Dear Friends, I am writing to you on Sunday evening. The winter chill is still with us on some nights. I am ready for a warmer room and hopes of putting away my heavy wool blanket. What is most memorable from this last week is a conversation I had with one of my retreatants a few days ago. She is a tall, slender Kenyan from the northwestern parts of the nation, where life is typically given to tending goats and cattle, leading them to watering holes, protecting them from rustlers, and staying out of the hot sun. This is a woman in her mid 30s, very black skin with the hair over her entire head braided beautifully. She speaks softly and with a British accent. I have to strain to understand her. I am not successful all the time! She is soon to make her vows perpetual after being in her religious order for 12 years. The 30-day retreat she is in the middle of and I am guiding her through is to prepare her well for this most special moment in her life next February. Her work is teaching high school age boys and girls. I had given her the previous day a scripture passage (Genesis 22:1-18) to pray with, a text that tells the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his miracle child, Isaac, since he understood (mistakenly) that God had asked him to sacrifice his son. As you recall, God intervenes and prevents Abraham from doing such to his son and then praises Abraham to no end for trusting God, putting God first above everything. This young nun prayed on that passage among others but was moved to relate to me a major moment in her life when two members of her religious order had come to her village and to visit her mother to reassure her of her daughter's choice to join and stay with the religious order. In this part of the world where it is considered by so many that you are not whole unless you have become a mother or a father, she had made a radical choice, risking rejection by some and resentment or resistance at least from her mother. Her mother is a quiet, reflective woman and listened well to these two visitors while her daughter sat near them. When it came time for her mother to speak, this nun, her daughter said, "My mother trembled and said, 'Who am I to fight God? God gave her to me and now I give her back to God'." I was so taken by how this young nun told of this great moment in her life when as she said, "my mother really accepted me then and supports me in what I am doing with my life." The love and awe for her mother, and for God, that radiated from that nun's face was something to behold. I later found it very meaningful to know that while I am half way around the world from my homeland, I am listening to a young Christian woman who wants to give her life to God in this way, and comes from a world of goats and cows, thatched huts, and barren surroundings, yet the Holy Spirit moves in her heart in the same way that this same Spirit has moved in mine and in so many others I am privileged to listen to and guide in their walk with God. I had a new sense of the reality of God's Holy Spirit moving in the depths of EVERY human being, no matter what our background. I have had a good first week in writing the beginnings of my new book. I am finding growing enthusiasm inside me for doing this. Maybe it was providential that the course I was going to offer on Teresa of Avila got cancelled! I think my finished product will find many interested readers. At the same time, I suspect it will be a few years into the future before I finish it and have it in a form fit for publishing. There are some parts in this book that will come from the deepest parts of me. That will not be easy to put into words, and I will be willing to wait patiently on that till I am satisfied with what is the final version. I do not see a book coming from me after this one!! I need to go! Have a blessed week. Till next time . . . Bernie Owens