Evendays

 

We host a meal about twice a month, where people can come to the house, eat Wife’s good cooking and practice their English afterwards when I lead a discussion on a Bible text. Normally, it’s just our family with one or two people from church and a couple of visitors. The discussion lasts an hour, but participants habitually stay for a tea and “biscuits”. Although we’ve been doing this for 15 years, it hasn’t been a very successful program. It hasn’t grown and, to tell the truth, there’s about an evening a year when no one comes.

Confession: I tend to judge our home meetings, Bible studies (catechism), even Sunday worship times and LKT meetings as rather insignificant. Yet I know the people who come are significant. L. comes from the next town over. She’s totaled her cars three times in the last 4 years. She traveled by bus-train-bus last night and brought me a book published in 1845… A. has come since the beginning. She was one of my first students in the language school where I used to teach… H. attends, always bringing something to eat… M., a Muslim, came for years, but her job and grandchildren make it hard now…

Last night we were thirteen. S., J., and a neighbor who came for the first time were present. We spent an hour on 1 Corinthians 13… Reminding me, of course, love sees no individual, or event, as insignificant.

We’ve made friends with H. She’s about our age. She was a “boat-person” and escaped communist Vietnam with all of her brothers and sisters. I think they are 8 or 9 all together, and they all live in the USA except for H.

We were doing a Let’s Start Talking lesson one afternoon in October when she told me part of her story, the story of the end of the Vietnam war. Her father was high up in the military and was in the USA when Saigon fell. The family begged him not to come back, but he said life was not worth living without his family.

The authorities met him as he disembarked the plane. They put him directly in prison. Two years later, the mom got a call from the prison telling her to come for a visit. Her husband was dying. They had a few hours together before he quit breathing.

I often think about that man. I think about what he said and about what he did. I think about H.’s tears after all these years. They fall for a father who died a long time ago, for the wounds are still fresh.