I've called my oldest niece "Emily the Fabulous" ever since she was a little tot. Her advent into our family, like that of every first child of the next generation, was a source of great joy and blessing nineteen years ago next Sunday. She's lived far away from me in New York State her whole life, but summers and Christmases and other visits have kept us close.

One summer, when she was three and in her dinosaur-loving phase, I bought her a set of sheets covered in brightly colored dinosaurs. She fell in love with them on the spot, took them outside and made parachutes and tents and all kinds of things out of them before she put them on her bed. I think she still has them, come to think of it.

She graduated from high school last summer and decided to take a year off before college. Wanting to make it a year full of different and powerful experiences, she chose a variety of ways to engage her heart and lively curiosity. She worked full time on a presidential campaign this fall and learned what it meant to invest her heart and soul and nearly every waking hour into a cause that she believed in with the full intensity of late adolescence/early adulthood.

A couple of weeks ago, she took off for Ghana to work with a volunteer organization there. The one stipulation she made to the organization was "No teaching!" She had no training to teach and wanted to do something that she felt she could do well enough to help people. Of course, they put her in a classroom right away with 2-9 year olds! She's now moved on to a different experience and sounds much more enthusiastic about that.

Already she is having experiences that will shape her life -- living with a Ghanaian family, rising early and trying to carry huge containers of water on her head like the Ghanaian women do (and spilling most of it), learning that receiving hospitality graciously may drive you past your comfort level.

My grandfather used to say, "That sound you hear is doors closing behind you." I've remembered that, and wanted to make sure that the doors closing behind me had opened onto a great new experience and I'd walked through it with my eyes open and my senses alive to something new.

In seminary, I went on a study tour to Nicaragua. I was there for just three weeks, but it was an important and life-shaping experience. I never forgot what I learned from my contacts with people there; those people -- peasant men and women at a brick-making cooperative, a ring of children who were thrilled that a norteamericana could talk to them in Spanish, mothers whose sons had disappeared, and many more -- have found places to live in my heart. I try to remember to bring them with me when I go places and see through their eyes. I'm not always successful at that.

Emily the Fabulous will have many people enter her heart and mind during these months in Ghana. She will always carry them wherever she goes. She's a long way from the three-year-old who fell in love with the dinosaur-print bedsheets. But the magic in her eyes from that moment has never left; it has only intensified as she has soaked up the world around her. That's a blessing beyond measure.