4E.

In some countries, cynical doctors' receptionists work for you!

Our lamb has conquered, let us follow him

Yesterday we took off from Orlando into a sea of clouds. The white outside my window was so thick, it was if we were flying through snow. And the plane jerked and bumped and shuttered as if some crowd of giants were pelting it with snowballs, a snowball gauntlet in the sky. In the moments of calm I read through a back issue of Time, from the New Year, that Robert had found lying around. Interesting to see yesterday’s predictions of today. In fact the title was The Year Ahead. If you ever want to read good fiction, read yesterday’s predictions. History has yet to lose a game of “Cheat the prophet.” We never get it right. Appealing to tradition, one reporter was predicting that Ted Cruz, with his dogged wooing of even the most remote voters, would outdo his more flashy, filterless, jet-setting competitor. Who knows. All traditions die sooner or later, and it doesn’t really pay to be right, anyway. As another of the columnists quoted, “There’s an inverse relation between fame and accuracy.”

In the waiting lounge at the airport, the TV overhead was set to a news station, and in between flight announcements and Southwest’s corny jokes, I heard soundbites from some of the American presidential candidates. Bernie was ribbing Hilary about her emails with a bit of profanity thrown in for the sake of modern ethos, and I caught this from Donald: “We can’t afford to be that nice.” I considered this ironic coming from someone who has just been compared to Jesus by a prominent Christian leader. Somehow I find it impossible to square the hard things Jesus said about loving your enemy, the language of love, with the knee-jerk language of fear I hear in “we cannot afford…”

But I don’t want this to be about American media stars. The article that most caught my attention in the Time issue was entitled, “Media: Storytelling—both fiction and nonfiction, for good and for ill—will continue to define the world,” with the opening line: “We have examples of transformative storytelling all around us.” The stories that the article mentions are not necessarily ones that Evangelicals would find transforming. They might even be alarming. But the point made was valid: “Stories matter. In 2016 and beyond, those who wish to create a better world will have to make storytelling the center of their efforts…We will have to see if 2016 will be a year in which stories of anger…are ascendant, or whether stories of the power of love…rule the day. People will decide the winners and losers. In this age of narrative, the stakes have never been higher.”

St George and the Dragon

As Christians we have a choice to make. What narrative do we follow? What comes out of our mouth publicly as well as at home? Fear? (“We can’t afford to be nice”) or Love? (For God so loved the world that he gave…) Are we trying to “save our life” (or way of life)? or are we willing to risk something to bring other people to God? I’m as cowardly as the next person. I’m as fearful of something happening to my kids or my husband. I used to have voices in my head telling me to fear, fear, fear. I spent a year in depression fighting these voices and the havoc they played with my emotions. But I learned that I have a choice to turn away from that narrative. One day at a time I can choose not to live a narrative of fear. Because love casts out fear. The world today is desperate to hear a winning narrative. The loud narrative gaining ground all around us right now is the natural, instinctive one, the easy, default go-to narrative of fear. Love is a much harder story, but a truer one. At BSF right now, I am studying in Revelation how God protects the Woman against the mighty Dragon. He does. He, Love, is the Victor. This is our true story. Let’s tell it.

Family culture

Liquid sunshine is what they call it. Rain. Because it’s warm and muggy and wet. It rained all through the night last night, kept raining during the day, and has kept it up all tonight, too.  We will check to make sure that there is no flooding to keep us from getting to the airport today, an hour and a half drive away from here. We had planned to spend our last day at a park, walking around in sunshine. But instead we have been indoors. What does your family do when you are driven in doors? Ours has theological discussions over card games.

Every culture has its games. Every age. Every family. Cats and dogs and otters and dolphins play games. If you look online, you find educational games for kids, game theory for economists, and most of all, of course, video games. We love games. Apparently they fulfill just about every need out there: practice for real life, rewards for behavior, social interaction, fun, power, opportunities for organizing things and tidying up, character training, development of mental prowess, competition and collaboration, escape, mastery, and as I added in my commentary on football, the suspense of a real-time story.

What games did your family play on rainy days? I remember lots of games. I remember how my dad invented games. He created a game called WAR, and though we played thousands of times, I never could beat him. It was like Stratego but so much better. You set up your army and used a supply line to advance against the enemy, and running through both territories was a train track on which you could move a train carrying up to three players. You could make player switches inside the train so that your opponent didn’t know who was coming out. You could hide an atom bomb on the train and move it deep within enemy territory. If your opponent attacked the train, thinking she was going to capture your players, the bomb would explode, killing everything within a two dot radius. Or you could explode the atom bomb yourself and wipe out key enemy players. So you guarded the track against such eventualities. We played at the height of the Cold War.

At boarding school, where I lived for fourth through six grade, we had game nights. It was a Mennonite school, conservative, so many games were off limits. We couldn’t use playing cards but instead used “safe” cards like Rook and the ultimate speed game Dutch Blitz. I was good at Dutch Blitz. (My favorite Dutch Blitz game was years later when Andrea Agee made giant cards and people had to run to the center to get their card and run back to their team to build their piles) Outside, we played tetherball and foursquare and other active games, but we were not allowed to play Cowboys and Indians, chucking pine cones at each other or aiming sticks at each other for a kill. How naturally children pick up these games, even those who have never seen guns. I remember my confusion at being forbidden such play.

Today our family favorites were card games: the quick Euchre with its quirky bowers (apparently from the German “bauer” or farmer), responsible for introducing jokers into modern card packs. Euchre was once the national game of America and is still popular in Ontario and the northern Midwest. It may have come across the pond from Cornwall, where French prisoners played it to while away their time in Dartmoor Prison, and where it is still popular today. We also played Pinochle, another French game brought over to America by German immigrants (it was outlawed in parts of New York during WWI out of anti-German sentiment) that includes a bi-racial marriage of a black queen and a red jack. When the game was tied and within points of going out, dad and I beat the odds to get a double pinochle and win the game. We even tried Quiddler, a new favorite my Canadian friends have taught me. Mom won. I’m definitely not the only word master in my family.

Throughout the games, we talked about everything. I wonder how much family games have been responsible for passing on family news, memories, inventions, thinking, and even character. I’m glad they are part of the Patterson culture I inherited. 

Gratitude

Here I am in Florida with my parents, catching up with them and learning about football, but other bits of my life have been shining through the windows with the Florida sun. Yesterday Megan drove here from West Palm with her son Jaeden, age two, whom I met for the first time. I remember sitting in Megan’s apartment in Oaxaca at our women’s Bible Study, praying for a baby for her, and here he is with luscious olive skin, warm brown eyes, and pale blond hair, chasing down the enormous cranes that live around the pond in the center of the village here. He falls in, of course. He has so much fun with Robert, driving the golf-cart, wrestling on the couch, walking on the banister, chasing cranes, that when it’s time to leave, he cries. That’s a new one for Robert, but excellent practice…I felt I was breathing in fresh air and beauty. It’s so true that being around children is refreshing, life-giving. I said, “It feels like being around “our” refugee family.” Robert said, yes, in one sense they are also like children—vulnerable, eager to learn, dependent on you, seeing everything with laughter and fresh eyes. I’d never thought about this.

Christmas pic

As we walk home, Jaeden happily sitting on Robert’s shoulders, getting him all wet, a car stops beside me. It’s Peter whom I haven’t seen in years, since he came to Oaxaca and photographed Monte Alban completely flooded with water, mirroring the sky. Peter creates training videos for organizations all over the world and has biked around just about every country on the planet, I think. We plan to get together the next day.

In the evening, we meet Petal and her family. Her son Julian has just graduated with a degree in engineering and a masters in management in just four and a half years of study. He is not only smart but very articulate. We are talking about how God does not win pyrrhic victories. This story that we all live has a hands down, unequivocably happy ending. It won’t be like the kind of victory the US would win if we had global, nuclear war. Rather, “His kingdom comes. His will is done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This happens!  The depth and calm and intensity of the conversation, and the give and take without someone getting angry and raising a voice in the slightest is as luscious a treat as the five course meal Petal laid out on the table. How good it is to talk about the things of God with joy and utter respect for one another, iron sharpening iron, “brothers dwelling in harmony.” Petal said she wishes we lived closer so we could have such conversations all the time. I would love this (and her cooking, too!) Some day, Petal. Some day.

Last night we walked over to where Peter is visiting his mother, Aunt Hazel, the missionary woman who welcomed us to Olanchito, Honduras, the very first day we arrived in 1965, and the only “aunt” I’ve ever really known. I was four. I remember it was Christmas, and when we walked into her home, she had a Christmas tree up. Peter and Rachel and Esther were so excited about gaining new playmates that they were jumping up and down on our newly-made beds. The energy had to go somewhere! Peter was a like a cousin to me. We were nonstop playmates and then schoolmates at Los Pinares, the boarding school we attended in Tegucigalpa, and our families spent many weekends, holidays, and retreats together. Eventually Peter joined me at Wheaton College, where he set up the Honduras project that goes on till today. Now he owns a company in Honduras, where he was born, lives in Madrid, and helps Christian NGOs all over the world think through the hard job of serving people and carrying the gospel cross-culturally. He makes me laugh like he always did. I am glad we have met up again.

As Peter said when we left, “I don’t regret anything about how I was raised. I’d do it all over again.” Looking back at these few days in Florida, the days with my parents, with Megan and Jaeden, with Petal and Julian, with Hazel and Peter, I realize what a rich life God has given me for having grown up in Honduras and worked in Mexico. It has shaped me in a way I would never exchange for anything. These friends remind me and fill me with strong gratitude.

Happy Endings

I am in Florida! My mom called me to say she was going to fly me down to see them, since they couldn’t make it to Canada as they had planned, so here I am. And it’s cold! I flew right up and over the “monster storm” hitting the east coast, but its tentacles of cold have curled themselves around Sebring where I’m staying until Thursday. It’s 61 degrees!

And last night I learned about a culture I have been studiously avoiding for years: the Superbowl. My parents wanted to watch the game, so Robert and I sat down with them, and I watched both play-off games! You should be proud of me, because I have never sat through a single football game in my whole life. I don’t know the rules or the positions or the big name players. I can’t even identify the teams. And I have to admit, I have been prejudiced against this culture for various reasons that go all the way back to high school when it seemed to me that the big football jocks were arrogant and had girls coming after them simply because they could knock other people over really well. It didn’t help to find out the amount of money that star players make, or to see how they are idolized, or to know that the Superbowl is the single biggest sex-trafficking event in the world. All that male testosterone. Bear with me (I just saw this in an article spelled “bare” with me. Imagine that. Or not.) Like I said, I have a certain prejudice toward this culture that I’m openly confessing.

Because last night I saw another side of football. I suppose that all those fancy cameras covering every angle and slowing down every play helps. I saw an entire stadium worth of humans all wearing blue (I bet Superbowl games have to have the most people voluntarily wearing one color in the world). I heard a NEIGH!!! every time the Broncos scores and a GRRR!!! every time the Panthers scored (which was a lot. 49 points. Including conversions, which, I learned, have nothing to do with religion. In fact, I still don’t know who gets converted. And what grown man goes NEIGH!!! Games make us silly!) And Dad was there to explain that not everyone on the team can catch a (forward) throw, and that when the play goes to the other team after an interception or four downs, the entire team changes on the field because everyone’s role is so different on the field. And the quarterback is really the captain and can do anything he wants. I saw this very calm quarterback named Cam run the ball all the way off the field. I saw him give the ball to a little guy in the grand stand, who, I later found out, had been promised by his dad they would come to a Panthers game, but the dad had died the week before, so the two granddads had brought him, and Cam didn’t know anything about any of that.

You see, it’s all about the story. I finally understood that. As humans we love story. We crave story. We invent a back story about every single thing that ever happens to us. So often the back story doesn’t match up with reality (No, our neighbor didn’t say that out of spite but out of ignorance; no, that driver isn’t  trying to make us late but is distracted), but that doesn’t stop us. We are as good at creating fiction as non. And the Superbowl is a giant nonfiction story happening in real time. You have these quarterbacks and their teams and coaches working toward a goal with so many stumbling blocks and opponents working against them. It’s an excellent plot. The suspense is addictive. The fun about this particular story is that as a reader, you get to pick your protagonist, casting all other characters in the story as antagonists. And different people choose different protagonists, placing themselves in the story. Then the story of their team becomes their own story at home or on Facebook or wherever (NEIGHHH!!! GRRRRRRRRR!!!). Some people risk huge sums of money on their protagonist, gambling on the outcome of the story, adding to the suspense, giving themselves an adrenalin rush. Story is addictive.

Now that I am caught up in the story of this particular Superbowl, an absolute first (and possible last) for me, I have to pick a Protagonist and ride the bucking bronco or the stalking panther to the happy ending. Or not. Hmm. I definitely identify with the Carolinas over Colorado because I lived there once and loved it. Love the Carolinas. So let’s just go with that. And watching Cam, knowing nothing about him whatsoever, he looked kind of serene and contented, not sour like some guy with long braids on a team dressed all in red I saw. Of course that media shot of Peyton’s four year old son peeking out from behind his dad while he was standing there, behind the podium, giving his statement, makes his story kind of cool. The guy is old.  A family man. Hmm. That’s interesting. But no. I’m sticking with the serene rookie who hands balls to grieving kids. May he win. May my newly chosen Protoganist, that I never heard of until today, win. May my newly chosen story have its happy ending.

 

Home away from home

In the chemo chair Friday I was calculating how many treatments I have left. Four! Four! That is worth a count down. I will be done by the end of April! Yes, there is still the minor issue of ablating heart arrhythmias  and unlocking thumbs, but the end is in sight.

Strangely enough, it will take yet another transition, another moving to Oz, to get back to “normal life,” to set aside a year that has been about hospital visits, IV lines, and side effects. I’m not the same person anymore.

For one thing, I have a married daughter. Today is exactly one month since Elai and Mikael were married. “I do.” It seems impossible that two words, just two syllables spoken in seconds, can change so much (or words like “You have cancer.”)  You’d think I’d be used to that by now...to circumstances changing suddenly. But each time it gets to you. You get used to the process, whether it’s working away at your job, or raising your kids, or loving your spouse, and then suddenly it’s…different. It can be for a good reason, or a bad one. Elai knows about this, living now in her apartment in Wheaton, getting used to being married. My refugee family knows about this, building a new life in Canada. And I know about this, adjusting to a modified body.  I started thinking about the morning of the wedding, when it finally hit me how much change that day could bring.  It was just before the wedding, when the house was silent because all the bridesmaids had left for the church in other cars. Robert and I were left alone with her for just a few minutes. We fussed over her for a few seconds, and then, for the last time, we walked out the front door of our home as “immediate” family. Robert helped her into the front seat of Greg’s bright red truck, tucking her dress around her, and we took our last pictures together of her and us in the get-away car. This was it. The calm before the storm.

Our lives are a constant cycle between calm and storm, slow and sudden, the long processes and the immediate transitions. We wait and plan, and then suddenly the event is upon us, and we are still not prepared. And then it’s over. And we rest and clean up and get back to work. But things have changed. We start pulling out the pictures, piecing together the moments as memories, taking stock, and wondering how the ground could shift so much underfoot. I had never thought much about how weddings are such Oz moments, good ones, but still, ones that shake everything up, especially when your kids live so far away.

Released from the chemo chair, I went downstairs to wait for Janey (she would have stayed with me, but Manal needed a lesson in how to take a bus from her English classes back to her apartment). The “Ukulele Lady” stopped to chat. She is the grad student who organized a ukulele class for five of us cancer patients as a way to build community, have fun, and give the hospital a more positive image.  I learned to play Bruce Cockburn’s Mary Had a Baby, My Lord. We talked about my flight to Florida Saturday to see my parents and the storm that is threatening. (She checked on her phone to see if my flight was cancelled.) We discussed her research—how much easier it is to build trust quickly in a chemo lounge because you know the lady sitting across from you sure isn’t there to sell you anything, and you know she’s facing a battle similar to yours, but as the hospital system gets more and more efficient at moving patients in and out, in and out, we all get that much less of a chance to actually “see” one another, interact and meet one another. With great efficiency, something is lost. Comfort and convenience is gained, but a certain Ozness is lost. Laurie saw that, too. She has a long term illness that keeps her in and out of  the hospital. It’s why she’s trying to add something to the hospital experience. She’s trying to help people “see” one another. This is what we discussed, standing in the lobby of the Niagara Health System (very odd name for a hospital), my new friend Laurie and I, as Janey aided Manal, also my new friend. See, I am not the same person just doing a countdown. I am wandering in Oz, still riding a tornado.

Weddings in Oz

Yesterday I had a final follow-up visit with my radiologist who gave me the thumbs up: Everything looks good. The nurse who brought me to the room asked me about Elai’s wedding. “Did you get really drunk?” she asked. I was taken aback! “Not really my style,” I said, “but we danced a lot.”  She went suddenly serious, “Good for you,” she said, “very healthy.” Hmmm.

Weddings reveal a lot about culture. The last few weddings I’ve been to have been in Mexico. One was in a cavernous, heavily guilded cathedral in Mexico City. For weddings there, you book a mass, show up outside the enormous wooden doors (the bride’s dad escorts her that far from the curb across the stone plaza) and then the priest takes over, walking her down the endless aisle to the altar. The wedding party makes its way down on its own, and the mass begins. Marriage is a sacrament to Catholics, like Communion, so the ceremony is part of the worship service.

The weddings I’ve been to in evangelical churches in Mexico have also been full services, open to everyone, with the wedding ceremony added. Weddings are considered a ministry of the church. But with the stringent separation of church and state in Mexico, church weddings are not legally binding. You have to get married beforehand by a justice of the peace. I have an American friend who married a Mexican woman, and the whole wedding was planned, but his documents never arrived from the US in time to perform the legal rites before the wedding, so the question was whether the couple could be married in the sight of God before the government had its say. Most Mexican pastors would not perform such a wedding. Interesting theological conundrum. Who unites man and woman in marriage? God? The Church? The government? What if these are at odds with one another? We’ve all seen this.

In North America, people have far more ownership of their weddings, writing their own vows, and moving outside to beautiful gardens and exotic destinations. This is a good thing, giving couples freedom to express their own culture in their celebrations (Elai and Mikael added the Mexican lasso to their ceremony). Of course, there is always a price to be paid, a flip side to such freedom. In North America weddings are pretty much private affairs, no longer a ministry of the church (I went through a bit of culture shock when I signed a contract renting the church building for Elai’s wedding that said “Contract for Personal Event.”) I love the individual expression, but I'm still a bit saddened that the greatest symbol of union between Christ and the Church—the exchange of wedding vows before God and His Family that unite two people as one—is no longer a ministry but a “personal event.” Every culture picks its spot on the balance between community and freedom.

I hope Elai’s wedding showed something about the Thiessen (and Berthiaume) cultures. We wanted people to come early and stay late and feel welcome. We wanted God to be at the center of it and for the couple to know people loved them. We had a big wedding party, and everyone who came from out of town was hosted by our Canadian friends (Janey’s family actually moved out of their house to give eleven Berthiaumes a place to stay), and we did fun things together. (This was how Robert and I planned our wedding 25 years ago, with a full week of activities together, and I’m glad our kids carried on the legacy.) We went on a tour of a local winery and hiked the Bruce trail below Janey’s house. We had a dance (minus the alcohol) at a hall where one sister of mine decorated in steam punk for Elai, with gears and old lanterns gracing the tables, another sister made Christmas cookies, and another served. The Berthiaumes actually stayed through Christmas, and on Christmas Day we got to experience a bit of their family culture. They sat around Janey’s dining room table and made seven little gingerbread houses with m&m’s, red-hots, licorice and gummy bears for trim and chocolate mints for shingles. There was even a Stonehenge. We all got to judge for first place. Lizzie won. Later we introduced Mikael to our family Christmas tradition: the string game where you hide stocking stuffers throughout the house and connect them with a maze of string, one roll per kid.

Such a rich, rich time. Culture, culture, culture. Oz moments. You can see I’m still unpacking it. 

Father of the Bride

At the wedding, I sang Good, Good Father with two friends who also love Elai. It took us hours of practicing to master the time change in the middle of the song, and we had to drop the key to match our alto voices. I realized, as I chose the song and sang it, that what I wanted above all, as Elai was married, was for her to know how much she was loved, and not just by me. I didn’t know what Robert would say in his speech, but it was the same message. You’d think she would just know this by now, but this lesson is never a permanent one. It gets erased when we sleep. Learning (choosing) to love and be loved isn’t like learning to read. You can forget. You have to re-learn—re-choose—every day, say and hear “I love you” every day. It’s a dance that has to begin over and over again, a painting on water, a sculpture of fire.

As Robert put it:

Having only one girl makes it easy to always say “RuthE is my favourite daughter.” What makes it even easier is how much I love her. Ever since we gave her the names of two close friends, half way through the pregnancy, she has been special. Names do that – make us “knowable”, closer. I had been using the female pronouns from the beginning of the pregnancy, not wanting to be traditionally sexist, but when the ultrasound technician let it slip that she really was a girl, we began to use her names, and falling in love with her.

Elai, when you would still fit in the crook of my arm, and spent many hours there since you wouldn’t calm down or go to sleep without that movement, I loved you.

When you would run everywhere and climb everything and face the unknown, still unaware of dangers, I loved you.

When your will began to develop and you resisted whatever path we had laid out for you in order to make your own way, I loved you.

When we watched you go through the intricacies of making and keeping friends, in three or more different cultures, and felt the joys and pains that accompany that, I loved you.

When you came home from school mad at things it seemed the Apostle Paul was saying, and when you wondered about how good God was, and then as you took your own steps to find Him, I loved you.

 When you pursued your studies or art and other creative tendencies, and enjoyed your successes and ached with your disappointments and setbacks, I loved you.

I have loved you through twenty one years, helping and watching you grow and mature into the beautiful, courageous and resourceful woman you now are. I know you will continue in this path, and that as hard as some of life’s experiences will be that there will also always be more parts that make it good and better. I will love you through it all.

 But now is the time to let another love you, and care for you, and provide for you, in even bigger and better ways than I am able to. You are entering a whole new era of development and maturing that has many special challenges and pitfalls, but so many more possible joys and fulfillments. I will love you through them all.

Welcome, Mikael, to my daughter’s life, and our life. I pass on to you this crucial role of being her closest male. Take her, even though she never really was “mine,” and she will not be “yours,” either. We are both blessed by having her in our lives, and charged with her care. You are now “hers” and she is “yours”.  You have our complete blessing. We love you, and will grow into loving you even more.

Elai, this day marks a new life that you are only beginning to imagine.  You will have many joys, and great blessings, and some challenges and difficulties. I want you to know, and always remember, I love you. No matter what. Nothing will ever change that.

I love you.

Mother of the bride

Today I was helping Elai edit her Soc paper on what is called the Swedish Law, a new strategy for targeting sex traffick and violence toward women. It is now law in Canada and according to Elai’s research, seems to be a good idea. It eliminates prosecution of prostitutes, recognizing them as victims, and goes after the johns. Fighting sex traffic has been Elai’s passion, and it was fun to work with her on this project. I learned a lot, got to slip back into English Teacher mode for a bit, and shared something with my daughter. Who is now married! I am realizing more and more how much my kids have shaped the roles I play in life, and now these are changing.

Those of you who were at the wedding heard me say something like this:

Mother of the bride.

I have had many roles in Elai’s life. I started out as Baby-holder, Baby-feeder, Baby-rocker. She was a happy baby, but she didn’t like change much, so “no thanks” to bath time, and when the sun disappeared and it was time for bed, she’d cry for hours. Robert hung a hammock over our bed and we took turns rocking her there to comfort her. We would be dozing, and pulling, back and forth, back and forth. I was Changer and Comforter. I was even Food itself, capital “F,” and she was a warm bundle of needs.

And very soon I was Audience for a little princess, a little actress. We lived in a one-room home with a curtain between our bed and her playpen-bed, and every morning she would stand up in her pen, grab the curtain and pull it aside with an enormous grin as if to declare, “Ta Da! Here I am.” The world was her stage. If we went to a restaurant, Elai would be making friends with the people at the next table, her royal subjects. And I’ve been her Audience ever since. I was Director and Audience for her plays when she was the passionate Juliet, the outraged Shylock, the flighty Puck, the arrogant Shrew, the brash “My Fair Lady, and the cool, witty Sherlock Holmes. Elai has many facets to her personality, always a mystery, and I will always be her Audience.

I was her Teacher. I taught her to read Calvin and Hobbes, and to do math with plastic squares and multiplication songs (Try this to Jingle Bells: Three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one. Twenty-four and twenty-seven, thirty, and we’re done!), and to act out history lessons with wooden swords and garbage can lids.  We read books together and listened to Grampa Patterson on tape, reading all the voices in the Narnia stories. At night I sang Christmas carols to put her to sleep so she’d learn them (Away in a Manger ,to the tune we sang during the wedding). And she visited Mixtec villages, and historic cities, and Zapotec ruins, and learned an extra language and a bunch of extra cultures, and today she knows her multiplication tables and her history, but she also knows how to pack light, and live out of a suitcase and call anywhere home and anyone a friend.

I was Advisor in the hard times, and Police even, sometimes, when it was necessary. And I was Minister, too. I taught her about Jesus. When she was fifteen, she knew she was ready to give her life to Jesus forever, and I baptized her in a kid’s plastic swimming pool in the front patio of the house where we met for church. I remember the water was cold, and the moment was warm.

I was Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Boss, Cheering Squad, and Memory. I’ve been many things to Elai. I have had many roles. But today reminds me of my role as tutor, or guardian, to bring her to what she was born for: a relationship with Jesus. God put me, and Robert, and all of us, in Elai’s life for two reasons. So she would have Mother and Father and Brother, and Uncles and Aunts, and Cousins, and Godparents, and Friends and now Husband, to love her forever. (I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always. As long as you're living, my baby you'll be.) But it’s also so she can have just a tiny preview, a taste of the role she has forever in the family of God. All that we do now is rehearsal. Today, this wedding, is a rehearsal.  As 1 Corinthians 2:9 says in some version, “Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

And that includes the roles we will play and jobs we will have some day. As we watch our roles shift, losing some we love, gaining some we don’t, we can take comfort in that. It’s all rehearsal.

Two women shopping

Fine print: wikimedia

Today I had to help Manal understand the concept of fine print. She had been given a coupon for a nearby thrift store (thrift stores give coupons!), so off we went shopping. The coupon gave her $10 off, but she had to spend $25 first. That was the fine print. Try explaining that using Google Translate! First she picked out some things for $10. I suggested a bright red sweater, holding it up to my neck, and she scrunched up her face to say as if. Some facial expressions are, fortunately, universal, and I laughed because I wear bright red sweaters. She picked out a bright pink sweater instead. Ahh. How differently God has made us all. Finally she figured out she needed $25 worth of stuff and added some pillows, but when we got to the register, she didn’t realize she had to pay $15! The lady was very patient as we sorted things out, and Manal still got a good deal.

At the apartment, halfway through our language lesson, Rashad disappeared for a few minutes to do his prayers, and then a while later, the phone started singing in Arabic, and Manal turned to listen intently. I finally understood it was her call to prayer (she mimed genuflecting as she would have seen the Orthodox Christians do in her country. She does not know our prayer customs). She disappeared for a bit and came back covered in a white flannel outfit with little pink flowers that covered her completely head to foot. She rolled out a small mat on the carpet at a slight angle from the wall, facing Mecca, and spoke a few words aloud and kneeled three times, touching her forehead to the floor. Rashad communicated that you would do this prayer anywhere. “Supermarket?” I asked? “NO!” He answered with a frown, motioning that you would never pray where people could walk in front of you. “No,” he said, shaking his finger. I realized I could be offensive if I weren’t considerate in this matter.

He then went on to mime the oblations necessary for prayer, showing me exactly the ritual washing he does once or twice a day. He mimed washing his face and head, mouth, nose, ears, neck, hands, arms, elbows, toes, feet. It was important to him that I understand. I wondered what he thinks of our praying habits.

It was my birthday. They all sang Happy Birthday around the dinner table. In English. Sort of. Then for the cheering part at the end, Rashad mimed firing an automatic weapon into the air. “TTTTTTTT!!” He gets little 4 year old Hamad to do the same thing.  It’s our turn to be alarmed, saying, “NO! Not in Canada!” And I make the sound of a police siren and mime being taken away in hand cuffs. I realize I’m alarmed Rashad has brought with him the idea of automatic weapons firing into the air. I guess we do the same thing when we blow off firecrackers. It’s gunpowder going off dangerously with a bang. In celebration. Celebration bombs. Oxymoronic.

Gun Salute: Wikipedia

Yes, they are foreign..foreigners…alien…aliens. We are so different. I can alarm them. They can alarm me. I can come across disrespectful. So can they. We can offend one another. Misunderstand one another. If we do not first build a platform of good will and trust, we can be in trouble. But this is a family that has been through hell, and they have survived and come as foreigners and refugees to “my” land. My job as a Christian is to welcome them. Pray for them. After all, we Christians are all “temporary residents and foreigners.” They remind me of who I am. I am thankful.

Teaching again

refugee camp (wikipedia)

Today Janey and I helped the refugee family we sponsor learn some English. We took the elevator up to the third floor and knocked on their apartment door. We heard feet scrambling on the other side, and children’s excited voices, and Arabic. We waited. Manal opened the door with a big smile, her head covered with a scarf, and her clothes covered with a beautifully embroidered, full-length jacket. I assured her Robert was not with us—it was just us women—and she whipped off the extra clothing. (The apartment was hot; they can’t control the temperature.) The kids gave us hugs. This is Bayan’s fourth day of school (first grade), and Rashad’s first day of English (there was no space for Manal at the Multicultural classes). Janey and I are filling in the gap for Manal.

She’s a smart and willing student. “More,” she motions with her hands when I offer to quit the lesson. She shows me phrases she has downloaded on her phone: I’m hungry; I’m thirsty, I’m tired. I’m bored. “Am Darshdy,” she says.  Every fiber of my teacher being is awakened when I see her face fall at her failure, and I gesture for her not to try to pronounce the words but simply listen to them and response with a gesture until she has grasped their meaning. This method is effective for first-time learners, TPR Total Physical Response. “I’m hungry.” She rubs her tummy. “I’m thirsty.” She mimes drinking. The “thirsty” frustrates her. “Englezi za’ab,” she says. “English is difficult!” Yes. Englezi za’ab.

She cooks early supper (I have no idea when mealtimes are for her; we try to show up in between them, but she still insists on feeding us, reminding me of Mexico), and we follow her into the kitchen to name the ingredients she is using for the meal. We try to pronounce the Arabic equivalent: “Ta’am” is garlic. “Flayflay” is pepper. “Macaroni!” We laugh. I recognize the Arabic for oil “zeit” because it is so close to the Spanish “aceite,” and I guess that the word was learned from the Moors when they occupied Spain. I recognize “verdera” and “tomatim.” Manal takes a pinch of  green herbs from a plastic bag (did she bring this with her from Syria?) that smell like mint and makes a tasty pasta supper and insists on feeding us. How can we say no?

Janey is gluten-intolerant, so she just can’t eat the food, a disappointment for the family, and we hunt for “allergic” on Google Translate, which, as we have discovered, has maybe a 50/50 chance of ever getting it right. Half of what they try to tell us is lost. We feel the distance.

When it’s time to leave, little Bayan climbs into Janey’s arms and wants to come home with us. We would take her if we could. “I love you,” she says with a radiant smile. She is beautiful to me. This family makes me think more about the God I love and the Jesus I serve than any preacher. It is always this way, you know. “God, shower this family with your love. Reveal yourself through your Son Jesus.”

I think the beginning of the answer to this prayer is:

“Manal, touch the table.”

“Bayan, touch the chair.”

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“I love you.”

Robert and Rashad