Dear Friends,

Dr. Maria Evans talks about hearing all the whispered stories when she was growing up about how her great grandmother Louise died in 1939. The event became a part of family lore as each family member told their own version of Louise’s death and the versions varied. Dr. Evans is a pathologist who trained in the same hospital where her great grandmother died. During her residency she looked through medical records to find an answer to the decades old debate. She found the medical truth about Louise among the yellowed handwritten records in the back of a long forgotten file cabinet.
At the next family reunion when the stories about Louise reared their heads again, Dr. Evans made the announcement about the kind of cancer that had killed Louise so many years ago. It had started in one place and traveled to another. Rather than giving Dr. Evans accolades for solving a long time family mystery, the family members not only stuck to their original versions, new stories began to emerge about how Louise’s death affected them and how they felt about it at the time.
By now you probably recall the oral traditions of your own family – the stories that come up nearly every holiday or birthday when your family gathers together. Those stories are a profound part of the family identity. Telling stories connect us and reconnect us with each other. Aren’t you glad the prophets and poets tell us stories about God? We could go back into the yellowed and frayed records of the stories we hear and examine all the details of what we hear so that we can put “meat on those bones” by clarifying any inconsistencies to the stories we hear, but then we would miss the point.
In Exodus 12 where we find the story of the Passover, we read verse after verse of detailed instructions (13verses to be exact) given by God to Moses about how the lamb is to be cooked, how and when it is to be eaten as well as how the leftovers are to be handled. The story of the Passover gives more details about cooking a lamb than Betty Crocker ever thought about giving and I have no doubt that in their rush to get everything prepared, some households missed a step or two. We have a plethora of resources available to us to help us ferret out and explain Jewish customs and dietary laws so that we can clarify all the boring details. But, clarity would miss the point that faith is hard. Since we are God’s children, God will help us work out the details rather than leave us to our own devices. That’s what healthy families do.