Have you ever heard a child ask to hear a story again? My children did. Sometimes I read the same story so many times I wanted to hide the book – but I never did. I read it again or ‘gin’, spoken with a hard ‘g’ as Pastor Joel’s daughter Maxine would say.
I attended and played the piano for Jerry Hughes’ funeral recently (whose picture is above). What a celebration of a Christian it was. Jerry was a longtime teacher, coach and community man in Goodrich. He was also a teller of stories. Again and again. His family knew he retold his stories, everybody at church knew this and I’m sure the community did. I heard many of his stories again and again. It was almost a bit of a joke to his family.
Many I heard were about his sainted mother who raised 8 children as a single parent during the depression. Jerry admired, honored, and called his mother a saint. These are important stories. Pastor Joel was right when he said that by telling these stories again to all who would hear, Jerry became a legacy builder.
Who else was a legacy builder? The person Jerry’s mother and Jerry himself followed – Jesus Christ. Jesus told stories again and again to people throughout his ministry. He told them again and again to the disciples – they took some re-educating at times, didn’t they? They needed to hear the stories ‘gin’ and ‘gin’ (hard g, remember) just as we do. So maybe we all smiled when Jerry started the same story again. But he didn’t mind if you helped him tell the story – I tried it sometimes. It was the same story if you told along or not. But by telling along, I learned to tell the story myself and keep the lesson and truth of it in my heart.
Jerry had something important there. If we learn and love to tell the story of Jesus enough, others will also begin telling it. In the words of an old Faberge commercial, “If you tell two friends, they might tell two friends, and so on and so on and so on.” But this is not a commercial, rather it is a call to true faith and to tell the story of Jesus ‘gin’ and ‘gin’.
Thank you Jerry for your story and Maxine for your enthusiasm. You are both God’s children not unlike each of us.
~Shauna Weil
A devotion provided by the Devotion Ministry of Goodrich UMC
Listen as Alan Jackson sings it true as only a country singer can sing a song of faith.