Accompaniment and Mountains
Grief. Anger. Frustration. These are not the words we would choose to have enter our sister church relationships, yet there they are, in the midst of our US sister church meetings and conversations. Grief, anger and frustration. You might expect a writing about violence. Invasions. Gun shots. Blood flowing across tile floors and dirt paths. Promising lives of girls and boys and now even old men senselessly lost. Certainly grief, anger, and frustration are rightly expressed in the current context of violence in El Salvador. But gang violence is not the subject of today's writing. Today I write about a beloved pastor who died. She died. We don't even like to say it out loud: she died. As a bunch of brothers and sisters from a bunch of sister churches who knew and love this pastor and her family, we do not want to accept the reality that she died. She was a mother with three children. She died. She was a creative, lively, leading, successful pastor. She die