Springtime Grand Slam Day

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  I want to be flexible, free and gracious in my relationships. I was blessed this week to spend some extra time with my only surviving aunt,  Johnnie Wishard Fink. What an enjoyable person to spend time with.

Mom and Dad both would comment that she seemed to have excellent Christian qualities.  Dad said, "Well she naturally has a wonderful personality and was always loved by all her older brothers and sisters and her husband and family."

Wednesday the spring trees were bursting forth with buds and hope for another year. As we were driving to Paris, Texas, to have lunch at Bodacious BBQ, I asked her what had helped her to reach the age of 87 and still have a positive attitude. She has gone through all the ups and downs of life, yet she is so alert and young at heart. "What is the key to a long and quality life?"  She hesitated quite a while before answering.

"I don't know. That is a hard question. If I had to say, I think is it security. I always have felt loved by my family and others and I have felt secure in their love."

We laughed a lot about funny things we had experienced.  My Aunt Johnnie had kept her upbeat, positive attitude in spite of some hard things in her life.  Most recently the extended illness and loss of her daughter, Judy Fink Adams, had been very hard, but still she kept joy in her heart.

She has always been a follower of Jesus and I know that His words have trained her mind and heart.

Jesus says that we need to be fearless in our God. He is strong and able to help us have a victory over the challenges in life. The Bible says that "All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and who are called according to His promise." (Romans 8.28)

He promises if we choose to put good things in our mind, then the stock pile of love will be in our hearts and come out of our mouths.  Nothing is more important to Jesus, it seems to me, than honesty. He speaks against lies and deceit over and over again.  Maybe one of the reasons is that we must admit our real problems in order to get help for them. This freedom to choose our thoughts is a radical freedom. The choice for hypocrisy or earnestness lies before all of us daily. We can dwell on the good things or the bad, but choose carefully.

As we face the reality of death and loss, we can approach life with more dread or determine to live each day with more joy and fullness. We had a delicious lunch at Bodacious with her son-in-law and my friend, Richard Adams, serving us with his staff. (Great BBQ by the way.) On the way home we saw wild flowers in the bright spring North Texas sunshine. A day of association with loving people, springtime in North Texas and Bodacious BBQ is what I call a grand slam of a day.

Larry Wishard



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