Dear Friends, Here we are on Friday during Thanksgiving weekend. I know most of you who read this are living in the USA and so I wish you lots of relaxation and enjoyment of being with family and friends. Here in Kenya it is a regular week for work and the usual routine. But as an American I cannot help but be with all of you in spirit and wish you the best and the peace that only our good God in Jesus can give. Oh, how we and the USA needs this now at a time of such strife and disrespect from many voices around us. I am so struck by the disrespect and insulting manner reflected in and even fostered in the newspapers, the TV and internet news sources. I am saddened by all of this. We so need to make a choice for listening respectfully to each other, even when disagreeing. We need to calm down and reclaim our center in Him whose love makes all the difference. I am well overall, even though I have had three bouts of dysentery in the previous two weeks. The most recent week I have been normal and hope I have gotten through whatever it was that bothered me so much. Our neighborhood monkey is frequenting us again and makes loud noises when running across our roof tops during our breakfast time. Just imagine a medium sized dog with a long tail running around on top of your own house and looking for any open window to sneak in and steal food. That is what this character is like! He can even open our big sliding door from the veranda into our dining room if the door is slightly left open. About five days ago our monkey succeeded in getting into our dining room and stealing a cluster of bananas off our center table. I had had a banana from that cluster at breakfast the same day and found them too ripe for me. I ate about half of it and cut away the rest. So really, these bananas were ready to be put into banana bread. So this pest did not get the best in what he stole. I did spot him, however, soon after his theft nestled in the crotch of a nearby tree gorging himself on one banana after another. It is after all rather humorous! In the end one has to admit he is cute even though obnoxious at times! Our worry now is how he, and we think a second monkey, are beginning to steal our mangoes. We will have in January a bumper crop of mangoes. Our trees are loaded with them but need to have more time to have them fill out and be ready for picking. And when they are ripe, the eating is out of this world! I assure you, mangoes are on the menu for the eternal heavenly banquet!! In the meantime the damn monkey aims at beating us to them, even before they become ripe! We are planning to throw nets over these trees, which is not an easy task! I begin my own yearly 8-day retreat next Tuesday evening, the 29th, and finish on the morning of December 8, the feast day of Mary's Immaculate Conception. I would greatly appreciate your remembering me during that special time in your prayers. Thank you so much. By the way, do you who are US citizens know that the USA some years ago was put "under the protection of" and dedicated to Mary, under the title of her Immaculate Conception? The basilica or national shrine in Washington, DC, is dedicated to her under this title. The meaning of this title given her and its implications for us who aspire to follow Jesus closely are pretty awesome, something quite worth learning about and applying in one's own spiritual walk with God. It implies extraordinary blessings available to any follower of Jesus who is childlike enough to learn and be led by God's Spirit to new spiritual depths in Christ. It has struck me, and I included this in my book (More Than You Could Ever Imagine), that all the attention and honors given by Christians to the Mother of God are not attention for just her but also constitute wonderful good news for any of us who aspire to follow closely her Son. That is because she and all the blessings God gave her are a mirror and anticipation of the many blessings God has in store for each of us as we make our journey home to God. All that is honored in her is a hint of all the goodness and beauty of God being realized in us. Her story anticipates so much of our own story that is still in its early stages and is unfolding toward a fullness we get glimpses of when looking at her, if we will look! I will close with relating to you a very painful story I heard just last Tuesday. Some of you will most likely find this disturbing; it certainly was and still is disturbing to me, but it does give you the reader a hint of some of the monstrous evil I am learning about here in Kenya, evil going on in this young nation, among a fragile people who are for the most part terribly poor and susceptible to the forces of evil. It is a story of a family with the scourge of alcoholism in a number of members of the family, and I think mental illness too, accentuated by some members calling upon witch doctors and curses to get revenge on other members of the family. the family is said to have become Catholic Christian, baptized, but mixing with such polygamy, philandry, and the consulting of leaders of the occult. The story I tell climaxes in the death of a 39 year old daughter, dying I think from a heart attack, after she was found to be pregnant and got an abortion. Her father, who is mentally unstable and a micro-manager of the grown children he fathered from one or other of his wives, demanded that this daughter get an abortion, a late term abortion at that. So she did because the economic means for her was with her father. She was jobless and dirt poor and vulnerable to being left out on the streets if she refused. So I am told by the one who related this awful story ( half-sister of this woman!) that the baby during the abortion, bleeding and all, was crying when it was thrown into a nearby bucket and there it died. I have heard in my spirit this cry and it so upsets me. My faith in Christ tells me this is a moment in which He, who said that when you give a drink of water to one of the least of my brothers or sisters you do it to Me, is crucified again. The ultimate mystery and meaning of every human life is found in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is where we find the meaning and purpose of every human life, Christian and non-Christian. The only resolution to monstrous choices like this is found in His mercy spoken while He hung on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they really don't realize what they are doing." May you and your families have a blessed Advent. Come, Lord Jesus, Prince of Peace. In You alone is our hope and lasting joy! Bernie Owens