"Dad would have been twenty-one or twenty-two when he met my mother in Mexico..."
"First tell me a bit more about that church he was in."
"He hasn't told me a lot. In fact, I probably learned more in my forty minute chat last night with Aaron. Dad never mentioned it, for some reason. But it was quite a phenomenon, where people really sensed and lived in the presence of God's love and power. The place attracted huge crowds from all walks of life, and the way he described it, the air was always electric with grace and joy."
"Any idea why Aaron changed his name?"
"He has promised to tell us all about it in the next couple of days."
"So your father met your mom in Mexico."
"She was attending the Pentecostal church they were visiting. She wanted to improver her English so they became pen pals. Dad went back on his own to visit her a couple of times. Then, on visit number three, they married each other and he brought her back to Canada. At that time he was starting his career as a social worker. I was born a year later. With help from my grandparents they bought the house at UBC where I grew up. It seemed like a happy marriage, but no one was accounting for my mom's terrible sense of culture shock and dislocation and loneliness. Around that time, Dad had left the charismatics and become an Anglican. Anglicans, in those days, were not the world's friendliest Christians. Now they are more welcoming, but they still tend to hold all outsiders at arms length. This, for my mother, became intolerable. According to Dad, her mental health began to spiral downward, she became depressed and delusional. And paranoid.
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