Dedicated to ...

My first entry as I’m getting my feet wet so to speak, will be to dedicate this venture to the three people who had the biggest impact in shaping who I would become …

        My parents, Mitch & Marjorie Brown

        And my dear Aunt Jo Newton, my mother’s
        only sibling.

It would be easy to say that my dad certainly lived out his life’s purpose.  He served his country in the Navy then later worked for many years for the federal government. He was a faithful and loving husband, a good provider for his family and an amazing father to his four little girls.  In addition, he traveled for many years as part of an evangelistic team, the Virginia Travelers, a southern gospel quartet. They traveled the east coast and southern states singing in concerts and holding church services every weekend.  Countless lives were touched and changed as a result of this ministry.   Today, he lives in a nursing home but .. did he achieve his life’s purpose? 

I’m thinking … yes.

My mother was a stay at home mother and housewife.  She never worked outside our home.  She kept house and raised four girls. She made nearly all of our clothes.  I was always so proud to wear my new dress to school that she had made for me.  Mom hated to cook .. but we always had delicious meals, including a hot breakfast every morning before leaving for school.  She was a Girl Scout leader, served in the Women’s ministry in every church we attended, and sang in the choirs.  When Dad began to show signs of Parkinson’s and his mental and physical health was declining, she took care of him.  When it became necessary to move him into a nursing facility, it broke her heart, but she was there every day of the week to spend the day with him and made sure he was clean, dressed neatly, and had the kinds of foods he loved.  She was his guardian angel .. or maybe guardian bulldog would be more accurate!  She never had a career, she never taught a class, never wrote a book.   Only close friends and family members ever knew her name.   Mom was 85 when she died unexpectedly in a car accident in January of this year.  Did she achieve her life’s purpose? 

Yes … she did. 

And Aunt Jo …  Everyone needs an Aunt Jo in their life.  Seven years older, she was Mom’s only sibling.  She had been a widow for nearly 30 years and never had children of her own.   My sisters and I were her kids … she was our second Mom.  She and Mom were so different.  Because she never had a family she worked all her life and retired as an accountant for the Naval Shipyard.  So she was very well-versed in money and business matters where Mom had always just waited for Dad to give her the “house allowance” each week.   Aunt Jo was hilariously funny which made it so much fun when she came to visit.  After we were grown and Uncle Charles had moved on to Heaven, Aunt Jo, Mom & Dad became the “three Muskateers. You never saw one without the other two close behind.   And she studied the Word.  It was nothing to find her in her robe at noon, sitting at the kitchen table poring over three or four Bible versions and whichever study book she was going through at the time.   She was the “go to” person for in-depth discussions of the Word and the goodness of God.  Aunt Jo was the Bible scholar of the three.  She was in the car accident with Mom, and died an hour later.  She never had a family of her own but she definitely left her fingerprints on the lives of my sisters and me, and our children.  She studied the Word intently, but we were her only audience.  So .. when she walked through those Pearly Gates … had she fulfilled her purpose?

Yes.

When I look at these three awesome yet ordinary, anointed yet flawed, gifted yet relatively unknown individuals, it is clear to me that they each had a God-given purpose for being here and they lived it out to the end.  The point I’m trying to make in this dedication is that God has given each of us certain strengths, talents, and desires and using those strengths, talents and desires will propel us toward fulfilling that purpose.  It may not be as simple today as it was for my parents’ generation … we have so many more opportunities, more choices, more doors to choose from.  But that just makes it more exciting.  One thing I’m sure of … we were designed to live our lives with purpose and joy!