Steadfast

Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, being continually aware that your labor in the Lord is not futile nor wasted.   1 Corinthians 15:58 Amplified Bible

I am slowly dismantling my mother’s life. Last week it was the pink and burgundy tile of her bathroom. This week as the plumbers move the hookups for the toilet and the sink, I scale the built-in pine bookcases she designed to fill the entire wall in the living room in 1954 as the carpenter stood by waiting for her pencil sketch. There are books in the high nooks with cloth covers and faded titles no one has reached for in years.

I always knew this would be the hard part. When she fell in my backyard from a stroke, hitting her head on the terracotta planter on her way down, and promptly died 36 hours later, I sort of took that in stride. She had lived a full and vibrant life and had told me that last week she was lonely. “I want to go home” were her last words. My sisters and I met with the mortician in Greer, planned her service with her great nephew officiating, talked with the relatives who gathered, and I wrote a poem about not missing her enough knowing the missing her part would come later.

We continued to gather at her house. It was summer and we had opened the pool. Ann had a good cry when she closed the bathroom door to find all my mother’s robes hanging there. I had a decent cry a few months later when I sat in her bed with my Sunday morning coffee and my eyes fell on her pocketbook still sitting on her dresser on the other side of the room. We started pulling up the carpet and pulling down the wallpaper that afternoon.

Nieces and nephews showed up to paint walls neutral colors and we had a yard sale to disperse her clothes and her favorite chair. Nancy drew the short straw for Mama’s gold locket with a photograph of her looking like a Gibson girl, hair piled high, in a lace blouse. Opposite her, Papa, looking like a country farmer in a straw hat. Ann got the mother of pearl Air Corps sweetheart ring her Daddy must have sent mother from Japan, and I got the wedding band my Daddy gave her with their initials and wedding date engraved inside. We divided up linens and blankets and some of the furniture, but much of it stayed in place since we sisters continued to meet each other here in Greenville.

So, this is the issue, you see. The time has come. It is finally time to go through the last things. The things that have continued to live in my mother’s house long after she left. Someday soon I will need to find a place in my house for our grandmother's crystal-filled curved glass-front china cabinet that Daddy refinished 50 years ago, carving by hand the missing base of the column of wood on the right side when it was handed down to my mother when her mother passed away.

It is not a small thing. This house is my mother in ways that her own flesh and blood was not. There are remnants of my daddy still here; his beloved antique hand-painted glass front wind-up clock still sits on the mantle – it has not been wound since he died. His grandmother's gold-framed mirror still hangs in the living room (she was the original Georgia Tanner). On the pine shelf sits the remnants of the photo album of his wedding (the best photos have been pulled out and framed) in that very living room my mother built the year before their wedding when she still thought she would remain a widow raising her two young daughters alone.

Daddy's presence is still here, but really, this house is Momma. She was a strong force and Daddy was sort of an accessory. He was handsome and hardworking and reliable and stable; with a shy grin and a soft-spoken nature, and he would diffuse her bristling temper and her too-strong opinions with a good-natured "Oh, Pauline…"

So today I pulled the vinyl albums out of their 40-year place on the shelves and went through them one by one. Lots of big band music and familiar Christmas albums by Lawrence Welk. A few albums from my childhood. Of course, Charlie Rich and, Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gale and handsome Herb Alpert playing his trumpet from the open cockpit of a biplane. Lots of Floyd Cramer and Eddie Arnold and Chet Atkins. There were amusing dance records – especially the new craze, The Twist. And long-play comedians like Andy Griffin (What it Was, Was Football). And remnants of Ann and Kathy's teen years; Peter, Paul and Mary, and The Everly Brothers. And then my teens; The Young Rascals and Karla Bonoff and Donovan. I will hold onto 10 or 15 of them to play while we are painting.

It was the books that wore me out. They were old and their cloth covers faded and disintegrated. Their interiors age-stained and dusty. On the front page of most, there was my mother's name written in blue fountain pen ink. The books from the '40s were assigned to Polly and Joe Farber. The early '50s changed to Polly Farber. Were these the ones she read waiting through the long nights still hoping a knock would come on the door and he would be home? The mid 50's changed to Mrs. Joe Tanner with her new home address under her name, and then finally to Polly Tanner as the '60s became the '70s and she subscribed to condensed compilations by Reader's Digest.

I would read a paragraph or two, trying to imagine her reading these books and saving them all these many years. I set aside a 1947 edition of Great Expectations for Joey, and one of ‘favorite reprinted sermons’ from the 1970s for myself. Nancy discovered an ancient Jane Eyre and Alimony from 1928 by Faith Baldwin. All these pages of words made me sad.

Words are worth nothing, I thought in frustration. Why do we bother? Words sitting on shelves as the pages slowly turn to dust, faded and forgotten like the authors who wrote them and the people who read them so long ago.

And then my friend randomly sent me a text with a word and its definition. “Steadfast: having a firm loyalty or constant and unswerving dedication to something or someone. It is fixed or unchanging and solidly established. Steadfastness is immovable, irrefutable, unchangeable, unalterable, and is completely and utterly dependable. God says I am the Lord and I change not. Malachi 3:6.”

Steadfast. That was my mother and her books of written words and the black bible with a zipper in the King James Version inscribed as being given by my older sisters Ann and Kathy dated December 25, 1951. Eight months after their daddy’s plane went down over Korea. This must have been my grandmother’s doing. And next to that bible was Aunt Mamie’s bible given to her by Nelle in December 1937. Steadfast. Their hope was set in His love and His faithfulness.

These books - all of them – were a testimony of being steadfast. Of being dependable. Reliable. In the storm and in the drought, they would be found steadfast. A house built on a rock that does not move. A strong foundation that does not fade away.

My friend Muriel and I had sat with Sarah McCracken a couple of weeks ago, (second table from the front in Eddie’s Attic in Decatur) and sang along with her as she sang these words,

“By the word you spoke

All the starry host

Are called out by name each night

In your watchful care

I will rest secure

As you lead us with your light

You are steadfast, steadfast.

Muriel sent the song along with the definition and I listened to it three times in a row like a little child… and said with sweet tears in my eyes, “Yes, God is steadfast.” And so was my mother. And the rock on which she built her house.

She was solid and reliable and trustworthy and steadfast – because she was created in the image of her Father. These books of words are not sad. They are much-needed reminders of the permanence of God’s spoken words, written down, handed down through the decades, through the generations. From grandmother to daughter to her daughter and to hers.

Build your house on these words. They are not wasted. They are not worthless. They are trustworthy and true. They will prove faithful. They are steadfast.

I will build my house

Whether storm or drought

On the rock that does not move

I will set my hope

In your love, O Lord

And your faithfulness will prove

You are steadfast, steadfast

By the word you spoke

All the starry host

Are called out by name each night

In your watchful care

I will rest secure

As you lead us with your light

You are steadfast, steadfast

I will not trust in the strength of kings

On your promise I will stand

I will shout for joy, I will raise my voice

Hallelujah to the Lamb!

You are steadfast, steadfast

In the moment of emptiness

All was fulfilled

In the hour of darkness

Your light was revealed

In the presence of death

Your life was affirmed

In the absence of holiness,

You are still God.

You are steadfast, steadfast

You are steadfast, steadfast.

Sandra McCracken