Cheryl

You know how when it's raining, and you need to go somewhere but you don't want to get wet? You try to wait it out to see if it's going to stop, but as the time rolls on and it doesn't let up, you have to eventually run out in the midst of it anyway? That happened to me today. I got wet. I suspect there's a theological application in there somewhere. It's been raining a lot lately.

I have no intentions for all my blog posts to be melancholy. I much prefer my charming wit anyway. But I thought it would be good to explain one of the reasons for my tears lately. The death of my friend Cheryl prompted this recent wave of writing for me. Here is what I typed a month ago when she died.

August 8

I found out today that my friend Cheryl was one of the aid workers killed in Afghanistan a few days ago. Cheryl had mentioned the opportunity to go on this medical trip in her last month’s correspondence. How tragic to discover its ending. The story of her death is all over the news and Hillary Clinton has spoken out against the culprits for this atrocious act. Never would I have thought that my dear friend Cheryl’s life, or death rather, would be known throughout the world. What must have been going through her head as they were ambushed. Was she scared? Was she peaceful? Did she feel Jesus with her, holding her as she went down? It all seems so surreal—like a bad dream. Stuff like this doesn’t happen to people we actually know.

Cheryl was one of those people who you can’t think of a single thing negative to say about even if you tried, and there are very few people who fit into that category. We lived in the same house together for about six months at a time that was incredibly life-shaping for me, and watching Cheryl’s life played a huge role in some of the changes God did in me that year. Cheryl was full of life, laughter, deep faith and humility. I don’t really have the words to describe her accurately. We spent Christmas 2001 together on the farm. We had to wait to go home to our families that year because someone had to stay behind to do the chores. I’ll never forget how peaceful that Christmas was. We woke up together, did chores, sipped coffee, ate our homemade biscotti and exchanged the gifts that were under our illegally chopped down Florida Slash Pine. I don’t remember what I gave her—a journal, perhaps—but she gave me a cookbook that I still have entitled “A Little Meat Goes a Long Way”. I pulled it out today just so I could see her handwriting. She had written on the inside cover “just one more step towards being ‘ready’!” which was our way of referring to skills generally thought needed for marriage. We also attempted to make a dish for a potluck dinner that afternoon. Since we only had cucumbers on the farm, we consulted the Mennonite cookbook and found a recipe for cucumber salad. Unfortunately, our cucumber salad was really more like cucumber soup. Needless to say, it really didn’t get eaten and neither of us ever got married.

The last time I saw Cheryl was a few years ago when she was in town for a conference. We got to spend nearly a whole day together. Even though we hadn’t been keeping in touch with our daily lives, we picked up right back where we left off and talked passionately and deeply about everything God had been doing in our lives the last few years—about singleness and missions and our friends and about God. I don’t remember details of our conversation, just that we were at Starbucks and that it was amazing to see her again. It’s moments like those that are the most beautiful to me in life, and I think of them as “communion”. Getting to enjoy God and weep together with a dear brother or sister is one of the sweetest gifts that I think God gives to us, and Cheryl was a person who God allowed me to share in Him together with. She was also a fellow lover of pumpkin icecream, and I remember late night runs to get a pint of heaven at the 136—an icecream shop so small that we knew it only by the numbers in its address. I think God Himself might have enjoyed some pumpkin icecream after he created the world…and I imagine that He and Cheryl are enjoying it together right now.

Thank you God for my dear friend who loved you and the people you gave her to serve. Thank you for using her to dramatically shape who I am today and for the communion that we got to share together with you.