BUTTONED LOVE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Yesterday after church, a woman told us of a time she helped in Vacation Bible School when she lived in another town. She was just a teen-ager and not smart enough to stay away from the Jones [not their real name] children, the way all the other VBS teachers did. The Jones kids were always dirty, always had head lice and other vermin, were always ill-behaved. Maralee liked Jimmy Jones, though, because of his eyes, big brown eyes.

Years later she was back in that town and had business at the bank. There, at the manager’s desk, sat Jimmy Jones.

“Do you remember when you taught at Vacation Bible School?” he asked. “You helped me make a butterfly out of yellow felt, and you said we had to find the biggest brown buttons in the jar to put on it for its eyes, because you said my eyes were so big and beautiful they could see into souls.”

“I still have that butterfly,” he said.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.