Meaning in the Mundane
Last week we received an email informing us that Sherman “Dick” Beard, the father of some dear friends, had passed away.
The pastor who spoke at his funeral likened Mr. Beard to George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. As you recall from the reruns you’ve watched while munching on yuletide sugar cookies, George Bailey longed to do more with his life than run the financial institution he inherited from his daddy. Yet duty kept calling. And because George kept doing what was right, he sacrificed his dream of “doing and seeing” on the altar of “selflessness and responsibility.”
Mr. Beard was a lot like that. Because of his good choices, he never achieved even so much as a Warholian fifteen minutes. He was an eyewitness to the Kennedy assassination, so he could have made a name for himself over that alone. Yet the first I heard about that was from his wife, Betty, during the visitation before the funeral.
Dick Beard chose to be unhistoric.
Yes, he was like a lot like George Bailey. The pastor said so. But the preacher wasn’t the only one who did. A teen who didn’t know he’d used that analogy made the same comparison a couple of nights ago when talking to her dad about Mr. Beard.
He graduated valedictorian of his class and scored a full veterinary-school scholarship. Need I say he was a smart guy? Yet soon after graduation, his father died of tuberculosis. He took several odd jobs at the ripe old age of 18 to provide for his mother and three younger siblings. He did this until his country called him to service at twenty-six. After four years, he returned home and found mundane employment with the U.S. Postal Service. Why? He had siblings who needed him.
He waited until he was 29 to marry at a time when everybody tied the knot in their early 20s, because he wanted to make sure his siblings were “launched well.”
When his sister was nominated to homecoming court, he heard she was going to turn down the honor because she couldn’t afford a dress. Dick found her one. To this day his family doesn’t know how he came up with the money.
Recently an online writing group to which I belong asked, “What is your favorite ending to a book?” One of the contributors chose as her selection the ending to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It’s not flashy as endings go. A lot of critics find it disappointing. But I think it’s profound. The book ends with this description of the main character, Dorothea, but it could have just as easily been written about Dick:
[Dorothea’s] full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Two hundred years from now, if the Lord tarries, nobody will be visiting my tomb. Probably nobody will be visiting yours. And most likely nobody will visit Dick Beard’s. Such pilgrimages are reserved for people like John F. Kennedy, George Washington, Winston Churchill.
And that’s just fine. In this life the effect of faithfulness in relative obscurity is the growing good of the world. But that's not even the whole story. The One who weighs all thoughts and actions remembers every act of kindness done in secret as though it were done to Him personally. And He will bring His reward with Him when He comes.
“Even so ... ”