Papers

We are back across the border, car and everything. It's all in the papers you carry. If they say the right things, you're in.  But some 
 people, of course, have no papers at all. 


Here is a story about someone with no papers, no family, not even a last name. On one of Robert's visits to his Mixtec village, Alberto introduced Robert to a new son he had just adopted. Unofficially. But what do papers matter where there is genuine father love? Alberto has a big heart, and most Mixtec families welcome kids. On a trip to buy supplies in the market town, Alberto had walked through the town square and noticed a five-year old shoe-shine boy. The town is Indian, so the boy stuck out because he was obviously Hispanic. Alberto struck up a conversation with this five-year old boy and learned his story. The boy had run away from an abusive family situation, slipped unnoticed onto a series of buses, and ended up in this bustling Indian market town. Here he slept on the street and ate from his shoe-shine earnings. Alberto asked him if would like to come home with him, and this is how Ray joined Alberto’s family as his son. Adoption can be simple in Mixtec towns when fathers are willing.

Ray learned Mixtec and took his place in the family. Years passed. Some ten years later, Alberto got up one day, and Ray was gone. Just gone. Alberto was frantic. He searched everywhere. He asked everyone. No one had seen him. Convinced that his son had been abducted, Alberto got on public transportation and started visiting the larger towns and cities in the area. He went to the state capital. He went to Acapulco, the tourist center. He wandered the streets and asked for help, but how do you find a lost son in a city of a million? Alberto was heart-broken, but his son was gone.

Three years later, Ray came back. Just showed up. Apparently he’d just got fed up at something and run in teenage frustration, but he’d figured out where home was, and he’d come back. And there was a father there to welcome him home.

Back when the Mixtec church had been born, Alberto was one of five elders chosen by the group to lead the church. One by one all the other leaders migrated to the US to look for work, but God told Alberto in a dream to stay and look after the congregation, and so, for many years, he did. Eventually he got into debt. And interest on loans in the Mixtec mountains runs at 50 to 100% per month, so anyone borrowing money gets into trouble very quickly. Business is hard in the mountains. Everything is hard in the mountains. Alberto eventually got into steep debt and fled to the US to climb out of the hole. Ray went with him.

A while back, on a drive across the US, Robert and I stopped to see Alberto in Alabama, where Alberto works long hours welding in a factory. All his money he sends home to his wife and kids. His oldest sons are at marriageable age, and the dowries run high. And the church in his village is asking him to send money for them to buy a new sound system. Some things never change, and the village economy is skewed by imported money. We got to see Ray, who is married now and lives close to Alberto, his father. And Alberto took us out for dinner, to MacDonalds, where he could treat us to the best meal in town. And so it was. On the last morning, just before we left, he borrowed a camera and stood us in front of his door, all solemn as befits such a solemn occasion, and he took our picture together. He said what I will never forget, this loving father of a beloved adopted son, “Robert, you are my best friend.”  What do you do with that? 

I think God is a father like Alberto, father to those without papers.

Winning

I’m in Florida, land of Everglades, theme parks and beaches. But is that where I’m spending my time? Of course not. I’m hanging out in Emergency and Hospital rooms---American ones this time. But I’m not the one on the bed. That’s my dad, although when it’s someone you love, it feels like you are interchangeable, like it doesn’t matter which of the two of you is lying there because you feel everything happening as if it were to you, the flinch when they poke you to take blood (again), the draining away of energy. We were in Emerg for seven hours, and at one point Dad was starting to wonder if he’d make it and began giving last instructions, dictating a letter that needed sending, just in case, and Mom and I were praying and trying to keep the quavering from our voices. 

After hours, it was if a switch flipped over, the meds kicked in, and Dad rallied from one moment to the next. By the time, 2 in the morning, that the tech rolled him up to his hospital room, he was dictating a joke about hippie hearts. The crisis was over. He’d won.

And finally we figured out who his Mystery Doctor was. All those hours and we still didn’t know. We thought this was because he was waiting for test results, and the first blood samples hadn’t worked. The tech who came in for five more vials from the other arm (as if we wouldn’t notice somehow) had sheepishly admitted the samples had hemolyzed. (Did you know blood could hemolyze?) This is a bad thing. It means the red blood cells have gone and ruptured and spilled their guts all over the machines and clogged up the works, so the tech has to start over. And they do this so cheerfully. (I had a nurse in the chemo lab run her finger over the veins in my hand and comment gleefully, “You have such great veins for IVs.” Great. It’s what I’ve always wanted.) When the doctor finally showed up, we realized he’d actually been in and out of the room several times, but he was so unassuming, never announcing his entrance, that we’d mistaken him for another tech asking questions. That’s a new one, a doctor coming into your little Emerg cubicle and not making an entrance. He was bald, black, handsome, and obviously not arrogant. Dr. Unassuming.

Dad is fine. By the next day he was preaching to his visitor (his pastor), gesturing wildly with his hands, forgetting that the nurse standing beside him was trying to slowly inject medicine into his arm through his IV line. She would patiently follow his hand as he waved it around to avoid pulling the line right out of his arm. We all took turns visiting and playing games, including  Quiddler. I won.

Then came my turn to scare everyone by having a fever. Fortunately, it stayed nice and low all night and all next day, so I put off going anywhere, and there was praying, and Mom’s couch and I got to know each other pretty well, and everyone else went to see dad and play more card games while I waited to see who would win out, me or the fever. I won again. I’m on a roll.

And I figure I wouldn’t trade these five days with Dad, Mom, Sister, Niece 1 and Niece 2 for any theme park rides or Everglade tours because getting through the stuff of life together is a kind of winning that doesn’t happen any other way, and just how many more chances like this am I going to get?

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.

Family Tree

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Aboriginal Australian woman

The friend I was visiting in Chicago is a genius researcher. She researches family genealogies and then prints the family story as a gorgeous coffee-table book. She has spent days helping me trace my own family back as far as I could go. I found I'm a mix of Irish and English and German. I also found out I am a Daughter of the Revolution. My great…Irish grandfather, Henry, the revolutionary soldier, was stationed in Pennsylvania, where he met Eva, a German immigrant. The two of them were married in a Lutheran church and managed to do do something to get themselves in trouble, because the church records show an official reprimand for them (hmm).  Later the couple was given refuge by the Moravians after their settlement was attacked by Indian folk. The records say the brothers gave them stockings. Cool. But I’ve got older family history yet. And this stuff is BIG and also involves an Eva.
When we look at God’s family history, we have to go much further back to tell the story. If we think back, way back, farther back, until we are at the beginning of time, when the world was being shaped and spun into space, what image do we see in our minds? A spirit hovering? If we go back even further, back even before the creation of the universe, what do we see? Maybe angels worshipping? Myriads of creatures surrounding the God of heaven? What about back further yet? What image do we hold of a “time” before angels? Anything? Of course eyes can’t see what we are imagining, but that never stopped anyone before. Do we have some image of God? And how do we imagine him back then, before all else was created? I’m asking the impossible, but that first image may tell us something.

Is it lonely? Is it of a God alone in all the unborn universe? Or is it something quite different? Is it a society, a community, a culture, a family? Because this is where we start. With the fact that God has never been alone, never been lonely, never been one single Person. God, as Trinity, as Three Persons so united in love that they are eternally Inseparable, has always been One Community. The relationships that we have in this world are but pale reflections of His. God doesn’t merely love. God, in His very nature, lives out love as the union of perfectly bonded Persons. God truly is love. It is the essence of His existence. And out of this love comes such an exuberance of Joy that it cannot be contained. Love wants to share itself. Give itself away. Grow. Why else do married couples, perfectly in love, risk it all, and bring babies into their harmony?

God, then, risked it all and brought babies into his harmony. Out of the joy of his existence he created a beautiful universe and called it good. He created a solar system and called it good. He created the earth with its verdant growth and lush ecosystems and called them good. At the end there, he created man. And what a man. Adam stood before God in perfect male-ness: an intellect prepared to manage the world; a body balanced and muscular. And Adam’s relationship with God was not tainted. He was perfect. But God looked at Adam, and for the first time in the story, God did not say that this thing He had done was good. No, in fact, He said it was not good. Adam was perfect, but because he was alone, something was off.

If you take one second to think about it, it makes sense. Adam was sentient, aware of God and himself, but he was alone, and no One had ever existed alone in God’s culture. It just didn’t fit. So God took some bones from Adam’s side, fashioned Eve, a woman, and history’s first Match Maker introduced them to one another, arranging for them a marriage made in heaven. I’m sure He had a twinkle in His eye. When God put the first people into a relationship, He didn’t just bring Adam a friend. No. He brought Adam a wife. Just imagine poor Adam seeing Eve for the first time: that smooth, soft, voluptuous body, that voice that warmed, that face that smiled. What choice did he have but to fall madly in love with this first woman? And Eve in her very body represented all that had to do with human relationships. She could be Adam’s soulmate and lover. She could have babies. She could reflect the aspect of God’s nature that makes love grow and reproduce, which had been missing. In fact, the whole femaleness of God had been missing so that his image was not well reflected yet. When that first couple, holding hands as they walked, joined God in His afternoon garden stroll, He could finally say that things were good.

Knowing where you come from can make a difference. I am glad to know that I am child of soldiers and immigrants and pioneers. I hope they were brave and good. Best of all, I'm glad to know that ultimately I come from a love story. I am a descendant of an expression of love, an outburst of love. I suppose this is my Big Bang Theory of Love.

Games

Last night I spent seven hours as banker for a suspenseful game of Settlers of Catan. The players were Husband, Chill Son, Master Player Bryan and two Newbies. Good thing someone practical (our host) grilled sausages to provide a meal in the middle to keep up their strength for the dramatic ending. Chill Son was holding in his hands the cards he needed to win and (living up to his name) was sounding pretty confident nothing could stop him, no matter what catastrophic  choices the others made. Bad move. Stealing merchants, displacing knights, and removing roads, the rest took up the challenge, of course, and wore him down. It was a few more turns before he made his 13 points. Then (since the game obviously hadn’t gone long enough) the guys decided to allow a grace round (Grace? Where?) to catch up. Immediately Master Player dropped Chill Son to 11 and made 13 himself. Then Husband went up to 14. Who was going to match that? Then First Newbie hit 13 and dropped Husband  back to 12. Chill Son quietly caught up. Husband went down to 12. Another grace round. It was 11 pm! This could go on forever! Banker Mom was getting the picture and fading fast so called a truce and a three way tie. Seven hours of fun were had by all.

Beyond the obvious, that grace rounds don’t belong in Settlers of Catan games and that predicting winners is a bad idea, I was noticing other things, too, as I counted out resource and commodity cards. One was how happy I was just being there, sitting next to Chill Son, whom I’ve not seen for five months, watching him so calmly lay out his strategy, get taken down by the rest, and come back. There would have been a time he couldn’t have borne it. He’s grown up. Two was that it didn’t matter to me what we all did together, as long as we were all there, doing it together. As an introvert I don’t mind being on the periphery when something else is happening  to fill up the conversation because I can run out of words if there are three people in the room. And games can tell you a lot about people. Just look at my new taste for Quiddler (not related to the other Q game that you are thinking of).

What struck me most was how much life training my Chill Son has received--from others--through these games. Someone said never to trust someone who cheats at games, no matter what moral standards he defends. It’s the habits that give away character. And I thought of the hundreds of hours Master Player has invested in guys like my son, just playing games, teaching such skills as how to use strategy,  how to abide by rules, how to control your tongue when you’re angry, how to lose. (Chill Son got lots of practice at that with Master Player, and my dad did the same for me, pushing me to think, to learn, to lose again and again in good grace, in preparation for losing in life.) Remember the news stories about how young elephants would go rogue if the older bulls weren’t around to train them?

I wonder how many people have helped me train my kids in the things that really matter, in things they needed modeled rather than taught. I wonder how much I have other people like Master Player to thank for my son’s choices today. My guess is that all of us have a great deal more thanking to do than we realize. Maybe especially parents. Thank Goodness it’s far more of a team effort than we will ever know.

Fathers

When my mom found out I was flying to Florida, she protested about me coming alone. It is a risk to travel, but I was realizing that in the middle of everything, I have not felt anxious. Ordinarily I’m rather an anxious sort—been biting my nails for forty years. In fact, in some ways, this strange time in my life seems to be even restful. It’s as if my emotions, like my body (and my brain, unfortunately), are in slow mo. The nail-biting is gone. I’ve been wondering about this.

Last week I spent a day on the shore of Lake Huron at a debriefing for a group of young people who had come back from a month in the Middle East. Some of them were graduating from college and moving on to job searches. They seemed pretty calm about it. I thought about my own transition from college to the various jobs that followed: nanny, research assistant, refugee camp worker, teacher. Looking back, it seems to have been a natural progression, and I don’t remember stressing out about it. But as I’ve gotten older, it seems to be harder to face uncertainty. Maybe it’s one of those hormonal things they warned me about. Usually it raises my blood pressure just to decide what to do about dinner when there are unexpected guests. (I know of at least one other person like this). But I am not anxious right now.

Ironically, I find that with all the uncertainties of cancer, this one thing is restful: at least the treatment plan itself is charted. Once I accepted back in March that I needed to come to Canada for the yearlong treatment, I no longer had any major decisions to make. The next year of my life is planned, and I’m not going anywhere. I am realizing now that for me this is a gift from God and freeing.  It allows me to think about other things, work at other things, invest in other things, and not waste energy worrying about my future. I think this is what God wants for me right now, an unplanned, unexpected, forced sabbatical. A time of rest. I am just supposed to take one step at a time, one day at a time. Ordinarily I’m not very good at this, really, so I guess he’s giving me practice.

This is something every good Father does, every good teacher, or coach or counselor: he takes you from where you are just to the next step.  That’s all he’s holding out to you. Think how restful this is. All you have in front of you is the very next step. And it’s a Father that is holding out a very strong and very loving hand, saying, “Come on. You can do this. I will help you. Come.”

Because sometimes we get mixed up about what our faith is. 

Instead of thinking of it as a Person we love, we start treating it as a religion, or a “to do” list. We measure ourselves and other people by the things we have to do. We also start thinking of truth as a list of things to believe in.  But truth is not a list of doctrines. Truth is a Person. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the Life, and no one enters into relationship with the Father without entering a relationship with me.” Truth is a Person. When we give ourselves to Jesus, we enter into a relationship with Him, and He puts us into relationship with everyone else that is in love with Him. And there is no list of things that have to be done or beliefs that have to be held. It’s all whether we belong to Jesus or not. And he calls every one of us to the next step of obedience, the next step of faith, just the very next step. And my step isn’t my sister’s. And my sister’s isn’t mine. Because there is no list, just obedience and this excellent Father doing his job.

 This is restful.  I can relax in this. Because it’s not a religion to follow, but a Father, a Husband to belong to. And I know how good that can be.

Reflections through fog

I’d been warned of  “chemo brain,” and laughed at the times I’d gone back downstairs again, forgetting what I’d gone upstairs to bring. But yesterday was the first day I lived the whole day in a fog. Hours…missing. We’d gotten up at 4 to slip across the border, mix up the cars, and start toward Chicago. I’d downloaded podcasts I really wanted to listen to, and the very first (was it?) called 4 am a magical, haunting hour, with songs sung about it and ghost stories launched, but as the miles swept under the wheels, I was gone, hearing only pieces, snippets, like flashes of scenery through the car window. One podcast described how a man used the camera on his phone to record one second of every day of his life for four years, creating a 24 minute video. He makes a living, now, developing the app. He says you can actually watch the time of your life go by, catch its thread. Like watching flashes of scenery through the car window.

He says that you can watch yourself change. That you are always surprised how different you are now than you were four years ago, and that no one ever believes how much you could ever change in just four years. Of course not. You didn’t have the experience back then to understand. We are all bad at predictions.

…And sometime later I woke at the end of a description of the end of WW1, the speaker claiming that the Allies had pushed out the final days, the final weeks, demanding more clarification of terms, more time, so that Germany would lose just a few more thousand men, each day, and sink just a little bit lower before the guns stopped. And he read how Hitler burned from the shame at quitting, at ending the slaughter of thousands of men, each day, and wrote in his book, and dreamed of yet more war. Ten million men was not enough lost for anyone. Numbers like that mean nothing. It’s only a father, a brother, a son that have meaning. And those were gone…in a shuffling of territories, a maze of secret treaties and power struggles. And what do I know of all the reasons, except that someone said there would be wars and rumors of wars, and ten million lost is nothing. We never learn until we learn too late.

…And next I heard, (was it next?) bright and flushed with wonder, a voice describing microscopic dark matter, the world beneath the scope that is another form of life no one has tagged or understood, and how this could unlock cancer and who knows what, forever. The hope. You could hear the hope. And the scientist on this podcast believed, believed  that man could solve anything…given time enough. Given time.  And in the evening, still trying to dispel the fog in my brain, trying to wake, I opened my historical fiction novel about the Hundred Year War, and read and re-read, the scenes of crossbow quarries thumping into flesh, of horses and axes smashing, and it seemed to me that the scenery outside the car window merely changes in technology--never plot--because we live in this paradox: that the world ever changes, and we grow, and we learn to count the cost of war (the Greeks called Peace an interruption toWar), but the road stays the same. And even if cancer gets defeated in the long run after bouts with chemo fog, there’s still the other side: a Hitler dreaming of a war after the war to end all wars, leaving sixty million dead. Whose dream is this? What dream is ours? What dreams may come?

I write this on July 4th. Today I celebrate this country. 

Here there is freedom, and there is slavery. There is beauty, and there is corruption. There is discovery, and there is violence. I give thanks for today's treasure when I find it. The only thing I know about tomorrow is that we're all bad at predictions.