Visiting Teaching

I went over to Norma's house this afternoon.  Norma, who is now 83, has been retired from her job as a professor for many years.  My next door neighbor Cassia came, too.  Cassia retired recently from a teaching job, and her husband retired within the last couple of weeks from his university job.  

Norma and Cassia and I, we laughed a lot, and read over the new instructions for visiting teaching that were just released in the most recent church magazine.  We then scratched our heads and agreed we didn't know where the changes were.  It has always been a program we had to adapt to our own needs and the needs of our neighbors.  It's always been more about helping people than checking dates off a chart.  Hasn't it?  Then what are the changes?

And then Norma and Cassia began reminiscing.  They've been neighbors for decades, and visiting teachers to one another many times in those years.  Cassia recounted how impressed she was the very first day she attended church in this neighborhood, and Norma was teaching, and keeping the class on its toes.  She laughed at the way Norma had teased her decades ago when she dropped her husband off at the university without giving him a kiss goodbye.  

Norma reminded her, do you remember the fun we used to have when I was your visiting teacher with Gail?  And they laughed, and then told me that Gail had died.  And then the conversation turned sober, and Cassia asked, do you remember when I had cancer?  And she told the story of how she had survived.  But Gail had not.  And she said she felt badly for years that she had survived and Gail had not.  

And Norma told how when she had her own cancer, in her late 60s, how she had asked God if He would please let her live to be 70.  And she lived.  And then she told God she was very grateful, but if it be His will, could she please live to be 75?  And she lived.  And then she thanked God, and told him she wouldn't ask for anything more.  But could she please NOT live to be 90?  

And me, I sat back and watched these women laugh, and felt ... an ache.  I was watching something beautiful, but outside.  I was born too late.  Too young.  Moved too recently.  Here these two amazing women had been such friends for so long, and had heaped so much of life upon themselves.  Two impressive careers, illnesses, friendships, neighbors, parents, caring.  What became of the woman who had lived on the corner?  She moved to Arizona years ago.  Do you remember?  Yes, but I was too busy then, with baby and full time job and dying brother.  Did you ever meet my grandmother when she lived with me?  The woman up the street helped me care for my mother.  And as they laughed and reminisced about all the people they had cared for, and the ones who had cared for them, they knew that visiting teaching had been good to them, through the years.  

Someday, when I am 83, with life heaped upon me, will I laugh with my neighbor, and say, did you remember Norma?  Who lived in so and so's house just around the corner?  She showed me how to do visiting teaching.