Sweet By and By

It was sunny and perfect weather outside the walls of the church.

A little country church that sits on the same road she lived on for so many years.

Country churches are different.

Different in a sense that they lack a need for approval, but instead call you inside for a conversation wearing blue jeans that are dirty.

They carry a kindness and a nostalgia.

They carry the scent of years spent singing and dinners on the ground.

We pulled up to the church, me five weeks postpartum and running on fumes after a night of breastfeeding every hour.

I’d borrowed a dress from my sister, who spared me from having to run to Walmart “in town” to find something suitable for my new postpartum figure.

I stared outside my car just a moment and realized this was the place she loved and it was the place where we would bury her.

My grandmother, this beautiful souled woman.

The grandmother that was your classic country grandmother.

A heavier set woman with an open arms demeanor.

If I wanted a good nap as a kid, I would curl up in her lap and sleep for hours.

I’ll tell the world I had a southern grandmother and I had a country grandmother. Both women of power and grace, but southern in different ways.

Mama Rue (as we called her) was the country one.

The one whose house smelled like breakfast food on an iron skillet and a little bit like a chicken house.

She outlived my grandfather by 11 years.

I stared at the church and realized that she was always the reason I came back here. The reason I came back to this small town that most wouldn’t be able to find unless they got lost going somewhere else.

We pulled into the church parking lot and I spotted people from Montgomery standing there waiting for us to arrive.

They drove 3 hours for this.

My aunts and uncles came from out of town coming to support us and love our kids while we celebrated the life of my grandmother.

I looked around at the visitation and saw faces of people I haven’t seen since I wore a training bra and my teeth were covered in metal.

The people I didn’t know hugged me because they knew I was “Grover’s youngest”, making me the granddaughter of their best friend.

The funeral began and the old baptist hymns started. Songs I had only heard my grandmother sing but never took the time to learn.

My uncle started to explain the next song and our reason for singing it, “Years ago mama was asleep and in the middle of the night heard a voice from one of “the girls” (a description of me and my two older sisters) singing this song at the top of her lungs. Just laying in bed singing away.”

The song we all knew, the song she and my dad made as a night time song for us our whole childhood. “Sweet by and by”.

We started singing this song. The song that was never sung at my church back home. The one that was only sung when we were with her.

The song that gave me heaven and gave me her.

All I could do in the midst of that music was listen.

There’s a land that is fairer than day

and by faith we can see it afar

For the Father waits over the way

to prepare us a dwelling place there

In the sweet, by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

I listened as my brave father gave the eulogy at his own mother’s funeral.

I listened as he shared stories of her consistency, her kindness, her hospitality, her love for her husband and for her kids. I listened as he shared every mark of her life and watched as people in the audience nodded in agreement and memory that matched his words.

This was was her place, her mark, her life.

Love and hospitality.

An open door.

Isn’t it funny how funerals ask us to recall our own actions while we remember someone elses?

I realize she grew up in a different time.

A time before cell phones and central heating and air.

A time when gardening was a means of eating through the winter.

A time when the twilight sleep was the way to have a baby and men waited outside.

But love is timeless.

Hospitality is timeless.

Kindness is timeless.

The one who waits over the shore for us, He is past, present, and future. He is our timeless friend who never changes with the generations or morphs to tradition because he never created trends, He created consistency.

Consistency that calls us to a greater life off a screen.

A life that dares us to love people who don’t deserve a second of our time.

A door wide open to share whatever is sitting in your fridge.

Because He “waits over the way to prepare us a dwelling place there” we must fight to bring His kingdom to earth for as long as we are here.

I hate that in 2019 I have sat through more than one funeral, but I love that it has reminded me why we are here in the first place.

The Father waits over the way so we can show others His kindness along the way.