We Will Remember You

Years ago, Cyndy and I were serving Hilltop United Methodist Church in Sioux Falls. The church didn’t have a parsonage, and in five years we lived in four different places.

At one of those houses, we’d barely gotten settled when one day I was driving us home and turned the wrong way.

I got confused.

Cyndy looked at me like, What in the world are you doing?

Eventually I figured it out and got us home, but I could tell something about it bothered her. Somewhere in the back of her mind was that frightening little question:

Is something happening to his memory?

So the next Sunday morning, I decided to be a terrible husband.

There was an Episcopal church near Hilltop. On our way to worship, I calmly pulled into its parking lot, parked the car, got out, and started walking toward the door as though this were perfectly normal.

Cyndy was having an absolute cow.

What are you doing?!

I turned around and smiled.

She realized she’d been had.

We laughed about that story for years.

I’m not sure I find it quite as funny anymore.

Not because we shouldn’t laugh. Sometimes laughter is one of the ways we live with our fears.

But I’ve lived long enough now to watch people I love lose pieces of their memory. I’ve watched disease change what people can do, where they can live, and even who they can be with.

Disease doesn’t only attack a body.

Sometimes it attacks our belonging.

I think that’s part of what is happening in the Gospel story of the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.

Her illness had pushed her to the edges of her community. She reaches through a crowd just to touch Jesus’ clothes.

Jesus heals her.

But then he does something more.

He calls her Daughter.

A relationship word.

A belonging word.

It is almost as though Jesus refuses to allow her disease to have the last word about where she belongs.

I’ve been thinking about that because our friends Jim Crouch and Linda Sattem recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

They have quite a story.

They graduated in the same high school class without really knowing one another. They reconnected at the University of Cincinnati, where, as Linda tells it, Jim began showing up at her workplace for free lunches. Eventually they started sharing rides home.

They married on Linda’s parents’ farm in 1976.

Then came a house, careers, gardens, softball and golf. Their daughter Nicole. Girls softball and Girl Scouts — including seven years of Jim being, as Linda puts it, a Girl Scout.

Eventually there were grandchildren and a move to Washington to be closer to family.

A life.

Fifty years of it.

Linda describes their marriage simply:

“Our marriage has been filled with love and fun!”

But these last years have been terribly hard.

A devastating infection damaged Jim’s back, heart and brain. The brain damage eventually took away his ability to drive, cook, golf and function independently. Linda cared for him for eight years, until his needs became too great and he moved into a secure care facility.

Then, two days before Christmas, Linda learned during a routine colonoscopy that she had stage 3 rectal cancer.

Radiation and chemotherapy followed. So did serious complications. Eventually Linda became so sick that treatment had to stop, and she entered a care facility herself to recover.

And so this couple who have spent fifty years together reached their golden anniversary living in separate care facilities.

That line just breaks my heart.

Disease can do that.

It can shrink a world.

It can separate us from our homes, our routines, our church, our friends, and sometimes even the person with whom we’ve shared our life.

And maybe retirement has changed the way I see some of this.

For ten years, I was one of the pastors at Bear Creek United Methodist Church.

I loved being their pastor.

But I’m not their pastor anymore.

There is something strange about retirement after all those years of ministry. You spend a lifetime wondering what the church should do, helping organize what the church should do, preaching about what the church should do.

And then one day you aren’t in charge of any of it.

You get to stand back and watch.

And sometimes you see something that makes you think:

Yes. That’s it.

Bear Creek recently did something beautifully simple.

They asked people to send Jim and Linda anniversary cards.

That’s it.

No program.

No grand solution.

No cure for what has happened to either of them.

Just a congregation remembering two people who have been part of its life.

Jim used to sing in the choir.

Linda’s hands created many of the beautiful quilted things that have been part of the church.

Illness has made it impossible for them to participate in the ways they once did.

But absence is not the same thing as no longer belonging.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of standing outside the pastoral role now.

I get to notice church happening without having to make it happen.

And this is church.

A colorful card in an envelope.

Because every one of those cards says:

Jim, you still belong.

Linda, you still belong.

Your fifty years matter.

Your story matters.

You are still part of us.

That’s what I love about Jesus calling that woman Daughter.

Disease had given her all kinds of other names.

Jesus gave her a belonging name.

And maybe that’s one of the things a church can still do remarkably well.

When disease makes someone’s world smaller, community pushes in the other direction.

A visit.

A phone call.

A prayer.

A colorful anniversary card.

A name remembered.

A story told.

Small ways of refusing to let disease have the final word about who belongs.

And there’s something especially moving to me about doing this for Jim.

His brain has been injured. Remembering has become difficult.

So perhaps every one of those cards carries another quiet message:

Jim, when remembering becomes difficult for you, we will remember for you.

We will remember your voice in the choir.

We will remember Linda’s beautiful quilts.

We will remember the two of you sitting among us.

We will remember your fifty years together.

We will remember that you are ours and we are yours.

Maybe that’s part of what church is for.

To keep calling across whatever distance disease creates.

And maybe one of the unexpected gifts of retirement is getting to stand back, watch it happen, and simply say:

Yes. That’s it.

We remember you.

We love you.

You still belong.