As we look at the decreasing numbers of sisters in the congregation we also look back to our beginnings. Six women gathered in the little French town of LePuy in the 1650s to commit themselves to a life of service to those whom their founder Jean Pierre Medaille, called their dear neighbor. Under the patronage of St. Joseph, the community began. Almost 200 years later, another six came across the Atlantic arriving by river boat in St. Louis to begin a ministry of service in a new country wit ha new customs and a new ;language to learn. Thirty-four years later, seven young sisters of St. Joseph traveled across the desert to what must have seemed to them a new world, They were facing all new things new - a rough frontier town, homes made of mud and straw, desert heat, sandy winds, and new ways of living. Five of them, recently from France, had to learn English, Spanish, and the Indian languages spoken in the west. Our history has a pattern of starting small and growing under God's hand to meet the needs of the neighbor. "The last CSJ has not yet been born." These words of St. Mary Kevin Ford, superior general in the 1970s, linger with us. What this CSJ will be and look like, and what language she will speak, we do not know. But we do know, in the words of one of our leaders, "that we are passing along our charism to those who can sustain it."