I couldn't take my eyes off of her as we exchanged our first greetings, groping for something familiar, some feeling of connection. "Where are you, Joyce?", I silently mused. I could feel the intensity of her stare when I occasionally looked away and I knew she was looking for me too. Yes, 10½ years is a long time, especially at our age! I wondered if I looked as much older to her as she did to me. And every once in a while, I was startled as I glimpsed my mother in her. We were off on an unusual adventure, my sister and me. It had all started with a computer E(electronic) MAIL message to Jim: "Tell Cora not to panic I'm coming. We need to see each other while we're both still alive." (After which Cora promptly panicked!) You have to understand, I have never really known Joyce. She went off to college when I started High School and I left home at 17, never to return. My contacts with her in recent years had mostly involved desperate attempts to share the Gospel which eventually turned her away from me for the most part. To Joyce, her sister was a sincere but misguided fanatic. To me, mine was a rebel for as long as I could remember. And now the rebel and the fanatic were about to meet again! I think the hardest part for me was the shame I felt ahead of time about her seeing me in my condition. What would she think now about the God I proclaim and serve about my trust in His promise of healing about His faithfulness to His children? What could I possibly say and even worse what would my life say to her about God? I shed many silent tears in sleepless nights before she arrived, arguing with the Lord about all this. I was certainly much too weak to be a witness in the way I thought a Christian should be. We scheduled short visiting hours for Joyce to be with me and the remainder of the time she spent with an old friend (whom she stayed with) and the rest of the family. She was very impressed with her niece and nephew and the love and unity of our family and kept telling me so. Since I couldn't talk too much, she did a lot of talking and I learned a lot about the real Joyce under all the bluster the hurting Joyce who had never felt truly loved, the needy Joyce and I fell in love with that Joyce. I shared some of my journey, mostly through my poems on suffering and Joyce wept and took her favorite and e mailed it to herself so she'd be sure not to lose it. We reminisced and I realized that a lot of my funny "Joyce stories" were not at all funny to her but had actually been terrible times of wounding in her life that took years of recovery. Here was a sister I didn't know and of whom most of my assumptions were very wrong. I am glad to say we found each other but not as we'd known each other. Am I concerned about her spiritual state? Yes she is so confused and doesn't even know it. Yet I felt so powerless to say anything. But I discovered something awesome about being a witness. It is really not so much what we say as what we are. Our lives are the real witness. And in my weak and humbled state, somehow she saw a glimpse of God in me that she'd never seen in all my years of sermonizing. And even though I'd felt such shame before she came, I realized now that she would never have known what an awesome miracle this healing is if she had not been a witness to my affliction. But more importantly, she wouldn't have known the victory of Christ possible in the midst of what looks outwardly like total devastation and even death. I really didn't think God could be glorified in this state but He was! So I can say, "Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph and through us spreads and makes evident the fragrance of the knowledge of God everywhere. For we are the sweet fragrance of Christ unto God [discernible alike] among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; To the latter it is an aroma from death to death the smell of doom; to the former it is an aroma from life to life a vital fragrance, living and fresh." (2 Cor. 2:14 16 Amp) To me this says Joyce is appointed to salvation because the fragrance of our lives to her was that of life, not death, in spite of outward appearances. How do I know? She e mailed several friends from our computer and her messages were left in Jim's account. I think the Lord did that just for me so I could know what Joyce experienced in her own words to her friends: "I am having the experience of my life, emotional, cathartic and I've learned more in the past few days than I have in a very long while. I can't really write about it now because I get too weepy. In some ways, I never want to return home... or maybe I've come home." Me too, Joyce... me too.
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