Variously Named Siblings

What I am about to say doesn’t always get a lot of air time among the world’s truest truths. But I’m convinced it is one of the most powerful truths of our planet.

And that is this: siblings do not have to have the same last name.

We know this on a practical level, don’t we? Blended families with children of various last names pull off this gig known as “family” all the time.

But what I’m saying is one or two steps beyond even that.

That not only do siblings not have to have the same last name, they don’t have to have been raised in the same house.
They don’t have to share any genetic matter.
They don’t have to have any parents in common.

Case in point: I used to be one of those poor, deprived little girls born with no sisters.

So at age three and age eight, when my mom developed baby bumps, I took up
“thinking pink”, hoping to will a little sister into existence.

Apparently that’s not how it works though, since soon people began stuffing me into tiny t-shirts labeled “big sister” and insisting that I was in some way attached to these squawking, pooping, drooling messes of humans known as “brothers”. (Brothers I adore, but still members of the species known as boys, nonetheless.)

It was not until young adulthood that God finally delivered on my sisters (better late than never).

The first set of the three sets of sisters I count family, acquired around age twenty-one, are “the women formerly known as the Timmons sisters”. They are genetically related to each other, but have no more of my DNA than the average grocery store clerk.

When I met the “Timmons sisters”, the youngest was the beautifully edgy seventeen year old Melissa, a member of the youth group I (then Sarah Raymond) helped lead.

Jennie and Bethany were Melissa’s two older sisters, sisters who—in record time—became two of the best friends of my life…and then my roommates…and then in 2003, co-maids-of-honor in my wedding…and, somewhere in the process, sisters of my own.

In 2005, I played wedding coordinator when Melissa married another youth-group-member-grown-up and became the gorgeous Mrs. Evans.

In 2009, I got to walk down a lakeside aisle in the wedding that made Jennie the fabulously stunning Mrs.Sottovia.

And now tomorrow, I will walk another aisle in a nearby park (along with my son who may or may not be willing to deliver a ring for the price of an M&M), as Bethany becomes the oh-so-sweet Mrs.Stutzman.

So you see, none of us—not even the actual Timmons sisters—have the same last names we started with.

But we’ve never been the type to let something as silly as letters on a piece of paper define who can and cannot be our family.

In light of this, I think (and here I’m getting back to the powerful truth part) the world would be a MUCH better place if we all figured out more of this Biblically-inspired mystery—the art of  taking strangers on as brothers.

(The upside of this also, I figure, is you can have the sisters without ever having to donate a kidney. It’s a win-win people.)