When I lived in Florida, I managed to pick up a collectable cake plate from a garage sale for $3. The seller didn't know or didn't care that the flowery pastel green plate could easily fetch seven to eight times that amount anywhere else. I bought it nonchalantly then ran to the car like a bandit fleeing the jewelry heist. It was my one and only piece of Depression Glass, but I knew what I'd found because my friend Sheila had schooled me on depression glass from her extensive collection. She had a love of all things old - collectible glassware, antique jewelry, vintage clothing of decades ago, dusty Victorian houses with salvaged windows and fences. She taught me valuable things should be kept, and that they'd only grow more valuable over time.
Sheila and her family came into my life nearly 40 years ago. She became my Sunday School teacher, and I became her headache. Good heavens, my little circle of friends in that class could only be described as... um... let's say challenging. We were in Junior High. Enough said. I don't know what kind of short straw she drew to end up teaching junior high girls, but no one could have been more unlucky, or less prepared for a bunch of bratty girls like us - except... she was tough. She prayed for us, taught us, had meetings about what to do with these unruly girls in her care, laughed with us, cried with us, and loved us. What started as "another in a long line of Sunday School teachers" ended up becoming a life-long friend.
Eventually Sheila and I attended different churches, but we always kept in touch. She wrote me letters while I was away at college. When I moved home, she'd have me house-sit for her watching her 45 Shitzhu dogs. (Ok, there weren't 45... maybe 4 or 5... could also possibly have only been 2, but it seemed like more.) I'd sit with her through baseball games (of which there were a LOT). And always, we laughed. We laughed a lot and we laughed hard.
By my early twenties, I was in a dead-end job and there was an opening at the company where she worked. I got the job and we worked together until I was promoted and then she worked for me and with me. It seemed weird to me, but never to her. We were just lucky enough to spend every day together and get paid for it. And through it all we laughed a lot. We laughed hard. But she also knew I was struggling. Most of my friends were still in college out of state and I needed a more-vibrant church with people my age, so she invited me to go to her church. They had a cool new pastor and there were several others my age involved and following the Lord. She offered to have a girl named Brooke meet me at the door one Sunday so I could try the church and meet some people my age. I did it. I accepted her invitation and met Brooke that Sunday. That invitation changed the trajectory of my life.
If I'd never accepted that invitation, I'd have never attended that church. If I'd never attended that church, I'd have never eventually worked for that church, and if I'd never worked for that church, I never would have worked at 2 more churches over the next 20 years doing work I loved. Ministry took me from Kansas to Florida, but still would see Sheila when I'd come home to visit and every time we'd see each other, we laughed. A lot.
In my early thirties, I found myself in the front office of Beni Coffee Company in Ocala, Florida at a Monday morning staff meeting sharing with my Christian co-workers that my dear friend had cancer - breast cancer that had metastasized to her liver and elsewhere. Sheila had been given 6 months to live. We prayed that desperate, tearful, ugly-cry kind of prayer - the one where you are driven to your knees because you have nowhere else to go. Turns out we didn't need anywhere else to go. God heard and answered our prayer. Twenty years later, I'd say that six-month death sentence didn't age well - not nearly as well as Sheila did. (I told you she was tough.)
Sheila went on Home last week and her family laid her to rest this morning. This afternoon, her friends and family celebrated her new life in the kind of service that mirrors the Heaven she is currently enjoying - where Jesus is the center, where worship happens 24/7, where night and day they never stop saying, "Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come." And we witnessed the glorious moment when people she loved moved from death to life, from lost to found by turning to the God she loved and lived for.
I could tell you a thousand stories about Sheila - about nearly wrecking her car when a junior high girl who shall remain nameless stomped on the gas while she was driving, about going with me to get my ears pierced, about laughing so hard her teeth nearly fell out, about mindlessly putting away all her office supplies when she'd leave the room as if she wasn't using them, about accidently eating a hole through a bread bowl of soup on a desktop of insurance paperwork, about churches we've loved and churches we've left, about her resilience when her son passed away, about her generosity in my coat-drives, about my first Tom Brady jersey she wanted me to have (and you can keep your comments to yourself about that). I could tell you about Depression Glass, and old, treasure that get more valuable over time - treasures like friendships and love for Jesus, the things she taught me about just by how she lived.
Of all the things I could tell you about Sheila, nothing is more treasured to me than this - she was my friend, a very real and constant friend. And if you can say the same, you are blessed.
Enter your rest my faithful friend. I'll be there soon, and we'll laugh... a lot... we'll laugh hard, again.