Celebrated lives. We see them on award shows. The audience stands in honor of lives well lived with great accomplishments according to the standards of the film or music industry. Those lives are spent acting out a part, pretending to be someone they are not to entertain people.
What makes for a celebrated life? Just as babies are always good news so is life itself.
Witnessing a spider being put to death for its crimes recently made me rethink the death penalty. How’s that you say? Well to make a long story short, back in the summer our grandson was over for the weekend. He plays all kinds of games that he has made up.
One of them that day was putting spiders in a jar with pushpins and then rolling them down the slide. If they survived that and were repentant of their crimes then they were let loose. If not then they were put to death.
Well, I was quite horrified seeing a spider with a push pin sticking in it. When questioned about it our grandson said that the spider wasn’t sorry for the bad things it had done.
We then had a discussion about how precious life is and that once the spider was dead, if it could think and had a mind to be sorry it couldn’t because it was dead. We decided it was best not to play games like that with living things.
The whole scenario set me to thinking about the death penalty. Once someone or the spider was dead, it couldn’t repent of its crimes. It couldn’t ask for forgiveness and could not have a change of heart. In fact I think genuine remorse was felt for the spider that day!
Billy Graham once shared in a biography that he felt remorse over stepping on an ant, because God had given it life. It had a purpose and fit into the master plan. Every life is precious and one worthy of being celebrated.
Celebrated lives are noted every day on the obituary pages of the paper. While sometimes those features are short and others are quite lengthy they speak of a life lived, a celebrated life.
The year 2009 saw the home going of some of the best among us. People like Marsha Humphry Cox, Ocho Scott Pell, Grier Stout, Lynden Craven, Eli Jones, Glenn Patterson Jr., Pep Watkins, Clara Phillips Cain, C.T. Hardin, John Workman III, Mabel Moore Bray, Vera Needham Asbill, Martha Sutton York, Hoyt Clark, Alvin Roddy, Louise Wilson Grimes, Jessie Whitehead and others too numerous to mention here.
Their span of days varied. Their quest to live itself spoke of their courage and determination.
Their joys, passions and commitments to life and living has made us better people.
Celebrated lives … yes. A celebrated life is ours to live in 2010. May we find life worth the living as we find our place in the master plan.
Simply Sandy is written by Sandy Jarrell and appears the first Wednesday of each month. Simply put, it’s Sandy waxing wordy once a month about life as she knows it. Jarrell is a native and life-long resident of Coleridge and a librarian at Ramseur Public Library. She can be reached by e-mail at wjarrell@rtmc.net
