Step back in time with me a moment to 95 years ago today.
The date is May 13th, 1921.
This year, Mary Pickford is considered “America’s Sweetheart” (who even is that?!?), the “Black Sox Scandal” will occur (although not until August 4th), Einstein won the Nobel Prize for “The General Theory of Relativity,” and Radio Shack opened in Boston. Woodrow Wilson has just completed his term as President of the US and Harding was inaugurated as the 29th president. In August, the US will formally end WWI, finally declaring peace with Germany, and on September 8th, Margaret Gorman will be crowned the first Miss America.
I won’t be born for another seventy-four years, but I already know that today is Friday—Friday the 13th—oddly enough, just like it is 2016. But the reason I know this isn’t because I looked it up. I know this because dear, old Bessie told me so time and again. She has said, “Honey, I was born on Friday the 13th in 1921, and I ain’t never had good luck since…”
Bessie.
She is the reason why I have asked you to step back in time with me to May 13th, 1921. Because 95 years ago today, my dear old friend the gun-toting, world-traveling, Kentucky-born, redneck, slip of a woman, Bessie, was born.
It has been nearly 1.5 years now since Miss Bessie decided she’d grown old enough and went to spend the rest of her days with Jesus. But not a May 13th –or for that matter a Friday the 13th—can pass without me thinking of this dear old friend and the part of my heart that she stole so many years ago.
I don’t exactly know when she came into my life. She was just always there…a fixture of sorts in the back row of church. She’d been attending for years before I was even born, but somewhere over the years I became her friend. I don’t know when or why or how. It’s just the way things worked out.
Every morning after Sunday School, Bessie would walk in 30 minutes before church started (after her weekly visit to the dollar store of course) and sit in the back row. I’d stop to give her a hug and she’d always squeeze back as tight as she could with ice cold hands. And some days she’d bring me gifts from home. Mostly little knick-knacks; things she’d collected over the years and sometimes things that weren’t worth a nickel, but her Depression-era heart couldn’t bear to throw away. It got to the point that my Dad swore we were becoming Bessie’s trash dump.
She’d always tell me, “Honey, never get old!” and she regularly advised Grandma that if she was starting to get old to just have Grandpa take her behind the barn and shoot her! She was an NRA supporting, gun-toting, backwoods Kentuckian to the bone who would proudly pronounce, “I’m lucky, I’m from Kentucky!” even into her last days, and she swore that if she was just a few years younger she’d have asked my brother out on a date because he was “such a good looking young man.”
She’d lived through more than I can imagine, growing up dirt-poor in the most backwoods part of Kentucky with a whole mess of siblings. One day her father simply went missing on the river and they never heard from him again. She grew up in the midst of the Depression and later experienced the craziness of WWII. Bessie married young, and moved clear across the country with her new husband to California. They divorced not long after her sons were born, but Bessie had the gumption to raise them both all on her own. She held a job at PGE for over 30 years.
But never once did Bessie lose her spunk. Never once did she stop being the most adventurous, gun-toting, trouble-making, young lady there ever was to rear from the backwoods of Kentucky. And never once did she loose her faith. Bessie came to be the craziest old woman I will ever know, and I will never be able to fully describe her. But I can say without a doubt that through all the struggles and adventures she experienced in her long lifetime, never once did she walk away from her faith. And that is her story that I love to tell the most.
But I say this all to bring up one final point. You never know why the Lord has brought you onto this earth. Perhaps you will live well over 90 years of life just as Miss Bessie did, or perhaps the Lord only has 20 or 30 years planned for you. But whatever that length of time may be, know this: you will always have an impact on the lives of those you see around you. You may never do “great things,” or even seem to have the best of luck. (Bessie complained for years that she’d had nothing but bad luck, and the truth is that she did experience many great sorrows in life.) But the stories you live out will impact someone, even if you don’t notice it. These will be stories that they will carry with them for years after you have passed on. Stories that they will share with others, and that those others will pass on as well.
And so I ask a single favor of you: Live your life in a manner that speaks of Christ and His love, so that when your stories are told 95 years from today, others may not only laugh at the crazy adventures you had, but that just as Miss Bessie’s life was, that your actions will continue to live on as a testimony for His great love.
I miss my dear oldest friend greatly, but I could not be more thankful for the legacy that she has left behind, even if only in a few hearts, and I pray that I too can live out the love of Christ in the same manner.
And I just know that right now Bessie is dancing and praising Jesus just likes it’s 1921.
God is very good!
May 13th, 2016
Proverbs 19:21 