My Graduating Sisters

(pictures forthcoming)

Sometimes I regret missing the "growin' up" years of my sisters and brother. For two years, I was serving the Lord in Orange County and since then, except for a 4-month trial run of being an RM in Utah, I've been living in the very area I served as a missionary. I don't regret for a minute the experiences I had during my missionary service or subsequent community service among the Vietnamese Americans here (heck, I married one :) but I do wish I could have been around while my family was growing and maturing. It's a bit of a paradox.

However, the Lord hasn't left me hanging. Since I couldn't be "there" for my own siblings, he's blessed me with other brothers and sisters - with whom I cannot claim blood relation but who I definitely claim as family. This concept hit me like a brick this past week while I stood at Van's graduation and realized that my Morgy's graduation was just two weeks ago. Could it really be true that they are the same age, that they were going through the same trials at the same time, that they're both moving beyond high school in the same year and starting on the same road of opportunities? My goodness, it still shakes me up to think that all this time I hadn't even made the connection. My Utah life and OC life still run parallel paths in my head, yet to intersect at any meaningful crossroads, so it never crossed my mind that my two "sisters" who I feel are so far separated might be more-closely related than I imagined. Now I can't help but think, all those years I've been geographically distant from my Morgy (I didn't even email her for crying in the mud!) but in constant contact with Van, perhaps through some channel of karma or flow or "what goes around comes around" or just God's tender mercies, I've been there for both of my sisters. I sure hope so. And either way, they're both graduated and moving on, so I need to do the same.