a bunch of my fork kin in other countries right now, acting as missionaries.

A powerful lot of them are babtists and Pentecostals, but we try not to hold it against them. I remember Dad having to take one uncle aside and explain to him that if he and his wife ever told my sister that all Catholics go to hell and made her cry again, Dad was going to arrange for a personal audience between my uncle and Jesus Christ himself.

They were always at our house, it seemed, because when they had finished their travels through the US, thrashing the locals for donations to help support their missions, they ended up in Hoosieropolis, broke, car a wreck, kids half starved, and exhausted. Dad and I would patch their car together, Mom and Sis would cook for them until you could no longer easily see their ribs and mend their clothes, and we would get them an audience with the local Baptist church whose congregation often contributed more for their mission than the hundreds of churches they had visited in their US tour.

Ordinarily a goodbye consisted of them offering to pray that we came to our senses before we all died and went to hell, but there was never any thanks for anything we’d done for them. I wondered why Dad kept it up all those years.

They would drive off to the coast where they would sell their car and use the money to buy steerage passage on a freighter and get back to their mission in Germany, or Poland, or wherever they were converting the wogs this year.

I am constantly astounded by the pick and choose nature of most Christians, and this last Sunday, when the Gospel focused on the Good Samaritan, it comes into focus more than at any other time in the cycle. Dad did what he did because it was the right thing to do, even though his own family thought he was insane and there was never any thanks.

I hope someday to be half the man he was.