Three Women

What a loss it would have been to me if these three women had all been cut from the same pattern.

Three women

I can see her house about as well as I can picture the house where I grew up.

Up the back steps and through the screen porch to the back door (and I always came in the back door.) Walk in through the kitchen with stove and fridge and sink to the right and the kitchen table on the left. Walk down a short hall and the living room is on the right. In my mind there’s a TV against the far wall. You can often find me stretched out on the floor watching afternoon shows like The Monkees.

Her backyard backed up to our backyard, and her sons were a year older and a year younger than me. In the third grade we walked home from school together. For years we played together, in the woods that linked our yards and on the ballfields of the school next door. We divided up the pro football teams between us. Because Curt was oldest he naturally got to choose the then-champion Green Bay Packers. It’s why I feel a certain fondness for the Buffalo Bills even to this day.

I was Baptist and they were Episcopalian, which worked out well in the summer as we made the Vacation Bible School circuits together.

This came back to me a few days ago when I stumbled across Phyllis Newsome’s obituary. She’d lived to be 100, yet somehow her more recent picture was just as I remembered her. She was my neighborhood mom, always welcoming and occasionally feeding me.

I received news of the death of another friend yesterday.  She was a member of the church I served just out of seminary. I don’t remember when she and her sister joined us for they so became part of the fabric of our church that it was as if they’d always been there. Penny always and without failing greeted me with a smile on her face and in her eyes, always and without failing greeting me with the words, “Hello, my friend.”

Penny was never one of those church members who had the prominent leadership positions or who helped lead in worship. She was one of those church members who made everything else possible. She was a weekly fixture in the office  folding bulletins and doing whatever other volunteer work needed to be done. When Jesus met Nathanael he said, “Here is one in whom there is no guile,” and I suspect he may have welcomed Penny Chambers yesterday with the same words.

Another friend died yesterday. We knew she was sick, having just started her second round of chemo in a fight against leukemia. Still, her death was sudden and unexpected. She had the title of Director of Children’s Ministries or something like that. In truth, she was our children’s minister. She was a Pied Piper, drawing people to her wild and joyful spirit. Chrissy Hardy was the rarest kind of person who could be organized down to the last detail of the last piece of glitter while making you think it was nothing but a big party. She loved Jesus and she loved her family and she loved the church’s children and she loved all of us, in ways fierce and big and kind.

Yesterday a steady steam of church members found our way to the church chapel, needing hugs like we needed air, gutted and totally helpless to imagine our church family without her.

Three women whose places in my life could not have been more different. Three women who could not have been more different from each other. Three women whose lives blessed my life, and whose memory will now be a blessing.

Sometimes when we look around at the people we admire we wonder why we can’t be more like them. We feel inadequate and awkward. Why can’t we do the things they do? Why can’t we have the personality they have?

What a loss it would have been to me if these three women had all been cut from the same pattern.

The world doesn’t need more of the people whom you admire. The world needs more you. The world needs all of us to be the authentic selves we were created to be, whether bubbly or quiet, whether the folks out in front or the ones tending to the details in the back.

The world doesn’t need for you to be like anyone else. There is no grading system based on someone else’s standard.

The world needs you.