A Loving Cloud of Family

Some family are chosen for us. Mom, Dad, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Their witness bears both genes and culture.

A great, great grandfather exiled by a czar. A grandmother who was postmaster in little North Newton. A farmer grandfather who loved to sing and whose strains of "Ich Weiss Einem Strom" still ring in my ears. Another who, as a pacifist, joined the army as a noncombatant in World War I - yielding incongruent photos of a Mennonite sergeant.

Teachers, artists, Mennonites, thinkers. Pacifists, activists, die stille im lande. Rural, educated, skeptical, faithful. I live spiritually in an earthy reality with a history longer than I can remember.

Calling Philadelphia home but looking toward Vermont, Kansas blood still flows in my veins--and German thickened by the Russian stepes.

My cloud of witnesses is as geneaological and geological as that of the author of Hebrews 12. It seems only right for a faith that confesses incarnation.