I thought about Renee yesterday. Maybe I'd better clarify that a bit. I think about Renee every day. Sometimes, I see her practically everywhere I look.
But yesterday, I thought about her when I woke up - at 10 o'clock AM. I admit, she wasn't my first thought. My first thought was, "What in the world? How did it get to be so late? This clock can't be right. I must have forgotten to turn it back an hour the other day." And the first thing I did was run to look at another clock. Nope, it was 10 o'clock alright.
How did this happen? This never happens. I'm a "morning person". I always have been. Who needs an alarm clock with a snooze button, who needs coffee when you pop out of bed ready to go as soon as daylight creeps into the room? For me, "sleeping late" has always meant staying in bed, usually wide awake, until 7:30, or maybe 8:00 on a "good" Saturday morning.
And this was something Renee just could not understand. Sleeping late on Saturdays was something she enjoyed immensely. She was definitely not a "morning person". She didn't "get" “morning people". She thought they - uhm, we - were all crazy. She didn't get the "popping out of bed ready to go" thing. It was her profound belief that the snooze button was the greatest invention in the history of the world. And she really didn't get the "no coffee" thing. She came from a long line of proud coffee drinkers, and she certainly did her part in maintaining, living up to, and even expanding their tradition - taking coffee drinking to new levels, and in new and different directions. If she was ever up before 10:00 on a Saturday, it was because something was going on which required her [grudging] caffeinated attendance.
Of course, as you have probably guessed, her "sleeping late" thing, snooze button thing is something I never understood either. There were some Saturday mornings that, when I figured she had slept long enough, I would run into the room and jump on the bed shouting: "Don't be too fond of sleep; you'll end up in the poorhouse. Wake up and get up; then there will be food on the table!" - [Proverbs 20:13]; or, "Wake up sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!" - [Ephesians 5:14], neither of which she ever found to be very amusing. And coffee? As I enjoy telling any of my church family folks who might ask if I'd like a cup: "No thanks; it's against my religion." No, my wife and I just didn't "get" each other.
And so, when I found myself yesterday drowsily opening my eyes to behold a clock that said 10:00 AM, well, I thought about Renee. And I thought that, at last, I have finally done something that, in some way at least, resembled her way of doing things.
Because my feeling for the last 10 months since she left has been that virtually nothing I have done - in taking care of my son, in taking care of the house, in taking care of the finances, in anything you can name - has in any way resembled the way she so smoothly and easily and expertly did it all. Her weeks were spent in much hard work, and she had earned and deserved every "sleep late Saturday" that she was able to enjoy.
But she set the bar of raising a family way too high, and all I can do is stumble around beneath it - always looking up, always stretching but never reaching it, never really even coming close to grasping it. And so, I sigh, and keep on doing what I can, trying to keep things going in my own fumbling way, hoping it will be enough, hoping it will at least get us by, but knowing that all of it is just more ways in which my world has changed.
So, to see her, even for a moment, even in such a silly thing as "sleeping late", was fun, and sweet. And though it sounds strange, it was, in a way, a sad reminder of the days - those very good days - when we didn't "get" each other, and yet all was well in our world.
Ambrose Ramsey | Pastor and Shepherd
