Human Portrait I

(I'm labeling this #1 because perhaps this will become the first in a series of portraits of human encounters I've had.)

I'm remembering the first time I realized I was face to face with an "undocumented immigrant".... illegal alien we called him. 

It was the winter of 2013. I was working as a traveling insurance sales woman on commission. I was in the home of a policy holder in a poor neighborhood of Milwaukee, working with a training partner. We were visiting an elderly policy holder, reviewing his policies, and seeing if he wanted to re-up. He turned out to be the best looking 97 year old Hispanic man I've ever met- and uninsurable at his advanced age. While we were in his living room, another family member came in, listening to our insurance pitch, and started making conversation about buying a policy for himself. It wasn't another idle conversation, this guy was genuinely interested. Like, I want this stuff, sign me up now. An agent can tell. I opened an application on my laptop and asked a few opening questions- your name and date of birth???? The man had a weird reaction, one I've never seen. He literally shut down, and refused to answer any questions or engage in further conversation. I caught the eye of my partner, and dropped my line of questioning. A few minutes later, we exited the home, and my partner, by way of explanation, simply said, "Illegal." 

That was it. No commentary. No further explanation. No speculation. We continued our schedule without as much as a hiccup. Flawless execution, right there. An insurance agent in the field has to take whatever's thrown at him or her and adjust the plan accordingly with out a hitch. But I digress. 

I've sometimes wondered about that man. The first undocumented I know I've ever met. A man. A worker. A loved one. A human. But to so many, an illegal. But so human. 

That's it, then. It cannot be illegal to be human. Living. Breathing. Loving. Loved. Full of hope and potential. No human can be illegal. 

Art

I started scrapbooking again tonight. I picked up the pages that I haven't worked on since I packed them up the week after my mother died in preparation for her funeral celebration- 8 years ago. I've been dreading working on the last few years what with my change in beliefs and lifestyle. I have pictures and memorabilia from a part of my life I cannot agree with, hate to think about, and don't really know how to handle. BIble school, nanny families, host families, vacations, moves, travel...... PIctures I haven't been able to look at. Memories too painful. Idealologies I can't reconcile.

Tonight I realized this is my chance to depict my past as I feel it, as I interpret it. I'm not obligated to record it as it happened, or how it felt then. My choices of colors, shapes, positions of the photos, reflect how I feel about what happened and how I lived. 

I got a Christmas newsletter from a good friend of mine, who I have known since I was 15, and who is still a Mennonite member. We have a good friendship, which has survived the test of time- and my abandoning the Mennonite/Christian community. We keep in touch three or four times a year, updating each other as her & her husband keep adding to their family and I keep moving around the Midwest. :)

This year, she sent a family newsletter celebrating the birth of their second child, an adorable baby boy. They gave him a six-syllable Old-Testament name that I can't even 100% place! Of course they included an idyllic family photo and some cliche Anabaptist verbiage. Even though I don't seek out or welcome the Anabaptist experience, the familiar phraseology was somehow, weirdly, comforting.

I found myself sitting in my car, stuck in my daily commute, staring at her family photo, oddly envying her. I realized this girl had embraced the legacy she had inherited, and had recieved the most out of what she had been destined to experience.

I looked at her (gorgeous) family photo. complete with tall, dark, and handsome and adorable baby boys, and felt a strange jealousy. Here is a woman who has accepted her designed lot in life, and has found peace and joy. She has accepted what generations of Mennonites before her have handed down, and become part of the living Anabaptist story. A modern girl, who has taken on an ancient role, and loved it. She continued on the course that she knew, and found forever love.

I'm not sure if I'm really communicating how I felt in that moment. I felt a woman who had joined the ongoing march of the Anabaptists. A woman who had fit in with what she was destined to become. A woman who had fulfilled what her culture expected her to. And in a way, I envied the ease and peace of her decision.

In no way does this make me regret or double-think my decision. But I have realized that in some way, I will always envy the peers who chose to accept the path that destiny and our churches chose for us. They haven't had to interrupt their entire lives, loose their entire life plan, and redefine their very souls, to find a new path and meaning in life. They have simply accepted their status quo. And in pictures, it looks beautiful.

I wasn't handed any tools for success in the 21st century. I had to defy everything my parents and my church set out and expected for me in life. I had to endure the soul-searing redefining of my very personality. I chose the road less traveled. The road that means I will probably be single, for a while at least.

In that moment, I compared her idyllic family and homestead life with my single-woman, corporate career path. I don't regret it at all. But it is lonely. I won't have that picture-perfect family, because that doesn't come with my life choices. My choices have determined the life that *I* will experience, not the life that other lives will be born into. 

Was I better off in a two-parent home?

Some times I wonder if I would have been better off if my parents would have separated or divorced.


I read memes like this on social media and read the current theme of the day about divorce, which seems to be if you're unhappy, get out, because you don't want your kids to see you unhappy. Well, I've seen parents who separated because they weren't happy with each other, and yet still managed to make their own lives, and their children's lives, a living hell because they still weren't happy with each other.  I know my own parents probably didn't have the happiest marriage, but they stayed together because of their daughter, and because their religion told them too. I'm honestly not sure which was more important to them. Would I feel any different if it had been because of me, or because of the church? I've run both scenarios through my head many times over the years, and I'm not sure either one makes me feel any better.

The day I stopped believing in god

I remember the moment, two moments, actually, that I stopped believing in God. It wasn't a sudden, conscious choice, but defining moments that changed the course of my faith much later.

My twelfth summer. A year or two after I had experienced what I considered my "new birth" and at the crux of my awakening as a conscious adult. This was probably the first season that I began thinking and reasoning critically as an adult. Values, choices, life experiences were coming to light in painfully vivid, new focus. My life as a blooming adult was full of "aha" moments as I started to think for myself for the very first time in my life.

Part of my adult awakening was a spiritual journey into Anabaptism. As a teenager I was looking for acceptance, and a movement, a group, an idealism, to get behind, to throw my teenage energy and angst into.

I will probably never forget the first Sunday I stepped into an Anabaptist church. Never in my life have I experienced such raw anxiety, anticipation, and thrill. But enough of the niceties.

It was communion Sunday for this congregation. The details have been blurred by choice and pain. I do remember the communal cup, and the old-world style loaf that was passed around on each side as worshipers shared what I only can assume was grape juice, and pulled pieces from the loaf. As the cup and loaf were passed through the congregation, an elder walked over to the row our family was sitting in, and deliberately passed the communion dishes around us. I awkwardly made eye contact with a few worshipers around us. We sat quietly with the realization that we had clearly been passed over for communion. I have never been so singly embarrassed and hurt in a church service. I could feel my face burning as my heart cried silently and I longed to run out the door and never come back. If only no one had seen us that day! If only we had chosen a different Sunday! But to be snubbed at the precious sacrament of communion.

My belief in god started to die that day. If there were christians who could discriminate against other christians they didn't even know and refuse to commune with them, then how could one trust other christians? How could anyone know who he or she could commune with? And who were human beings to judge the state of another's soul, a soul that cannot be seen by an mortal, only by god? If communion was god's way of acknowledging our clean souls, and man's way of communing with god himself.... then why could humans make the decision who can take communion?

There was  a second day my belief in god died. They day I was told not to come back to my church's Native American outreach for children. I had stopped attending services with the church, but continued to faithfully volunteer for the children's services. Even though I had basically lost faith in the institution of the church, I still loved the kids, believed I was making a difference loving & feeding them, and didn't think it would be a good "testimony" to the children, since we were supposed to be representing the same god. In the end, it seemed my motives were more christian than theirs.

My faith in just about anything spiritual was eroding faster than the desert sand in a sudden rain, but I still believed in the children. They were my reason for keeping on most days. But that day I found out there were more important reasons in christianity than representing god, loving the children, and feeding the less fortunate. A mere man could prevent others from hearing the gospel, and could dictate the standing of others in the church, and by extension, god. If a man could do all these things in the guise of religion, and get away with it, then I could make my own relationship with god & religion on my own terms.  If a man could make or break my own relationship with the church and god, then I needed a god, a religion, a belief made on my own terms with that god, and no one else.

I'm still working on whatever those terms are with that Being. Or whether that Being exists. Or actually watches us. But I know one thing, I haven't regretting shaking off the chains that bound me to a man-made god with man-made rules for pleasing that god.