Like Mike

The first time we met Mike, sitting on his neighbor’s porch, he looked at our small group of 4-5 strangers, smiled, and said, “y’all don’t know what kind of joy you brought today. I’ll see you soon.” From that day forward we were his designated Dream Team.

Mike was important to me. He really was. He was the first neighbor to take me in as a friend. That first day we met, I remember being shocked by how genuine his response to our presence had been. I believe it’s because he saw our authentic care and matched it with his own. He knew we didn’t want anything from him and he didn’t want anything from us. Mike was our friend – start to finish.

Most of the time I saw Mike he was on his porch. I walked up that driveway and up those stairs so many times. I listened as he told me about the rose bushes planted in his front yard to honor the death of his daughter and grandson in a fire. I listened as he made fun of people, including himself. I listened as he lovingly scolded one of my young friends from the neighborhood who needed a lesson on how to act from someone he respected. And I was shooed away when he respectfully didn’t want me around when he smoked.

There were always other people on the porch. For as many times as I went there over the years I should remember their names, but I never have. I can’t tell you why. Maybe because I met so many new people on a regular basis, sometimes my brain refused to accept new members. Or maybe because I’m awful? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I never forgot Mike. Not because it was an easy name, but because he was impossible to forget.

The last picture I have of Mike is when we finally convinced him to grill burgers for our cookout. We had the biggest turnout of the men in the neighborhood because of his presence. COVID hit a week later making it the last time we saw him out and about before cancer hit and he kept to his porch.

Cancer sucks. We all know that. But the friendship we kept, not by consistent visits or one of us saving the other one from anything, but by pure decision and genuine care, is something I keep stored in the depths of my heart and will never not be grateful for.

At the end of 2021 I found out Mike wasn’t doing well and the possibility of him not making it much longer threatened my chances of seeing him. I tried to visit but he was too tired to come out of his room. Having experienced the passing of friends without a proper goodbye, I went home and wrote him a letter that thanked him for his friendship. I ended it with the same thing he told me a year earlier – “We’ll always be friends, no matter what.”

Mike died on Sunday May 22, 2022. I found out three days later when I tried to visit.

I don’t know if he got my card. I hope he did. I hope that in his last days he knew the love of friends. And even more so now, I hope and believe he knows the full extent of God’s love for him as he now lives in the presence of the One who knew him and purposed him before the foundations of the Earth were known to us.

Exactly six years to the date after meeting Mike, I sat in the back pew of his funeral service alongside a handful of others who had come to know and love him the same way I had. I watched his family and friends pour in the doors of the funeral home, weeping for their loss, celebrating his life, wearing his face on their shirts and praising God for the assurance of his salvation, knowing that Mike was no longer in pain but in a place where “every day was Sunday.” Praise God. Seriously. I praise God for that truth. I praise God for that hope we all have should we choose it.

Before the service started, a friend leaned over and whispered in my ear the weighty news of another friend’s passing just the night before – the third death in just two months.

Maybe I’ll write separately about those deaths or maybe I won’t. But whether you read about their lives or not, they were precious to me, as they were to many others. And whether you knew them or not, the truth in their passings is a truth we all share – we have an end.

Anticipated or not, we cannot outlast our own time. Yes, what you do with your time is mightily important. But what will you do with your end? In a world that drowns out the sound of truth with selfish ambitions and feel-good opinions, I pray you and I both live fully aware that reality is not what we make it. There are principles that exist regardless of our offenses and the truth of that reality is we are not enough on our own. Until we have God, we lack. Until we have God, we have no steady assurance of purpose. Until we have God, we are susceptible to every anxiety and threat and dangerous deceit this world has to offer.

But when we have God? We have hope. When we have God, we have peace. When we have God, our end becomes our beginning.

I’m so thankful for the love God puts in human hearts to love others. I’m so thankful that that love has gained me friendship with so many people, if even for a short period of time. I’m so thankful that when Mike told me we’d always be friends, it was not a feel good gesture but a reality for the present and to come. Even now.

Praise God. Praise God. Praise God.