"It's a Small World After All"

We have a large map of the world hanging on our wall. Colored pins mark all the places where we have been. My travelling life began almost as soon as I was born. It was not a luxury of choice that caused my parents, my grandmother, my aunts, and my uncles to leave their home in southern Ukraine and travel the world when I was only four months old. They were forced to flee.

By the time I was four, we had fled via Poland and Germany, then crossed an ocean and ended up in the southern hemisphere (in the Chaco of Paraguay, South America). When I was nine we arrived in Canada. After high school I changed provinces; after marriage I changed continents and found myself once again in the southern hemisphere (in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where we lived for almost twenty years.

Travelling must have been in the stars for both my husband and me. He too fled his home (in the Vistula Delta of what is now northern Poland) with his mother and grandparents. He was seven years old. He too crossed an ocean. If I hadn't changed provinces in 1963, we would not have met each other! As it turns out, we did, and that is another whole story, left for another time.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in the same place your whole life; to be born in the same place where you die; to keep all your uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents around you, always! That is not my story.

This January we will be celebrating our 47th anniversary. We are travelling again, but now we travel backwards more often than we travel ahead! Allow me that pleasure for just a moment.

It was a bitter cold day that January 13th in 1968, much like it is these days here in Manitoba. I felt like the winter queen in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series. I should have worn a fur stole and arrived in a sleigh drawn by horses!  Instead, Hardy's cousin Lothar chauffeured us and we had decorated the car with plastic flowers. Just recently Lothar and his wife Ruth celebrated their 60th anniversary and we reminisced a bit about our wedding day. Their daughter Karin was our candle lighter, together with my little sister. Karin is now a grandmother!

When I look at this picture of the beginning of our life together, I realize that, even though we are totally absorbed in each other, we were not alone in this venture. Lothar made his car available to us; my sisters and I made the flowers that decorated it; my Mom made my wedding dress; the women at the church cooked our wedding meal. 

When Hardy and I got married, we left our loving community but we never felt that it left us. We took with us what we had learned from community at home and in Africa we found another community -- fellow missionaries who helped us transition into another culture; other expatriates whom we met at our children's international school and at the international church; and finally, when we were more comfortable in our surroundings, the local people. They taught us their language, their customs, and their way of life. So, in a sense, we took our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins along with us and added many more to our community.

On this cold January morning of 2015 I realize once again how wealthy we are! We left Africa in 1984 and found a new community in Kitchener-Waterloo. In 2008 we returned to the place where we began our life together: Winnipeg, Manitoba. Some family members and friends have passed away. Others have moved on. We have once more transitioned to a new community, gained new friends, touched base with a few of the old ones. 

By loving forces quietly surrounded

Secure and sheltered I can feel no fear,

So I would like to live these days together

And go with you into another year.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned these words [my translation] from his prison cell in December 1944, days before he was executed by the Nazis.)