What We All Need…Sometimes.

His name was Jerry. Brown hair, strong features, few wrinkles, except those ones earned…from the suffering, few realized.

I first met him visiting my Grandma in a nursing home.  Her agitated, unappreciative….though I came a long way just to be with her.  Weekly.

He asked me to open his door.  That was our first greeting. Looking down on him
with just a few fingers fumbling with a button that made him mobile.  I obliged, still quite shy, only twenty-six, insecure, soaking inside my own identity crisis.

Though I had feet…not wheels. Like Jerry.

My Grandma impatiently grumbled, “Why do you visit him?”  To be honest, I didn’t really know.  The door led to a greeting, then a conversation about my children.  Later he asked me to bring him something from across the room.

My husband met him also.  A gentle soul.  A broken man in more ways than one, who needed someone to listen.

And don’t we all need someone to listen…sometimes.

I never mentioned the wheels.  Never mentioned the pain that left him confined all his days to a wheelchair.

For who was I?  How was a child like me to grab hold the ideas of why a man once so strong, so capable, could spiral dramatically downward, so quickly.

As the days and weeks and months past…..Jerry became more than “the man who lived next door to my Grandma” in the nursing home.  He became my friend.

At times I would go to visit just him, if my Grandma’s door was shut or she was sleeping.  My two-year-old toddling beside me, as Jerry found joy in the face of an innocent one gripping so needily to his mommy’s fingers.

And don’t we all need fingers…sometimes.  Don’t we all need door openers and someone just to stand up and bring us what we can’t.

And can’t sometimes we all be handicapped.  Somewhere.  Sometimes….

Jerry had a son.  Jerry was smart, educated, and I could tell that He was someone important.  In his old life.

He flew planes, crossed seas, survived in the ocean painstakingly floating without a life preserver…until someone rescued him.

And don’t we all need a Rescuer to save us from floating desperately…sometimes?  Don’t we all need a rescuer when people abandon us and waves crawl steeper…and dark things linger far below?

His life was an adventure.  Mine…just beginning.  His stories led me to grab a seat and listen to the life of a man who didn’t just dream….but lived to taste the

air, breathe in each breathe and grab a hold what my small life stuck dormant with small children seemed to be lacking.

And isn’t that it?  That the dreamers and doers must come together?  Leaping, bounding, and drawing strength from the common vision meant to be the wings that carry us?

And don’t we all need wings…sometimes?

Jerry’s son was killed. A stray bullet from a hunter, unexpected.  Died while at the hospital.  There were those lines across his forehead.  The lines of remorse and heartache and offense.

We all have them.  If we look closely.  Jerry’s were just more visible, more than most of us.

And I guess it could seem a little strange, an aging paraplegic and an innocent twenty-six year old becoming so fast of friends.  Maybe it was the safety I felt in a man who had no motives or agendas.  A man who I knew without a doubt, could never hurt me….really.

But he did.

People all do in the end….end up hurting us.  In some way.

Or maybe it was the child-like girl who clearly could not fling out pain, and cause more wounds…like his son had done when he left him.  Like this hunter had.  Like his weakness led him to experience.

His wife left also.  I asked him that day to look at the album in the cold stark room…the only thing I knew was his.  The only treasure I could tell he loved.

And he offered up the book. Willingly.

And isn’t it true, we all have treasures with us, in us, that we all need someone to ask to look at, to open, to experience…so we can come alive.  Sometimes. 

A beautiful wife.  A man strapping, dark, and handsome stood beside the one that had so much to offer the world.  Now hidden in plastic.  Now captured in a photograph.  Nothing more.  Just a memory.

But we all can suffer loss, becoming empty, sometimes.  If we are honest.

She had left him when he got M.S.  The bitterness flared in his eyes and he seemed to curl up in his pain like a salted worm shrinking from it all.

I never saw him like a vulnerable insect stepped on by the world…but I knew he saw himself that way.  And what is worse?  Living like a worm, or feeling the whole world looks at you that way?

I took Jerry outdoors when spring came.  His power over that button that he slammed impatiently into doors becoming useless.  I pushed his wheelchair as if he was my dad.  He could have been.  They had the same name.  Or maybe an uncle.  Or a brother…in God’s way.

Doors open.  Sun streams.  And the light rose on his face, making the wrinkles shrink brilliantly.  I wanted to keep him there all day.  But eventually, in this life anyway…the sun will always inevitably go down.  Darkness and shadows come…even on the most valiant of men, the strongest of us all…sometimes.

And I knew he wasn’t.  But I had to ask him.  It had burned for weeks and the inferno it was causing just wouldn’t let me stay silent…“What about God?”  This brave, adventurer who once conquered the world paused in silence.

“I once believed in God, but if God is good, why did he take my son, my wife, my health…everything?  No, I won’t offer this to God….I can’t”.  He looked down at his body, lifeless, useless.  A rag like the body of Jesus just before his crucifixion.

That was the first day darkness really overtook him.  I saw it in his eyes.  I feared it so much so that I left that day, early.  My child gripping tightly to my fingers…ready to leave too.

I opened the door for the last time.  And closed it.  He was gone.  For even the most innocent can cut strong when love is the link that UNIFIES the weakest of us all….

Soon after, I returned to his room.  He was gone. Just an empty room, a made bed, and a nurse that said he passed a few days earlier….

Jerry died days before I got there.  Maybe early fifties, a paraplegic, longing for more in life that he had been given.

I loved Jerry.  I ache for him even now as I write this.  Very few in my life have been so honest, open, candid….sharing stories, and vulnerability, and albums of

treasure, and losses of children with me….as transparently, as vulnerably, and as willingly as that broken vessel, Jerry.

And although Jerry was physically useless in this world, only moving his head and a few bent fingers to move his electric wheelchair through the hallways of the nursing home….

Jerry was one of the bravest men I know.  Not because of his great adventures, but because he was willing to bare his soul.  And there is nothing God treasures more than a barren soul.  

I wish I had told him so….

And some say we never know where people go, and what people say to God those last private moments before death takes hold and darkness crawls upon your doorstep.

But I sure do pray Jerry is there.  That he stands at the gates with strong legs, open heart, gripping me with arms that did more than sit like rags upon some electric wheelchair.

For eternity is our inheritance, not this earth, not the promises we think we need or should be given.  And we all need to remember that, though even the best of us forget where eternity lies…sometimes.

I opened that door for Jerry that first day.  And I have never regretted it.  But better yet, God stands at the door and waits for all of us to open all we are and offer it to Him willingly…

Like Jerry…but trusting a Savior who is good, even when we don’t see it.

Still everyone has a door.  And even the weakest of us need a door opener….sometimes.

Who can you open the door to today? What area of your life do you need to open the door of your heart to, more fully?