My friend Hanh, a Jesuit priest from Viet Nam, has accepted another assignment and will be moving soon to Louisiana. I will miss him. He doesn’t really want to go: he enjoys his work at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat Center in Sedalia, Colorado, and his family lives nearby in Denver. His father was imprisoned for 10 years by the communists after the fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1990 the US government had an agreement with the Vietnam government to bring all political prisoners and their families to the US.  So the family came to Denver as refugees on Oct. 23, 1991.

When he told the family he was being reassigned to Louisiana, his mother was clearly disappointed and just said, “That’s a long way from here.” His father has dementia, and this is what his father said:

It’s far away. But you are a priest; you should go where the church needs you. Think of the missionaries who left their homes and families to go to Viet Nam. If they hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t know about God.

Did you catch that his father has dementia? Hanh took that as a direct word from God, speaking through his father.

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19.29, ESV)