How God Showed Up During A Church Member’s Transition To The Great Beyond
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(OPINION) Vickie came to our rural church roughly 15 years ago. Nobody remembers exactly when.
She and my wife, Liz, had become acquainted through their participation in the National Writing Project, a program that trains teachers how to teach kids to write. Liz and Vickie were both English teachers, and they hit it off. Vickie was born in the Pacific Northwest and had taught all over the country before landing in Kentucky.
When Liz invited her to church, she seemed skeptical of all this God business. As far as Liz knows, she had no real background in religion, although she’d dabbled here and there.
As we learned, she’d also had a very difficult life. Her mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and mental health issues, was institutionalized when Vickie was young. Her dad was a workaholic and neglectful. By the time Vickie was 6, she told Liz, she was raising herself and her younger brother, trying to figure out how to open soup cans so they’d have something to eat.
As you might imagine, she’d developed a tough hide. She didn’t take guff. But she’d also gotten an education. She was an avid reader and a master teacher devoted to her students.
Soon, at Bethesda Church, she became a Christian — the sold-out kind, not in an overbearing way, but in a glorious, happy, relieved sort of way, as if she’d finally found a meaning she’d lacked. God became real to her, not as an abstract idea but as a constant partner.
She joined the Wednesday night Bible study and the adult Sunday school class. She was elected as a deacon and joined the music team.
She had this wonderful laugh. On Facebook videos of our services, you could always hear Vickie, just outside the camera’s eye, guffawing at whatever struck her funny bone.
This past summer, still in her 50s, Vickie fell ill with what turned out to be advanced ovarian cancer. Surgery didn’t help. Chemo didn’t help. The cancer just kept coming.
That’s when truly remarkable things started happening.
Vickie had many friends and sympathetic teaching colleagues, but she had no one to comfort her to the extent a terminally ill patient needs to be cared for. No husband. No children. No relatives close enough geographically or emotionally to look after her.
Our church has shrunk slowly from 200 faithful to 35 or 40.
As Vickie weakened, that tiny group just spontaneously became her family. Led by Liz, the women particularly looked after Vickie 24 hours a day — sat with her in extended shifts in the ICU, stayed with her overnight when she was at home. People carried in food, bought a comfortable recliner, cleaned her house, drove her to chemo treatments, argued with insurance providers. It was ceaseless, right up until the morning of January 11, when she passed, at home.
It was a work of the Holy Spirit. I’ve never witnessed anything quite like it.
Then there was Vickie herself. Under a death sentence, in pain, she preached the good news to everybody who crossed her path. When she was in the hospital, she listened to her medical attendants’ personal problems and consoled them. She handed out 1-inch plastic Jesus figurines to all who entered her room.
She became a big hit with her medical team. They’d come down to her room in groups on their meal breaks just to hang out with her. They’d bake sweets and bring them to her. Like the rest of us, they’d never met anybody quite like her — dying but concerned about them, laughing that crazy laugh, telling stories.
Vickie was relentlessly real, though. She wasn’t putting on a desperate, whistling-through-the-graveyard act. When she had a bad day, it was bad, whether she was in the hospital or at home. Sometimes she sobbed over her helplessness. Sometimes she raged.
But she’d always come back around to the profundity of the love God had shown her, how he’d transformed her life, how he was infusing her with joy even now.
At some point during her ordeal, she had what she described as a vision — it sounded like the sort of thing the great mystics see. She’d been shown the interconnectedness of all things, she said, the shimmering presence of God animating the whole universe, that all people are one, enmeshed in a kind of giant, fiber-optic web. She was ecstatic.
She wanted me to write a column about that.
After her death, Liz and I thumbed through her journals, trying to find an account of this revelation. It felt intrusive reading somebody else’s private musings, but Vickie had told Liz to search her journals after she was gone for a passage on sailing she wanted read at her celebration of life. And she’d asked me to tell others about her vision, but my aging brain couldn’t remember the details.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to locate a vision passage. Maybe Vickie never wrote it down.
But we did find something else, an entry from 2014, long before her illness. It was an exercise from a summer writing conference she’d attended. When asked to answer the question “What do I hope people say about me when I am gone?” she’d responded:
“She worked hard.
“She played hard.
“She loved hard.
“She persevered.
“She loved others.
“She loved herself.
“She took care of her own affairs.
“She quit being so whiny.
“She finally grew.
“She loved God.
“She knew she was flawed and strived to be more like God.
“She didn’t judge.
“She loved teaching.
“She inspired others.
“She overcame, oh, God, how she overcame.
“She made amends.
“Oh, God, how she loved, loved, loved the needy, the poor, the spiritually bankrupt, the angry, because others had loved her when she was just like them.”
Vickie, you got your wish. That’s exactly what people are saying about you. So long, good sister.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.