When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice. – Cherokee.
I admit I am an almost annoyingly happy person, but today I feel like I have a lump of charcoal burning in my chest, because Tommy died this morning. We are all Christians; its not like we live as those who have no hope. Yet the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept” was in compassion for his friends whose loved one had died.
Tommy was unfailingly kind, soft-spoken, extremely intelligent. He spent his last years in South America at a mission station, teaching orphans and I’m sure, making them laugh. He was not yet sixty years old.
He was born with a heart defect, but that was only his physical heart, not his emotional one. He never got rich or famous or any of those things that we so often think leave a mark on the world. But Tommy left a mark on us.
My daughter still has a ceramic musical bird he gave her when she was small. She was so excited, she tripped and broke it. She was devastated, but he reassured her and together they patiently glued it back together. She loves it all the more for the cracks.
Little things, day by day…random acts of kindness. We are the ancestors of future generations and we make our mark on them, and on our own souls, hour by hour.
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