EVERYBODY’S BEST FRIEND      [M, 3-2-20]

I pastored several churches as a part-time interim in my retirement years. I enjoyed and appreciated them all, learned from each, but the one that was the easiest, the smoothest, was Tampico, IL. It was full of good people.

I knew of Tampico long before I was appointed there. Ron Wetzell, one of our Wesley Foundation [campus ministry] students at ILSU, was from Tampico. He is a good friend even after all these years. He made a point of coming all the way from Minneapolis to be there the first Sunday I preached in his home church, 35 years after we first met. [Of course, he was coming to visit his mother and other relatives, too, but he timed the trip to be there for my first Sunday. I appreciated that.]

Before that first Sunday, though, I had a funeral. Monifa Wetzell died that week. She was distantly related to Ron; there were thousands of Wetzells in that town of 600. She was distantly related to everybody.

The church organist, Betsy Hoover, told me later that she worried all week. “Monifa was so important to this town. Had been forever. And your predecessor was a nice man, but a terrible preacher. He was especially bad at funerals. And Monifa deserved something special.”

I had been worried, too. It’s hard to give a good woman the funeral she deserves if you don’t know her. So, I talked with people, to try to understand Monifa, and as I did, one thing happened over and over again. Every woman I talked to, of every age, said, “Monifa was my best friend.”

Recently, on line, I discovered an old black and white photograph of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service, the Methodist forerunner of the United Methodist Church’s United Methodist Women organization, at Tampico. It’s from the late 1940s. A caption underneath gives the names of the 20 or so women. They are outside the church. All are frowning a little bit, as though the sun is in their eyes. They range in age from mid-thirties to mid-sixties. They look alike, though, because they are all wearing similar “house dresses,” what women wore all the time then except for Sunday morning and formal occasions.

Monifa is one of the younger women, thirty-something, her house dress like all the others, but her face is set in more of a wistful look than frowning, as she gazes in a slightly different direction. She is standing almost alone, off to the side of where the other women are grouped together.

Apparently like the photo, in life she stood far enough alone and away to be the best friend of each of the other women, perhaps because she had no one who was a best friend to her. Perhaps it was her name, Mon`-i-faye. It was different from all the other names in that picture, or any place else in my life. I have never known another woman with that name, but I wish I had known her.

But maybe Monifa and I were enough alike that I did know her, anyway, for each of her best friends told me later that they were pleased that she got the funeral she deserved.

John Robert McFarland