Family Tree

Robert is in another market town tonight. Thursday he left Tlaxiaco at 7000 feet and went down to Ometepec (or as our friend Dan says, who visited us there for a few weeks: O Sweatepec) at sea level. In fact tomorrow, as he leaves, he and Jason will stop at the beach and take a swim, eat some ceviche, and chill until they head on to the next stop. (We never did this once when we lived in the area.)

He called me and out of the blue gave me some news that I didn’t expect and that is some of the best possible news he could have had. Not like the cryptic fb message I got from Philip that said, “I accidentally worked all night and got evicted” plus his new status of “Homeless.” How do you unpack that from several thousand miles away? I messaged back, “Should I be worried?” because I figured that if there was anything really wrong, he wouldn’t be saying cryptic things. He said, “Nope,” so I guess we’re ok. He said he had until midnight to move out. Something about mold in the room next door. How does this happen in the driest corner of Texas? It’s a mystery. Then I got a message from Elai saying she had a surprise for me, so I called her to see what  that was all about, and she told me she has a Frida Kahlo tabby kitten. I'm hoping that all these kitten adoptions means  she’s practicing for giving me some real grandchildren some day.

So the news. I have to go back to when we lived in another market town—Tlapa. We were at home one afternoon with the kids and a car drove up to the house. It was some Mexican mission mobilizers who had tracked us down (we had no phone, so they drove a bunch of hours to Tlapa to find us) and were inviting us to spend time in Acapulco, mobilizing missionaries there in churches that had participated in the latest Comiban (a worldwide Hispanic mission conference similar to Urbana). So off we went. We lived in a concrete jungle far away from any beaches or sea breezes, and it was the hottest, most uncomfortable place I have ever lived. The kids slept in hammocks to stay cool, and we would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to shower to cool off. The walls were always hot to the touch.

But while we were there, we gathered a team of women from the churches in the city and led it to O Sweatepec to plant churches among the Mixtecs there. One of the women, Celida, was a persistent and gifted evangelist. She brought her Mixtec landlord, Vicente, to the Lord, and several others and taught them the basics of being a church, but for a long time, not much happened. Vicente has been faithfully traveling to his home village to tell them about Jesus, and tonight I found out that finally, some have responded. Recently they were baptized. Now they want to visit other Mixtec towns and take their good news with them. And Vicente, who had been gathering just with his family in his home, has now grown a small congregation in O Sweatepec.

You plant. Someone else waters, but the plant that grows gives joy to everyone. Go Vicente. His name (it’s Robert’s middle name, too) means victorious, winner, overcomer, and this is true. Something good has been won. This chain of events has taken a while, but it’s why we came to Mexico. Seeds planted over ten years ago are bearing fruit, and that’s about the best news that could come to me over the phone from O Sweatepec. 

Some day...