Breathe In, Breathe Out

I may love funerals too much.  Although to be clear, I love Jesus-y funerals, not just any old funeral.  Same as weddings - I'm always a bit sad when Jesus isn't in the mix. But that's a rant for another day.

Today, we celebrated Auntie Irene's life. Hers was a long one.  Half-a-decade shy of a century. She was lovely and sweet, a knitter of sweaters for every single cousin and aunt and uncle I have on that side of the family.  Even T-Bird had an Auntie Irene sweater.  They were legendary. 

And now she has died.  After a long life, full of the good and the hard, and the impossible and the so sweet. She did all the things this life required and died as we all will.  And it was good and right to spend an afternoon remembering the stories of that life, hearing her children love her, and seeing yet again that I am part of a family that passes down faith.  We get blue eyes and faith in our family and sometimes I forget that it's not just me that looks in the mirror and sees a light-eyed Jesus lover.  There are dozens of us.  It's takes the edge off the lonely, you know?

There was some young whippersnapper leading the service and I was tempted to look down on him because he was young but then he started talking and said one of those things that tucks itself in a corner of me and lingers.  "Irene would breathe in the nutrition of God and breathe out a life of service and the rhythm just repeats itself over and over and over."  Poor man. He said it much more poetically I think - I most certainly have a word wrong, so the quotation marks are a lie, but maybe we can call them gist-of-it marks?  Regardless, he caught a truth about my great-aunt but a better truth about this life of ours:  breathing in and out is about all that's required in this life of ours and if we keep breathing in Jesus, we can not help but breathe out love of our neighbours.  When we start breathing out anything less, we should probably check what we're breathing in.

My Auntie Irene's life was a picture of faith - loving her neighbours as herself, all the time. She could not do otherwise.  And that is our inheritance.  That it would not be squandered.