The Divine Secrets of the Sisterhood of Birdie
Saturday, September 27th, 2008I drove by Birdie’s house the other day and found her out in the front yard waging her annual war against the dandelions. She was dressed in old army fatigues. A pith helmet topped her outfit and she had in her hand a spray bottle of some mysterious toxic potion marked threateningly with a skull and crossbones. The toxic look on her face I had seen before. I couldn’t help but stop the car and yell out to her through my open window, “If we’d sent you to Vietnam, we might have won!”
Birdie is our resident historian for the early days of the church. She was a young woman when she and Earl became one of this neighborhood’s first residents. They moved here in the post-war boom days when the GI’s returned from saving the world from tyranny. She and Earl were newly-weds … love birds who built their first nest together in the suburbs.
Birdie and Earl had helped start our church back then with a handful of other young families. Most of them were 20-something’s with only a handful in their 30’s. After the long struggle at war, the joyous welcome of the troops back home resulted in swarms of children and they were as numerous as Birdie’s dandelions.
“Back then,” she told me one day, “if you had grey hair, you were considered ‘Methuselah’s kin.’ We thought of anyone older than 40 as ancient. We were just a bunch of eager young pups trying our best to build a good church.”
“Strangely,” she told me, “there was one prominent grey-haired woman named Miz Lydia who was wise and wonderful and loved our rambunctious young church with all her heart. She was a faithful tither and was an anchor in the meagerness of those early days.”
In the early days, the church was like all those young couples. It had more bills than bucks. After a particularly long finance committee meeting where the committee labored over which bills to pay and which bills to hold, Miz Lydia grew tired. As she left, she said to the last group of committee members who had stayed late to see if more could be done, “I could write a check to get you kids out of this mess if I wanted. But if I did, you wouldn’t learn anything.”
She was right. She could have taken care of their problems with the stroke of her pen. But where would they have been at the end of the next month? Miz Lydia had a country wisdom that knew the difference between being a faithful partner and making the church dependent on her.
“When I look back on those days now, Miz Lydia became my hero as a woman,” Birdie said. “I began to watch her. I watched how she handled herself with all of us. What she had as a woman, I wanted more than anything. All I know is that when I was around her, something in me thrived.”
“It took me a while to realize what was happening, but I discovered that she was teaching me how to be a strong, vibrant human being. Once I figured out how precious she was to me, I made more of an effort to make sure our paths crossed in the doing of church. I spoke to her every time I could. I tried to be around her so I could see up close what made her tick.”
“I became as curious as a kitten about her every move. She was beautiful in my estimation and I wanted very much to soak in as much as I could. When you think about it, she was a gift from God giving me an idea of who God might be leading me to become. In the end, I realized that I had a hunger and a thirst for knowing who I was that was deeply rooted in the same soil that made Miz Lydia so magnificent in my eyes.”
“What I think was going on was biblical. Miz Lydia was older and wiser than anyone in the church. She knew some of us were watching her and she let us. It wasn’t her money that helped us most. She understood she was the best gift she could give us.”
“God’s transformation of us, it seems to me, is a handed-down way of living. Jesus called it ‘the Way,’ and it’s usually regarded as something each of us gets from some real-life human being as a gift of God’s goodness.”
“Birdie,” I ventured, “is it possible that God might want to do that with all of us in some way?”
“Preacher, you’re smarter than you look. Everybody’s got to have someone to teach them who they are. I’ll bet even you have your heroes. Can’t you recall someone who made you better than you could have been on your own? I’ll bet if you work hard enough, you’ll remember who that was for you. When you do, be sure to say a word of thanks for them.”
“Who knows? Maybe someone’s watching you right now. Scary, isn’t it? Just don’t get paranoid on me, Preacher.”
[Originally published in Baptist Today]
