42 Paradigm Changers: #1 M'Lady

Still smiling after all these years

 I was a sick puppy just beginning my journey towards spiritual/mental health. One cold September evening nigh on thirty-five years ago when I was a pastor in training living in Kitamaat village (a small Indian village on the north coast of B.C. Canada) a tall lanky young man named Mike who lived in Kitimat town, showed up on our porch with a Filipina Youth Worker. 

I must have looked surprised because he instantly reminded me that we (we= my first wife Elly and myself) had agreed to host this young lady. He smiled and left with M'Lady shivering on the front porch. 

Flustered I was, but politeness overcame the fluster as I invited her into our home.

Back when she had The Answers

Instantly we ran into the problem of building a relationship in a cross-cultural situation. I was shocked that she was so young! She was puzzled because I didn't look or act like any pastor she knew. We were definitely going to have to work through our cultural baggage if we were going to understand each other.

Youth workers in the village way, were middle-aged heavy-set women of infinite wisdom, humor and gravitas. She was none of these. 

But she was 24, which brought up my first question as she entered our home: 'How many children do you have?' In her culture, this question was an afront to her dignity and morality. She moved to slap my face but controlled herself. From there things just got more and more interesting. 

We all come with culturally instilled biases. M'lady, coming from a country with an armed revolution that had been running more or less hot since WW2 ended, knew a lot more about guerrilla conflict than peace.  As we chatted, she sized me up. All the signs told her that as much as I was a little strange to her way of thinking I was basically harmless. It wasn't too long before she was comfortable enough to ask where her bed was. I showed her to her bedroom.

It was colder than she was used to, and she had had more than one hot drink to warm herself as we had chatted. Not surprisingly she found herself in need of the comfort room. (Comfort room = bathroom) Not wishing to disturb anyone she went to the door I hadn't opened in the bedroom with high hopes of finding the comfort room. 

What she found was my armory. Before I became a pastor in training I went through my Survivalist Stage. Elly and I moved to a lighthouse, and I began collecting (legally) weapons and ammunition. When M'Lady opened the door rather than a toilet she found multiple assault rifles and somewhere around 30 /40,000 rounds of ammo. To say she was puzzled would be a classic British understatement. She knew pastors that were rebels but to her way of thinking I showed no signs of being anything other than a well-meaning if somewhat strange pastor. Being a prudent young lady, she decided she really didn't need the comfort room and crawled back under the covers.

She stayed in Kitamaat Village for two? three? days and came with me as I did what a Village Pastor does. We walked the village from end to end, chatted with the people we met and went in for tea or coffee and food when invited. 

The more people we met the greater the fun I had. Indigenous people from the north coast could tell a person's home village by signs so subtle that even after nearly five years of immersion I still had not the needed skills. None of them could place this young native woman in any village they knew. But their dignity and M'Ladies privacy kept them from asking. After day one or was it day two? the people we met would find a way to separate us and then they would ask me what village she was from. They found it hard to believe that she wasn't indigenous.

I have if not an infinite supply at the very least a humongous supply of stories about how after she returned to the Philippines and my marriage dissolved, we came to know each other through snail mail. But this is a letter, an epistle, a post not a book So, cutting to the chase, here is why M'Lady is #1 on my list of Paradigm changers:

M'lady has shown me and taught me, how to truly Love. Not an easy thing to do with a person such as myself whose early examples of how to love were given by his paranoid schizophrenic sexually perverted father. But do it she did and that makes her #1 on my list.

Brian