Blog 2477 – 08.06.2022

One More Day

It is a common theme. Some years before my daughter Emily passed twenty years ago, she sent me a Father’s Day mixed CD with songs that she thought I would like. She knew me well, and one of those songs says, “I heard some news on the phone from a friend yesterday. The doctors gave him two weeks to live. I’d give him more if I could.”

This past week I had to say good-bye to a friend that I had known and loved since I was fourteen. Becky and I lost track of each other for many years, but reconnected through a mutual friend about fifteen years ago. I only saw her briefly a few times over the last fifteen years, but we talked, texted and emailed often. I teased her that her life reminded me of The Perils of Pauline stories. She was in and out of hospitals a lot and though she loved and had great faith in her doctors she seemed to me like the woman in one of Jesus’ stories who had suffered many things at the hands of her doctors for years and had only gotten worse.

Becky devotedly believed in a loving God and Jesus was her Savior but, most of the days that she and her Lord co-created seemed to me to require the patience of Job. From my daily mantra, I share a couple of lines: “This is the day that the LORD and I have made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” Becky dearly loved her three daughters and her grandchildren and also a multitude of other people. As a Christian she believed that not liking how someone acted or thought did not keep her from loving them. She believed she was supposed to love everybody and made it her mission to befriend everyone she that she came in contact with each day and did her best to find as many ways as possible to show love to them. She will be missed.

Today’s song is titled “One More Day” and expresses, I think, the best way to spend each and every day that we have left to us, just as Becky did – finding as many ways as we can to be loving to all the people around us. If we do that well enough we will find not just ourselves, but others wishing us one more day. Why, even the undertaker might shed a real tear or two at our passing.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zk8ZWN6XJEjjKR0K0UWuiR8h7pnKLMuq/view?usp=drivesdk

One More Day