It's My Birthday and I'll Be Tired If I Want To.....you would be tired too if it happened to you.....

It does happen to be my birthday, although it wouldn't have to be to write this post.

I am losing steam.  I find myself being grateful that raising my children is behind me, that my education is behind me, that my ten years of traveling and and living in different countries is behind me.  It is maybe because of all that?  that I am getting so tired.

Friday my daughter and I spent two and a half hours at what had been my storage porta box and is now the family porta box.  We were sorting through boxes, deciding what goes to Good Will, what gets taken home for further storing, what gets put in the back of the box and left for the next generation (granddaughter) to deal with someday.  Thankfully my daughter is strong and she is also very good at organizing things.  Many of the boxes I was not able to lift and she was right on top of them, moving them around and putting that box is order.  When we left it had a shape and form as well as substance and content.

And my body hurt everywhere.  I went home and was in bed by about 6:00 p.m.  I can't do heavy lifting anymore.  In reality I never could but I was at least able to survive long days and in traveling times, sometimes several changes of plane in different countries in a 24 hour period.  Not no more.

Yesterday, Saturday, I got a call from my daughter asking if I could come and help her sort months and months of Tupperware out.  She is a Tupperware Consultant and has recently moved up to Manager.  These are good and wonderful things and at the same time she has a toddler who looooovvvveeeesss getting into mommy's boxes....   So I went and spent several hours with her working on that project.  I think I made it until almost 8:00 p.m. and again I could hardly move.  I got in my car and drove the whole five minutes to get to my own place and was in bed pretty darn quick.

Friday I began thinking about (not for the first time) about death and about what remains behind when a human being dies.  Yesterday the United States lost a great Senator, John McCain, to death, which rather intensified my thinking process.

We of course leave behind our bodily remains, whether by cremation or burial.  We also leave behind our earthly remains.   In the United States it is likely that even a homeless person whose possessions can fit into a shopping cart has something to leave behind.  Most of us own something.  A change of clothes perhaps, maybe a sleeping bad or a battered tent.  On the other end of the spectrum people leave behind houses full of stuff.  Some of that stuff may be very valuable, some of it may not.  Book collections, china and silver collections, clothing, cars, etc.

I have been sorting through and downsizing, and upsizing, and downsizing for approximately fifteen years.  First I left a house and had three porta boxes.  I also gave a great deal away, desks and cameras are two things I remember, and they went to Good Will.  As I left the country to follow God in first discernment, and then as a Mission Co-Worker, I would return each year to sort through those three porta boxes.  Every year.  It gets old really fast.

And yet there are things that are really hard to let go of this side of Glory.  Books, family pictures, family furniture.  It is both things that are mine in the here and the now, like the books; and things that connect me to the past and the folks who have gone before me into Glory, like pictures and furniture.

Now I am down to what is in my apartment and what is in a part of the storage unit, the porta box.  For this lifetime I may have given away as much as I am able to do without breaking my heart.  Books are just a part of my blood.  I have given so so many, even in China I left boxes and boxes of books at the Chinese Pharmaceutical University where I taught Oral English, and left books with Chinese friends there; English books that would be dreadfully hard for them to obtain on their own.  I have ethnic clothes that were tailor made for me in different countries.  Many are gone because of circumstances like the Civil War in South Sudan where everything in my apartment was lost because I could not return to claim it.  And yet I have the clothes that were made for me later on in Africa.

There is so much treasure on earth here in the United States.  And then there are people in countries that live through Civil War or who are innocent victims of war being done to them.  Like South Sudan and Yemen.  In those cases truly all a person may have are the clothes on their backs.

When we die we leave behind our fleshly body.  AND we leave behind our earthly remains.  Those remains include all of the things that in our mortal, perishable existence we collected, loved, shared, willed to the generations that follow us, or felt burdened by because how does one let go of paintings that one's mother has painted, or beat up tables that belonged to a grandmother?

There is clearly so much more that could be said on this topic, this is just a beginning.  I must now get ready to go to church.  As an ordained pastor in the Seattle Presbytery I have the honor of helping with the installation of another female pastor into service in a church here in the presbytery today.  Even though Presbyterians do not have the Apostolic connection as some other denominations do, non the less we pass on traditions and those things which through our God, are not mortal and are not perishable.  This is something that we will leave behind when we die as well.  Being part of a faith tradition is to be a part of the past, the present and the future.  To leave behind earthly remains, and to leave behind heavenly treasures.

And there is the gift. 

Family Reunification

Yesterday I was at a small park near home with my daughter and granddaughter.  There was an older Asian couple with a young boy there as well.  He was using the playground equipment and they were pushing him on the swings and keeping watch as he used the slides, etc.

I thought about the fact that they probably lived with the boy's parents, I was assuming of course that they were his grandparents.  In Asian countries  retirement age is often at a younger age than it is here in the United States.  Extended families, at least in the past, have often lived together in one dwelling and it is a normal practice for grandparents to care for the grandchildren while the parents work outside of the home.  With forgotten children in China, where parents are gone to a big city to work for much of the year, the grandparents essentially raise the grandchildren.

Something clicked for me and I realized what I was seeing in real time is "chain migration" or family reunification.  Chain migration is something that the 45th administration of the United States wants to eliminate or severely curtail.  This is when one member, or perhaps a nuclear family, immigrates legally (documented) to the states.  Then they sponsor family members in their home country who migrate in a chain to the states. 

If one looks at this through the lens of family reunification then we can see that this is a natural way for people in most of the world to live.   South America, Asia and Africa all have cultures in which it is natural for whole families, and several generations, to live together, to help care for one another and the little ones, and therefore to move together when opportunity presents itself. 

I suppose this means that chain migration is an industrialized, modernized way to look at the same thing.  The United States is certainly a country that puts a premium on independence.  Families are mobile, often moving many times for job opportunities in other parts of the country, and we are used to doing this on our own. 

I think that perhaps 45 and his administration do not understand the cultural reasons and the cultural value behind family reunification.  This is not seen by those who apply to sponsor family members as a way to create a terrorist network.  It is a seen as a way to keep the family intact, to not create splinters of the family on different sides of the Atlantic, or between North and South America.  Because the modern United States does not function in this familial culture, there is a lack of understanding as to the intent and desire behind this kind of immigration. 

This lack of understanding spills further into categories such as putting tariffs on countries in an attempt to force their governments to conform to the will of the government in Washington, D.C., but instead those extra taxes are causing calamity to the lives of the citizens in those countries.  And their governments may not care that the citizens no longer have access to health care or affordable food. 

I think that our administrations should be required to take missionary training.  Not to become missionaries, instead to learn about cultural differences and to be sensitive to the ways in which other parts of the world view the world and one another.  Surprisingly, everyone is not just like us.