No matter who you are, there is one simple question each of us must ultimately answer. Where do you stand with Jesus? It really is a very simple question with eternal final results that will at last determine where you spend eternity.

That was the simple question I asked my dad one day nearly thirty-five years ago. This simple question was met with an incredible and angry response from my mother who thought that I had no right asking such a question and that it was none of my business. This was basically the same response that I got from my sister when she learned that I had the temerity to ask this question of my dad.

This simple little question began a familial discord between my mother and me that resulted in what ended up as largely a dysfunctional family relationship for almost thirty years. In addition to this underlying cause of our family dysfunction, I did more than my share to advance the cause of dysfunction in our family.

Over the course of years, our family relationships remained strained and distant, largely my fault, until that day when we all learned that our mom had cancer. From that point on, things were very different in our family. The steady treatment and advance of Mom's cancer seemed to take an oddly twisted and tangled route to a result that left all of us arguably stunned and even more so surprised.

This is the story of that, twisted and tangled trip.