My colleague and friend Ginny Kubitz Moyer wrote an incredible piece on the life of her friend Mary. It was strewn with all kinds of things she learned from her in her much too short life.
However, a piece not on her list but embedded in the story may perhaps be the most important lesson of all, thinkest I.
Over the last several months, as Mary’s illness progressed, I kept making the same offer to God. Look, God, if you bust out with a miracle here and cure Mary’s cancer, I promise I will write about it and tell the world about her miraculous healing and so many people will come to believe in you. Win-win siutation! I was, very clearly, in the Bargaining phase.
It did not happen that way, for reasons that I cannot presume to know. But over the last few days, I have realized that Mary’s very life, short though it was, was still a kind of miracle. And I realized that I can still write about her, and that her spirituality just might help people come to know God a little bit better, because if anyone ever radiated the love of God, Mary did.
And there it is…Indifference.
That word usually gets a bum rap. However, it’s actually a very positive word. It suggests “whatever” and not in that snotty teen-ager way, but rather a more open sense of “whatever comes my way, I can handle.”
And embedded in that “whatever” is often exactly where God wants us to be, because it is there that we find great meaning in life and we most often learn that we are stronger than we thought we were.
Ginny has much to share about her friend and while sister death beckoned her home to God earlier than she may have wanted, her life, despite death is well…heavenly.
Who is your Mary? Who is someone who was taken, perhaps unfairly from you and who you mourned bitterly and who you prayed fervently for prayers of healing that seemingly did not result in a miracle?
Write about them, talk about them, laugh and love because of them. Because it matters not that they are no longer here.
What matters is that God gave them to us to be exactly who they are and for us to love not because they had riches or wealth or because they were sick or healthy–or even for some selfish ulterior motive.
We love them because they are God’s.
And guess what? They still are.
Rest in peace, Mary and it’s been great meeting you through our amazing mutual friend.