The phone on my bedside table rang at 5:41 a.m. the other morning. It was still dark outside and early enough to make me a little apprehensive about bad news coming my way.
But no – it was just my sister, Susan. She lives in a little village outside of Nairobi, Kenya, and never seems to get it fully in mind that, yes, there are a full eight hours of difference between her time zone and mine. In addition to that, when she calls me – a lot of the time, it’s by mistake. She had intended to call someone else closer at hand and got the numbers mixed up.
That’s what happened the other morning. She was trying to call her son and daughter-in-law to let them know that the doctor’s office had moved up her appointment and they needed to pick her up earlier than planned.
Susan has lived in Kenya a long time by now – right around fifty years, I guess. Her husband of more than fifty years has passed away, and her four daughters have long since moved back to the U.S. But Susan remains steadfast, refusing to return, for by now she is, in many ways, more
Kenyan than American.
I am delighted that the Internet, over the past twenty years or so, has made it possible for us to talk on the phone at virtually no cost. And that we are able to make the occasional trip across the ocean to visit one another. What was once a family of five is down now to just Susan and me, and it's important for us to keep up with each other.
To be blunt about it, Susan keeps me honest. Her faith is much stronger than mine, and she doesn’t have much patience with a lot of the side issues that we over here seem to think are so important. The first time she heard me give a sermon in person, she said loudly in front of crowd of well-wishers, “Gee, Bob! That’s the first time I’ve heard you preach . . . from a pulpit!” Whenever we’re together in a group and the conversation tends the least bit toward religion, she routinely issues the challenge: “Well, let’s hear what the Reverend Doctor has to say about that!”
Here’s her story from the other day. In Kenya, she said, it’s common to pay money for different things over the telephone. And she had an expense that needed to be paid. Not a lot of money, she said, but not a little, either. At any rate, she made the payment over the phone only to realize that she had sent it to the wrong number.
She called that same number back right away and explained to the woman who answered that he had just sent her money by mistake. The woman said, “Well, that’s your fault, not mine!” Susan tried to explain, but the woman kept insisting it wasn’t her mistake. She had the money, and she intended to keep it.
Finally, Susan said, “I have just one question for you: ‘Are you a Christian?’” And she hung up. Within two minutes, the money had been returned. As we live out our daily lives, that can be a good question for us, too! “Are you a Christian?”
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