My Troublesome BFFs

For years, I created a respectable, rational cover story for my possible madness. “Research” with a prestigious national award for independent study, countless visits to distant impressive libraries, authorizing credentials on lanyards, fingerprints, and notable historical societies provided legitimacy. I misrepresented as scholarly passion my ongoing, genuine relationship with women who lived over three hundred years before my birth. Their narratives and mine blurred. I am there; I am not. Am I present, past, future, or just tense? Does it matter?

Katherine, Mary, and Anne found me browsing in the county library stacks. Only passing time as my twins finished researching for a school project, my attention was caught by the three women’s irreverence for library protocol. They were dressed in long linen skirts, simple and a bit outdated, but like the variety of clothing people wear to the library these days. Frequently, I see a patron even in pajama pants. 

Doubled over with hearty laughter, the three motioned for me to come over, pointing to a book on the floor. Before replacing it on the shelf, I read the title aloud: Troublesome Women.  

To match their playful mood, I asked, “Are you troublesome women?” 

“Well, I suppose it depends on who you ask,” the older woman said. “We have known men who hated us and men who adored us.” That got them chatting, their words cascading with animated facial expressions and muttered little nicknames, clearly sorting a list of men into either the loving or hating categories. 

I nodded teasingly. “Okay, which of you would be the most troublesome?” The women burst into another round of responses and laughter.

“That is a short question with a very long answer,” the youngest answered.  

Holding the book in my hand, I asked, “Will I find out if I read this book?”

Immediately, they all broke into denial. “No, no. Certainly not in that book. Our stories are long forgotten.” 

It was clear these were good friends who could easily complete each other’s sentences.

“Only now can we see the ironic but satisfying path of justice. And it is weirdly amusing.” The older woman smiled. “Because it all ends well.”

The mood changed as the tall woman moved over and placed a protective hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Few people remember how God moved in our community, but they attribute the faith we expressed, lived, and for which we died to the very men who harassed and persecuted us.”

I reflected on the silence we were comfortable sharing. I thought many people could consider that painfully funny, but I saw in their faces a mysterious glint that they wanted me to understand why it was okay that they were laughing. 

The third woman was very attractive, in a simple and comfortable way. “We are not vengeful, for we have long ago forgiven. However, we see it as a bit of God’s humor, applied when His hand of love turns things upside down and all around. All we did was for the glory of God, but it is very amusing that the ideas these men fought so hard against are now remembered so closely with their names.” The women all chuckled and shook their heads.

 “I have time.” Surprised and pleased that I would take the time to sit down at their table and open the story, they shared. I was mesmerized for the next three hours as Anne, her sister, and Mary told a story that was unbelievable in its sadness and joy—its suffering and glory. 

My twins had completed their search and were ready to go, so I stood up to leave. “Well, I thoroughly appreciated hearing your stories. They really are unbelievable, almost fiction. I do not know why I never learned this at school. I was a history major!”

A simple but profound statement followed Anne’s parting smile: “You must remember the line between reality and fiction is not a single straight line but many lines of narrative that blend to create a blurred horizon of pasts and futures. When the sense of time shifts, it seems less necessary to sort it all out.”   

I wasn’t at all sure what she meant, but the afternoon’s experience did not leave me. I looked up Anne’s name in the index of my white set of World Book Encyclopedia to see if any of the facts they told so passionately were true. Surprisingly, they were true-ish. The text had a different slant, but their names and events were close enough. 

A boy I dated probably tried to impress me by saying, “Mysteries exist because not all that is rational is true, and all truth is not rational.” The memory of when and where he said that came back: a walk on the boardwalk, the smell of suntan lotion, orange and peach nail polish, french fries, pizza, and the top 100 playing on my new transistor radio. Incredibly, this one date and these words had floated back after over four decades of more interesting and important dates and statements. The passage of time seems to speed up, slow down, or evaporate but survive. It is not the linear experience I once believed.

The confusing, mysterious, even irrational conversation I had in the library continued to interrupt my thoughts and reasoning. Returning the next day, I hoped the women would still be there, and they were. I signed them out, and we went home together. 

Since then, Mary Dyer, Anne Hutchinson, and Anne’s sister Katherine Scott have been my faithful companions for over 35 years. 

Mary confided, “We did not envision the consequences or accomplishments of our lives becoming history. We just went to Anne’s conventical, and there faith created gratitude for Christ Jesus, who submitted to pain and suffered for the sake of sinners and for a Father who endured the unbearable pain of seeing his innocent Son accused, abandoned, beaten, and humiliated unto death.”

Anne finished, “and for humbling themselves—delivering us from the darkness of death to the light of Glory.” 

Mary added, “When George Fox taught about Light and Love, it was a confirmation that what Anne taught was from our Lord.” 

Katherine confided, “What was meant to reduce, instead multiplied; what was meant to bring death, brought life eternal.”

I am not sure how long her simple surrender floated around us. Words hung in radiant, sacred light. A minute, a year? Was breathing necessary? The completeness and peace of all things were close and real and trustworthy. Theirs was not the survival story I first heard in the raw details of their experiences. It was an amazing, eternal love story, and I was privileged just to linger there with them.

I complained about the state of the world, the state of the church, and the state of my despair. “I don’t know how to fix everything I find heartbreaking.” 

“Grace enables you to see your neighbors’ needs. You are not responsible for fixing everything. You will want to do what God makes clear you can do. Although our trials were many, in each we learned the resilience of faith is possible within His Light, guidance, and comfort,” Anne said quietly, looking into her friends’ eyes and patting their hands. They nodded agreement.

Katherine stated, “We are pieces of a great mosaic. Although we cannot see all the other pieces or the grand design, we trust the artist.” 

The unexplainable is sometimes the undeniable. I cherish the bold ladies’ visits, less frequent since I finished our stories. I remember them by intentionally seeing the Light in strangers and Friends.

Years passed, and my perspective matured. Sometimes truth is irrational. My Friends and I stretched out on the warm sand, heated by light that had taken eight minutes to reach the beach. The unknown inhabitants of oceans existed silently near us in patterns repeated and predictable: seasons, tides, moon and stars, and billions of horseshoe eggs emerging the same week the first migrating plovers—depleted and starving—arrive from their South American migration. In our Creator’s patterns exist the mystery of contradictions: snowflakes, fingerprints, DNA, and voices. This is our God, the Creator of all things, seen and unseen, the author of time. The mystery of time gently settled in my soul.

Are my secret friendships with these three women a pattern or a contradiction? Should I be afraid and have misgivings? Should I feel anointed and be grateful? Are they visions or delusions? 

I trust the goodness and love I see and how their lives honor God. The only answer that gives me peace is acknowledging the necessary, submissive journey of love. Angels declare not to fear. Light exposes the very emptiness of darkness and deprives it of power. An ironic sense of safety is in the unknown

I repeat a distant Summer Bible School lesson line from John that I memorized to earn a pink, plastic bouncy ball. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity. Whoever follows Jesus will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”  

Anne, Katherine, and Mary all smile and nod. Again, the memory of singing a song, “Hide your light under a bushel? No!” sung in a hot church hall bubbles up, fresh and wise. We sing it with exaggerated, clever hand motions. “We’re gonna let it shine!”

Likewise, the ladies’ memories came forth, and I shudder at the courageous faith that helped build a nation. It forces me to consider whether I am equally willing to sacrifice for what I claim to value and believe.

A simple action or a defining moment? Anne sits confidently in a chair. She breathes deeply and waits. We follow her lead, expecting the unanticipated. “What has God revealed to you recently?” she asks.

Enough time passes that I hear the birds outside the window, and then Katherine says, “His Grace is love without merit, and his mercy is available to the righteous and the unrighteous.”

Calmness prevails. There is time to abide, so we feel no rush. I wait, and then without a decision to begin, I say, “Only Jesus is enough. His Light within provides a path to follow through the aloneness of trials and doubt. His Light is more than enough to keep us from falling as darkness passes over.” 

I pray that more than just speaking this truth, I can live it.

Anne Hutchinson lived on this corner of School Street in Boston before her 1638 banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her home burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1711 and was replaced by a building known as the Old Corner Bookstore. The site now houses a Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant.

Is such fellowship my secret madness? Is fiction possibly irrational truth? How is this possible? It was as unlikely to Anne that in 2025 I could stand on the corner of School Street in Boston with a Chipotle bowl in one hand and call her name above the din of buses and trucks, as it was for me to watch a lighted UFO float above the houses on School Street in my own town. But they are both true—as true and unexplainable as space and time and the universe that clearly are filled with the holy unbelievable.   

Recently, I met Mary on Shelter Island at dawn. As I climbed over a dune, there she was dancing in the sky’s reflection of the shallow tide’s advance across the beach. Water and sky perfectly mirrored into one seamless expanse of light and color and unheard harmony. She danced wildly, twirling, swirling with joyful liberty that only a glimpse of heaven might promise. Her hair was loose; her long linen skirt wet to the knees from the delicate ripples that began on the African coast, now creating intricate patterns at her feet. 

Mary turned and saw me. Waving, she shouted, “This is our Lord’s glory, His promise fulfilled. When you see only oceans of darkness, faith offers an ocean of Light to cover it. Come dance with us!”

The faith of my irrational life remains. I follow unseen Light; I trust ancient third-person witness accounts; I believe the truest thing in my life is the divinity and defeat of death by the religiously rejected and politically executed Son of God, which sounds like foolish fiction to the perishing. The unexplainable is sometimes the undeniable. I cherish the bold ladies’ visits, less frequent since I finished our stories. I remember them by intentionally seeing the Light in strangers and Friends.