Sisters

This past week, I took a camping trip with my sister up to Niagara Falls (graduation gift).   My sister and I have always been really close, but we get busy, and taking trips like this allow us the moment to take a step back and reconnect.

My sister’s one of the people who has influenced me most in my life: I started piano lessons because she started piano lessons.  I started gymnastics because she started gymnastics.  The list goes on.  Despite the fact we see talk to each other way less than we should, and see each other even less, This week, we kept surprising ourselves with similarities—the same reactions (literally saying the same thing at the same time), ordering the same food at a restaurant never having discussed it. 

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of differences.  She’s always been the adventurous one, the social one, the athletic one.  I tended to stick to my books and my piano.  She’s a high school English teacher, while I’m studying to go into law.

The Bible doesn’t really abound with many stories of older sisters.  But one exception is a story I particularly love.  It’s about Miriam, Moses’ older sister.   When Moses’ mother saved his life by literally setting him adrift down the Nile, Miriam kept watch over him.  After the Israelites had left Egypt, Miriam (by now referred to as a prophet) grabbed a tambourine and led the singing and dancing, composing a victory song to the Lord on the spot. 

I see a lot of my sister in Miriam: protective, charismatic, fun-loving, and creative.  Most of all, though, she is an inspiration to me.  The stories she can tell about the impact she has had in the lives of her students even in just two years of teaching can make me rethink my plans to Save the World through my Law Degree.  She reaches out and connects with all sorts of people on an individual level in a way I never will be able to.  Above all, though, she challenges me on a personal level.  Sometimes, that means getting me to more completely experience a waterfall in Hawaii by climbing it when I would have been perfectly content taking a few pictures.  Other times, it’s getting me to go to a club I might otherwise be a bit leery about going to, or introducing me to sets of people I would have never struck up a conversation with on my own.  It’s through the new experiences like these that I am challenged and can really grow as a person.

It’s so easy to get comfortable, surround yourself with people who think the same as you, and coast through plans that you came up with several years ago.  It’s easy to condemn people who act differently than you as cowards, fools, immoral, etc., all so you don’t have to deal with your own views and beliefs being challenged.  But my sister never lets me do that, and instead has taught me to look for the Christ in them, and the wisdom that they may have—however different it is from my assumptions. 

Aristotle always thought that the highest form of friendship was the one in which friends inspire each other to be better people.  I think the same thing might apply to family, and I’m thankful for the blessing that my sister is for me every day.