Faith: Blessed and honored to be friends with kind, gracious people

If all of our eggs are in this earthly “basket,” how sad.

I find myself thinking of the Apostle Paul’s words written, of course, specifically to Christians: “If for this life only we have hope, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:19)

No pity needed this morning. But I must admit that I’ve lost faith. I’ve lost faith in those who have enough blind faith to claim to believe in nothing and esteem their own blindness as some sort of tragic courage. Fashionable, yes. Popular, yes. Courageous, no.

What nonsense! Nobody believes in nothing. A truly irreligious person will never be born. Everyone bows before something or someone — even if their god is the most pathetic of all: Self. God himself is the One who gives us the ability, even in the face of increasingly staggering evidence, to doubt that he exists. How big of him! How small of us.

We spent several hours recently with dear friends at a hospice facility (about 90 miles from our home) as they held vigil around the bed of one of the sweetest ladies I’ve ever known. We got home late that evening and awoke to word that she’d passed away, went truly home.

Am I more emotionally tender than usual this morning? Oh, yes. I could easily fill a book with descriptions and anecdotes all about the myriad blessings God has given me and mine via that sweet lady and her amazing husband.

Beautiful, wise, intelligent, loving, kind, dignified but fun, unfailingly gracious. Oh, I could go on.

But then, years ago now, Alzheimer’s. The diagnosis was correct — and so soul-chillingly wrong. Never was there a more inappropriate target for that horrible disease. But when light seems to fade and darkness threatens to rule, stars make their presence more fully known.

Even if these sentient stars would much prefer a completely hidden luminescence, our High King presses the darkness in which evil often does its work into service for the beautiful and the good. And those who would most eschew accolades for heroism, too busy in the midst of the onslaught doing what is needed, to have any thought of self or patience with others who stand in awe of their actions, soldier on and rise like stars to shine in the darkness, oblivious to their own shining.

My friend keeping vigil would say that the breathtaking faithfulness he has shown his amazing wife is not breathtaking at all. He would impatiently and quickly deflect any such praise cast his way by saying that he has only done what he long ago promised. He would say, quite rightly, that she for decades has been unflinchingly faithful to him and blessed him and their family (and so many more) unimaginably. He would say that, had the situation been reversed, her love and devotion to him would have been as dependable and brilliant as the rising of the sun. Yes, oh, yes, it would.

And so, he would use one word for what he’s done. Nothing. Nothing that she wouldn’t have done a thousand times over. Nothing that she didn’t deserve a thousand times over.

Those of us, the many who love them both, will not quarrel with him or gainsay his protestations. We’ve long ago taken his measure. And hers. And been blessed and honored to be their friends.

Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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