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.