- these are lost and dying. there was an old lady across the way from my house who was wheeled out most evenings to participate in the sunset and evening air. She was there but she wasn't; from the beginning she was waited on as if by pallbearers. I ached for her as I watched her head droop lower and twist to the side. Her mouth needed wiping then; her tongue stopped shaping words, and the women talked around her; she couldn’t see her granddaughter’s picture or the excitement in her eyes. The children were shooed off, night set in, and she was wheeled away. I made her a cake once; it molded as I debated whether or not to break cultural rules and stagger through an explanation of what it was for. She had no where to go and no one to point her the way. Her body lies covered by a few inches of dust in an open cement casket pointed south by southwest.

They all go this way, the future so unclear they stumble into it as children off the merry-go-round. It’s a tough question, this “what is to become of those who never hear,” and one that I only find answer for in the sovereignty of God. Some tell me that’s no answer at all, that everyone has a choice. I agree in a way they find disagreeable:
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