Honoring Our Sisters

I have a short window of time to post something on this date.  In the absence of enough brain power to think of anything very profound to write about, I'll resort to a dairy-like entry, strong on documentation rather than commentary.

Today is my sister Carol's birthday.  She is next to me in the family, and is nearly two years younger than I am.  She is the wife of a Nazarene, Nicaraguan pastor.  Both of their daughters are married.  Andrea and her husband Brandon have two sons, Micah and Eli.  Emily and her husband Andrew (Drew) Miller have twin daughters, Clara and Charlotte.  Brandon is a fire fighter and Drew works in finance (can't remember his job title, but I know he holds a CFA Charter).  They all live in Shawnee, in the Kansas City, Kansas area.

Carol is short--not even five feet tall.  She has always had a bustling pace, and memorable one-liners roll  off her tongue like egg whites skittering over a hot skillet.  She is an avid consumer of news and is quite capable of forming lively and insightful opinions--which she articulates fearlessly.   

Carol is quite fastidious.   Germs, polluted air, and littered roadsides are all enemies to be attacked.    

In her early twenties, Carol lived and worked in El Salvador for three years, as I recall.  During that time, she worked at an orphanage, cooked for refugees during the civil war, and taught school.  Each of these happened at different times and places.  Later she earned a degree from Bethel College (Newton, Kansas).  International Development was a major focus of her studies, although I'm not sure that it was offered as a major.  She worked on the side at Prairie View, a mental health facility.  

After graduation from college she moved to Washington, D. C. to work in a ministry under the auspices of Myron Augsburger's church.  Many of their clients were refugees from Central America.  That's where she met her husband Roberto.  He was a young pastor, trying to help  his people with the same kinds of needs that Augsburger's church was helping.  

One more interesting detail:  Myron Augsburger was a college roommate of my father's.  During the same time that my dad was busy being a farmer and an Amish Mennonite preacher, his friend Myron was establishing himself as a  distinguished leader in the Mennonite Church.  Besides being a pastor and an author, he was a college president and denominational administrator.  He was a godly man, trusted for his wisdom.

When he visited Kansas one time, he spent the night at our house and preached at Center Church.  Dad took note that as the service began he wrote a few notes and then got up and preached a powerful sermon from those notes.  The title:  Beliefs I Would Die For.

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Some parts of my day were somber and wearying.  Hiromi's older sister, Chizu (Chee) whose 90th birthday will be celebrated on March 20, is not well.  It's not certain that she will be able to recover from having broken her hip in a fall.  There are many complicating issues, most of them having developed just before or just after the hip fracture happened.

Hiromi and I went to visit her today in a Wichita hospital.  I'll spare you the details on all the challenges of our making this "big" trip, many of them related to us being old and very country bumpkinish.   We bumped into some really annoying restrictions apparently in place because of Covid (no flowers, no waiting areas with chairs, no chairs for visitors in the patient rooms).  The parking garage has no letters or numbers to mark the parking stalls, and unfortunately we didn't take careful enough notice of the colors of the walls in the parking garage, so we spent an inordinate amount of time looking for our car on the wrong level.  

The  brightest spot in our day happened because of two hospital employees who helped us, going out of their way to help us look for our car.  Pretty soon, one of them made and carried out a plan to call security.  "They'll drive you around until you find it."  The car showed up promptly and we collapsed gratefully into the seats and were soon settled into our own vehicle.  

Do you know your car's license plate number?  I was glad just glad that I knew the make and model.  I knew too that it did not have a veterans tag and that it came from Reno County.  For perhaps the first time ever, the blue plastic Kansas Author's Club frame around the plate seemed like a critical piece of identifying information.  

By the way, do you know how many people in the world drive black vehicles that look like a 2014 Chevy Traverse?  A lot.  To my undiscriminating eye, that is.