They both shared bright smiles as we greeted one another. It had been over forty years since my cousin and I had seen each other and here she was before me, with her husband by her side. They had arrived in the States just the week before. My cousin and her husband went to Japan in 1981 as missionaries. He is pastor of a church there now and also teaches at a university near their home. The glow of the smile that even lights up her eyes is the same as I remember from those childhood years when our families would visit at their home or ours. My cousin also lives with Parkinson’s disease. She was just diagnosed in August of this year, so she is in the early stages of wrapping her mind around the concept of the disease and what it does and does not mean. Her journey to diagnosis was circuitous. Amplifying her symptoms may be an apparently non-invasive brain tumor she has known about for a few years. Regardless of symptoms and challenges wrought there from, our time together was filled with memories and the joy of current events. We will see each other again in a few days at a family reunion and I look forward to greeting distant relatives from long ago. My cousin will be a frequent contributor to this blog, once she is back in Japan and settled into her routine. As she and her husband drove away on their journey to her brother’s house, I paused to utter a prayer of thankfulness for fond memories and re-connections having been made. I am discovering blessings of connections new and renewed.
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