This is a love note to a friend of mine. I mean love in the friend sense of the word rather than the romantic sense of the word. I am sad that English uses the same word for the romantic love between a man and a wife, the deep affection of parent for child, and the way we feel about ice cream. English truly is the fruit cake of languages.  |
| Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay |
But this post isn’t about English and its foibles.* This post
is about Sally.
I didn’t know Sally long. A few years. A decade or two. Not much in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know what she was like as a child or a teenager or a young adult. There’s this whole world of Sally I don’t know. Was she a precocious child? A rebellious teenager? What was she like as a young adult? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. But I do know the Sally I met. The mother and grandmother. The wife. The loving Christian woman.
How do I describe Sally to you? She was blond and soft spoken without being soft. She was an amazing listener. Have you ever talked to
an amazing listener? It’s such a gift. When I talked to Sally, it felt like she
truly cared about everything I said. She would listen and smile and interject
at the right times with questions or emphasis. This description, of course,
does not do Sally justice.
Let’s try this. Imagine a roomful of preschoolers. Running around.
Smiling. Laughing. Bouncing off each other like human bumper cars. Blurs of bright
colors and motion. Now imagine Sally – Ms. Sally to those kids – sitting down
in a chair and opening a Bible picture book. See the swirling, whirling chaos
of the room become calm with the magic of her voice. That, the act of chaos
brought to order with love and kindness, is my mental picture of Sally.
What else can I tell you? Sally loved Jesus. She loved her
family. She loved those preschoolers. That is, of course, the secret behind her
wonderful listening skills. Love, I mean. She loved people. I’m using the past tense
here because Sally died recently. And I know you’re supposed to say stuff like “they
loved deeply” when you talk about people who have died, but it was the defining
feature of her in my mind when she was alive. There was something about Sally.
Can I take a guess at why Sally loved so deeply? It’s an
educated guess, but I’m going to call it a guess because I didn’t have this
exact conversation with her. Sally loved people deeply because she felt loved deeply
by God. There is an incredible freedom that comes with knowing you are loved
deeply, that you belong, that you are welcome and forgiven. Sally used that
freedom to love. It was a good choice.
I will miss Sally. I know she won’t get to read this. But I
got to write it. To remember her. And that, getting to remember our friends in
this life and the next, that’s a gift.
Love,
Tom
*Foibles is a fun word to say. You should try it. F-oye-bulls. A delightful little word.
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