Ellen Fair: A Story.

This is a story about my great grandmother, Ellen Fair. It's a little long for a blog post, I know, but if you read it, I think you'll understand. Her story is part of mine.

*****

No alarm needed to break the stillness of the early morning. The gentle pink light of an Alabama sunrise easing in through the sheer bedroom curtains was enough. Beside me I could feel her sliding out from under the sheets. Even at the age of ten I was not much for early mornings, but a few more moments to shake off sleepiness remained. Eyes still closed, I lay in bed pretending to be asleep while I listened to her move around the room.

*****

Papa slept in the hospital bed positioned straight across from where I lay snuggled under blankets. As soon as Mama's feet touched the floor she reached for her robe and seconds later was at his side. This was the morning routine. If he was awake I could hear her softly speak to him, washing his face, adjusting his covers, making sure he was comfortable. If his chest still rose and fell in the even rhythm of restful sleep she would slip off to get ready for the day.

When I was very young Papa had a stroke that left him unable to care for himself, so I don't remember many things about him. But the memories I do have bear the vivid color of early childhood. His five foot five, wiry frame seemed even smaller in the faded overalls, a plaid shirt and cap that was the uniform of an Alabama farmer. I loved going places with him. He'd lift me into the passenger seat of his tiny red pickup and carry me into town for groceries (and I suspect to show me off to the other old men who were inevitably sitting around talking about the things old men in small towns talk about). He, Granddaddy, Dad and I would drive out to the fields to pick watermelons - People came all the way from Tuscaloosa to the tiny town of Ralph to buy Papa's watermelons because they were the BEST - and he'd show me how to know which were ripe and which still needed time.

What I remember most was feeling that Papa must have been very wise. He had a quietness, a humbleness about him that wise people seem to have, as though they don't need to say much or push themselves into the spotlight. Although he only had a fifth grade education, Papa was one of those people everyone respected. He took care of Mama and of his kids. She never learned to drive because anywhere she needed to go Papa would take her, anything he thought she needed he would give her. That was Papa. Quiet, but faithful.

If anybody ever modeled love, it was Mama and Papa. All those years he had taken care of her and loved her the way a good man should love his wife, and she had done the same for him. So when Papa had his stroke and was confined to the bed unable to speak there was never a question of what Mama would do. If he couldn't sleep in the bed with her, he'd be in the bed next to her. She went on taking care of him like she had since the day they married. Maybe now she had to read the Bible to him instead of with him. Maybe now she had to feed him, not just cook meals for him. But this was their life. Until death took him away Mama was by his side, faithful and generous in love.

*****

It was six am now, and the phrase that prompted my sleepy eyes to open came at last, "Anner. It's time to make breakfast." She'd called me Anner since the first day she wrapped me - the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter - in the handmade baby blanket she'd sewn before I was born. If anyone else had called me by that name my feisty self would have put them in their place, but from Mama it was just comforting, another sign of being at home.

Out of bed I rolled and shuffled in my PJs and slippers into the kitchen. This was time for just me and her. Out came the White Lilly flour, buttermilk and a glass. One by one the ingredients found there way into the bowl. "That looks about right," she'd say as we poured ingredients in without measuring. "Just stir for a little bit, then let me see how it feels." To this day I have a hard time measuring because, well, that's just not how we did it. Cooking is about feeling, you know? People always say cliche things like, "It just tastes better when it's made with love" and it sounds funny, but I think once you know what love tastes like you CAN taste the difference.

While I stirred and kneaded, the squishy dough puffing up in little pockets between my fingers, the smell of bacon and sausage would begin to waft up from stove top skillets. The crackling oil, the pwoof, pwoof of dough and flour, the clatter of dishes and the scuffing of feet across linoleum were the only sounds. We didn't talk much because neither one of us had much to say, we just enjoyed being together. While the meat sizzled, I rolled dough into a quarter inch sheet with a juice glass and then pressed the open side of the glass down creating puffs of flour and perfectly shaped biscuits. She'd measure out grits while I placed the biscuits, sides touching, into an iron skillet. Into the oven they went, out came the sausage patties. As her fork clanked against the ceramic sides of the bowl she scrambled eggs in I took my flour-covered self over to start setting the table.

One by one my parents, siblings, grandparents, aunt and cousins came trickling into the kitchen from their respective rooms. Soon the tiny farmhouse would be bursting at the seams with family. Aunts, uncles, second and third cousins and anybody else who felt like a good breakfast would come wandering in the front door.

There were always more people than should have physically fit in one house, around one table. EVERYONE felt at home in MaMa's house, and everyone was welcome. She had a special gift for making people feel at home, for graciously inviting people not just into the house, but into the family and into her life. If she was on the back porch snapping beans, it just felt right to sit up there with her and do the same.

Usually we went to Alabama to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some things about that holiday just lend themselves to big family gatherings and large Southern-style meals. I secretly love Thanksgiving just a little bit more than everyone else because my birthday also happens to fall within a couple days of the holiday. Being in Alabama meant celebrating not one, but two "holidays" with a house full of family. It meant football games and food and Christmas movies and hours spent wandering the farm on adventures with the cousins. It meant watching Uncle Bobby pop his fake teeth out and let the dog "clean" them before he popped them back in. It meant flipping Uncle Lawrence's golf-cart as many times as possible while off-roading in it, climbing giant magnolia trees and creating huge sand slides in the sand pit we found just before you come to the swamp. But really, more than anything, it meant being surrounded by people who loved you. I used to think everyone came to Mama's house because that's just what we all did that time of year. It wasn't until years later that I realized everyone came because of Mama.

**********

After Papa died Mama started to age more quickly. Her life had been about taking care of her family, and there were fewer people around who needed to be cared for. Eventually it was Mama's turn to have someone care for her. My grandmother is the oldest in her family, and much of the time Mama stayed with her. Her mind seemed to have reeled back twenty years to a time when Papa was well and she was raising my second cousin. Time after time we would find her in the kitchen trying to cook for Bobby Jr. She worried constantly about how different family members were doing and grew frustrated that she could do nothing for them.

At Thanksgiving the family would still all go to Alabama if Mama could make the trip, but nothing was ever the same. The little white farmhouse had new tenants so we all had to stay at different places and it was difficult to all be together as we had been.

The summer of my eighth grade year I went on my first mission trip. One week in to the two-week trip Mom called to tell me that Mama had died. I would not be able to attend the funeral and I was devastated.

I sat on my bed that day, thinking back over the time we had spent together. For years I'd received multiple cards a year from her. Cards that let me know she loved me and was thinking of me. Always the card said all the words and usually she would write "To Anna" at the top, sometimes "love Mama" at the bottom and often nothing more. I wondered if I still had any of them. In my hands I held my first Bible, the one she had given me. We'd had something special even though neither of us had ever voiced it to the other. It wasn't as though we had talked often or spent much time together other than Thanksgivings. But it had been spoken in the quiet of those early mornings when time was ours and words weren't needed. My heart broke as I mourned the loss I couldn't explain.

Years afterward I still felt that loss and it would rise to the surface unbidden once in a while. Not being able to attend her funeral left something in my life unresolved. For a couple years our family tried to do Thanksgiving together, but something intangible was missing and we all felt it. Things would never be the same and eventually as we all got older and people got families of their own we gave up trying to pretend that they would and developed new traditions instead. I began to understand the powerful role one person can play in uniting others.

One particular day when I was in college and Thanksgiving was on the horizon I began to feel again that sense of unresolved loss. A few weeks earlier my Grandmother had found Mama's Bible and told me she'd left it to me. It was such a precious gift to read through the years worth of notes she had written in the margins of those worn pages, and I began to realize the impression she had made in my childhood. But something was still nagging at my heart. I'd never gotten to say goodbye. As I sat pondering this, my mother came in with the mail. A letter had come for me from my great uncle back in Alabama. Inside was a note and an old, yellowing envelope. His note read, "Found this while going through some of Mother's things. It's addressed to you. Love, Uncle Lawrence." I opened the envelope to find a card titled "When I'm Gone." Below it in blue script was a poem and prayer about releasing the life of those we love back into God's hands and moving forward in our own. At the very top, above the title, in the cursive handwriting I had seen scrawled on so many cards throughout the years was written "To Anna." That was all. There was nothing more. But nothing more was needed. Somehow she knew. She had quietly and intentionally spoken into my life all those years. She had chosen to demonstrate a special love toward me, and she knew that eventually I would recognize it, anticipated that it would be hard for me when she left, so even in preparing for the end of her life she was thinking of me. Why me? I don't try to answer questions that have no answer.

For the first time since she died I began to see how she had lived, not as confined to a farmhouse and tied down by a family, but blessed with peace and the freedom to love others selflessly. I was only one person of so many that had been impacted by her quiet life.

*****

My personality could not be more different from Mama's, but I have always wanted to be like her. I can't imagine living my entire life in one place without even being able to drive myself somewhere. It's tempting to think she never really "experienced life" or that she was being held back in some way. But she lived in a way that many of us miss out on, and she still lives through each and every one of her family members who could tell you more and better stories of her love than I can.

The journey we have is so very different. Her world was small and mine seems overwhelmingly large. But if I can give even half as much of myself to others as she gave, if I can be half so selfless, patient, generous and full of grace and have even a fraction of the servant's heart that she had then maybe I will have accomplished something real. Ellen Fair taught me by example that life is about people. Warmth and openness emanated from who she was and it welcomed people into life, promised them safety, showed them the meaning of home. When I grow up, I want to be like her.


Anna Ellen Gervasi

Tales from the Med: Life Together is Messy

It's well past time for updates from West Asia.

Here's what I want you to think: I'm an awesome leader, I have everything figured out and this was the most positive and visibly productive experience of my life so far.

Here's reality: none of the above.

Now, it will take a little time to unravel exactly what I mean by this, but let me start with the concept of community, a core value to how we approached this trip.

The idea is that we can't live out a genuine encounter with the gospel of Jesus in isolation, that the Kingdom of God requires relationship and that this is especially important in bringing the message of Jesus overseas. People have begun to look at the shallow, lifeless, bourgeois, pseudo-business system that we often call church and ask some good questions. Maybe somewhere along the line American culture got it wrong by proclaiming "rugged individualism." Maybe we aren't meant to be so alone. Maybe we actually do need each other. This is profoundly true. We are beginning to see that as the Body of Christ in America are missing something vital, and to take some steps to make big changes. That's really, really good.

However, often when the rubber of community meets the road of life the tire explodes. As a leader you start out thinking you're simply supposed to drive the mini-bus to Destination A and instead you end up changing a lot of flat tires and seeming to get nowhere.

It's hard enough learning to live this value out in our own culture, but when you take a team of people from totally different ages, genders, lifestyles and backgrounds, put them on a team and jet them to another location it all becomes only 100 times more apparent how little we really know about "life together."

We don't understand each other. Honestly, we're so entrenched in our own points of view, so comfortable doing things on our own, so used to leaving behind anyone who can't keep up that we don't even realize how self-centered and myopic we are.

Before you hear me saying this about OTHER people, you should know I'm really referring to myself. I don't know how to listen, or how to truly be open to the input of others in my life. I don't know how to trust or how to consistently lay myself aside and serve others. I don't know how to place myself in the context of community, how to live and work with other people. It's scary, and it hurts.

But also don't hear me saying this is only about me; this applies to pretty much all of us. Living life with other fallen people is hard. Doing missions on a team of people committed to this is even more difficult. You don't get a free pass on conflict because you signed up for missions. Honestly, you really just signed up for conflict on a whole new level.

It's a pretty thought that we're all doing this for God not for us, so it will just "happen". The truth is, it's going to be a lot of work. A lot of really hard, really painful, really humbling work. People are messy. People who know Jesus are messy and people who don't know Jesus are messy. We require a lot of grace and we're not always sure how to extend that grace to each other.

I suppose that's all I really want to say for now. Don't expect life together to be sanitized and orderly. Don't expect mission trips to be neatly packaged experiences of adventure and victory. But don't expect God to be thwarted by our messiness. He's still God.

Over the Deep Blue SEA

Rubber orange arm floaties. They weren't the most chic accessory ever. The point may have been to keep toddlers from drowning, but perhaps I was a disproportionate three-year-old. To me they presented the unavoidable dilemma of restricting vital arm motions and encouraging me to face- plant into the chlorine rather than remain upright. I hated them and avoided them at all cost.

One slight problem. If I told you how old I was when I finally learned to swim, you'd laugh in my face. So I won't. But trust me, it was ridiculous. Going sans floatie was seriously living on the edge for a little kid. I had a secret weapon though. Dad.

The deep end, with it's enticingly azure water was so much more intriguing than the shallow end of the pool where I usually lingered near the steps and the stainless steel railing. Inch by inch I would step along until the little shelf where the floor began to drop farther away from the surface. It was over my head and my feet didn't like the feeling of losing the texture of cement below.

One day as I sat pool side, tiny feet dangling in the deep end, Dad said the iconic words "Jump in. I'll catch you."

"YES, please!" Was my first thought, but then something along the lines of "Heck, NO" quickly followed. I mean, what if he missed? I didn't know how long it would take before I drowned, but it had to be something like three seconds...that's quite a gamble.

Deliberation and fear eventually gave way to curiosity. I stepped back a few feet to get a good running start (which you should never do at a pool kids) and then I jumped. The wind rushed against my face and I was suspended in mid-air for what felt like ages. Then feet hit the water...and I didn't feel his hands. I was down, the water rushed over my head and the certainty that the end was near overwhelmed me like the force of the water. And then, I felt his hands. As quickly as I had gone under I was pulled back to the surface and into his arms. In the deep end of danger, I was safe.

And this, my friends, is how I feel about life. There is a deep end, and it beckons with the invitation to adventure. But far more importantly, the deep end offers the opportunity to experience the sufficiency of God to both call us to jump and to catch our full weight when decide to trust Him.

Today I leave for Southeast Asia. No, I'm not scared. What's to be scared of? This is another small opportunity to jump in the deep end and swim around. I'll be out and drying off again in two-ish weeks. This is just a swimming pool. One day, I'll be jumping in the ocean baby, and swimming out to be lost at sea.

And that's enough water-related metaphor for now. Ciao. Peace. Love.

a series of mini-lives

Transformation. How many times can it happen in one lifetime?

People often say things that are wistful and tinged with regret. It is easy to look back and miss what once was. It's easy because time has a way of fading the edges of pain. They say hindsight is 20/20 and in some ways I suppose we are able to look back and get more of a bird's eye view of past life events. Hopefully we dissect the past enough to learn from it once the raw emotion has faded. But I think as a human race we are more inclined to look backwards with sentimentality. The good 'ol days don't really exist, you know. Even Mayberry had its issues.

But I digress. What I meant to say is that I am daily astonished to remember that I live in Virginia. This life is so very different from the one I had anticipated for myself. In fact, when I look back, what I see so far is a series of mini-lives. It's as though I were the same character in a bewildering variety of settings. My life hasn't been that long really. I'm what, a third of the way through an average (American) life-span? But I haven't lived one life, I've lived many. One day we should get a big cup of coffee and talk about our mini-lives together. There are good stories there just waiting to be told.

Perpetual life-change inspires me to see that I am not stuck in one life pattern. I will always be becoming. Each season of life, each set of experiences and relationships, brings out and refines a new element of my character. Sometimes a mini-life is characterized by success. Sometimes it resonates with the theme of failure. But what others see as failure has begun to look like freedom to me. Every failure was birthed out of risk. Fears that are faced are fears that lose their power. Whether we succeed or fail, we grow more free with each attempt to reach outside our predefined lives.

We are all dynamic characters. You can't live any sort of life as a static, one-dimensional archetype. It's just not possible. We're fluid, we rotate in and out of roles, and most of the time we don't see it happening. Yet life has a strange continuity in its diversity. I am who I have always been, but I am also becoming who I was always meant to be, who God created me to be.

a penny is only worth .006 of a cent anyway.

Following Christ is not a prayer we pray so that we might reap a temporal life of earthly comfort. It is a recognition of a truth so transforming that we can find no more appropriate response than laying down our lives in gratitude.

When the cost of following Jesus seems too high a price to pay we ought to remember this: we were bought with the price of His life. He surrendered His perfection on our behalf. We were enslaved to death, imprisoned by fear. There was no underground railroad to which we could run, no way out of our bondage. There would be no emancipation for our souls, no reparations for our suffering. We would die. The fear of that death drove us to fill this life with all manner of sensual pleasure and attempts at building a legacy on this earth in order to render our memory, if not our soul, immortally enshrined in the minds of men. There was no other way towards significance or fulfillment, and we intensely desired to matter, to live.

Can the cost be too great when we realize the price of our freedom not just to choose, not just to become the best possible version of ourselves, but even more fundamentally, to LIVE and to live forever? The blood-debt we owe Him is one we can never repay, and so joyfully we enslave ourselves to Him because we are at last truly free to choose our own master and there is none so gracious and generous as He.

Rather than bemoaning the cost of discipleship, rather than begging Him to spare us the hardship or save us from the difficulty we ought to plead for the opportunity to go. Reveling in the great joy of our rescue we should find ourselves petitioning God to send workers out with his message of freedom and truth: liberty to those held captive by death! More than asking Him to send others, we should answer the call of Heaven "whom shall I send and who will go for us?" by shouting and leaping in a frenzy of desire to be chosen for the task, "ME! I WILL GO! PICK ME! CHOOSE ME! SEND ME!"

God should not have to coax, cajole or bribe us into proclaiming hope to our neighbors and to the nations. We ought to be like finely-tuned racehorses in the Triple Crown, foaming and anxious to run, stopped from all-out pursuit of His kingdom only by the closed gate in front of us and the reins of the Holy Spirit holding us back until the time He has chosen to fire the pistol and let us spring into action.

The cost of surrendering everything we own, our dreams for ourselves and even our physical life is mere pennies in comparison with the bottomless treasure of eternity.

Come. Taste. See.

To stand on the precipice of my own wretchedness and see what fate lay before me had not I been snatched from the edge affects a more profound realization of grace than I can withstand.

There are times when doubt overtakes me and leaves me wallowing in a mire of despair from which I cannot pull myself free. Here my view of my own sin is overwhelming. It hangs on me like a heavy black cloak, a death shroud, and frantically I search for its hem that I might free myself from its suffocating weight. I grieve for the wrongs that I have done, that I seem unable to avoid doing. Perfection beckons, and I would attain it, but my feet are like stones and my will so deeply rooted in my flesh that the cause seems hopeless.

Then you in your radiance and perfection pass by and I cannot bear to be so near your holiness. How much darker my sins seem in your presence! How much more desperately I long to have them removed from me, that I should desire them no more and pursue only righteousness! Like Isaiah I hear my own voice drawn from my chest, "I am a man of unclean lips!"

I would run and hide from you, as Adam and Eve in the garden, for I cannot bear your face upon my sin. But you bid me come and linger. "Come, be cleansed, have the bloodguilt washed from your hands and see through new eyes, think through a renewed mind, feel through a restored heart. Taste and see," you say to me, "For I make all things new. Enter into my courts where one day is infinitely more sweet than lifetimes elsewhere."

What is this grace that does not cast us aside when we falter and stray? Rather than abandon it pursues, knowing that we in our poverty could never attain the rescue of our own souls, nor perfect them when in the light of that glorious rescue we stand. From our lips pour forth praise and our feet will not be stilled from dancing in your throne room. You are our Redeemer! And we cannot help but proclaim your freedom to the nations for you, our God, have shown yourself to be the Hope of all mankind!

compelled.

Sometimes placing one foot in front of the other day in and day out is the most fearless way to live. We do not achieve lives of greatness by seeking out adventure, by catapulting ourselves headlong into risk, cost uncounted. There is nothing wrong with risk. It is, in fact, required of us if we would live for the cause of Christ. There is nothing bad about adventure. On the contrary, if we live as we were designed to we will find ourselves immersed in an adventure of epic proportions. But we do not live for these things. Nor do we live for greatness, accomplishment or personal fulfillment. We live for Christ and in Christ and through Christ and because of Christ.

For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all and therefore all died. And he died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again. (2 cor. 5:14-15)

I do not lie awake at night dreaming dreams for myself. I lie awake because my heart is heavy with the burden of mourning and the weight of joy. Because I see around me death yet I feel within me life and daily I desire more to find a way to bridge this disconnect.

So, one foot in front of the other. Slow and steady, pressing forward. One brick upon another to build a life of character and integrity. Piece by piece stripping away the trappings of success and expectation to learn the heart of servanthood, the humility of surrender. It is here in seeking God's face, in straining our ear to hear his voice, in inclining our lives toward Him that we find all our desires fulfilled in the most unlikely way.

For I have counted the cost and have determined that though the cost be greater than I can pay, it is worth more than I can give. I would rather "waste" the sum of my days on the name of Jesus than indulge them on the pleasures of this life.

I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation. We put no stumbling block in anyone's path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance, in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger, in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. (2 cor. 6:2b-10)