Yesterday my family gathered to say goodbye to the oldest child of Joe and May Woodard's nine children. My Uncle Cecil came close to living 88 years before he graduated this past Friday. Not only was he the oldest of my Uncles, born in 1927 and having already had two children of his own before his youngest brother, my Dad, was born in 1950, but he was the tallest, quite possibly the smilingest, and without doubt the hardest working in a family of hard workers.
My Uncle Cecil just never quit doing what needed to be done. For those who know and remember how hard my father worked in the early 80's and shake your head in dismay having still been unable to figure out how he did it and how he kept going during that time, or how hard he still works today for that matter, my Uncle Cecil lived a life that made my father's insane schedule and pace of the early 80's look downright lazy. I hope God's got some work that can be done in heaven, because Uncle Cecil may have to ease into this whole eternal rest thing. Maybe that's why he let Uncle Cecil teach me one last lesson two days after his death.
My cousin-in-law Sam preached Uncle Cecil's funeral yesterday, and he did a good job. I kinda hate that it took a funeral for me to see and hear him preach for the first time, but although I wish the circumstances had been different, I am grateful for hearing him. I'll probably steal his line about being more lost than a duck in a desert, and I learned something from Uncle Cecil through what he shared. One of the things Sam shared about my Uncle Cecil is how he spoke so quietly that you had to get in close to him to hear him. I remember that. My mind jumped in its way back machine and traveled to an attempt to record some of the many stories my uncle told of the family history one time that didn't work out so well because I hadn't gotten the recorder near enough.
I don't know if the quiet man Sam and I remember existed all those years or just the latter half. My Uncle Cecil turned my age, 44, in June three months after I was born. Almost exactly half of his life was lived before my birth and half after, so while I never remember him being anything other than an old man, the truth is he was middle aged in my youth. I'm quieter now at 44 than I was at 24, maybe he was too. I don't know. What I do know is he was quiet, and he didn't really do the get louder because someone couldn't hear you thing. If you couldn't hear him you had three choices. You could get closer so that you could hear him, in which case his stature sorta enveloped you and made it impossible to not be effected by his closeness and presence. You could smile and catch some of what he said and hope it was enough for you to stay in the conversation without misunderstanding and looking like an idiot. Or you could come up with an excuse to walk away and find someone else to talk to.
As Sam reminded us of this aspect of who Uncle Cecil was it occurred to me that this is one of the ways that he was a lot like God. Uncle Cecil was a good man, but not good enough to get to heaven. There were plenty of ways that he wasn't like God and needed that amazing grace that he clung to. But having found the blessed assurance of amazing grace he lived faithfully to God and grew to be like Him in more ways than not. I hope that by the time I die that can be said about me, that I was more like God than not like Him at the end. I digress again. His quietness was one of the ways Uncle Cecil reminds me of God.
It's not that he didn't like to talk. Uncle Cecil loved talking to people, at least family. Nearly every time I saw him he was either talking to someone or had just finished and was looking around to see who to talk to next. He had a way of telling you stories about the family, about other people, that still somehow made you feel special, like they were his stories just for you, even when there were several people there or you knew he'd told the whole family the story, more than once. God is even better at that than Uncle Cecil was.
God loves to wrap an arm around our shoulder and pull us in close to talk to us. He loves to share things with us, and although some of those things are the same things that He shares with the whole family He can somehow make them special and just for us individually at the same time. He spots us and smiles a smile that says if you have time to stop and listen I have a desire to talk to you. And then He speaks, quietly. If we're having trouble hearing Him, He doesn't get louder. Sometimes it seems He gets more quiet as He tries to draw us in closer for more intimate conversation. Like with my Uncle Cecil, we all have three choices at that point. We can think of an excuse like not being able to hear Him speak to walk away, or we can stay at a comfortable distance and miss at least as much as we catch of what He's saying and hope it's enough to keep us from messing things up too badly, or we can get in close enough to be enveloped by His presence, to feel the warmth of Him against us as He speaks in our ear and we not only don't miss what he's saying but gain more than the words.
Abba, don't let me stay at a comfortable distance, barely able to converse with You. Draw me in closer where it's impossible to miss Your words and Your love. Thank you for this and all the other things that You taught me and others through the life of Cecil Benjamin Woodard. Amen.
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