Hands capped, hands clapping

 I've been, literally, hand-capped for about 5 of the last 7 months. Two broken wrists,  the first one old-fashioned casted and the second one requiring a surgical plate and screws, then a thumb tendon rupture that required a transfer of a tendon from index finger to thumb .  . . I've had bandages and splints, plaster, fiberglass, molded plastic, velcro and fancy knobs and strings and slings, all restraining my hands. 

This has not been the most important or the most difficult part of the last year, by far. But it HAS made all the important and difficult parts more challenging. And, it's tiring to be on round 3. My current contraption actually does look like a plastic cap, so looking at it for the last week has brought the word "handicapped" to mind. The word came from a wagering game in the 1650s involving putting money into a hat or cap for betting, and evolved to imply putting at disadvantage or equalizing uneven chances in a competition. In the last century the concept spread from race horses to children with physical challenges, and in my lifetime seems to no longer be seen as fair or kind. 

Whatever term is used, the truth is: every human receives a unique set of human capacities, capped by genetics or histories or cruelty or injustice .. . and cheered on by clapping from family, community, governments, God. We are all in an every-changing story of breaking a bone and snapping a tendon  . . . or strength and dexterity building exercises and gifts. Right now my abilities to type, cook, dress, bathe, play the piano, drive a car, wash dishes, hold objects are significantly limited. And it's not hard to see that! My bulky braced hand is visibly impaired. Objects clatter loudly to the ground around me. I'm in a season of waiting (aren't we all).  Healing requires both grace (God's mercy in tendons reconnecting along stitched lines) and effort (PT/OT exercises). No guarantees how far either will take me. But as I sigh and look mournfully at this brace (that feels clunky and unwieldy, but is actually protective and a gift) . . . it's a good pause to remind all of us of the hidden truth.

post-op plaster and wrap, and our wood stove, two pics of survival.

Grateful for WV ortho care, and my companion through every broken bone . . .

We can't see the plethora of hand-capping events that shape other lives. But we can remember they are there, and clap for the small increments of hands creating and working all around us. 

Cheers from here to our teams all over East and Central Africa, where unfamiliar languages, dangerous roads, armed adversaries, drained budgets, protective exclusion, spiritual fears, abusive histories, and on and on, all cap the ease of living. Our teams and our communities deserve the celebratory reality-check, that feeding the hungry, healing the sick, speaking the truth, all shine in God's eyes. Schools like Christ School Bundibugyo are taking in their new class of students for the year, with parents anxiously gathering whatever they can to ensure their kids' thriving. Some Sergers are traveling hundreds of dusty miles this week to tell the good news in places that have never heard it. Others are staying put even though floods or wars or epidemics stalk uncomfortably close. Our partners are putting up with our mistakes 70x7 times and still going. Yesterday we made it to the end of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, and plodded back into "ordinary time".  

Certainly awards and contests and holidays get their share of the spotlight . . . but for today, let's clap for the ordinary.  People with their own unique stories of handi-capping, persisting anyway, for you are hands clapping. (Or hoping to clap if they are ever healed enough!).

Can we all pray this prayer of faith for 2026???

Please pray if for us.

Ordinary days, supporting extraordinary people from afar.

Prostest as lament; locating our story in God's

 Like many Americans who are people of faith, we've been pondering a Biblical framework in which the current story fits the big story of God's arc from "in the beginning" Gen 1 to "all things new" Rev 21. That is the daily work of "heeding, pouring, detouring", looking for truth and beauty in the reality we live through, investing our gifts and resources for the good of others, changing our plans to adapt to the constraints of life in time and space. 

This Chameleon was located in a story set in Rwendigo, but Luke re-located him in the icy story of Sago with his Christmas creation.

That's life. And how, we are all wondering, does that look in January 2026?

This morning one of my current reads focused on lament, and it gave me a location for much of what I see in Minnesota. Scott was born in Minneapolis-St.Paul, and his maternal roots come from the Norwegians and Swedes who settled on Minnesota farmland, people of faith and determination, tough and yet understated, who do what needs to be done. So we resonate with the 50 thousand marching in subzero temps to say: something is WRONG. Protest is a mass lament, a naming of broken systems, a resistance to harmful happenings. Lament acknowledges the gap between the goodness of God and the terrors of the world. When that many people lament together, physically, they provide a needed perspective that all is not well.  The Bible is full of people crying out to kings, to judges, to GOD, not accepting the status quo as right just because it's the status quo. Protest, lament, heeding what is happening, naming the sorrows, these are our calling.

And another read reminded me that all power is secondary to the rule of Jesus. Earthly rulers are derivative. Everyone answers eventually to God. There is no place that we are told to obey human governments IF they contradict God's ways. That is why the protests that eventually led to the abolition of slavery were largely located in Christian churches (though to our lasting sorrow, not all churches and not enough). Or why faithful Germans like Dietrich Bonhoffer stood against the holocaust (yesterday's remembrance). No government perfectly aligns with justice and truth, so "just obey" never absolves people of conscience. Current events are NOT as dire as slavery or holocaust, but they still require thoughtful believers to weigh their reaction. To live together, we have to compromise up to a line, and decide where that line is. For many believers, it is abortion. Or revoking citizenship for immigrants, or withholding food from the hungry or healthcare from the old, or other "love thy neighbor as thyself" summaries of the law. So expressing to our government that we expect constitutional protections to be respected by our military, AND by our customs and border patrols and immigration agents, is not ungodly. Pouring into the streets sometimes comes from an outpouring of love.

Lastly, we won't get this right. The quote that keeps coming back to me this week is: "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. " (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago). Every human (even the ICE and BCP agents who fired fatal shots, and the protestors who "impeded" their wishes) contains the imprint of glory, the image of God's goodness. And every human is marred by evil, the evil of their own choices, the evil of their hard stories in a world that doesn't work for their good, and the evil of a malevolence that lurks to harm. No people are only good, or only bad. We try, we detour. We admit our own self-centered self-protective self-justifying hearts, and we forgive the same in others. The platform for this "truth and reconciliation" as Bishop Desmond Tutu showed us can be the family, the community, the legal system, the institutions that connect us. To listen to each other, to call out right and wrong, to choose to restore the threads that bind. 

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were humans who tried to do the right thing from all we can see, yet it cost them their lives. Their killers were humans who possibly believed they had the right to kill anyone who got in their way. Lamenting this state of affairs, holding the policy-makers who led us into this situation of January 2026 to account, and humbly examining our own hearts as we seek to build bridges to others, these are all holy occupations for God's people in any country. We usually ask readers to pray for our teams in Africa, where injustice and death seem more common, where the concentration of power and money in the hands of too few is even more problematic. But we add prayers for America too. Prayer is a real moment, not a platitude, an action of putting the story of life into God's story of good. Re-orienting our priorities, and heeding the next step of pouring love and detouring plans. So let's pray.

Together, we can change the world.

Even ICE can be beautiful . . .

And speaking of prayer . . thanks for those who prayed my ruptured thumb tendon into a new story of surgical repair.

 preop to post op

The scars are incorporated into the story.

Epiphany, an ongoing season of eyes wide open

 'Til the season, of . . . epiphany, which has somehow come to mean a very individual big-idea insight, rather than a conspicuous manifestation of a reality. 

So in deference to the original meaning of the word, this is the season after Christmas, when magi traveled from Iran before it was being bombed, because their careful ongoing eyes-wide-open study of the nighttime sky led them to conclude a once-in-a-lifetime regime change for the known world had been set in motion by a royal birth west towards the Mediterranean. At extreme effort and expense, they mounted a caravan and spent weeks on the road towards a murky destination. And became the tangible moment that Christ's birth story's significance crossed borders, exploded to be relevant to all the nations, not just one.

"Heed" is a key word in this story. The tale starts in motion, because of attention. They had to heed the star-sign. Not everyone notices a new configuration of the galaxy-distant lights. Their awareness of the impending change, their finding a path they had probably never passed over, their questions of a bewildered court, were all active pursuits of opening their vision to new horizons, to the ancient truths taking new forms. 

"Pour" is another, upon arrival they showered Jesus' family with gifts that befit his kingly status. Heeding led to relinquishing. Precious metals, precious products, in an era where the spice trade and the gold trade were the mobile money and banking. These were not given out of an endless fringe of abundance, they were treasures they parted with to honor the occasion. Costly. Bestowed. Entrusted. 

"Detour" is the last key to the story. After heeding led to journey, and pouring led to treasures transferred . .. they were required to react to a changing scenario, to danger, to embrace a new path and plan. As Middle Eastern royal sages themselves, who studied and financed and acted . . they were perhaps more used to being in control than to being redirected. Dream-warnings needed heeding in the end, and they chose to NOT fulfill Herod's expectation of a return report, but to depart a different way.

The frozen river we cross to go to church

These wise humans set a pattern for our own millennia of post-Christmas wait for the baby to reign. 

Eyes open to heeding the ongoing work of God, which is often obscurely messy and disguised at the weakest margins, we begin 2026. Yesterday a long meeting with our leader in Uganda, trying to discern the complications of contradictory interpretations of our tax status, mourning severe illness and loss in friends we've known for decades, weighing out how to be faithful. Then this morning a letter from that team that fills the picture in with lives impacted. Same in Kenya, and Burundi, and all our Area. Very real challenges, and very real goodness. Seeking wisdom to heed God's merciful, true, calling.

From Boas Opedun, in Uganda

So we pour out hours in calls, meetings, emails, documents, payments, agreements and ideas. Not our favorite way to work, but the season's cost nonetheless. Most of our days stretch in an office, with some punctuation of distant meetings we must travel to, or more frequent medical appointments to attend, or family issues to be present for at last. And as we pour out this phase of our lives, we ask others to do the same, raising money for the very similar magi purposes of blessing babies who face danger, by BundiNutrition and Christ School support. 

Scott presenting at a Serge leadership meeting two weeks ago

And detour is the name of the game in 2025, spilling all the way through 2026 too. We wanted to be Area Directors who were present with our 11 teams in 6 countries, controlling our caravan's plans. Instead we are reacting to death threats and finding new paths. As are all at some level. The world spins into 'might makes right' and into the 'wealthiest drain the poorest', with fewer of the restraints that have limited evil through our lifetimes. Adapting to new road blocks and new open doors becomes essential.

    

At the Serge office, sporting the coat Julia made me for Christmas

Epiphany's root is the word "shine". Shine on, display, come into view. A star is best seen in the darkness of night. May Jesus' love, truth, hope, all be best seen in us shining our small lights in 2026. 

BundiNutrition: Aid that Works

Following the Star . . . 

This season's Christmas story brings into focus the vulnerability of becoming a baby in a marginal place of poverty. Like Jesus' family, many of our neighbors in Bundibugyo and around our East/Central Africa Area deliver babies proximate to sheltered livestock and distant from secure assistance. And then struggle to keep those children fed, healthy, growing. In 2025, their sense of isolation has increased as USAID-funded programs have been cut off. But BundiNutrition maintains a solid, faithful connection from distant compassion to those who need it. The generosity and courage of strangers, like those of the proverbial wise men, bring gifts that enable the endangered to survive.

This year, our team of Bwampu, Ivan, and Clovice pressed on without missionary presence for the first time. At the main district hospital, they found and enrolled 913 malnourished children out of the nearly 4000 they screened. In the outpatient program at Nyahuka, they enrolled 549 kids from 14 different Bundibugyo subcounties and from across the border in DRC. That's 1462 kids, over 300 more than last year, showing the pressure on our little program when other funding is cut. They also provided meals for 79 mothers in the NICU so they could nurse their babies. The full report will be prepared after the year ends, but the preliminary data is encouraging. Malnourished kids in Africa have mortality rates in treatment around 10%, but of these thousand-plus, only 2 died. Food, medicine, and attention are the gold, frankincense and myrrh of 2025. 

Would you consider a year-end gift? Our Serge BundiNutrition Page tells you how to donate. Please share this blog post to pass the good news, to augment the cheer, that it's possible to close a rough 2025 by bringing food to Jesus, a la Matthew 25.

An unlikely infant altered the course of the universe as he cried for his mother's milk in Bethlehem. We are all now part of that story, and the good news is that we too can push the arc of the ending towards good.

Construction and Comfort: Isaiah's call to attend Advent 2025

One more week of normal work until the week of Christmas brings us close to the end of 2025. Light is fading on our WV farm as we brace for plummeting temperatures and a winter storm watch today. Clouds have covered the sun most of this month, providing a physical context of dull obscurity.

A year ago, the words I anticipated forming the year were 'mend, send, attend'. And as we draw near the year's close, I hear these words echoed in the chapter I keep coming back to, Isaiah 35, and in Isaiah 40's opening Messiah chorus. 'Mend and send' are congruent with the highway construction project in the desert, the filling of valleys and leveling of hills, the straightening of country-road curves. The advent season of waiting is not passively idle, there is a call to preparation. God is coming. The realities of a redeemed future reach back into current events as we mend the broken people and places, as we send good forward. A year ago, I expected the setting of mending to be Bundibugyo, and the setting of sending to be in-person in our Africa area. A Trinity-Forum podcast this week said that hospitality entails both preparation to serve AND embrace of disruption. A good word for life and an apt thumbnail of this year upended by Stage IV cancer and continental shift. Still 'mend' and 'send' sound satisfyingly active. 

Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zacharias, shepherds and magi, all had mend-and-send sorts of roadwork in the months before Jesus' arrival too. Most of them were literally on the desert highway, literally moving towards Jerusalem in anticipation. From paying taxes to setting up camp to labor and poetry, they were each doing their part to make way for the coming one.

Having lived on Bundibugyo road from muddy quagmire to paved highway, having spent decades in a place where childbirth requires foot-path hikes and still risks death even in the best circumstances, having witnessed the arrival of new life be not sterilely technical or safely separate from the messiness of life, having spent Christmas displaced by war and by fatal epidemic . . . the reality of the road resonates. And here on our gravel, riverside road in Sago, the "take me home" of this state sings out a longing for those roads to lead to belonging. Those with little power mend and send in small daily faithfulness around the globe, moving towards home.

    

But that final word, 'attend', is the one I'm ending the year on. Comfort ye my people, speak peace . . these are phrases of pause, of paying attention. Phrases of noticing a change, a new situation, a pardon and a hope. The promise of a King who is pictured as a shepherd, the one who gathers gently, is a radical departure from the machinations of human empire.  Presence, not power. A new way of thinking (repent means "change your mind-map") can only be noticed if we slow and stop. If we listen and look. If we 'attend'.

Advent should be a season of paying attention. But in our attention economy of 2025, such focus requires intention. I am guilty of spiraling into the ever-increasing wealth of writing, art, music, shows, quips, thoughts, opinions, news available from every corner of the planet every second of the day. Choosing only four (4!) Advent series sounds crazy. . . but there are so many options. Today's passage in one of them quotes Karl Barth on Zacharias as a story that, even a hundred or two thousand years ago, listening to God requires us to stop talking about ourselves. Requires a shaking encounter, a disruptive re-set. Stop. Attend. 

Because 'attend' is more than concentration. When we 'attend', we are present. Present in the behind-the-veil reality glimpsed by Isaiah. Present in the God of the universe turning our lives upside down to make the whole world better. Presence with God in the cloud is a double-edged experience, the comfort of being enveloped in goodness, the disorientation of having our whole conception of goodness reset.

Let me end with Is 35:3. Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. That is how we enter such a draining attention, asking for Jesus' strength in our weakness. It is also our family verse for December since I'm recovering from surgery on a second broken wrist that has left my hands weak, and Luke is recovering from major surgery on his knee, and everyone feels feeble in the face of Scott's cancer.

 Not to mention the despairing directions of much of our world this season. So my final image is from a former teacher on our Bundi team who continues to be a key support to our Area, and spent 2025 in her own life-threatening struggle that brought her baby prematurely and risked her baby's life too. Here we are, in the reality of a life of brokenness (see the feeding tube still many months later) but embracing the smile and color of Christmas, the truth that Jesus changes everything. Waiting, attending, because love is stronger than death.

    

Gratitude and Grief (again): Thanksgiving 2025 edition

Gratitude and grief were key words for us over the past few years, starting with my near-death accident and moving through dwindling team and stolen resources and personal betrayals. And we’ve certainly come back to them in 2025 which began with a lightening bolt of stage IV cancer and complete upheaval of home and work and life and future. The pairing insists that the world is complex, that even in times of shaking loss, if we pay attention, we will see reasons to be thankful. The fingerprints of divine mercy grace even the scorched waste of a rough year. As we have grieved, we have gratefully celebrated too.

   

November winds down into the American national holiday of Thanksgiving, and the paradoxical pairing pins the complexity of gratitude and grief in place once again. Gratitude is the essence of this holiday: for survival, for feasting with friends and family, for finding our place in a story that hints at redemption in spite of darkening days. For the unfathomable list of things tangible and intangible provided from outside in. We humanly need the communal pause to focus on that providence. Being thankful is not a time for gloating. Being thankful acknowledges the many ways our days are better than they could be. Thanks becomes both humbling and directional, a posture that notices the thousandfold bounty of access to much we did nothing to earn or deserve. In 2025 we don’t have to invent penicillin or electricity; vaccines and public resources have smoothed all our paths. Many of us thank parents, or elders, or teachers, or colleagues, as well as thanking God. It is a national moment to breathe in the changing season, to taste the pleasure of food and drink, to lean into the relational girding of our neighborhoods. To look beyond ourselves.

But even the week of Thanksgiving, gratitude is not a platitude that coats a glossy veneer over troubles. We gather around tables spread in metaphorical wildernesses. Attending to reality requires the dual discipline of noticing reasons to be thankful, and reasons to mourn. Both have a direction towards family, community, and God. Psalms of lament and psalms of thanksgiving, both/and, give voice to the tangible truths.

So this Thanksgiving, join us in thanking God that Scott’s cancer treatment is actively extending his life. (And thanks for all the comments on his birthday post below!) I am writing this on the house-on-the-rock porch in Sago, WV, where a rain-swollen river churns by and acres of woods embody the beauty of death renewing life, leaf color fading as leaf-fall returns richness to the soil, thankful for the wild wonder of this old farm. Two of our kids will travel to California to bolster one grandmother’s holiday, two will join their loved ones’ families, and we will be hosted by my sister and nephews and mother, thankful for all these family networks. Every day we miss our Africa life, but we also have ongoing reasons to be thankful. New doctors trained in multiple residencies and medical schools multiplying healing. A failed rebellion in our old home manipulated young people and cost some their lives this past month, but that accentuates the goodness of hundreds of others a few miles away daily grounded in Gospel truth and nourishing safety at CSB, as the school year draws to a peaceful close. Our photographer in Fort Portal has gathered a cadre of others to create art and tell stories that the world needs to hear, and just joined a sister team to bless a country in our Area with much suffering and few believers. Thousands of blind people have had sight restored as the Eye Love Africa project trains and provides cataract surgery. Two places that have suffered horrific violence, this year and for decades, had Gospel-hope incarnation visits from our teams, and a third has our team back making homes in spite of temporary evacuations. Hundreds and hundreds of people heard Bible stories that they could relate to and ponder the nature of God’s love and work in their immediate worlds. On every team, we are the bridge generation to African saints with bigger hearts and minds. SO MUCH to be thankful for, SO MUCH that God continues to do through the 80 workers we left behind, so grateful to maintain a thread of connection to all this work. 

And this Thanksgiving, join us in holding onto the paradox of both gratitude and grief. The God whose mercy allowed all the above is not offended by our crying out as we encounter the massive sorrows that persist. Wars have not ceased, and from Sudan to Congo to Gaza to Ukraine we lament the greed and fear that preclude peace. Hunger has not ceased, and in every part of our Area we ask God to provide more funding and food for those who suffer. Sickness has not ceased, so we call out for God to spare the lives of people we know and love, and the many more that are known to God and not to us, to protect women in labor and vulnerable newborns and frail elderly and everyone on the margins. 2025 has been a shocking year to be back in America where we are more tuned into the news, to pay attention to the abundance of injustices here and everywhere, of punishment without due process, of sexual harm to children, of mass shootings, of resource concentration to serve the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest, of rescinding protection and hospitality to the stranger . . . we lament all this, and the unseen truth that our hearts need new priorites in Jesus.

At your Thanksgiving table this week, we send our wishes that you embrace the discipline of searching carefully for traces of God’s goodness to stir your thankfulness, and that you unabashedly mingle those thanks with weeping over the world’s woes.

Jesus wept for Jerusalem on the way to his final passover feast with his closest friends. May we all make room in our hearts for complex realities.

Thankful for a tractor and trees, getting ready for winter

Thankful for this farm and the family that settled in Sago

And pray for us to be thankful for countless zoom calls (this is how we appear in our little office, calling Africa)

PS if you read this far . . . here is an ablum of songs about the Table that is appropriate to this week, listen as you cook and serve, or if that doesn't work, search Spotify for Table Songs by Porter's Gate.  

He shall be like a tree: Happy Birthday to Scott

 The most important person in my life is turning 65 on Wednesday. First of all I am thankful he’s reaching that milestone. As we grew up, “65” was considered the legitimate end of a working life, the transition point to retirement, much like 18 was the line between child and adult. Starting this 2025 year with a new diagnosis of Stage IV cancer made the birthday an aspirational milestone. And he hadn’t exactly taken the “safe” route for the 64 years prior either, working front-line in two different Ebola epidemics, riding a tank into a war zone to bring aid, gritting out diseases and injuries far from the centers of care, or just the most dangerous reality of decades on high-mortality roads. So today we celebrate not just survival, but the person formed by it. And whether or not you read my thoughts, please feel free to open the comments and leave your name with a word or sentence of witness to who Scott has been so far to you.

65 finds us uprooted from the house where we raised our family and spent 23 of our 38 years of marriage (Bundibugyo, the other 15 were Chicago/Baltimore for training, and a long stretch in Kenya), and falling back on the farm inherited from my family. So the transition from the primary learning/working years to the final stretch of life is a threshold not just of time, but of place. God often moves in those liminal zones to get our attention. This year He’s certainly grabbed ours. Not a day goes by that I don’t affirm that I’d rather be in the whirlwind of uncertainty (Stage IV sounds final, but so is life) with Scott than anywhere else without him.

Birthdays and diagnoses leave us pondering: love is stronger than death, AND death’s limiting inevitability is God’s chosen context to refine our souls. So a birthday tribute to Scott is called for. I once wrote a whole retreat on the image of the tree, and this week our Burundi team is basing their retreat on a Tim Keller sermon on Psalm 1 we listened to, plus it’s peak Fall and we’re surrounded by acres of forest. So some thoughts about Scott, my tree, from my heart today.

Stable roots: Scott is dependably present and not easily blown down. He anchors our family and our Area in his trustworthiness. None of us wonder if he’ll abandon his people or his reality. Those roots have spent a lifetime burrowing into the Rock of Ages, holding and being held. We all count on him to do what he says, and to operate out of truth and service. We know he’s choosing what is good for us, not what is easiest for him. We can lean on him, and we do. I wanted to be supporting him this year, but he’s had to carry me through two broken arms. Which he does, for many, without fanfare and without complaining, a stable presence.

Curious branches: Scott’s roots and branches fork and extend continuously: by research, data, reading, talking, listening, engaging. One way he loves his kids is by going to great lengths to understand what they are interested in, to keep up with it, to try. He has always been an athlete, but an American football/baseball/swimming/track star who then embraced soccer, rugby, racing, climbing, and marksmanship as his kids’ and community’s passions led him there. He has always been a stellar student, but he doesn’t rest on laurels for any new problem. He finds the tools and expertise to address new issues in new ways. He loves to work with his hands, to mend, to create, often with a YouTube video teaching him how.

StrOng trunk: One of the hardest challenges of cancer is the severe impact of treatment on core body capacity. Scott has always been someone who can do hard physical labor, and who enjoys strenuous exercise. Some men abandon treatment for these impacts, which is a legitimate metric of accepting a shorter life but opting for a quality important to them. It is difficult to choose the uncertain forward arc of physically diminished but longer days. He has done that for us, and we are deeply grateful for the soul strength that grows paradoxically by limits and suffering.

Tranquil shade: Scott is a person other people like to be around. He has solid friends from every phase of his life. We rest in his leafy shade, because he’s inviting and communal, he does not horde, he welcomes. He hasn’t based his life on pruning back inefficiency to produce wealth. He’s a family medicine doctor, the path of lower prestige but broader capacity. He’s willing to stretch out his arms further to protect more.

Tactical fruit/seed: The Tim Keller sermon on Psalm 1 points out that fruit is seasonal. Our biologic and our Ugandan “fostered” kids are fruit that will have their own seasons, as will the mothers and babies with HIV, the women saved by timely C-sections, the many hundreds of students nurtured by a school whose mentorship and finances he has long carried, team leaders and members in Serge which have grown from a handful to a crowd in his years. Working remotely now feels a little more pine-coney to us, not spectacular fleshy mangoes as fruit but tiny dry potential seeds. 65 years is not long enough to know all the hidden good that Scott has brought to this world, and that’s as it should be. His part is to be rooted, branching, strong, inviting, productive … but earthbound and time bound views are partial. Faith rests on an outside perspective that will make sense of even prostate cancer.

Celebrate 65 years of Scott by leaving a comment, or saying a prayer. I'm selfishly asking for many more.

All Hallow's . . on saints, eves, death, and leaves

 Death, the universal experience least discussed. A metric of development might be how adeptly the average person in the area can avoid this reality. In our 30+ years in Africa we went to more burials in a year than Americans attend in a lifetime. The first one or two thousand years of the church for most of the world could not ignore death, and so this weekend in the church's calendar is a time to "memento mori", remember death, in All Hallow's Eve (Halloween), All Hallow's (Saint's) Day, and All Soul's Day. I suspect the timing was set in the Northern Hemisphere by Fall, the season of fading light and dropping leaves. In 2025, we are once again in Fall, and once more face-to-face with death. 

A stage IV metastatic cancer dispels the illusion of living indefinitely. And yet the treatment gives a potentially substantial stretch of road ahead, suffering from the hard medicines and costly commitment but walking on through beauty and joy too. Which is true of life always, just more obvious for us. In my Wendell Berry novel last night I read the main character (Jayber Crow) describe his life as "hoping for good, reconciled to the bad, welcoming the little unexpected happiness that came." Amen. 

The depth of this holiday stretch is the communal nature of the recognition. We are part of a cloud of witnesses (Heb 12), a long parade of saints through time, whose lives upon this earth we recognize and celebrate. We are not alone, even in, maybe especially in, our hardest times. We recognize our belonging, and we garner the wisdom of people who have followed this path through the ages. No trick-or-treaters came to our door last night (so we had to eat a snickers ourself) but three different neighbors / church friends stopped us as we walked down our road yesterday to greet and chat. We miss living intimately with family, team, and village life. But we are not alone even now. (A Bundi favorite song we played and sang: For All the Saints. Exactly this).

Suffering and death, per 1 Corinthians 15, are also "thin spaces" between the seen and unseen world. As such, they are opportunities to recognise the "supernatural", the forces that we relegate to fantasy or horror movies but actually experience in our lives. Suffering is the path, and death is the doorway, and both get our attention when we are distracted by sex, money, power, and all the palpable principalities of this world. They realign our grasp of what matters. 

And lastly, both suffering and death have been redeemed. Death was our final enemy, but Jesus' resurrection turned it into a calling home. I love the old hymns in our country church that compare dying to being called in for supper. Perhaps the best seasonal Halloween passage is Ezekiel 37, where dry bones scattered across the wilderness are breathed to rattle to life. Love is stronger than death. (Andrew Peterson's Lay Me Down poetically expresses this, one of Scott's favorites).

The Fall foliage carries all these themes of death: communal, liminal, transformational. Each leaf is an individual work of art, and a splash of color in the branch, the tree, the forest of seasonal unity. The crisp forest of color takes us into the edge of another world. And the dying leaves blaze glory, redeeming finitude into victory.

True confessions, Bone stories like Ezekiel and Halloween resonate for another reason: I (Jennifer) broke my left arm in October (after breaking my right arm in July). It would almost be a joke if it wasn't so hard to be without hands. This time the crushed pieces and joint impaction meant surgery, which our hero ortho surgeon son arranged, so we diverted to Colorado between visits with moms. Cancer, loss of home/normal/work/community, injuries in the family, violence in Tanzania and Uganda this weekend and Congo most days, conflicts between people we care for, loneliness and disability in aging moms, a lot of bad to plod through this year. 

So this holiday weekend we lean into the grace that pulls bones back together, that gives camaraderie along the strenuous road, that connects us to saints living and dead in the human family that will one day reune at home.

With Ruth and Caleb in CA

With Luke and Abby pre-op in CA

With my mom Judy in WV

Hoping to not have any more x-rays or surgery for a while. The autumn of life is both colorful and creepy.