I attended the funeral of my Uncle Bob (not his real name) today. He was the husband of my father's youngest sister, Sue (not her real name). Bob wasn't yet seventy when pancreatic cancer took him. Bob and Sue were high school sweethearts, both a decade-and-a-half older than me.
When they were married, I was there and I vividly remember Bob emerging from a doorway on the side of the church sanctuary to wait for his bride to process down the aisle. The reception was at my grandparents' home. There, I shook Bob's hand numerous times, thinking myself very grown-up for giving him my congratulations. I guess I thought that the more I did it, the more grown-up I was.
My aunt and uncle settled into the small home they purchased just one month before their wedding. After the births of my cousins, they made a modest addition to the place, doubling its size. Later, there would be a garage. But, they've stayed in the same place for nearly fifty years.
In fact, they've lived their whole lives in a small Ohio town. Bob worked for only two employers his entire working life. His passions were few: his wife, his kids, his grandkids, golf, fishing, and mushrooming. He had no enemies and, as the attendance at today's funeral demonstrated, he had lots of friends of all races and creeds.
Some may consider his stability boring. But as I considered it and the impact his life has had on others' lives, another word came to mind: inspiring!
Both he and my aunt have always been unfailingly kind to others, but never in ways that called attention to themselves. Bob's eulogist today commented that whenever snow covered the sidewalks on my uncle's lengthy street, Bob pulled out his snowblowers and proceeded to dig out every one of his neighbors' homes.
And today, after the funeral, when family and friends gathered at the small and wonderfully overcrowded house, Aunt Sue did as she's always done...seen to it that everyone had coffee and food. She made sure that they felt welcomed and she thanked everyone for coming. Just like her mother, my grandmother, who was the chief cook in my grandfather's restaurants, my aunt has a servant's heart.
To tell you the truth, the whole experience chastened me a bit. As a preacher, I talk an awful lot about things like neighborliness, love, and servanthood. But I know few of my neighbors in this development, where I've lived for seventeen years. And I spend entirely too much of my time being concerned about other people's impressions of me, rather than concerning myself with what I might do for others. Worse than that maybe, I've always been concerned with what's over the next horizon, instead of living in the now moments and the here places of my life.
My aunt and uncle have never made that mistake and I'm sure that they've been happy for it. And even today, though I know that the grief will at times be almost unbearable for her, I feel sure that my aunt will be happy once more...living and loving and serving among the same people she's lived with, loved, and served all these years.
I'm too tired and lazy to look it up right now, but I remember that in an interview appearing in Leadership magazine some years ago, Eugene Peterson said that his goal as a pastor had never been to jump from one church to another. Instead, he wanted, he said, to stay in one place and keep loving it and loving its people and learning to love it all more and more.
As I drove across Ohio today, passing two of its largest cities, numerous small towns, farms just sprouting with the new crops of spring, and the state's varied topography, I asked myself if I could ever imagine or ever wanting to live anywhere else? Or, would I want to go to some other community? No was the answer I had to both questions.
As long as God wants me to be here, this is the state where I want to live and the community in which I live is the place I want to stay and keep loving it and loving its people and learning to love it all more and more. This lifestyle of staying in one place worked for my uncle and my aunt. Maybe if I learn to be half the servants they've been all these years, I can be a more useful person. And maybe if I let His love show in my life, I'll let my neighbors see just how much God loves them.
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