Why I Made My Wife Have a Website

Maybe I'm prejudiced. But I think the publisher's dry recital of facts on Tib's homepage manages to miss my wife's personality altogether.

Of course facts are important, not because they define us but because facts shape who we are becoming. Tib's adventurous "becoming" explains, I think, why readers of her latest book identify with her so quickly. "We're all becoming," I once heard her tell a group of beginning writers. "If we're honest about our fears and failures, then readers will recognize themselves, however different our lives on the surface." On every page of All the Way to Heaven readers are indeed finding themselves in Tib's struggles and doubts -- and finally in her hope and joy.

Tib was born into a family which felt no need for religion. Earnest, caring, upright people concerned for social justice, they were turned off by the church's history of violence and hypocrisy. Tib too was a fighter for the poor and the disenfranchised. Then... as she relates in the book, she was in her thirties when something new was added. No, I'm wrong - not something. Someone: Jesus.

It was a name never spoken in her childhood home, but with his entrance into her life came a whole new way of seeing the world. No less concern for the world's needy, but a new depth of caring for individuals.

Caring for people one at a time has its price. Because readers do find themselves in the pages of All the Way to Heaven, and because Tib has been vulnerable and open, they write sharing their own innermost struggles. Letter after letter, Tib tells me, contains words like, "I've never told this to anyone." Or, "I can't believe I'm writing this to someone I've never met."

Tib has never learned the art of the generic answer. She hates form letters made "personal" with a few alterations. Just yesterday I watched her spend over two hours on a single letter to a woman who'd written about being estranged from her son. The stack of unanswered mail on Tib's desk, of course, went untouched. I feel certain that that one woman will keep Tib's letter forever. But I'm also certain, because she told me, that Tib went to bed last night stressed and guilty because of the people who haven't heard from her. The problem is compounded because her work and mine keep us both on the road about half the time. The mail that piles up while we're away would daunt even a less conscientious person than Tib.

Which is the reason behind this Web site. It's because of the unanswered letters that I told Tib I'd gotten a friend to help me set up a system where she can (I hope) keep in touch with people more effectively and inclusively. I didn't ask her about this. That would have been wasted breath: Tib came into the electronic world protesting all the way, and each new application brings on a fresh volley of "never"s.

"You can do it," I tell her. After all, in All the Way to Heaven she does what she was "never" going to do: takes off the ghost mask and reveals herself. The result is an intensely personal story, including the adventure of our own romance, growing now for 58 years. Through it all runs the narrative of a faith journey both unique and universal. In letting us know her, she somehow manages to let us know ourselves.

Here's Tib after I talked her (with difficulty) into switching from her old upright Royal to this electric typewriter. She loved it once she got used to it -- in her opinion it was the ultimate in technology, certainly as far into that daunting realm as she'd ever want to go.