The Days Are the Life
Do you have a minute for me to share some things that have been on my mind? This week on a podcast I heard one of my favorite writers give that advice about finding your writing voice. “Just write as if you are sharing thoughts with a friend,” she said. This episode is a bit meandering, but at the core it captures one of my favorite sayings of my former pastor “The days are long, but the years are short.”
Transcript: Sunday night, I walked out of our church sanctuary and fell in line behind two women who I had never seen before. We had just sat through the funeral of our pastor, which felt more like a worship service to the Lord than anything else, which I think is the highest compliment to his life, as a man who lived to honor the Lord.
One of these women said to the other one, almost to herself, “Wow, those were some good days.” Her friend kind of did an elbow nudge. “You know what they say. You don’t know the good old days until they’re already past.”
I kept walking in behind them, but inside it just really made me want to stop and take note and write that down. Not because I haven’t heard that phrase many, many times before, but because it named something that I had been struggling to name; it put a title on something that I didn’t realize I was grieving.
I have been trying to write this essay for a week. I’ve tried to record the podcast version twice. I’ve gotten emotional both times. So we’re going to be emotional together, because I think that’s actually the point.
The funeral was for my pastor of 20 years, Brother Steve. His death wasn’t a shock to us. He had been in hospice, and we had been praying. We knew this may be coming, but all of it hit me in a way that I haven’t been hit with grief in a long time. I’ve had some losses recently of family members who had also had long illnesses. I just couldn’t figure out why this particular death felt different to me. I found myself searching for a reason.
Sunday morning I sat in my chair with my coffee and my Bible, and my heart hurt with grief. I have felt that way with some deaths in the past, with people who meant a lot to me. I kept thinking to myself how in the world has this happened? This is surreal. I don’t have enough strength to get up and go to church today. It felt like I couldn’t even put one foot in front of the other. Then I thought about how ironic is this that the person I’m grieving would want me to be in church, so I need to get up and go.
I turned to prayer, God, please just replace this feeling of hurting grief with a feeling of peace. He did. God gave me that peace that passes all understanding, so I got up and I went to church.
The whole drive there (we have about a 45-minute drive to church) I kept searching in my mind for why this felt so different than anything I’d ever experienced before. This is my pastor. He’s not in my family. He’s in my church family, obviously, but his death wasn’t sudden. It was something that, like I said, we knew might happen. But it just felt like something had shifted in our lives, an end of an era type of feeling.
I think those two women in the hallway really, really nailed it when they said what they said, because all those ordinary Sundays were the good old days. All those 20 years of going week after week to Bellevue, we hadn’t known that we were in those good old days while we were living them. Sometimes it’s only with looking back (to inform the present) that you can truly appreciate the meaning of a life.
What I thought about this week was how wonderful it is, and how unusual and extraordinary it is to hear the same voice from a pulpit open the same Bible for 20 years. When Brother Steve first started, I was 24 and newly married and trying to figure out that role, how to be a biblically strong and godly wife. I would hang on to his words about marriage as I tried to figure that out.
Then when I was a young mom in my early 30s, I was overwhelmed and tired and hanging on to every word, wanting to be a godly mother. I remember a sermon that he preached that referenced Susanna Wesley and how she mothered John and Charles Wesley. I remember buying every book he talked about in that sermon because I just had this desire to do everything the right way to honor the Lord in my motherhood. Brother Steve inspired that in me, to be a mom in consistent prayer.
Through national crises, Brother Steve preached us through. Through COVID, when time felt so disorienting, not being able to go to church; he was there to navigate us through. Through personal trials, too. Last year, I was unable to go to my church from January to Summer. It was like a second COVID for us because we were going through such a trial, and I was not even living in the same state as my church for a while. Yet his preaching reached through the miles. I would tune in, and when people would come in and out of the room, I would not turn his preaching down. I would not pause it. I’d keep playing it. I was able to listen when we were in Colorado. Once we got home, I did church from home for a while and his preaching faithfully reached me every week.
Sometimes Brother Steve was reaching out to my husband to encourage him through these trials. But then other times, the Holy Spirit just took something from the pulpit and it landed exactly where we needed it that week. Brother Steve wasn’t showing up at church thinking, hey, I need to preach to Zach and Emily. He was just saying, I’m going to faithfully do what God has called me to do. That’s what preachers do. Yet the Holy Spirit uses that to multiply that word across the congregation of people. We were just two of the people who were beneficiaries of his faithfulness to show up week after week. Our lives were made richer from the value that he added, from him leaning into his calling and being faithful to that.
I often treated these Sundays, I think, like they were ordinary, like they were just something we do. We go to church. And of course I love my church, anybody who knows me knows that, and I love listening to the preacher. I’ll often re-listen to the messages, take extra notes during the week, read over my sermon notes, all those things. Yet I think sometimes you just go through the motions and you don’t realize that all those Sundays are adding up to a larger body of days that are our life.
This is something I wrote down this week because I needed to put it somewhere before time swallowed it up:
When someone shows up week after week for over 20 years, faithfully, with the same unchanging word, you don’t think to be grateful in the middle of it. You come back and you let the Holy Spirit fill you up again the next week. You let the Word fill your heart again. You keep going. Yet all those Sunday mornings added up to a larger piece of what I’ll look back on as some really wonderful days of my life and the life of my family. My life was a container for those days.
I think so often in our culture, we’re expected to hear the death announcement, go to the funeral, fold the program up from the funeral, put it in your Bible, and move back on to the schedule we have on Monday morning. This was just one of those times I felt like I needed to cross some things off my calendar this week and really stop and think about the impact that this man had on the life of our family.
I think the grief that I’m feeling through this is not just the loss of an important person in our lives, but also the loss of an era of time that no longer exists. Brother Steve was our preacher during a time in American history and world history when things were so rapidly changing and evolving, yet his voice stayed consistent through that. So that was like a constant in our lives in a time when the world was upended in a lot of ways. Anybody who lives in this century knows this. Anybody who’s parenting in this century knows this. I think a lot of times we just hang on for dear life because things are so ever-changing, but yet our pastor was that steady voice in those times.
Then there’s a grief to all the stages of my kids’ lives throughout our church life, and to being in middle age in church, where you’re just kind of in this threshold of loving new people and saying goodbye to mentors. That’s why I write The Screen Door. I’m in the threshold of a lot of places in my life, and I think many people can relate to that.
I have a coffee table book that sits right inside the front door of our house. I have this large painting that I got from Hobby Lobby, actually, but it’s a stained glass window, and it reflects on the people in the pews. It strikes this memory of my first memory of being in church when I was probably three years old. I went to a Methodist church at the time. The stained glass windows are very colorful, and the light shines through. This painting reminds me of that. It makes me very happy when I walk in my house and I see it, or when I walk down the hall and see it in my living room in the mornings. Underneath it, I have a coffee table book written around 1999 or 2000 about Bellevue, By His Grace and for His Glory, that has a lot of the church history in it up until that time.
I thought back to these pastors who are the most long-tenured pastors at our church: R.G. Lee, Adrian Rogers, Steve Gaines, and now Ben Mandrell. On Monday morning, the Lord drew me to look at this book and think about the different personalities of each pastor and how, looking back in hindsight over all those days they preached, you can see how they were chosen and appointed and anointed for that specific time, for those specific congregations, for that point in history.
I’ll say upfront, these are going to be very short little descriptions. You cannot fit the ministry of a man in a few sentences. You can not boil the life of a man into a paragraph. So just bear with me as I’m looking at the huge arc of history and sharing what I see personally, from where I stand.
R.G. Lee came on the scene near the Great Depression. It’s really amazing that it’s been almost 100 years since he started preaching at Bellevue, yet we have audio recordings of him. His sermon Payday Someday had been preached over 1,200 times, and people would travel from all over to hear him preach it live. He had this real poetic, oratory type of preaching. He was in a world that was early in his ministry preaching to a culture who gathered information through radio and books. People could sit and listen to a long, poetic, wordy sermon and take it all in because they were used to an orator communicating the big ideas of the times. He was appointed by God for that time and that purpose.
Adrian Rogers stepped into the pulpit in the 1970s. I read an article this week written after he passed away where his friend said that Adrian had commented"I don’t know if they will respond to my kind of preaching.” Yet God knew Adrian Rogers was the man for the moment. His preaching was different than R.G. Lee’s, but it was preaching for that time and that generation. You needed someone with a lion-hearted spirit and a booming voice to stand strong against the tide of a culture that was changing. With Roe v. Wade getting passed and with the Southern Baptist Convention in upheaval, you needed someone to be a stalwart person for the gospel to hold the line. Dr. Rogers was that person. He also had these great, alliterated 45-minute sermons that packed a punch. He was a master at concisely communicating huge ideas in a way that was relatable to a wide variety of ages. He had a wonderful television ministry, and that’s actually how I ended up at Bellevue. We watched him on television as I was growing up. That’s how influential he was. People were literally watching him on TV and then also going to their own church.
Steve Gaines came onto the scene in 2005. What I see in him is that he was this strong man who brought courage to a congregation that was about to enter an era in history where they were going to need it. People needed courage to continue to be faithful, to share the gospel, to serve, to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to love God, love people, share Jesus, and make disciples in a culture that was becoming hostile toward the gospel. He came on the scene before smartphones, but had to preach and lead a church through a time when technology was evolving and changing at a speed we had never experienced before. More chatter, more noise, more confusion, more world problems, shrinking attention spans, a pandemic, and the return to a new way of life afterwards. Yet he was just a very consistent voice throughout all these tumultuous times.
I think about his football background, being a defensive player, and I picture someone who just takes the hits and protects the congregation. He was a shepherd watching over the flock, protecting the flock, but also giving the flock courage. Out of everything I got from him, it’s courage to do what the Lord has called me to do. He brought encouragement, but it wasn’t surface-level encouragement. It was encouragement undergirded with the Word of God. He encouraged us to memorize the Word and to pray the Word like it matters, and to believe it, and to know that we don’t just have to go to church, we get to come to church. We leave the service as missionaries, not as someone who heard a word and let it go in one ear and out the other. We leave ready to go and use what was given to us.
Now Ben Mandrell is our pastor, preaching at our church since the fall. I look forward to his sermons every week. As someone who has just come out the other side of a really hard and unusual trial, a trial where I’m literally seeing God restore what the locusts have eaten; I know there have to be other people sitting in church going through their own trials. People who have been in church their whole lives, but who the modern problems of this modern age pack a different kind of punch. I know from experience that Jesus is the only one who can fully relate to a lot of what I’ve been through, but Ben has this heart of the Wonderful Counselor, like Jesus is described in Isaiah. He has a voice that reaches the people in the pews who have been there their whole life and are hurting, and maybe the Holy Spirit needs to reach them in a new way. Maybe there’s somebody who has never been to church but has a hurting heart from just living in this broken world, and maybe that’s how we’re going to reach them too. Ben is also great with engaging shorter attention spans, a little like Dr. Rogers but in his own way, fitting a big message into a shorter sermon that’s still so deep you’re writing things down in your notebook on Tuesday and pondering something he said on Sunday. That is a gift and it’s something we need in our time.
I think all of this speaks to the fact that none of these men knew, while they were living in their times, that they were the man for the moment. They were just showing up and doing what God called them to do. You can’t see the days of your life while you’re inside of them. You can’t know the meaning of a moment when you’re in the middle of it. You can’t know the gravity of a life and the beauty of a series of days and years until you can only see some of these beautiful things by looking back on the arc of a life. Decades of Sundays put into something larger, a larger container than anyone could have planned. And that’s the beauty of faithfulness. Of showing up and doing what God calls you to do every day, even when you can’t see it, even when you can’t see the results, even when you can’t see any fruit from it. It’s the faithfulness to show up.
So I know we don’t know the good old days until they’ve already passed. But I’ve also been sitting with and pondering whether that has to be the whole truth.
Brother Steve used to say all the time, the days are long, but the years are short. He said it about parenting mostly. But I think it goes deeper than that. Our lives are a collection of days, and we rarely know what matters most until we look back and reflect. And I think, what if we started treating every ordinary day like this might be the one I would miss?
I had this happen recently. I’ve been so extremely tired this week. I think it’s just the changing of the seasons, the pollen, baseball season, and the late nights. I’ve had this undercurrent of grief, been pondering a lot of things that have been coming to the surface from everything going on this time last year. So I woke up one day really needing a day off. But then I started thinking about my little two-year-olds coming in, and taking the ninth graders to the square to draw. Because I’ve been writing and talking through this piece all week, even just trying to record it without crying, I realized this might be a day I would miss. When I look back on my life, these days in my classroom are going to be the ones I look back and say, wow, those were some fun days.
I think about days like this past week. I was sad on Monday; I wanted to call in sad instead of calling in sick. But I came to work, and I got the blessing of asking a rhetorical question to one of my third grade classes, and one of the little girls raised her hand and just gave her testimony off the cuff, how she was convicted of her sin, how the Lord saved her. And I thought, wow, if I hadn’t been here I would have missed that. That was beautiful. And that gave me inspiration to have my own testimony ready to give. I mean, if a third grader can do it, that’s amazing.
I know some days feel very significant, like the major milestones of our lives. But days like that, that simple day of the week at school, I thought, wow, this is amazing.
I think about showing up every day as a mom too, through all these stages and ages, some ordinary days, some hectic days, some days where you think, how am I going to get all of this done? But looking back now that my oldest is 17, a lot of my memories are just in folders on my phone and more memories in my heart. And I think back on the arc of raising kids, and yes, those days were a gift. Those ordinary days added up to my life, to these wonderful things about my life.
So I’m trying to practice being present. I’ve switched my phone to grayscale this week I put a little shortcut on there so I can flip it quickly. I’m trying to prepare for the summer, honestly, to not be tempted when I’m bored or have less to do to reach for my phone. Because when you put your phone in grayscale and you look at the apps you normally look at, it’s a lot less appealing. My daughter picked up my phone and said, “Mom, where’s all the color? You love color.” And I said, yeah, that’s the problem. The color is what draws me in and keeps me coming back. I’m trying to be more present because I’m realizing life goes really fast.
Like Brother Steve said, the days are long but the years are short but honestly, now the days are really short and the years are really short. My time of having my kids at home is growing shorter and shorter. I don’t want to look back and think I missed out on it because my mind was elsewhere.
We are appointed for this moment in time, not someone else’s story. We were called to live the life God gave us, the calling God gave us, in this time, in this moment, in this stage. Not somebody else’s life on our Instagram feed, not somebody else’s at our workplace. We have to stop and be present in our everyday and say, wow, God, you put me here for a specific story, just like these pastors I was talking about, just like everyone I look up to. They’re just going through and faithfully showing up for their everyday life and seasons, and those days stack up to the arc of a life.
So Sunday night, two women walked out ahead of me and they put words to the hurt in my heart. I know that they were right. The good old days were those days. But the good old days are also these days.
How wonderful it is to have a life to live and to recognize that you’re in the good days even while you’re in them. Even if your days are hard today. Even if you’re in the middle of a trial. Even if you’re in the middle of grief.
I’ve got a smile on my face this morning because I’m looking back to see what God has done. And I am choosing to look for the good and to be thankful instead of letting the negative side of life drag me down.
So this ordinary day might just be one of the days you look back on and think, wow, wasn’t that something? The voice you hear when you walk into church might be a voice you’ll look back on for years. The room or office you keep walking into at work, that’s your life. The table you come back to day after day to feed your children and clean up after them, those are going to be the memories you revisit one day. These ordinary things.
I know you, like me, don’t want to miss them.
So until next time, keep smiling and never, never give up.
Warmly,
Emily
Screen Door Magazine
