Proverbs 14:4 (NIV) says, “Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty, but from the strength of an ox come abundant harvests.” Now, I’m not calling my friends oxen, although I could stand to lose a few pounds. This scripture jumped out at me as I wrote this essay.
Yesterday was a perfect day. A few childhood friends decided to get together to celebrate our sixtieth year of life. For at least forty-five of those years, we have known where we all were and kept up with each other’s lives.
I moved back to Arkansas in 1994, and we have made it a point to be together as often as possible. I live in Little Rock and struggle with chronic fatigue, which forces me to slow down and rest—totally against my nature. Judy, who is retired, lives in Conway, where she led the band for thirty years. She has cataracts, which means that after surgery, she will never have to wear glasses again. Sherry works for the literacy program in Searcy and also facilitates adoptions for an agency there. Billy lives in Clarksville and is in the transport industry. Billy has no major maladies, as he hasn’t turned sixty yet. We shall wait. We shall wait.
We ate cheeseburgers at Market Cafe in Bald Knob and recounted ancient tales of growing up in Searcy. All topics were, as always, open for discussion, except one. In high school, we vowed we would never be like our parents, so our one and only concrete rule was to never discuss bowel movements. Ever!
Because a few—not all but a few—of us grew up in excruciatingly dysfunctional homes, this group of friends was our safe place.
We were all in band together, so there were plenty of travel stories. In our junior year, we made a trip to Six Flags over Texas. Billy and I were in a long line for a roller coaster. We thought it would be hilarious to intentionally get into a heated, although completely fake, verbal argument. We also decided to have the disagreement in a foreign language. Neither of us speaks a foreign language. We held the surrounding group of complete strangers spellbound for about fifteen minutes as we spewed forth red-faced, nonsensical verbal assaults on each other.
Later in the day, we found ourselves in line for the Spindle Top, a big barrel of a ride in which people stand inside against a circular wall. The barrel starts spinning faster and faster. At some point, centrifugal force takes over. The floor drops out from under you, and you are plastered against the wall.
Bill told me he had ridden it before and knew a cool trick: “Work up a big mouthful of spit, and the moment the floor drops, let ’er fly. The wad of spit will shoot to the people on the opposite side of the barrel. They will be so concerned with the floor dropping out that they’ll never know who did it.”
As the door to the barrel closed, with probably thirty people against the circular wall, I began the job of collecting. I mean, this was going to be one epic spitball. As the barrel started to spin, my anticipation built. The dude straight across from me, probably twenty-five feet away, was going to be very surprised.
The floor dropped. I spit.
My face immediately metamorphosed into a slimy bowl of soup.
At first, I was so shocked I couldn’t do anything but stare at the dude across from me and wonder how he could have been completely dry. Trying to raise my arms to wipe it all off was futile. The force caused me to slap my face rather than make the intended windshield-wiper action I intended.
There was nothing for it, in the end, but to weather it out for another forty-five seconds till the ride ended. I heard the people on either side of me emit a well-deserved gurgle of repulsion. “Ew!”
I glanced to my left and saw Bill, strategically positioned five people away from me, laughing hysterically and slapping himself in the face, vainly attempting to wipe tears from his eyes.
That’s just one example of our shenanigans. Growing up in a small town, we learned how to be creative. I will save for later stories the times Billy and I sneaked into the drive-in movie theater in someone’s car trunk.
Years later, Billy, Judy, Sherry, and I could still laugh ourselves silly over that and many similar memories. Once we composed ourselves and finished our burgers, we decided to go to my mom’s retirement village for a few minutes. Some of the friends she hadn’t seen for forty-some years. What a blessing to watch her hug them and kiss them on the cheek. I took a heart picture. It was a joy to watch them all get caught up and spend time with one another.
I thought about heaven and all my friends and family who were already there. I knew that was a taste of what heaven would be like. To sit in one another’s homes and get caught up on our lives and how we plan to spend the next few millennia hanging with each other and Jesus.
Closing our visit, Mom informed us it was time for her to go to bingo. We said our goodbyes, and she left, heading toward the cafeteria.
But we had one more stop to make. Another friend lived in the same retirement village as Mom: Fayetta Murray, our junior high English teacher.
We traipsed up to the third floor and got lost. We wandered through wings A through C and walked our cheeseburgers off while trying to find wing D.
We finally stood in front of her door. I knocked and heard her singsong voice: “Come in.” I opened the door and saw Miss Fayetta propped up on her bed, reading. She looked up, laid her book in her lap, and smiled. “Tim Holder? In the flesh?”
I said, “Okay, we are not going to invade you. But I have a surprise for you.”
She hopped up while I turned around and ushered everyone into the small living room. Mrs. Murray looked at them and said, “Bill Townsend. What a sweet face. Judy Lance and Sherry Treat.” Of course, Judy and Sherry have different last names now.
I said, “We all got together to celebrate our sixtieth birthdays.”
Mrs. Murray said, “Well, guess what? Yesterday I turned ninety-two.”
Sherry smiled. “I turned sixty yesterday.”
We sat down to talk for a bit. Mrs. Murray hadn’t seen Billy, Judy, or Sherry in probably forty-five years. We were amazed she remembered that Billy had lived across from the football stadium. She then proceeded to remind Judy that her dad had worked for AP&L. We sat for a good while and told stories and laughed.
When it was time to leave, I looked across the room and saw a precious lady who I knew loved the Lord. I smiled and said, “Mrs. Murray, we’re here because you made a difference in so many others’ lives. We want you to know that you are important.”
She smiled her humble, sweet smile and simply said, “Thank you.”
I really wanted to see Mrs. Murray stand up and glide through the room while wistfully waving her arms up and down like a butterfly the way she used to do down the halls of our junior high school.
We took a group picture; held her sweet, brittle, fragile hands in ours for a few precious seconds; and left.
Realizing we’d forgotten to get a picture with Mom, we went to the cafeteria to find her. Apparently, bingo time in a retirement village is serious business. When we walked in, everyone’s face was buried in a bingo card. I think I may have seen sweat on a couple of furrowed brows, even the ones with strikingly blue hair. Some used checkers chips as markers. Others used glistening red jewels as their markers, the kind of glass you find in the bottom of vases filled with plastic flowers.
We attempted to be quiet as we looked through a crowded room for Mom. She was in the exact center. I stealthily took the lead as the four of us traversed the chairs to get to her. More and more heads looked up to see the unwelcome intrusion. By then, I’d lost my nerve and dreaded the steps still needed to reach Mom. I reckon I would’ve felt the same if I had been at the White House and accidentally stumbled into the Situation Room during the Cuban missile crisis.
Two college-aged girls calling out the numbers picked out of a rolling cage looked at us with embarrassingly fake and condescending smiles. Not to be deterred, I knelt down next to Mom and said, “Sorry. We forgot to get a picture.”
The guy at the next table yelled, “Bingo!” Mom shoved her card away. I thought she was mad. And she was—but not at the intrusion. She was mad because she’d lost. The guy at the next table began calling out his winning numbers, as though someone might have thought he’d lie just to win a pill separator or the ever-popular chip clip.
Mom grabbed my hand and pulled me down close. Bill, Sherry, and Judy all jumped in, and we got the picture. Just to be rebellious, the lady next to Mom said, “Hey, let me take one for ya.” She snapped the photo, looked at it, puckered her lips, and said, “Not bad. Except”—she pointed to Sherry—“I chopped her head off.”
Memories like that are what binds friendships. After seeing Mom and Mrs. Murray, we went back to Sherry’s house and spent a little more time processing the day.
We haven’t fully figured out what was so special about our group. Was it generational? Was it being in band together? Was it a small-town dynamic? Was it a combination of some or all of those things? One thing we do know for sure: it’s definitely a God thing.
We are not oxen, but these friends are part of my herd. We know that the memories we build together today and the memories we’ve spent a lifetime building will never be lost. I’m thankful for technology and the terrific pictures I can take with my iPhone, but the most important, substantial pictures I take are heart pictures. I took plenty of those that day.
C. S. Lewis said in The Four Loves, “A friendship is born when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
The four of us friends, and a few others who couldn’t make it for our outing, are different in many ways. Somehow, when we were just kids, subconsciously on our parts but certainly not God’s, we chose to look for similarities instead of differences. It brings home to me the truth that God never meant for us to travel this journey alone. He was deliberate in telling us that two are better than one.
Lewis also said,
In friendship, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
Think of your friends. Be deliberate. If you haven’t already, start taking heart pictures, whether at the Spindle Top, a retired teacher’s home, or a mother’s bingo game. Those pictures are eternal.
By the way, later that day, I got a text from Mom: “Yay! Y’all brought me luck. I bingoed right after y’all left. Big ole package of bite-sized pretzels.”
