Best Buds Some Day

It’s been quite the week and it’s only Thursday. My computer’s been in the shop since Monday and my USB Drive is fried so I am having to recreate all my labels, wrappers, etc. I use daily for my home business. My orders are piling up.

I have some newly sick critters I am working with and that can be mentally and physically exhausting.

All these things are trivial in the light of the news that my mother-in-law died unexpectedly just before midnight Monday. That certainly brings clarity when you think every day things are tough. Death always does that.

Betty and I were not the best of buds, I married her only son (her baby boy as she put it) 40 years ago and she didn’t quite approve of me and made it very obvious. We lived long distance from each other most of my marriage and we were cordial but not close. There was no dislike of her on my part, we just weren’t destined to be best buds.

When Betty retired, she moved from Youngstown, OH to a little town in North Carolina and started a ministry to low-income folks — kind of a food bank/thrift store/helping the homeless all in one kind of ministry.

She worked at her ministry 6 days a week, getting up at 4:30 a.m. to go to the tobacco barn where the ministry was housed. She had very few reliable volunteers and did most of the sorting, heavy lifting and delivering of goods to those who needed it all by herself!

Until she was 93 years old! Ninety-Three! She was 95 when she passed.

I have to say. though we weren’t best buds I admire the heck out of her for committing to something and sticking with it for over 20 years — something that benefitted others. Something she didn’t get a dime for and often dipped into her own meager income for.

When she first talked about her vision for the ministry there were naysayers, and she got little encouragement except knowing it was what God had asked her to do and she did it.

What faith! What a way to retire! What a way to end your life! What an encouragement for me to stay focused on what God is telling me to do regardless of what anyone else says or thinks!

Betty, I wish we’d been closer here on earth, but this I know: we will be best buds in Heaven, so save me a seat next to yours.

Jackie Deems copyright 2021