I teach Sunday School each week to 4-year-olds. You learn a lot about the Lord from teaching 4-year-olds. For instance, any time you ask a 4-year-old a Bible question, his answer is inevitably and enthusiastically, “Jesus!” We pseudo-theologians, pompous in our mature faith, want to correct the innocent little one by telling him the correct answer, totally missing the fact that God really is always the correct answer.
Further muddying the waters for me is that I’ve always leaned toward the intellectual. I thrive on complexity; I dive head-first into the deep. But where the Lord is concerned, the simpler truths are infinitely deep. It’s the complexity that leads us into shallower waters.
This past Sunday was a perfect illustration. Our challenge was to help little ones understand the concept of the last being first and the first being last and the need to come to Jesus as a little child. (See Mark 9:33-37.) I was at a loss, but my friend Cyndi came up with a brilliantly simple plan.
We lined the kids up horizontally and had them race toward our outstretched hands at the other end of the field. Their assumption was that the first one to slap our hands would win. Instead, the little boy who toddled along haphazardly until he finally reached his destination despite himself was awarded a smiley-face sticker.
So then we were able to explain to the kids that sometimes the people who love Jesus the most and serve Him the best are the ones who draw the least attention to themselves. They don’t seem very important. We may overlook them. They are humble. They are simple. They are childlike in their faith. Jesus is the answer to their every question.
As I watched the children process this, it hit me. That was Miss Pat. As I had gotten up that morning, I had read a text that my friend Miss Pat had finally lost her two-year battle with cancer. In the frantic rush of the morning, I hadn’t had the opportunity to mourn. Fortunately, years ago, I had learned to schedule my cries. (Remember Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News”? Well, that’s me, except that I generally have one good cry a year. I’m weird like that.) But it hit me at that moment how gentle and humble and faithful a servant Miss Pat had been, and how few people would appreciate the impact of her life.
Miss Pat and I met nearly seven years ago when I transferred to our church and joined the choir. I would like to think she saw a kindred spirit in me, but that would be a vain assumption. She was everything I would want people to say of me – beautiful, giving, patient, kind, talented, dignified, refined, insightful, inspired and inspiring. We often sat together in rehearsals and performances, and how I loved to hear her beautiful voice in my ear.
For years after her retirement, she cared for her mother and her mother-in-law. I would ask her on a Sunday morning what her plans were for the rest of the day, and she would tell me about the huge spread she already had in the works for her family supper (that’s a dinner in the daytime for those of you not fortunate enough to be in the South), and about all the other special things she would do for the two mothers. “Miss Pat, I don’t know how you do all you do,” I would say. “It’s my joy,” she would say. And I could see in her face that she really meant it. That floored me. Where was the Sunday afternoon nap in this equation?
Miss Pat had to leave the choir when the cancer took hold. Her energy waned, her figure became more slight, and from the choir loft I would see bravely lean on the arm of her adoring husband as he led her into the sanctuary. Even in the heat of her battle, she still possessed beauty, dignity and grace. I would continue to pray that someday soon she would again be singing next to me. How I missed the sound of her beautiful voice in my ear.
Over the holidays, when her health began to deteriorate, I think she knew in her heart that this was to be her last Christmas. And as doctors prepared to put her on a ventilator during a bout of pneumonia toward the end, she said, “I wish they would let me go be with my Jesus.”
It wasn’t long before she did. Though I rejoice that she is now happy and whole and free – that her faith has been made sight – I mourn her loss in my life. I mourn that I may never know anyone else quite like her. If ever there had been someone deserving of acclaim, it was Miss Pat, who was extraordinary in every sense of the word. But she served quietly, joyfully and humbly. She never, I am convinced, thought of her own greatness. She instead focused on the greatness of her Jesus. And today, if I were to ask her the answer to my every question from her perfect vantage point, I know what she would say: “Jesus.”
Whatever your question, He is the answer. Thank you, Miss Pat, for showing me the faith of a child.
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