December 24, 2002.
If the world ended today


There's a nursing home not far from downtown that Tom visits all the time. He drops by on Sunday afternoons after church; he knows several residents by name.

I must admit that I've never been too enthusiastic about joining him on his Sunday visits. I have avoided the place because, naturally, nursing homes creep me out. The idea of spending my Sunday afternoons at a place with an abnormally high concentration of sick, neglected and suffering people is, well, rather dismal.

But Tom doesn't feel that way. He always goes. This past Sunday, I finally joined him.

The elderly female residents love Tom; they grasp his strong hands in their withered ones and ask him any question that comes to mind. On Sunday we met one woman who was blind. She couldn't see Tom, but as she talked to him and stroked his strong hands again and again, I was just imagining the picture she was forming in her mind of him. I was especially amused when I started to realize that the picture her mind was forming is probably not too far from the way Tom is in real life.

I went to the nursing home because they were having a "Christmas party" for some of the residents. For our purposes, that means that about a dozen residents were wheeled into a large, bare gathering room, the enormous TV was momentarily turned off, and some lukewarm ginger ale was served in tiny plastic cups as we stumbled awkwardly through a few Christmas carols.

A Christmas party like that sounds like would be just awful, but for some reason it wasn't. It wasn't awful at all.

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I was struck by how grateful the nursing home residents are. Sure, not every senior who gets checked into a nursing home is going to be a beam of sunshine. But the people we met were so warm, and sincere, eager to share, eager to reach out and hold our hands.

I suppose that if you live your whole life with grace and love and joy — if you have a light in your heart that is always shining — then living at a dismal old nursing home is not a big deal to you. In the long run, it doesn't really matter where you live.

It all made me wonder, what kind of old person am I going to be? What kind of an old person are you going to be?

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As the "Christmas party" wound down, I slipped over to the weary upright piano in the corner and started flipping through the Baptist hymnal on the bench. A couple of other friends from our church were there, too, and a few of them knew some of the old Baptist standards in the hymnal. We found a couple of familiar hymns in the book, and I picked through the notes on the piano as we all sang along. I don't know what the residents thought of our impromptu serenade, but I loved every minute of it.

I had forgotten some of those old songs. They are so pure and strong; when I hear those old chords, they fill my heart like the sound of trumpets, or bells. Actually, they take me right back to my childhood summers, most of which were spent at a summer camp that required me to attend chapel 3 or 4 times each day. (Yep. I looked forward to it all year long.)

On Sunday, we went through all four verses of "Softly and Tenderly." Do you know that one?

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.

Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home!

I wonder if any of the residents dimly recalled the lyrics to those old hymns from their earlier years. So many of the words seem to reference the end of life or the "closing of the hour." When you sing those words as a blonde-haired 10-year-old at summer camp, you understand them figuratively, but when you hear them as a wheelchair-bound 90-year-old living in a nursing home, you probably hear something much more meaningful.

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On the way home from the nursing home, Tom and I were listening to Everything But the Girl. One of the lines in the song stood out: "Maybe this is as good as it gets." When Tracey Thorn sings the line, her voice is full of doubt and loss — what if this is as good as it gets? But when I heard it on Sunday, I immediately thought, if this is as good as it gets, that's fine. It's plenty. It's more than enough.

2002 has been one of my best years on this planet, and I'm so grateful. For whatever reason, by whatever grace of God, I feel like I am slowly becoming more of the person I want to become. When I look back on the past twelve months, I can see small but encouraging signs of growth. It leaves me feeling like a very rich woman. I am probably never going to be ready to say goodbye, but if the world ended today, I think it would find me with a smile on my face.