How We Choose
Family and Friends
By John W. Fountain
The following is a column by award-winning Chicago SunTimes columnist, author and publisher John W. Fountain that
was published August 18, 2011.
M
y mother’s doorbell chimed one recent sunny
afternoon while I was visiting. I don’t know
how I knew it was the Jehovah’s Witnesses as
my mother answered the front door.
Maybe it was their tone—official and yet filled with a kindness
that rang in their voices. Sure enough, it was them, I determined
after hearing them ask if they could come in and “share.”
My first inclination was to quickly shoo them away, partly out
of having been raised in a Pentecostal Bible-thumping church
and taught to repel those who
didn’t completely share our beliefs.
It was soon clear they had been
there before, and the conversation that ensued—about my
mother’s health, about how she was feeling and getting along—
and the sense I detected of their genuine concern for her as a
human being made me see them less as “the enemy” and more as
her friends, if not a kind of extended family.
It also got me thinking again about