It was sincere. And it was significant — because it followed a trail that began in 1995, wound through decades of quiet service and unlikely friendships, crossed an ocean, passed through a closed border, and arrived at a pool in Dallas, Texas, where a Basque couple was baptized and their long-awaited son was dedicated to God.

This is that story. It is not a tidy story. It is the kind that only makes sense looking backward.

Serving from a Distance

Jane and I first got connected to the Basque Country through relationships that stretch back thirty years. You don’t always know, when you’re in the middle of ordinary life, that you’re laying a foundation that will hold weight three decades later. You just love the people in front of you and try to be useful.

With Xabi and Garazi, it started practically. They had a vineyard. They had a restaurant they were building. They had needs that people with willing hands could meet. So we found people — friends, young adults, people in our orbit looking for something meaningful — and we sent them over to help. Work in the vineyard. Build alongside them. Show up.

What happens when you genuinely serve someone without an agenda? They bring you into the family.

Rick — the tall guy who showed up one summer — can walk into Xabi and Garazi’s place now and be embraced like a brother. Not because he was impressive or strategic. Because he worked. Because he was present. Because love, offered quietly and consistently, crosses every cultural and linguistic barrier there is.

We held our deeper motivation gently. We believed in a gospel that changes lives, and we wanted our Basque friends to encounter it. But we knew — because they told us, through wariness and careful watching — that they would not be reached by pressure or programs or anyone who arrived with an agenda. The word missionary alone was enough to close doors. So we didn’t use it.

We centered everything around relationships. We served. We waited. We trusted that love, over time, does what arguments never can.

Ten Years of Trying

Patxi and Arantzazu had been trying to have a child for ten years when we first met them — at a big celebration at the vineyard, where my daughter Jessica and I were being honored for completing a segment of the Camino. They’d tried everything. By that point, Arantzazu was in her mid-forties. They had one last hope: a surrogate mother, somewhere in the world.

Xabi came to find me. His sister and brother-in-law had a question.

They told me the whole story — ten years, every option exhausted — and then they asked: Would you pray for us? That we’d find a surrogate mother?

I said yes. We prayed.

A little while later, Xabi came back. They had another question. This time it wasn’t if they found a surrogate. It was when they had their baby — would I baptize the child?

Something had shifted in that first prayer. Faith had moved from a maybe to a when.

The Infrastructure of Miracle

More than a year passed. Then COVID arrived, and with it the kind of chaos that reveals what people are actually made of.

I got a call from Garazi. Patxi and Arantzazu’s surrogate was pregnant. The baby was going to be born in Fort Worth, Texas. And the border had just closed. They couldn’t get in.

Here is where I have to slow down, because what followed is the kind of thing you cannot manufacture. You can only receive it with open hands and recognize it for what it is.

A musician friend near Dallas — David — was having dinner with someone and happened to tell them the story of a Basque couple who couldn’t get to their newborn child. The person across the table said: I have a friend who used to help in exactly this kind of situation. That friend had decided she wasn’t going to take in any more babies. But she heard the story. And she said yes.

Patxi and Arantzazu flew to Mexico to quarantine before crossing into the US. The quarantine stretched on and on. While they waited, their newborn son — Ortzi — was being cared for by a woman they’d never met, in a city they’d never been to, through a chain of relationships they had no part in building.

When their Airbnb fell through, another woman stepped in — someone from our Young Life days in Dallas, decades earlier, with a five-bedroom house and a pool. They stayed with her. They were treated like royalty. She didn’t know them. But she was woven into the same fabric, connected through thirty years of relationships that all ran back through the same source.

When you love someone’s child, something happens that no argument, no program, no strategy can replicate. They adopt you.

The dedication happened in that pool. David and his wife sang. Debbie — the woman who had housed them — felt to Patxi and Arantzazu like a mother. And before we dedicated Ortzi, I had a long conversation with his parents about what they were actually committing to.

I explained that a dedication is not really about the baby. It is about the parents — their promise to raise a child in a certain way, oriented toward a certain truth. For that to mean anything, they needed to understand what that truth was.

So we spent two days going through it. The gospel. What it means to follow Christ. What it means to raise a child in faith. And at the end, Patxi and Arantzazu looked at each other and said: This is what we want. Not just for Ortzi. For us.

We baptized them in the pool first. Then we dedicated their son. We live-streamed the whole thing — in both Basque and English — back to the family in Basque Country. Patxi and Arantzazu each gave their testimony. Their own words. Their own story. Broadcast home.

The Toast That Meant Everything

Back at that dinner table in Alkiza, when Josema leapt up to toast God, it wasn’t a polite gesture. These are not people who perform religion. They are Basque. For Josema to jump up in a room full of family and raise a glass to God — and mean it — that was thirty years of seeds breaking ground all at once.

Xabi and Garazi sat across from me as the evening wound down, and they said they wanted their marriage to look like ours. Not in a flattering way — in a directional way. They wanted lives that were open, that reached outward, that weren’t small and closed off from the world.

I don’t know exactly where Xabi and Garazi are in their faith. I know that Garazi, years ago in a quiet conversation, said she wanted to be a believer, and we prayed together. I know they’ve asked me to give blessings at public celebrations. I know they’ve been watching for a long time.

Patxi and Arantzazu, I know. Every time they reach out, God is in the conversation. Patxi is currently finishing a degree in religious studies so he can teach religion in Basque schools. He has shown The Chosen to his students. He talks about wanting to reach young people in a culture he believes is deeply lost.

The seed is growing. Branches are forming.

What We Actually Did

Here is the honest truth about our role in all of this: we served. That’s it.

The friends we brought over to help at the vineyard — they served. The people who housed a Basque couple and their newborn during a pandemic — they served. The woman with the five-bedroom house — she served. David, who told the story over dinner — he was just telling a story.

None of us were trying to be impressive. We were trying to be useful to people we loved.

Don Richardson once wrote about the idea of a “peace child” — the bridge that the gospel can cross on its way into any culture. For us, with this family, the key was children. When you love someone’s child, something happens that no argument or program can replicate. They adopt you. They watch you. They begin to want what you have.

Ortzi was that child. But in a way, so was every child we ever poured into, every young person who showed up at the vineyard with willing hands and an open heart.

The line from 1995 to that pool in Dallas to that table in Alkiza is not a straight one. It bends and doubles back and passes through decades and continents and moments that seemed ordinary at the time. But looking back, it is unmistakably a line.

God drew it. We just got to walk it with him.