My precious friend Mandy asked me to write a guest
blog. I said I would because I’d do
anything for my friend, including shave her legs if Jay’s man card doesn’t
include that option.
Shopping in Sedona
But now, I’m almost at a loss for what to say. How do you speak words when frequently there
just aren’t words? I love my precious
friend. I have almost from the first
time we met.
About 7 years ago, Jay began coming to Skyline church to
worship. He always came alone. I wondered why. I
didn’t know that his wife was sick and frequently just unable to come. Then one Sunday, Mandy came with Jay and he
was quick to introduce us. I adored her
immediately. (Jay later told me that the
first time he met me, he went home and told Mandy “I’ve met your
soul-mate.”) It took us a while to knit
together a friendship, but God has been good, and He has knit for us an amazing
friendship. Mandy, Ginger and I have a
beautiful friendship centered around our mutual love for God. He has
made a beautiful three-strand cord.
...a chord of three is not easily broken... (Ecclesiastes 4:12)
The Infamous Shopping/Antiquing Day
My precious friend Mandy has shown me how to love, really
love, deeply. She has taught me the
value of not holding back in affection.
When she loves someone, she loves them deeply and she communicates that
like no one I’ve ever known. She makes Jay,
every family member, every friend, every person she comes in contact with feel
like they are the most special individual to her, and we all are. God is love.
Mandy’s legacy is LOVE.
Walking through this time with her is so very hard, but I
wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. About a year ago, she gave to me and then Ginger
a book called Just Show Up: The Dance
of Walking Through Suffering Together by Kara Tippetts and Jill Buteyn. It’s a jewel of a book about how to be a
friend and just “be present” for someone who’s dying. Who gives you a book like that? Someone who loves her friends enough to show
them how to love her back. Mandy’s
legacy is LOVE.
Sometimes we cry,
sometimes we ask the hard questions that seem to have no answers, like “why
her?” We trust God when there are not
answers. But mostly, we find things to
laugh about. If we don’t laugh a lot, we’ll
cry too much. Mandy calls her big tumor “Grumpy”, so we
discuss whether Grumpy is behaving today or not. We talk about her visits to the “Scary
Snort,” (the X-ray machine). When she
was receiving Chemo treatments in Chicago, I’d offer to hold her hair while she
puked in the toilet. She never took me
up on that offer. (Think about that for
a minute, then I’ll move on). We laugh
about our dogs, getting in trouble in Sedona, or anything else we can come up
with. We laugh about whether we’re
living in Camp Denial or Camp Reality that day, and how we can jump from one
camp to the other on any given day. Oh,
we also laugh about the time we made Ginger go shopping with us; painful for
her, glorious for us. Laughter truly is
good medicine.
We got into so much trouble touching the car
I refuse to say goodbye to my precious friend, Mandy. Christians have a glorious hope, a hope of an
eternity with our loving God and Father.
He created us in His image and He loves us with a jealous love. He wants, craves for us to be with Him for
eternity. So I know that we will only be
saying “I’ll see you later.” I’ve told
her that I’m thinking of it as her moving a lot farther away than Arizona and I
just can’t go visit her for a while. But
I know that I’ll see Mandy again much sooner than I can imagine. We have talked and laughed and imagined about
what we will see and do in Heaven; seeing Jesus face to face and seeing friends
and family. We’ve talked about what we
might look like, where we will live (she will have a log cabin, mine will be
Timber frame-both in the Heavenly mountains).
I think she and Ginger and I will be beading at some point. They can crochet, I’m not doing it. I’m jes sayin. It’s fun to imagine. It will be so perfect for God’s people.
Beading
I don’t know a lot, but what I do know is that Heaven is a
wonderful place where “God’s presence with be with mankind, and He will live
with them. They will be His peoples, and
He Himself will be their God. He will
wipe away every tear from their eyes.
There will no longer be any death; and there will no longer be any mourning,
crying or pain.” Revelation 21:3-4.
With God in Heaven.
That’s the place I want to be, and its Jesus’ blood shed for my sins,
for Mandy’s sins, for the sins of the world that cleanses us and enables us to
receive the gift of eternal life. When
the time comes, that’s the place where I know that Mandy will be waiting for
Jay, me, and all of her loves.
I love you bunches my precious friend.
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