Dear Fans, Friends, Fiends, Foes and Family,

Thanks for dropping in and visiting, even when I haven’t written anything.  I have been working and keeping busy that way, of course, and most of the time recalling why I like working in a retail environment, although I have met a few who are good candidates for the Not Always Right website.

But really, there has been something other than my normal procrastinationary habits that has been on my mind.  A thing that has needed to be written but is hard, almost impossible.  Yet I can’t never write again so I have to try to frame my grief in words that make sense, if not to you, gentle reader, then at least to me.

Being a Sunday School teacher has a lot of rewards.  One of the many things is that, when you have been doing it more than 20 years, you get to know a lot of people.  Some, like one of our local preachers that I started out teaching in the 10 – 11 year old Junior class, are always in touch.  You see them all the time, see them around and eventually watch their families grow up, too.

Others will come up to you in a store or be your cashier at Wal-Mart and say, “You’re Brother and Sister Thiel, aren’t you?  Do you still go to the Pentecostal Church?”  “Yes…” “You brought me and my sisters to church in your van every Sunday and we…” or, “My name is…, Do you remember me?”  You struggle for recognition, and then the person explains that you were their teacher and even if they do not go to your church, you know that you have influenced their life in some way for the good or they wouldn’t act like you were someone.  The fact that you are still in the same church and still teach Sunday School gives them a sense that something is permanent somewhere, even though you know that anything in life can happen and twist that fate all up into an unrecognizable mass.

Others run in and out of your life and after they graduate from your class, you still see them, but as they get older, you don’t see them as much, but when you do, they are still the same.  Like a smiley young lady and her sister, who loved me so much and every time they’d see me they would always greet me with a big, warm, genuine smile and a hug, even when they knew that I did not always agree with the choices they made, there is love there that is hard to explain unless you have experienced it.  Of course, whenever you have two (or more) kids, even close siblings, they are as different as day and night.  In this case the one might have seemed a bit moodier, not as outgoing or as openly friendly.

The other one, always smiling, always talking, always being friendly.  Treating her friends with love and compassion, joking and teasing and even occasionally embarrassing them, sometimes just by how outgoing and extroverted she was.  She was in my 4 & 5 year old class, then again in my 8 & 9 year old class and was always the same.  Ebullient, smiley, happy-go-lucky, loving, caring, kind, generous, considerate.

Even after life threw her some of those wretched curves that it throws at all of us sometimes, the light was still in her eyes along with a bit of the wisdom that experience brings.  The smile on her face.  The love for her friends and family.  She had a baby and a husband and a couple of best friends and confidantes, including my youngest daughter who stayed her best friend and kept in touch and loved her as they shared in all sorts of times comforting and strengthening one another all through their young lives.  I mentioned a sense of permanence before, and it does kind of go both ways.  You may not always agree with them but you know that they love you and you love them and I guess you feel like they will always be there.  Perhaps (often?) taking their presence for granted.  You almost have to, in some ways, or how could you live your daily life?

As I watched my parents age and grow ill it was supposed to be “expected” that they would die.  I guess that’s true and something you should try to expect and even though the expectation does not make it any easier when it happens, it still seems to make some sort of sense.  Unlike a 21-year-old wife and mother and friend whom you have known since she was 4 years old whose life is tragically cut short by a bullet.