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| Photo by Nikko Tan |
When I was in junior high school, a woman at my churched died too young. She was loved by the church and the community. The people who attended her funeral filled the sanctuary of our church and spilled into the lobby. It was a standing-room-only affair. I was awed by the crowd. The church was never full to capacity for a normal service, and it certainly never overflowed. This, then, was something special. Extra-special. This was an extra-special honoring of an extra-special woman.
This event, the death of this beloved woman and the
community reaction to her death in the form of a crowded funeral, formed in my
pubescent mind a sort of way to judge the value of people. Valuable people had
big funerals full of sad people. It has a certain, broken logic to it. People
who make a big impact will be missed when they’re gone. People who love big and
help people and are part of the community are valuable. Their loss will affect
the community and that means the community will attend their funeral thus
passing on the message to their loved ones that they were, indeed, valuable.
Like I said, there’s a broken logic to it. It is the logic
of a twelve-year-old who is trying his best to understand what it means to be
worth something in this big, complicated world. That the idea might be wrong,
that my conclusion formed from one event might not be universally applicable,
did not cross my mind until my dad died last month.*
My dad was a good man. He loved many people in his life. He
clothed people who needed clothing. He fed people who needed food. He found
housing for people who needed housing. He loved Jesus, and he showed that love
with his actions. Had he died in his forties, he would have packed out the
church. People would have come from around the state to mourn this man who
loved so deeply and loudly, this man who loved so many.
My dad died at 77. He did not have a funeral. Even if we did
hold a funeral, it would not have resulted in an overflowing church full of
mourners. The slow decay of dementia isolated him from almost everyone. In his
last decade on earth, he was confused and easily angered. He was mercurial and often
incoherent. He did not understand the world or his place in it. In the end, he
had his family and his caregivers. Everyone else faded away.
Was my dad less valuable at 77 when he died than at 40 when
he was on fire for Jesus and changing the world? Did he devalue in those 37
years? Or was my pre-teen concept of value flawed in some deep, fundamental
way?
By the rules of value set into my mind in junior high, my
dad was less valuable at the end of his life than he was in the middle. But junior
high me was wrong. First, if helping people earns value, then we should not
lose that value when the people we help forget what we did for them. The work
was done. The wages were earned.
Second, and more importantly, we don’t earn value at all. We
are, as humans, made in the image of God. We are inherently valuable. What we
do in life does not make us more or less valuable in His eyes. The man with the
mansion and fleet of cars is as valuable to God as the man with nothing but the
shoes on his feet. Whether we are mourned by many because we died in our prime
or we are mourned by none because we’ve outlived our friends and family, we
are, all of us, valuable. It is not earnable. It is an innate part of our
humanity.
I think we should all do the things my dad did. We should
all help people as we’re able. But we shouldn’t do it to try to earn anything.
Helping people shouldn’t be transactional. It should be a natural result of our
love of God and God’s love of us.
My dad did not have a funeral. There was no packed church.
There was no overflowing lobby. But my dad was valuable. His age and dementia
did not diminish that.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you are valuable. You
are made in God’s image. You cannot earn your value. You are loved by God. You
cannot earn his love. But you can share it. I hope you do.
With love,
Tom
*It is embarrassing to admit that this idea was sitting in
my mind for so long unchallenged. I wonder what else is rattling around up
there.
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