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.