Kitchen Table Wisdom

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During the writing of Sunday’s sermon, I noticed something in the opening chapter of Exodus that I haven’t been able to shake.

We know the names of the midwives:

Shiphrah and Puah.

These were women with very little power in the world they lived in, yet Scripture remembers their names.

But the king who ordered them to kill the Hebrew baby boys? We don’t know his name. We only know his title:

Pharaoh.

There is something almost poetic about that.

Pharaoh looked at the Hebrew people and saw a population—a group he feared, a problem to be managed. He stopped seeing individual people and began seeing a category. And eventually, the man who reduced people to a category became, for us, a category himself.

But the women who stood beside individual mothers and received individual babies into their hands? We know their names.

It has made me think about how easily we do this to one another. We see race. Religion. Politics. Nationality. Gender. Age. Education. Geography. Poverty. Wealth. And we cannot ignore that all of those things play a part in who we are. They shape our experiences, our histories, and how we move through the world.

But none of them is enough on their own to tell us who a person really is.

I learned something about that many years ago from a woman whose name I will never forget.

I was fifty years old when I arrived at Wesley Theological Seminary for my first Course of Study intensive. Actually, “arrived” makes it sound much easier than it was.

I got lost.

I had spent decades away from school and now found myself trying to navigate an unfamiliar city to reach a seminary campus I had never seen. By the time I finally pulled into the parking lot, I was so relieved I could have cried.

Then I realized I had to get out of the car. The campus wasn’t large. But everything was unfamiliar.

I was a mature woman whose every insecurity seemed to have surfaced.
I had lived a life. Raised children. Become a grandmother. Answered a call to ministry. Stepped into a pulpit. But sitting in that parking lot, I didn’t feel particularly brave or accomplished.

I felt lost and terribly unsure that I belonged.

Eventually, I gathered my things, got out of the car, and found my way to the dorm room that would be home for the next four weeks. And that’s when I first met her, Josephina — my roommate.

On the surface, we were opposites in almost every way.

I was blonde, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned. She had mocha-skin, dark eyes, and brown hair.

Later, we would discover that our rhythms were different, too. I was a morning person. Josephina thrived at night. I was sunshine, happiest when morning came and the day stretched out before me. Josephina was a fire that burned bright late into the night.

And somehow sunshine and fire were going to share one little dorm room for four weeks.

I liked her almost immediately.
She intimidated me almost as quickly.

Josephina had a presence about her. She seemed confident in a place where I felt anything but confident.

I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to know me. But I also felt vulnerable in allowing too much of myself to show.

So, I tried to be guarded. I tried to appear confident. I tried to say the right things. I wanted her to understand that the differences between us weren’t barriers for me. I wanted her to know that I accepted her. The problem was, the more guarded I tried to be, the more I unraveled, one painful sentence at a time.

Finally, in what I thought was an attempt to communicate exactly that, I told her I could put her color and ethnicity aside.

I knew what I meant.

But Josephina only heard what I said, and she didn’t let me get away with it.

She told me she didn’t want me to set those things aside. They were part of her. She wanted me to embrace all of who she was and accept the total package.

I could have explained what I meant. I could have told her she had misunderstood me. I could have assured her that my intentions were good.

I wanted to defend myself.

But somewhere in all my unraveling, these words fell from my lips:
“Then teach me.”

The words dropped into the room.
For a moment, we just looked at each other.

“Okay then,” Josephina said.
She smiled.

I took a breath and smiled back.

I knew letting our barriers down enough to really know one another would not be easy. This first encounter proved that. We were still two strangers sharing a small room for four weeks, each carrying stories the other knew nothing about.

I was afraid to let my guard drop too quickly. I wanted Josephina to know me, but I wanted some say in how much she got to see. There were parts of myself I could share easily and others I kept safely behind walls.

But how could I ask Josephina to let me know all of her while I was still deciding how much of myself I would let her see?

One day Josephina walked into our room and found me crying.

While I had been sitting in classrooms learning how to become a pastor, part of me had been somewhere else entirely. My two-year-old grandson was in the hospital fighting for his life. The news that day had been troubling. I was worried about my son, and I was wrestling with whether to stay at school or leave and go to them.

By the time she found me, I didn’t have the strength to hold the walls up anymore. She asked me what was wrong; the walls crumbled, and I told her.

Then she shared her story.

There are some landscapes we recognize because we have walked them ourselves. Josephina had lost her own son to cancer when he was young. She understood the fear. The waiting. The helplessness. She understood the terrible ache of loving a child and not being able to make everything all right.

We had spent our first days noticing all the things that made us different. But grief took us somewhere beneath the surface.

She was still fire, and I was still sunshine.

Nothing Josephina had asked me to see about her that first day had become less important.

There was simply more to know.

Beneath everything we could see on the outside, Josephina and I discovered that we knew something of the same inner landscape.

Our differences were real, but so was our connection.

Neither truth required the other to disappear.

And maybe that is why, all these years later, Shiphrah and Puah have made me think of Josephina.

Pharaoh looked across Egypt and believed he knew who the Hebrew people were. He had a category for them. His own story about them. He knew what he thought they represented and what he believed they might do. But he didn’t know their names.

Shiphrah and Puah came closer. They stood beside individual women in labor. They received individual babies into their hands. They encountered lives, not categories. Shiphrah and Puah knew their names. And Scripture remembers theirs.

I wonder how often I have been guilty of believing I know more about someone than I actually do.

Josephina taught me that I shouldn’t pretend her color and ethnicity didn’t matter. They were part of her story, and she wanted me to see them. But they weren’t her whole story.

I couldn’t see the mother who had buried her son when I first looked across that dorm room.

She couldn’t see the grandmother, terrified that she might lose her grandson.

There was more to know.
There is always more to know.

Maybe learning who someone is begins when we realize how much we don’t know.

Maybe we need to stop writing our own stories about other people and let them tell us theirs.

Maybe…it begins with the humility to learn their name and the courage to simply say:
“Then teach me.”

Cathy D.