Recently I began receiving phone calls from writers at Hollywood tabloids, asking me to comment on various goings-on in the unnatural lives of celebrities like Brad Pitt, Britney Spears, and Angelina Jolie. I asked why they called me. “You’re on file as one of our experts,” an editor said. I stifled a laugh as she asked her first question: “What do you think of Brad and Angelina having twins?”
“I think they can afford them,” I replied. “Two more kids on your Lear jet won’t cost that much more.” But even as I responded, I thought, Why are we so obsessed with these often sad and lonely people? Have we run out of real life heroes?
Allow me a brief rant: I have no clue about the lives of these people. I see Jessica and Britney on the covers of magazines when I’m buying mangoes, and I know God loves them, but I can’t tell you a thing about their love lives. Will it help my marriage in some small way to know who broke up with whom this week?
I fear, in saying this, that someone may show up at my door and give me a talking-to for being insubordinate, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Perhaps this is a part of wisdom: Sorting through what’s rotten and throwing it out.
If I am going to write about people, there needs to be some depth, some honour, something bordering on nobility. I want to focus on those whose love for others propels me to love deeper, whose perseverance helps me persevere.
My wife Ramona’s family has been riddled with a hereditary disease known as Huntington’s. Three of her siblings inherited this neurological disorder—her dear brother, Dennis, succumbed two Christmases ago after being curled up in the fetal position in a nursing home for 10 years. Today Ramona’s sisters, Cynthia and Miriam, and their faithful husbands Bill and Jim bravely battle this awful disease together, and I consider the four of them to be saints, because they put other's needs ahead of their own without telling you about it.
A recent email from my brother-in-law Jim will give you an idea of the strength God gives his saints, and the nobility I’m talking about:
Miriam is doing great. Her speech is now to the point that we have difficulty understanding most of what she says. Sometimes I have to ask her to repeat herself five or six times and she starts to laugh at me. How great is that! The two phrases she says the best, and probably the most often, are “I love you” and “I’m happy.” It makes my day every time. Thanks for your prayers. Isn’t life amazing?
In high school I heard a sermon on what we should say when God meets us at heaven’s gates and asks in His thundering Charleton Heston-ish voice why He should stoop to unlatch the door for the likes of us. I was sitting with three friends that day and normally we were busy distracting others, reading Alfred Hitchcock magazines stuffed in our Bibles, or listening to transistor radios through tiny earpieces attached to wires beneath our shirts. But this day the topic sobered us enough to listen.
The preacher listed seven things we needed to say, and a host of things we would need to do on earth before we entered the hereafter. I’m ashamed to tell you I don’t remember more than one or two of them. With a few years under my belt, I have come to the conclusion that I’ll be speechless when I arrive there. But if I finally find my voice and, for some reason, God asks me why He should allow me in, I shall bow nervously and point to His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. Then perhaps I’ll stammer out the words a wise friend of mine said: “Because You love me, You know You do.”
Then I will smile and say: “I know Bill and Jim. They showed me what You look like. They’re over there in the front row.”
