Dots

I feel like I’m making a career out of grief.  It’s a terrible thing to joke about but grief has given me a warped sense of humor and if you are repeatedly slapped in the face with grief, you have to choose to laugh.  I’ve grown to love funerals.  I love hearing about the one that Heaven gained.  You learn so much from funerals.  You learn what is important, and what is not.  You always walk away learning new things about the deceased and wishing you had spent more time investing in that relationship.  You learn to dig deeper into the relationships you have now so that you don’t miss any wisdom that you can grab onto while they are here.  You walk away with the blunt reminder that life is short.  Make it count. 

Heaven gained another good one this week with my Uncle Jim.  My uncle was quiet with a very dry sense of humor.  He loved nature, trains, diving, and art.  He also deeply loved his wife, Annette.  The marking moment in his life was an accident he had when he was a teenager.  He was a diver in high school and practiced his flips on a trampoline.  One day he was practicing like any other day but he came down on the back of his neck, landing him in a wheelchair.  My Aunt Sandy shared a quote the other day that describes him so well.  “You do not have to stand up to stand out”.  Uncle Jim stood out.  He didn’t let a wheelchair keep him from accomplishing goals. 

As I said above, he loved diving.  You’d think being bound to a wheelchair would stop a diving career right in its tracks.  Uncle Jim loved the sport and knew it well.  He started coaching in 1973.  He was able to communicate instructions on how to dive to his students without being able to show them.  That boggles my mind.  I was told that his divers did so well in their competitions because they could hear his verbal instructions in their minds while they performed the dives.  In 1991, Uncle Jim was a Hall of Fame inductee for the Michigan Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association. He coached from 1973-2008.  That’s quite a career.

Another thing Uncle Jim loved was drawing.  As a quadriplegic, Uncle Jim had very limited use of his arms.  They really had no function other than just being able to move them.  He had braces that attached to his hands that could hold a fork for eating or a pen for writing.  He would put a black pen in the brace and make millions of dots that formed a picture.  He would draw trains or wildlife with such detail.  It was incredible.  He used to make Christmas cards.  I have a series of them that are framed.  They are beautiful but my favorite part about looking at them is looking up close where you can see all the tiny dots.  I can’t imagine how long it would take him to do it.

Uncle Jim loved and was loved by his wife Annette.  Annette is an amazing lady.  She too is quiet and humble.  She is selfless.  Obviously, they got married after Jim’s accident so she knew the difficulties that their life would involve.  But it never phased her.  Their marriage was about being together, no frills.  You would often see them walking (rolling) around in downtown Plymouth, where Uncle Jim grew up, the town he loved.  I was thinking about their wedding today.  It was a simple ceremony in my grandma’s backyard, in the garden.  It was beautiful because it was them.  They were surrounded by nature and the ones that they loved.  That was what life was for them.  Life’s simple pleasures and sharing them with the ones you love- that’s the beauty of life.

When you look back on Jim’s life we are tempted to ask the questions of “why?”  Why did God allow such a tragic accident to happen to someone so young? Why didn’t he allow him to be healed?  But why ask why?  Why do we feel the need to ask that question?  When we ask “why” and look deeply at the story, we can connect the dots in God’s masterpiece, much like Uncle Jim’s pictures.  Uncle Jim’s life is a series of dots that make up God’s masterpiece.  If you look at each dot individually, it doesn’t look like much.  But you put them all together, it’s a beautiful life, a life planned perfectly and with great detail by The Artist, God himself.  While I took time to reflect on Uncle Jim’s life, I saw some things I hadn’t seen before.

The Bible tells us that each of our days is planned by God.  If that is true, He saw Uncle Jim’s accident long before it came to be.  But He also created passions and talents within Uncle Jim that wouldn’t be limited by a wheelchair.  He gave him a passion for diving.  Yes, that is what brought about his accident.  But his passion wasn’t dampened by the accident- it was inspired.  He spent hours in his bed watching diving competitions.  He studied them so that he could communicate the moves effectively for his divers.  Through his knowledge he was able to prove himself professionally.

God also gave him a passion for art.  He gave him a talent that could thrive despite his physical challenges.  He didn’t have to stand to draw.  God gave him something to enjoy and give him a sense of mastery.  When he set that pen to paper he could accomplish something tangible.  It even gave him an extra source of income. 

I see God’s plan even in the city that Uncle Jim lived in.  He grew up in downtown Plymouth.  He got married and moved to the other side of downtown Plymouth, still within strolling distance.  Uncle Jim loved trains.  Plymouth is surrounded on three sides by train tracks.  Everywhere you go, you hear them.  I know to some the trains constantly passing through Plymouth were an annoyance but to Uncle Jim, that brought him joy and inspiration.  Like I said, his pictures of trains are incredible.  He spent hours studying them so that he could accurately draw them.

We often focus too much attention to the little things, the little dots.  We focus on tragedy.  We focus on loss.  We focus on grieving what could have been.  But when we do that, we miss out on the big picture.  We miss out on the masterpiece that God created.  Uncle Jim’s life was a masterpiece, each dot hand selected by a loving God.  Yes, God allowed tragedy.  But he also equipped Uncle Jim with ways to cope and survive.  Uncle Jim didn’t have a disability.  God gave him some amazing abilities that those standing on two legs can’t do.  Uncle Jim saw beauty and was able to capture it through his art.  He saw grace and was able to communicate that into words and inspire awkward teens into beautifully graceful divers.  Let’s look at a life well lived and be inspired.  Let’s look at the big picture.  Let’s choose to see beauty and grace in the world around us.