Finding Us Faithful

There is a large dumpster in the driveway of a house a block or so away from my house.  It's a house that I walk by or drive by multiple times each day.  There's a gold van in the driveway that announces who its owner voted for in a past presidential election.  It used to drive by my house several times a week, and when I was outside of my house, the driver would honk his welcome--and I would nearly jump out of my skin.  That won't be happening anymore, because the owner of the house, of the van, is gone.  He has arrived in his eternal Home, greeted by his Savior and his beloved bride who preceded him Home by 2 1/2 years.  The man has probably been a member at my church longer than I have been alive, and in many ways he embodied our church.

When I got the email last week that John had passed peacefully, tears immediately filled my eyes.  I thought of the joyous welcome he received and what a gift it was for him to look around him and see that he was Home.  I described John to a friend who is new at our church, and I said, "You'd know him if you saw him--or rather, if you heard him."  John was mostly deaf, and he compensated for it by talking loudly.  It didn't really matter how loudly you talked back, because he didn't really leave too much time for you to speak.  That's probably because he couldn't hear you anyway.  Still, John was an amazing and welcoming man.  He was one of the first people to welcome my husband and me to church, nearly seven years ago, and I continued to see him be that welcoming, Sunday after Sunday.  John was love.  John was a gift.  And John was faithful.  Heaven got just a bit louder at his arrival, and our church got just a bit quieter.

Since we started attending Fourth Reformed almost seven years ago, we have been to several funerals for longtime members of the church.  Jerry was the first, and when the memorial service is held on April 1, John will be the most recent.  As I was thinking about John, I was struck by Whose he was as much as who he was.  John had two loves: his Savior and his beloved Jane.  There were things he really enjoyed--hunting, getting away from the city in his rustic cabin, talking politics, his children and grandchildren--but he absolutely and completely loved God and Jane. 

Some day they will all be gone, all the saints who have built our churches and who have been the sources of our wisdom, our examples.  Some day they will all have reached their final rest, and we will be the saints who are left.  We'll be the ones who stand as an example of what it means to love God and to love others, to give up our lives for our spouses, to work with integrity, to welcome.  It will be up to us.  May those who come behind us find us even half as faithful as we find those who have gone before us.