Ashes, Not Dust

When I was a girl, away from home at college for the first time, finding out who I really was, and not just who everyone had always told me I was or ought to be, I came across a passage written or stated by author Jack London. Previously I had known London only as that miserable guy who, for the very life of him, could not start a fire with frozen fingers. Oh, the wasted matches! He ate a baby bird whole to keep from dying.

I wasn’t a fan. To Build a Fire stuck with me, yes, but not in any sense was it in a good way. I can say I never read White Fang.

But then I found this, his credo, and it resonated with me in a way that until very, very recently, no other secular work or statement has. I memorized it right away. It still hasn't left me.

I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark
should burn out in a brilliant blaze

than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor

every atom of me in magnificent glow

than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The proper function of man is to live
not to exist.

I shall not waste my days
in trying to prolong them.

I shall use my time.

                              —Jack London

I hand-wrote his credo on a piece of plain white paper. I stuck it to my dorm room wall. It stayed there for two years. It went with me to at least three different college-years apartments. At some point, it landed in my mother’s hands, and she, seeing so much of me in it, mounted it on a board, by that time the paper was yellow and curling, and hung it in the room that had been my bedroom as a younger girl—the same room for which I painted the walls yellow, and she let me, though it had never occurred to her to paint a room such a bold and garish color. (It is, once again, respectably blue-gray now.)

I have quoted this credo to many young friends. To my daughters. I mention it sometimes when we girls are singing Katy Perry’s “Firework” song at the top of our lungs in Bella, the Damselfly Beetle, with the sunroof open. I alter it a bit from time to time. “The proper function of man is to live not to exist” may sometimes come from me as “thrive, not just survive.” I want it for them. Life abundant, you might call it.

When I first became a believer, the weapon of the enemy I feared the most was complacency. I did not want the new fervor to fade away. I did not want to be one who “got all that salvation stuff over with, and then got back to normal life.” I wanted that spark to burn in a brilliant blaze, and it’s how I felt: renewed, with every atom of me in magnificent glow.

Today, I spoke directly with an artist. His work is breathtakingly crisp and pure. It isn’t overly dressed, but understated. He said he wanted to paint my daughter. I said I wasn’t opposed. Understated, and yet, it was clear because he was using his gifts, he was certainly not stifled by dry rot. His spark is burning. I could see it most when he talked about how happy his work made him. Nothing sleepy there. But superb, yes. He found his means of using his time.

I also spoke with a pastor and his wife, visiting my area here from their area farther south, which I once called home. Though the conversation stayed firmly in the realm of dignity and politeness, we were all bubbling beneath the surface with the same longing, the same idealism, the same hunger for the already in the not yet. The goal is in sight. No complacency there.

Last week, someone said to me, “Get ready, and let’s take this wild ride together.” He was talking about a very difficult ride that lies ahead. And I wasn’t thrilled. I was frightened. Isn’t fear the fuel of dry-rot, really? Fear paralyzes, and yes, that’s where I was. I was also thinking in terms of me. What I want. How I want to use my time.

But it’s not really my time to use. Yes, in God’s sovereignty he does ordain to allow me freedom of responsibility and creativity and response. But it’s all him. “I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them,” London said. What futility there would be in that! Many days of pointlessness? Purposelessness? Personal peace and prosperity?

All my days are written in the book, and have been before even one of them came to be. If every hair of my head is numbered, then I can be sure every atom of me is numbered as well, and all the elements that make up those atoms, held together by that mysterious God-particle, without which the entire universe would unravel in nuclear fury. Who am I to say I don’t want the wild ride, simply because it has turned out to be more of a blaze than I expected at times, at others, ash long before it seemed due for the glow to be subdued? What if this is the meteoric existence I looked ahead to so long ago? Why should today's fear so woo me with the permanent lull of sleepy comfort I once found more fear-inducing than the wild ride of faith in action?

I won't be dust. No. I won't be. Ash, maybe, but not dust.

I think I'd better buckle up.

A Harvest To Come through a Man Named Ray

John 12:24:
“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

These were Jesus’ own words, and he was talking about himself and his own upcoming death.

But then he goes on to tell us that those who follow him in this willingness to give up our lives for greater purposes—living with God and reflecting the truth of his will and power to save and unite rebels to himself—will be likewise honored by God.

This is not my story. This story comes from the life and death of a person I never met. Until the day he actually died, I can’t say I had even heard his name mentioned. But his story has now reached me, like a seed carried on the wind. And that is the point. When a seed dies, it produces many seeds.

Now that I’ve heard the story, it comes as no surprise that Ray was working in his garden on the morning of Tuesday, May 28. Gardening. Planting things, tending those plants. Looking for fruit or flowers. The whole image is one of production and growth coming from attentive work.

As he was known as “Smilin’ Ray,” I choose to imagine that he was enjoying himself that morning, taking delight in the creation he was cultivating, looking optimistically ahead to future blooms and harvest. Manyfold. I also imagine that he intended to share the bounty that was to come.

But he had no idea. No idea how much bigger this was than his personal garden.

There is life in a garden. Flora, fruit. Beauty and sustenance combined. Isn’t God just all over that? From dirt he raises up life that can produce, in just a matter of a few weeks’ time, lush greenery, varied in leaf, stem, and flower, and such abundance in flavor, scent, color, texture, taste, and nutrient—all from the same patch of soil. I always have marveled at a garden. Same soil, same water, same sunshine—but the produce is seemingly unlimited in its variety. Kind of like a crowd of humanity, made of distinct individuals, each with a gift to bring for kingdom good.

So Ray was working in his garden. And then it happened. Unexpectedly. That great heart stopped. By afternoon, Ray was gone.

The only reason I heard was because Ray is the brother-in-law of my pastor, and I was supposed to meet with him that afternoon. Our meeting had to wait, and I found myself in the position of grieving for someone I had not met, and all those he had left behind, and waiting in silent distance for the next word, and looking around me at the ones I love and giving thanks more often for their presence and God’s mercy which has brought us together thus far. I wasn’t thinking then about seeds that explode into abundant fruit for good purposes. I was thinking then about bruised reeds and how easily we are crushed.

But that wasn’t what was happening. God promises the opposite. A bruised reed he will not crush, and a seed that dies produces much fruit. 

I hope it does not in any way suggest that I am making little of the pain and loss and suffering of Ray’s family and friends when I say that even in death, Ray was not crushed. I imagine that I would feel crushed, if I were his wife. His daughter. His granddaughter. At least for a little while, I imagine I would feel that way. But yesterday, more of Ray’s continuing story was shared, and his life is being used for great growth. God is working through even this event—what seems to us like an ending is perhaps just a beginning in many ways, right here on this dirt planet.

My pastor told yesterday about the funeral and the events around it. Of course he went, to be present with his sister and extended family, to Ray’s home in New England. Many states removed from us here in the South. As a pastor, he was called on to conduct the service. And as Ray was well-known and well-loved in his community, it was reported to us that practically everyone in the town came. The Catholic church in which the service was held was packed, and packed with many who rarely attended worship services. Packed with broken hearts, hungry for answers, for relief, for real knowledge, balm that is effective in times of such shock and sorrow. Human hearts crying out in grief and longing for truth.

We’re all like that. But sometimes it takes a devastating and catastrophic event to open the eyes of our hearts to see, feel, taste, the acuteness of the need. What will satisfy?

Again, I imagine the congregation gathered, broken, feeling crushed. I know the feeling, the hole in the universe torn open by the loss of someone I loved taken far too soon, too unexpectedly. The raw gaping hole in my reality that seems senseless and irreconcilable. The hunger for something I can’t quite touch or even name. Just need for filling. And there is only one answer, one sustenance. It’s a different kind of food than what one finds in a physical garden. Jesus told his disciples, in the presence of a moments-ago lost and famished woman, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” He called himself the “bread of life,” the only thing that satisfies. And at Ray’s funeral service and Mass, my pastor let himself be used by that same Jesus to feed those people with that very same food.

How many seeds were planted that day? How much fruit is yet to come because Ray did not remain a single seed, but went into the ground? How much glory awaits our God because of one life? Even in death, God is always at work, and we see it happening around us. It comes, even to me, a stranger to the situation, living--what? A thousand miles away? It comes to me to renew my own hope in him. Nothing at all is outside of his ability and desire to work for good, for growth, for production, in this great kingdom garden. And no life that he has created is too small to have a role in his purposes.

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds. But when it is planted—when it goes into the earth—it grows. It becomes the largest of all plants in the garden.

I suspect Ray’s story has just begun to be told. As Christ is the vine and we are the branches, we can each expect that much, much fruit is yet to come.

Jane Reacts to Monty Python

This entry probably won't interest you much unless you particularly love almost-12-year-old kids and their infectious enthusiasm for new things, or unless you particularly love my own daughter Jane, or unless you BOTH particularly love Monty Python AND YET are not a "movie-quote snob" who insists on getting every quote exactly right. (If you do insist on absolute exact recitation, this video is not for you. You'll hear me make a correction here or there, when I should have just held my own tongue.

But I had to record some of this and I had to share because it delighted me so much.

Jane's history teacher decided that as part of class, the students should watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I am *so* glad that she did. I too saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a student--but I was a senior in high school and not a 6th grader. My English teacher felt it was absolutely necessary viewing, and I was elected as the class member to do the cumbersome ritual of calling Sycamore Video and reserving the gigantic metal box we called a VHS VCR as well as the VCR tape of the movie. Back in those days, we had to rent the box as well as the movie because most people (and most schools--at least private ones) didn't actually OWN such expensive and high-tech equipment.

So I brought the equipment home and my older brother Jimmy set it up at our house first. He, Kevin, Chris, and I put in the video, not having any idea what to expect. I remember within moments laughing so hard I feared incontinence. By the scene of the Black Knight, I can only remember lying face down on the den floor, literally crying and gasping for breath.

The cardboard cutout of God appearing in the clouds, complaining about the miserable groveling of all those Psalms, unfortunately coincided with the entrance of my dear Uncle Sammy, who stood in judgment over us with hands on hips and declared, "That is the most sacrilegious thing I've ever seen IN MY LIFE!" and bewildered, left us still giggling and howling.

Jane's reaction, even though she's much younger than I was at my first viewing, has been very similar. I'm so pleased for how much of the story and humor she really grasped, so that she could recount it to us in her own narrative.

For the Python-quoting purists, you'll just have to forgive her. She doesn't quote it word for word--at least not yet. But her enthusiasm and delight are worth every single inexact repetition. She went on and on for at least a half hour, sometimes laughing so hard at her own memory that she had to stop to breathe and start again. I'm sorry I missed recording most of that. She got decidedly more self-controlled when the camera came out.

Documented for our own family history.

How Can My Baby Be Turning 6?!

She's the baby of the family, and that makes it so much harder to limit the number of pictures I want to share. On the one hand, there aren't as many. Very few professional pics get taken of the fourth child in a family, even if the parents are pretty sure she's going to be the last one. And snapshots aren't even as common as they are for the first child, when there is utter dedication to documenting every new milestone, outing, facial expression. No, the last in the family doesn't get as much material tracking as the first, but somehow, by nature of being the baby, she holds a spot of excessive gushing from the heart of the parent nonetheless. So, I couldn't stop adding pictures of Jilly-Bean, who is turning six.

Hunting Island Lagoon. One of our favorite places. I have always firmly believed in putting a kid in a kayak at the earliest possible age. As soon as she can balance well enough not to topple out, and when she weighs at least a few ounces more than the oar, in she goes! Jill was a trooper. Of course she didn't kayak alone, but she looked nearly ready to do so, don't you think?

As she is only turning six now, I have to say that I'm not completely sure yet just who Jill is going to be. But one thing is for certain:

Jill is funny.
She is full of surprises.

Get ready for it. You know something's up!

And there you have it. SMOOCH! She's always up to something.

Here she is at her 5th birthday breakfast. Goofy girl. Always a clown.

And she's got style. This is one of her favorite outfits, all her own ensemble. Love the camo and combat boots, and the long jacket. She's never even seen Firefly! But she is her mother's daughter, and honestly, I'd still dress like this if I thought I could get away with it in polite society.

From a very young age, she just seemed to know what would make us laugh, and her big, big bright eyes and huge grin alone would have been enough.

Then there is also her joy and enthusiasm. She is so easily delighted. Everything warrants an excited squeal and full-on attention.

And she's the snuggliest of the four, even at this point when she's heading into elementary school. She always wants her Emma or a parent to hug and cuddle before bedtime, and she still creeps into my bedroom at night pretty frequently to climb into bed with me for awhile and snuggle in close (and it's not always related to a thunderstorm, though that's almost a guarantee). That's how she has earned and kept her other nickname, Snuggle-Puppy. (Sandra Boynton fans will understand.)

This year started her first outside-of-the-home preschool program. Here she is on the first day. I had her with me for Kindergarten at home four days a week, but a local preschool program helped in a number of ways by giving her an option for all those messy crafts that strike panic in the heart of a working mom, and let her get used to the idea of learning from someone else and working and playing with peers on a schedule not quite so determined by herself and the demands of the household and work. It was a good option for us, but my heart was divided on this day.

 

Back to being the comedienne, here she is at Old Navy with "her friend," one of the mannequins. Sometimes when Jill joins the crew and stands still enough, I promise you I have a little trouble determining which one is my living, breathing child. It's become a game for us.

That grin and those giant blue eyes certainly dig into something deeply maternal in me. We weren't sure we would have a fourth child. After losing several, including the one just before her, it was all a big question mark. But here she is, small and bright and blue-eyed and oh, so present and wanted. We would have been out of balance without her. I think I would have missed her always.

I love you, Jillian Beth Cochrane, Snuggle-Puppy, Jilly-Bean.
Now, don't you have a wardrobe to go explore somewhere?
Happy 6th birthday. You fill my heart.

Emma Turns 14 with Grace and Favor

 

She was a smiley, sassy one-year-old.  A firstborn, Emma was always on the lookout for other kids. From the time she was old enough to sit up alone in the grocery cart, she was constantly turning from side to side, scoping out the store for other kids. "Kidz" was one of her first words (along with ball, light, and Geez for Jesus).

I suppose that's why it seems to me she has grown so well to fit her name. Emma Ruth means "all-embracing" and "friend." The all-embracing friend, that's been so true to her personality. Never have I known her to choose not to be friendly with another child or adult, and it is only after many tears of anguish and regret that I have ever heard her express her difficulty with any one individual. She has a determination deep in her heart to love everyone as each comes, and it pains her to find that not all relationships can be harmonious all the time.

I've seen her make lemonade from lemons more times than a mother's heart can bear. I admit that, though I am an optimist at heart--especially where finding good in people is concerned--seeing her hurt turns me sour far sooner than it does for her. She has born a crushing blow from a peer, come home to weep on my shoulder, taken 10 minutes alone in her room to pray, and returned with a plan to set things right and win that friend back.

Perhaps that's why it is still so natural for me to refer to her as the "Sunbeam." There's a light in her that keeps being renewed. She's truly shiny. Oh, like all teens she has those times of angst, those times of needing her space. Like all firstborns with many younger siblings, she has those times of needing to withdraw just to reclaim her own identity. But on the whole, she is positive, looking at the future and laughing.

I first called her "Sunbeam" when she was just three months old. At birth, she was a shock to me. Of course I loved her and wanted her, but who doesn't look in a sort of disbelief and fear and perplexity at the very first newborn PERSON--right, a whole PERSON--who just emerged from one's own body? It took me a few days for that deep, bonding mother-love to kick in. At first, I admit, I was confused and curious and overwhelmed by her sudden and always present existence in my life. Her features were too new. They were peculiar. She was at least three weeks early, so it was as if her face hadn't quite emerged yet and it was shrouded in this ruddy (jaundiced) temporary visage that looked more old man than baby girl.

But after just a few days, her color began to normalize and her features smoothed out and her eyes weren't so puffy and she began to look around. And at three months old, she started to coo and smile and kick and flail all at the same time, whenever she saw me. And I fell head over heels in love. The light behind her eyes and the joy in her smile seemed to introduce a literal ray of light directly spot-beamed onto my heart. So in her nursery one day, at three months, in the big house we had just moved into, in the upstairs room with Mowgli and Bagheera and Baloo painted on the walls, I laid her on the carpet, in the light of the window, and I basked in the reflection coming from her. 

"Sunbeam," I said. "You were just what I wanted. How did God know? I didn't even know, until here you are. Just exactly what I wanted."

 It's still true. I could never have planned what she'd turn out to be like. Besides, she's still working on that. (Aren't we all?) She's taller than I am now. Tan and green-eyed. Fun-loving and determined. Driven to do what she is capable of, including working hard to become an Honors student--something that seems to come much more naturally to some--and an athlete--again, something she has had to train and push herself toward. Her efforts were rewarded just this month with invitation to the National Junior Honor Society and her school track team's "Rookie of the Year" award.

But her heart is to share joy and health and well-being--shalom, really--to others. She has just begun finding her place in a new youth group. The main draw for her was not the size (though there are many kids there--and she still loves "kidz"); it was not the music (though it is contemporary and very engaging); it was not the games or scavenger hunts or promises of pool parties over the summer. Her main draw, the one thing that she found MOST appealing about that youth group, was the fact than unbelieving kids attend. Some come with friends from public school. Some are invited from larger neighborhoods. But they're there, and she wants to know them. She wants to be able to talk to unbelieving peers about the hope she has in her Jesus. 

Longer term, she remains committed to a vocation she felt a calling for when she was just six years old. When her sister Miriam was born, and almost lost at birth, Emma got her first introduction to the NICU unit at Mission hospital. She was escorted in to the unit with her four-year-old sister to meet her baby for the first time, face to face. Little Miriam was on a ventilator. A tube was inserted through her mouth and taped down so that most of her face was obscured. She was bound to the incubator bed by straps because seizures were predicted. Her little hands had been given rolls of gauze to grip because her body had reacted to its trauma with such muscular contraction that the NICU nurses suspected her fingers could seize that way and possibly atrophy. The gauze rolls were to keep them adequately spaced to prevent such atrophy. A huge mass of tubes and wires and electrodes were attached to baby sister's body and head, including an IV line inserted into a vein there. She was still covered in blood and gore from her birth.

And six-year-old Emma was not shocked or appalled or frightened. She was overwhelmed with love for her baby. She spoke to her, and Miriam's eyes--the only part of her that could really move then--rolled toward Emma's voice. It was right then that Emma decided she would become a NICU nurse and that she would help babies wherever they needed it most. Years later, conversations with missionaries convinced her she wanted to go to Africa and serve in medical and biblical missions there. As a NICU nurse, she was told, she would be practically like a full-blown pediatrician there, so great was the need. She is choosing her classes for her first year of high school based on that strong desire: Latin for medical school, all the science she can get. She has never forgotten either Miriam or the other babies there and the calling she felt at the time. 

I'm amazed at how busy her life is already. And yet, the time we have together is so good and so precious. She is, so far, of all the children, the one most interested in seeking parental opinion. She is reasonable, even when she's hurting, and recognizes the need for adult input to affirm or gently redirect her at times. So far we've been blessed to not have to police her in any way at all regarding boy-girl issues. She is natural and at ease around both boys and girls. She doesn't feel the need to try to look older than she is or to present herself as provocative. (Perhaps it helps that she already does, naturally, look a few years past 14, but she isn't pushing for 20 like some girls her age seem to experiment with--and I think I did.) Her confidence seems to lie in something else. I pray it is in something eternal.

On the day of the spring semi-formal, some of the girls were leaving directly from school to get manicures, pedicures, and professional hair styling. (Even if we could afford that, I doubt I would do it for a middle-school semi-formal banquet, but I admit I almost certainly would for a Jr.-Sr. prom and of course for her wedding, if I can get her to agree.) Emma stuck around to see if her track coach had any workout assignments for her. "All the other girls are going to get dolled up," he said, "but Emma. Emma's going to the ball as Emma."

It was so true. And I'd have it no other way.

Thank you, God, for 14 years with this shiny Sunbeam. Thank you for the way she is growing up in you. Her eyes are on the prize and you have filled her heart with the knowledge of the true riches that aren't found in beauty and charm and pretense, but in Christ alone. She preaches to me almost daily that truth. Oh, how I wish I had had so firm a foundation when I was her age. Grace upon grace.

Psalm 5:12 -- "For you bless the righteous, O Lord; you cover him with favor as with a shield."

Remember: The significance of a story someone failed to forget

My cousin Renee worked for many months or years transcribing the love letters written between our great-great grandparents, Henry Johnson Spicer and Eda Lucinda Ferguson. The book is entitled Miss Eda, My Dearest Friend: The Love Story of Henry Johnson Spicer and Eda Lucinda Ferguson of Wilkes County, NC.

The letters were written back before and during the time of the American Civil War. Some relative had stored the letters in a trunk, which survived a house fire in 1942. My Uncle Sammy, Renee's father, had acquired those letters and held them in his own safekeeping for many decades, hoping that some day they might be preserved in book form. And his daughter has done just that, 150 years after the correspondence took place.

It seems like an inconceivable amount of time, and I wonder how many lives will be touched by the memory of HJ and Eda's story in the future. To think another 150 years might go by with descendants calling them by name seems, yes, inconceivable. And yet, it most certainly isn't the first time that a simple love story has been told and preserved in great detail. I've been reflecting on that this evening: a 3100-year-old love story, recorded and remembered in great detail, and actively read and remembered and retold today.

I am talking about the love story of Ruth and Boaz.

It seems to me to be absolutely implausible that anyone who knew Ruth and Boaz personally might have thought theirs was such a remarkable story that it could possibly be remembered millennia into the future--or even more than a generation or at most two.

Who could have thought at the time that the story of Ruth and Boaz would be so valuable as to record it in the kind of detail it contains? How many of us can think back to stories of our great-grandparents, and tell not only their names, but their occupations, the places they lived, the type of climate they lived under, the legal transactions they participated in, even the specific name of a former sister-in-law who left the family after her husband's death? But that's the kind of details we have in this seemingly inconsequential couple of Ruth and Boaz.

They seem to be just a fairly average family with a nice story of how they met. Some trouble, such as poverty and loss of loved ones too early; but they are getting by. An old woman, a young woman, a man, a baby. It's a family story. That's all. A lovely, endearing family story.

It's only later, when that couple's great-grandson David turns out to be the unlikely King of Israel (who saw that coming? Shepherd boy, youngest of the family) that the story takes on any real significance historically. Ruth and Boaz couldn't have known they were in the royal lineage. Their story contains no supernatural revelation about creation or catastrophic world events. No ground opening up to swallow anyone, no rivers turning to blood, no seas parting. There is no great war, no battle skirmishes, no girding up of loins to face an enemy. There's no taunting by the prophets of false gods, no child sacrifices, no pillaging. There are no talking animal oracles, no dreadful prophecies, visions, or revelations. Yet even in this ho-hum drama, a terribly minor character, Orpah the sister-in-law of Ruth who returns to her homeland and never sets foot on Israelite soil, is carefully recorded so that she is known by name.

Just imagine if this were the story of friends of yours. Let's just say, for instance, that it's my friends Brad and Caroline. They met after one had experienced a pretty difficult early life. But she had persevered and seen God's guiding hand through it. How they came together makes a great tale worth hearing over cocktails at a party, and remembering fondly. Eventually, they knew the great joy of bringing new life into their union with the birth of a daughter. They rejoice. They go to work. They raise their child. They pay their bills. They meet with friends. They are pretty much like the rest of us.

Now fast-forward a few generations. Who remembers Brad and Caroline? Who knows their daughter's name and how many years after they were married that she was born? Where he worked? When she left her job and why? What the weather was like the year they married? Seems unlikely, doesn't it? But that's only a glimpse of it. Fast-forward 3100 years. That's right, three thousand one hundred years. We're talking Star Trek generations, comparatively speaking. Who is talking about Brad and Caroline then? Who is drawing wisdom from their story?

And yet, that's how it is with Ruth and Boaz. It's been three thousand one hundred years (give or take) since Ruth gleaned some grain and those two met and married and had a son. And yet we know the fine details of their courtship, marriage, business practices, and even who gathered their child onto her lap after he was born. We know their story and draw wisdom from it, and reason for celebration and encouragement and hope. Good, plain folks.

Just good, plain folks. But their story was of critical importance to establishing the validity of the lineage of David for the purpose of the Kingship. Boaz was of the tribe of Judah, and though Ruth was a foreigner, grafted in by God's choosing and her adherence to her mother-in-law's faith, David is legit. Did David, know, however, while he was out making music in the fields and telling lions to scram from the pastures where his sheep grazed, that he would one day need to know in such detail the courtship story of his great-grandparents?

It's a remarkable thing to me that such a simple, common love story would be so carefully preserved for that length of time, when it had absolutely no historical significance evident at the time of its occurrence.

Perhaps there's more to each of us than we can ever begin to comprehend. Perhaps how we came to be and where we are now and what we do with our short little lives really does matter. Perhaps our little thread in the tapestry has a greater role in holding together the big picture than we can see. It reminds me of a quote we hear fairly regularly at church:

You are more sinful than you dare face, BUT you are more loved than you dare imagine, AND more instrumental than you dare think.

You matter. Remember.