Superman

As I travel now, I think of all the homes we've stayed in over an entire hemisphere. It's been an incredible experience of hospitality. When Robert and I went to Mexico for the first time, we explored many Indian towns and villages. Missionaries explained that Indian communities are self-governing, so if you live there, you abide by their rules. Some of them protect their cultural identity by keeping outsiders from moving in, so you have to get permission from the town president to live among them. Some prohibit the preaching of what they consider foreign religions. So we knew that moving into a Mixtec village was not going to be a straight forward affair. To meet Mixtecs, we spent months visiting the migrant labor camps where they worked in Sinaloa (in northern Mexico), and there we developed friendships among one particular group.   Our friends were new believers, barely a year old in following Jesus. They invited us to come live with them in southern Mexico, so after the migrant season was over, we followed them south to their home village.

We took public transport, a one ton stake truck (this is Robert’s definition—for the longest time I was thinking of “steak truck,” and I still haven’t seen any stakes anywhere) and five hours later stepped down from the truck onto the road next to a village where our Mixtec friends lived. Fortunately for us, one of the believing families lived right on the road, and as soon as they saw us (hard to miss, these white folk, possibly the first gringos to visit the village), they hurried down the mountainside to welcome us. Of course there was no way to tell them we were coming, and I doubt they took our assurances of a visit seriously in Sinaloa. So there we were, a couple of gringos, carrying backpacks, needing a place to stay. If this had been the village up the road, we would have spent the night in the square, without food or lodging. And the village was 7000 feet up in the air, so cold. I was wearing a skirt and open shoes, so I remember that. There were nothing but people’s own adobe homes and wooden kitchens in the village, so nowhere for strangers to eat or sleep. The truck driver who had brought us would spend the night on the side of the road in his cab and head out at 4 am, eating breakfast in some other town with more amenities.

Lydia (not her real name) was our hostess. She opened up the door of her home and set us up there. We lived with the whole family, mom, three kids and two grandchildren, in one room, and we cooked on an open fire on an adobe platform in the corner and ate around the fire. Our furniture consisted of bamboo stick beds (ours was behind the front door) and a few child-sized chairs.  There was no bathroom until Robert dug a hole in the ground, covered it with a wobbly board, and built up cardboard walls around that. We were newly married, so this arrangement was…interesting…but for Lydia, it was a natural act of hospitality. As fellow believers, we were her family. Lydia’s job each day was to make the family tortillas, weave cloth on a backloom, and bring in firewood. We did what we could to help out, but we weren’t much use.

Robert’s closest friend in this village was Alberto, (not his real name) father of seven, farmer, seller of dried fish, and shoes, and clothes, and whatever else he could think of. Eventually Robert taught him carpentry, and he sold doors, and windows, and beds, and tables, and chairs, but he never had much. Yet when we no longer lived in the village, and Robert returned for a visit, there was never any question that Robert would stay with Alberto. At night everyone would share the one family room, and the two men would talk in the dark, and Alberto would ask endless questions: “Brother, is it true people have walked on the moon? Is it really made of cheese? Does Superman exist? Star trek? Do we come from monkeys? Is there a hole in a place called Russia that reaches all the way to hell, so that if you lower a microphone, you can hear the screams?” Alberto had watched TV, and seen strange things, and who do you trust to ask about what is real and what is not? Alberto's endless curiosity was inspiring.

Alberto’s brother, Ronaldo, was one of the two martyrs of the Mixtec church. He was shot while shepherding out in the fields one day. Shot for his faith in Jesus. He probably couldn’t read. I don’t know. I know that he wouldn’t have gotten right any fine points of theology. He knew one thing: Jesus loved him as a Mixtec, had forgiven him his past life and given him a new one, and would welcome him home one day as part of God’s family. And that is about all Ronaldo would have known when he died. Alberto and the rest of the Mixtec believers never knew if one of them would be the next martyr. They stayed indoors after dark and warned us to do the same. But Alberto never wavered. He taught himself to read the Bible, as best he could in a language he didn’t own, and he led the church. We learned a lot about faith from him. And we were honored to be his family and share his home. He fulfilled that promise of Jesus that when you leave home and family behind, he gives you new homes, new families.

Verbs

Monday Angie comes to Canada. Yay! What I didn’t mention is that all my family is coming: mom, dad, sister, and two nieces, with only my oldest nephew, all grown up now and working, left behind. I had been wondering where I would put all seven of us, but Janey came to the rescue, offering to take her family on holiday to Paris just so we could have the house (just kidding! about why she's going, not what she offered)… 

Irony. As I was typing that paragraph, the phone rang. It was my mom telling me my dad is in the hospital after having emergency surgery. As well I could make out (I haven’t talked to him directly; just piecing it together from mom’s description and Wikipedia), he has Amaurosis fugax. Although this sounds like quick lover’s syndrome, it’s actually a kind of stroke that blocks blood to the eye.  So I’m waiting to see how he’s doing, and realizing my parents aren’t coming after all. Meanwhile, I called Angie, and she says it looks like she will be selling twenty, (twenty!) houses this week, with all the detail that entails (and I thought bureaucracy in Oaxaca looked like tangled cheese!), so she might not come…

Adjusting…adjusting…

It seems unfair how much our expectations affect our reaction to things.

But rather than dwell on that, I am going to turn a corner and relay what happened next, when my mom took a cell phone into the hospital so I could talk to my dad, who is still in ICU, and whose voice is still hoarse from the anesthetic, and who looks like a porcupine with all the monitor lines and tubes sticking out of him like so many quills, and who has lost vision in one eye but assures me he can still work on the computer, designing a course that trains church leaders outside the classroom, following an apprenticeship model, and he’s 82, my dad, and he almost immediately switches the conversation to me. How am I doing? He loves my blog. Etc. And he asks me what kind of readers I have, and what kind of comments, and I tell him, and one comment reminds him of what he considers the gravest danger in the church today, and off we go into a discussion of the dangers that the church faces today. And he’s in ICU, and my mom is making faces at him to take care and not get excited. This is why I love my dad. One of the reasons.

And, according to my dad, this is the gravest danger to the church today: abstraction. Not distraction, but abstraction. What dad means is that we can get so caught up in lists and discussions about doctrines and theologies and word studies that we miss the point of doing them. He says this is the gravest danger of relying on seminaries to train leaders because they tend to emphasize information, which can be measured on tests, over practice, which requires the more difficult Paul-and-Timothy-working-in-a-real-church model. In our culture, knowledge is so often assumed to transform behavior, but when you don’t check through active discipleship, do you know it’s changing lives? When they hand you a degree in divinity (!) do they know you've grown in divinity? There't the rub. There is a reason that some languages (Mixtec, for example) have only word for our two: listen and obey. At one point in our history, these two ideas were united in one English word as well, but the modern tool of analysis (not a bad tool unless badly used) made it much easier for us to analyze when we should be out the door, doing.

Abstraction means that people are hearing the Word, studying the Word, getting degrees in the Word, judging  people’s faith by their interpretation of the Word but not necessarily obeying the Word.  The Spanish translation of John 1:1 captures the idea so much better than the English: “In the beginning was the Verb.” [Guatemalan Ricardo Arjona sings it like this:  “To not be redundant, I have to say that Jesus is action and movement, not five letters forming a name, that Jesus likes for us to act, not talk, that Jesus is Verb, not Noun.” (link to the lyrics: Jesus is Verb)] My dad said, “Just look at the beginning of John where he describes Jesus. It’s all verbs. All actions—not an abstract noun among them.” (My dad writes training materials all the time. He'll write the day he gets out of the hospital. With every title a verb.)

My dad said he’d sent out a survey that compared seminary course content with field worker “course” content. What he found, and the results he sent out to 50 seminaries, was that the seminary course content was filled with abstract terms, while the field worker “course” content was mostly actions—verbs. His final conclusion asked: In which context should we be training our future workers? Isn’t it time we opened a second track?

All of this on a phone, from ICU, with Mom making faces in the background. My dad, planter of churches, coacher of coaches, and writer of verbs. If you ever wondered why I am who I am, a big part of it you just saw--in verbs.

Tranquil Father's Day, Dad.

Hadn't thought of that 'til now.
Irony.

Angie

One of the possible side effects of cancer is to pull a family together. I just got an email from my sister Angie. She’s bought her tickets and is coming to Canada! So let me introduce her.

If God wanted to send you out as a cross-cultural missionary to live in an unreached Indian group that eats beans and tortillas every day, every meal, and talks in a tonal language miserably hard to learn, and tells the local military intelligence you are training guerrilla fighters and bringing crates of guns into the mountains, so that they land helicopters bristling with machine guns in the town square to catch you, how does He prepare you to live among people so different from you? Well, he starts by putting you into a family. With a sibling so different from you that you will never completely ever get each other, but will love each other anyway. Which makes it kind of fun, don’t you think?

So let me introduce you to the sister you know the least, and I know the best. Angela Karen. Messenger of Joy, born December 25^th, Christmas Day. I have seen pictures of the two of us playing happily together when we were young, but what stands out for me is junior high. Awful time: junior high. Picture this: we live in Honduras where everyone is dark-haired, and there is my sister, my younger sister, remember. She’s blond, with the most gorgeous honey skin, and beautiful face, and voluptuous body, and she is fun and dramatic and fashionable, and artsy and outgoing, and though not necessarily book smart, she’s smart with people! I mean right now she sells houses, and she became the top salesperson in the entire company within two months of walking in the door, and other salespeople call her up all the time to ask how she does it, and she says, “I listen!  I just listen to them!” That’s my sister! Me, I couldn’t sell her houses for free!

…but here we are, back in junior high…The telephone rings, it’s guys from my class, two whole years older than her, wanting to talk to me? No, of course not. Always to her, and I don’t blame them now. I was hard to talk to.

Was I jealous? Yes. I remember having lunch with my mom, just the two of us--Angie was probably out with all her cool friends, and I wailed over our Honduran meal, “Mom, why can’t I be like her? No one likes me!” And of course she did the mom thing, “Honey, you are beautiful in your own way, and you will each have your own troubles in life and your own strengths. Don’t wish yourself your sister’s shoes.” This made no sense to me, of course.

Honduras mks: Angie, Anne, Peter,Rachel, Esther

Here we are some 40 years later. We have each had our own journey of ups and downs, and she’s had the rougher road, I think. And I see her physical beauty, and her love for helpless creatures like ducks and ferrets and even rats, (the Eccentric Aunt, my kids call her, with dozens of creatures running around the house),  and her fierce color blindness in the midst of neighborhood prejudice, and her endless ability to welcome guests with a big heart. She once welcomed a homeless couple into her house where they mooched off her for a while, then backed a truck into her yard, piled her household goods on it, and got stuck in the mud trying to take off. When Angie got home, she pushed them out of the muck and sent them on their way with all her stuff in the back of that truck. That’s Angie. Generous to a fault. Me. I am not naturally hospitable, or generous, or artsy, or compassionate. I work at these things. She’s just gifted.  And I realize that training for living with Mixtecs, and a Canadian husband, and growing kids, started at home, in Honduras, with missionary parents, and a sister unfathomably different from me. And I hope that in some way, God has used me to bless and train her, too.

Tortoises and Hares

One thing I find hard right now is being so far from my kids. Elai is a governess in California for the summer, where she has adopted two stray kittens (of course, she has). Philip is working at an internship in Chicago picking up eighty pound bags of abrasive powders. I want to hear from them every day, hear every detail. But that can’t always happen. They have lives, too. Sigh. But I think of them. Like this:

When my Hippie-Child Daughter was born, and I held her, she would squirm those little shoulders that had made popping noises in the womb and sent me scrambling to the doctor (“No, I don’t think you can hear popping noises in the womb,” “Oh, yes, you can, Mr. Doctor, yes you can.”) to keep me from holding on too tight. And when she could sit up, it had to be facing out. In restaurants I would be cutting my enchilada and turn, and find Elai goo-gooing at the family at the other table. I had to watch for that. All the world was a stage for her, and anyone might walk up and introduce themselves to…her, “Oh let me hold her!” I should have known when teenage girls in Culiacan, Sinaloa, first saw me pregnant with her and came up to me to plead, “Please, can I just touch your belly; it’s good luck.” And there we adopted our first stray cat that insisted on curling up between us, and we let it. And she climbed the castillo, the rebar structure next door, wafting eight feet up into the air, at barely 2 years old, and scared us half to death, and we tried to talk her back down. Calmly. It was Bob who saw her (having come to visit when Philip was born), my scampering hare, off to anywhere new.

When Philip was born, he would take that curly blond head of his and squeeze it between my collar bone and my jaw, as tightly into my neck as he could get, and just snuggle there. Forever. And I would purr like the cat. And it never mattered how tight I held him to me: he was content. And in the mornings, when we got up before 5 to beat the heat and get study and jogging in before the sun slammed down on us, we could never get up too early for him. At the first stir, he was up and in my lap, just sitting, being quiet, and figuring out the lay of the day, making it safe to move into. And he was a fixture at the back of my skirt, his safe place, his harbor, when we went somewhere that involved lots of people looking back at him, and he would stand there, in his harbor behind me, his fist clamped fiercely onto my skirt, and his little blond curls peeking, then peeking some more, creating a bridge from him to all those eyes looking back, creating a safe way to come out and explore this new place.

This was my tortoise, content to stay in one place and move only slowly to new places the rest of his life, but who would find his flippers constantly landing on patch after patch of new ground. And it was this tortoise who taught his mom to love tortoises. Because up until this time, I had no use for tortoises. Why, if God needed evangelists and church planters, did he make me a tortoise, and a woman? That was all a mistake. My dad had confirmed this, saying, when I was a teenager, “You live too much inside your head. This is selfish. Try to change this.” (He has repented a thousand times. It takes a while to appreciate tortoises)

I realized that I had no need for my tortoise to be anything else but what he was. I loved him this way, and wanted no one ever to make him feel he needed to change to please them. I didn’t know back then how useful it was to be a tortoise, I just knew it was good. Because of my bridge-building, safety-creating Engineer Son. Today, I know these sorts are like rocks in the stream, safe havens to stand on and find your bearing. Tortoises see things. Emily Dickinson never left her room but saw out her window, in one day, more than some people see in a lifetime.

My Hippie Child Daughter is all mystery, and startling thought, and theatre and movement, and color, while my Chill Engineer Son is grounded, as reliable as the sun coming up each day. We offered once to use his air miles to take him with us on our 25^th anniversary trip to Europe (that hasn’t happened yet; we were planning early). He calmly and firmly refused: we weren’t dragging him over any vast stretches of ocean, thank you very much. Elai was waving her arms in the air over his head: take me; I want to go.  Someday this trip will happen, though not now.

My Chill Son grew up two years in one his last year in high school, and went to a very difficult college at 17, and finished his year of mechanical engineering, building 3D printers and electric guitars, and buckled down and passed just fine after we thought he might fail, and he used those frequent flyer miles to fly a special friend down to Texas to visit. And his father’s stubbornness and loyalty live in him, and there is no one you would want to trust more than this boy. And he always thinks things through first, looking out from some safe harbor, and engineering a bridge of safety before stepping out to play, and work, and live. And he never lacks for a few excellent friends, and he never lacks for integrity, and I have a spray-painted sign above the entrance to my kitchen that says LOVE in five colors that he made for Mother’s Day, and well, when words fail, as they often did that last year between tortoise Mom and teenage tortoise Son stepping out into the world on his own for the first time, and when I don’t hear from him on the days I wish to, then that sign says it all, doesn’t it.

As if on cue, he called tonight. We talked for an hour, and it hurt to hang up, but my heart slept warm.

Bob...Charlotte

Today I got a letter that made me cry. It was from the husband of someone going through what I’m going through, only worse, and he was thanking me for our friendship. I’ve been wanting to write about her and about my friend Bob for a long time. They are fellow travelers on this cancer journey, and I love them very much. Bob gave me permission to use his real name. My friend Charlotte has a pseudonym until I get a go ahead there. Meanwhile I want to write about them because they are important to me, and because their stories intertwine with mine, and because their stories are beautiful, and because in telling their stories, I get to listen to them, too.

Bob is Philip’s godfather, the only North American visitor we had when Philip was born, and he’s one of Robert’s best friends, a friend from the Honduras days. He came to visit us in Guerrero, and we hoped one day he’d join us in Mexico. This never happened for various reasons. This summer he’s bringing his family down to Mexico again to stay in our house, where they will hang out with our friends and fill the back of our truck with silliness. If only we were there to join in, and listen to Bob playing on some guitar or other, and singing, “Has anyone here seen Hank.” When he found out he would be spending six days in San Francisco, isolated in a lead-lined room after an inhuman blast of radiation, he bought a guitar on Craig’s List and had it delivered to “his” room. Now he’s seeing if he can get it back to Chicago where it will join all the rest of the guitars stocking his living room.

Bob married Rebecca and they had three girls: Cayla, Emily, and Julia. Two Thanksgivings ago, Rebecca died. She fainted in an elevator at work, slipped into a coma at the hospital, and never came back. There was only Bob, with Cayla, Emily, and Julia. The parents from the girl’s Lutheran school brought Bob meals. For a year.  One of those parents was Gretchen, the widow of Kevin, who died ten years ago of cancer, leaving Gavin, whom the two decided to have anyway, knowing he’d grow up without a dad. Now it’s Bob, Gretchen, Cayla, Emily, Gavin, and Julia. But Bob has cancer. And it’s spread. His counts are good after the radiation, better than the doctor expected. Yayy!

And Charlotte, not her real name. Charlotte and her husband work…underground. We have good shared history, and they say we helped inspire them toward this work, and if that’s true, it makes me glad. They have lived in difficult places, and learned people’s languages (tough ones like Mixtec), and helped people fall in love with God. Charlotte was in another country for a conference, had a routine mammogram (our stories parallel) and was rushed home for treatment. She’s already had her mastectomy. Charlotte has five kids: four boys and a new baby girl (yayy!) whom she named for her Sister, also a friend I love. Our stories diverge a bit here. My cancer is HER2+, and there’s a drug called herceptin that targets it.   Charlotte’s is triple negative, and of yet, there is not a drug that targets it specifically. Chemo helps. And radiation. So that is the plan right now. But the prognosis is not what we would like. And I hate this. It distresses me. She writes to ask what chemo is like, and is it not a betrayal to our bodies and to God to poison ourselves this way. It is. But it is also an acceptance of the value of human work as a gift from God. However imperfect it is, however full of thorns and weeds, however mangled.

And what can I do? 

I write. I write about them, and hope, and try to whine only at the small things like borders and accents. Because these are nothing, nothing, next to Bob, and Gretchen, and Charlotte and Husband, and Sister, and all those nine gorgeous kids.

Magic Wand Thinking

This is the post that I was working on before getting stuck at the border:

Robert gets back from camp today. And to be fair, I’ve got to say enough with the “he’s not the world’s best nurse” stuff and tell you a story. Robert and I met in Honduras, but we lived a fourteen hour bus drive apart. After Robert and I got engaged on our first date, he went back to Catacamas, where he worked in a woodshop, learning how to make guitars, and teaching wood-turning to Honduran pastors so they could support themselves. We wrote letters to each other every day, sending them together in packets, and I still have them. In one he told me how he was getting a ride home late one night with his church friends, and on the side of the road, up ahead, they saw the fallout from a drunken machete fight. This was not uncommon in Catacamas, the wild, wild west of Honduras, where family feuds and weekend brawls left too many dead. Two men lay passed out on the road, one severely injured, his hand almost completely severed by a machete slash. At first, out of fear, the Hondurans did not want to stop, but Robert insisted, and of course, they agreed, and picked up the bleeding figure, and took him to the closest clinic. Which already had its hands full with two other slashed combatants from the same fight. So they drove on to another clinic. Which was low on supplies. Robert had to help the nurse put in the stitches (he liked this), and lent her his pocket knife to cut the thread.  He did not get home until the next day.

So no, my unempathetic husband does not sweat the small stuff. But when it counts, you’d want him there every time. I should know. But here is what I really like: He’s up at Camp mentoring people, while I am here recuperating from my fever and my trip to the ER, and I get this text: “Want to tell you about an idea that I talked about with Ed this morning. Magic wand thinking.”

Magic Wand Thinking. Robert and I have been talking a lot lately about how God loves processes. About how he takes time to teach us things, drawing from all kinds of people and happenings in our lives. About how he takes time to create things. Things like butterflies, grapes, canyons, teenagers, stars. Taking time does not seem to bother Him. In fact, He waited thousands of years to step into time personally. We should be expecting by now for Him to use long processes. I need to know this is true right now.

But what this text adds to the mix is what happens when we don’t give God time. When we insist on INSTANT along with the rest of our culture. What effects does this have, this magic wand thinking?  Well, for one thing, we might move into cultures or neighborhoods or lifestyles to fix them without listening first, without learning the language first. Or we might give someone a prayer to pray and walk away, without remembering discipleship is an eternal process, and who knows where it starts, and who know where it ends. Or we might insist on a miracle we desperately need but that God has not found fitting for His story. Or we might assume something about someone’s faith, someone, say, who doesn’t mind God taking his time to create a day, who is just happy it’s Him, creating. Or we might simply be impatient. (That’s me. My luck. I crash and burn on the Fruit of the Spirit stuff. Bet it’s on this semester’s syllabus.)  My guess is this: we are all, in some way, addicted to magic wands.

Robert is on his way home from Camp, and we are texting ideas. How could I not marry this one, this unempathetic Drunk-Rescuer? Do you know we are coming up on our 25^th? Yes, in August, when I’m probably having a mastectomy, or heart surgery, or radiation, or something. And this 25 year process—I’m good with it.

Courage

Today I want to talk about courage. I know this young woman who was dating a guy she thought would be her future husband. Her whole world revolved around him, and she shaped her future plans around his. But then he decided to end the relationship, just now, a few weeks before the end of her school year. “Too rocky a relationship,” he said, “It would be settling…” It is not for me to judge between them. All I can do is imagine what these words would sound like to me, if were in love with a boy who was destroying my dreams. I remember coming back from my first semester at college, excited to see the guy I thought I would marry. He and I had written daily letters, conducted a Bible study together over snail mail, (quite a feat, don’t you think?), and thought we were compatible. My first day home, I got the phone call. He’d found someone else at his own college and went on to marry her. What was wrong with ME? Wave after wave of emotional pain enveloped me that Christmas, and when a friend called me to wish me well, I realized that my voice was dragging on the floor like that of a dead person. But I survived and married a MUCH better man—for me.

And this will happen to my young woman friend, too, though it does not feel that way now. And I watch her go through her days, just surviving. She had to leave her classes because she was crying, and she, an A student on the Dean’s List, could no longer focus enough to finish a five page paper.  I told her to call me anytime, night or day, as a distraction, and we spent hours skyping. My favorite time was when I had lost my voice. Completely. Not one word could I speak to her. Instead, she taught me how to find the dialogue box on the side and she spoke, sporadically, gently, and I typed in responses as fast as I could: poems she knew, songs she’d sung, memories she’d had. I remember how in my silence, her voice was all I had in the room, and it was beautiful.  We had never been so close as in this agony.

And I watched her make it through her days. She found people to eat with in the cafeteria. She filled the bad hours of late night talking to her room-mates, twin missionary girls from Japan with the most gorgeous smiles.  She sought out her RA and her RD (she kept calling her the ADR for some reason, and I didn’t have the heart to correct her), and she forced herself to go to a concert and a play, and even had a discussion with the philosophy student sitting next to her with this interaction: “You’ve read G.K Chesteron?” “Oh, yes, my mom used to read G.K  Chesteron after supper.” “What kind of parents do you have???” And I watched this young woman put one foot in front of another every day, and survive pain. I thrilled when that skype blooop came up, and there was a hint of smile on her face, a glimmer of that old sparkle in her eye.  And she taught me to see courage in a place where I had never really looked before. And I have never been so proud of a young woman in all my life as I am proud of this young woman.

P.S. This message came in from her at 2 am: “I realize something. The Man Who Was Thursday (that would be G.K. Chesterton) makes sense to me. Job makes sense. It’s not God that broke me up with my boyfriend. God doesn’t cause brokenness. Satan does. Sin does. We have a choice when bad things happen. We can curse God, or we can praise and love him. He lets things happen because He loves us; He gives us the choice to love Him. I hate it when people say God made something terrible happen so we’d go back to Him. That sounds like an abusive relationship. He lets Satan take away everything from beat us down, but we are strong, and like Job, we choose to love God.”   Could anyone say it better?

Today I didn’t get a call from this young woman. She does not need to call today. She’s healing. She’s back.

Sisters

I have six sisters in North America. One I was born to. Three I married into. Two are not even related to me. My sister Diana married Robert’s brother. We got close. My cross-stitched dollhouse hangs in her hallway, and she manages my Canadian paperwork, which can get complicated. But something went wrong, and there was a divorce. I was keeping a brother—a good thing—but losing a sister, and I had no heart to lose either. I did not want our sisterhood to depend on other people’s choices. I didn't think divorce should break our sisterhood. Now Diana introduces herself no longer as her sister-in-law, but simply as her sister. And that is what I am, and nothing, no power of human beings, no power of death, can ever, ever, change that.

My other sister is sister by mistake. Janey I have known for thirty one years and we have been through many big things of life together: sharing beds, head to foot, under mosquito nets in refugee camps in Honduras where we dated the same guy (not at the same time! I asked her permission when they were done). When I got engaged, Robert called her up in Alberta to say, “Naksa, Prendki,” and that I was engaged to him on our first date and about to be married, and she had a ticket to buy to come to my week-long wedding celebration. I set her up with her husband Dan and our home in Mexico was their first date. And for thirty one years, everyone has always assumed we were sisters. It still happens now when I drag her to wig shopping and eyebrow painting. Others peg us as sisters, and we have decided simply to give up and acknowledge, yes, we are sisters, born two months apart, and just watch their faces. 

In the women’s retreat I was at this weekend, our speaker told us about how her birth mom abandoned her, and how her adoptive dad abandoned her, and how after fifty years, she finally flew to Nova Scotia to meet her birth dad for the first time, where he threw a party with 80 new relatives including three new brothers, and put up a banner that said Welcome Home, and pinned a button on her that said “It’s a girl!” and gave her a huge hug, and told her he’d been praying for her every day of her life. See, the cold facts of birth and marriage do not necessarily fathers or sisters make. It’s a choice of love and a whole lot of grace. God has adopted us into his family, giving us a Father and brothers and sisters, and though I don’t know all of them yet, there’s a party planned, a banner waiting, a button to be pinned on with my new family name, and a whole lot of new relatives to meet. At the beginning of this update, I said I have 6 sisters, but actually, I have many more, and you will meet some of them here. As a wise man once said, “Who is my mother, my sister? The one who walks with my Father is my mother, my sister.” Like I said, there’s treasure everywhere.