Likewise, I'm Sure

Carl and Lorraine Rauen were a really neat couple. They had a certain gentleness, an inner calm that silently poured oil on my psyche’s waters that I didn’t even know were uncalm until a kind of interior “ahhhh” happened inside me when I saw them, either of them, both of them. One of the things that I remember most vividly about Carl and Lorraine is that there was one mannerism that they performed identically. When I was speaking and they wanted to verbally convey that they understood, they would say the usual “uh-huh,” and nod their head affirmatively. But they would say it in a way particular to them, and exactly the same way, with a momentary delay between the syllables, the second one rising slightly: “Uh…huhhhh?” Now thirty years since I have seen them, I am still struck that they would become so much like each other.

I met Angela’s mother several years ago in a little town in Ohio, when I drove from Detroit with my little pickup truck and my neighbor’s chain saw to gradually collect the enormous logs of her felled walnut tree, a gift for my woodworking pursuits. It took three or four trips, and each time the white-haired woman would quietly watch this crazy young man work alone to muscle these huge treasures into his little truck. Each time she would come out in her cotton dress and well-used apron with a cold drink for me; after handing it to me, she would gracefully take the strands of her hair that were hanging loose on her right cheek, give them a half twist, and place them neatly behind her ear. I don’t know that I even noticed that gesture until, years after she had died, I was talking with Angela and she repeated that very same motion. I smiled when she did it, and she asked me why. When I told her that I had seen her mother do that exact thing, she smiled, and said “yeah, I guess she did, didn’t she. Hmmm.”

Who do you take after? I try to listen like the Rauens, calming and affirming. My wife and I both notice that there are things we’ve come to do similarly to each other. I consider the things that I do my mother did, ways that I am like my father.  Today is the day that Christians remember the Last Supper. Jesus shared bread and wine with his friends, and he said he was sharing his very self with them. Uh…huhhhh? In John’s version, he didn’t feed them, he washed their feet. Hmmm. But all four versions of the story of what he did before being taken away and killed include what he said to them after he fed them, or washed their feet. “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do”… “When you do these things, do them in memory of me.”

Jesus didn’t call us to die on the cross like he did. But he did tell us to serve, to share our selves, to take after him.

When people look at us, who do they see in us? We would do worse than that they would see Him.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.