“Find yourself . . .” she had no time for it. Nana had no time for people who flunked the challenge of life and went off to find themselves. You were you and did not need to wreck everyone else’s life or fail your duty in order to “find yourself”. The self you found likely would be some product purchased from profiteers of delusion.
Nana knew a good bit about life, death, and duty. The plague year was only one bit of her story.
My Nana went to many funerals as a little girl. She lived through the pandemic after World War I. This one killed children, older people, and healthy folk, being no respecter of persons. There was not much that could be done and when you lived in West Virginia, the government was not going to do the little that could be done.
The President was a stroke victim, unfit to serve, conniving to stay in office with the help of his wife. People died, lots of people died. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson schemed for a third term when he was not well enough to finish his second.
Things were bad and then they got worse, yet that’s not what I learned from Nana.
History books had to give me those details. Nana told of people and the funerals of young friends that began to pile up, especially the babies. Nana looked up in those days and had visions of the City Four Square lowering down. She did not expect to get out of life alive, so she loved God and her family, and took what a broken world delivered. She never spoke to me directly about the pandemic, but the stories added up. Nana was strong and kind, a rare combination, and hard times, she claimed, had turned people to God and made them better.
When the Bible says to love your enemies, we sometimes forget the hardest enemies may be those nearby. Nana loved difficult people, nearby people, all her life. She saw the Gospel transform some while others doubled down on spite to the end of their days. She endured.
This endurance helped her be herself.
If we should know ourselves, before God and man, then Nana learned who she was by seeing death, life, pain, birth, pleasure, and by refusing to retreat. When I was in despair, when I hated everything, Nana was not very comforting, but she was loving. She loved me, but wished me to do right. There was no compromise on what I should do: find myself by doing my duty and enduring.
We face a time of challenge and nobody is sure how severe that challenge will be. Most of us will only be asked not to panic, hoard, be foolish, or be consumed by fear, but to merely love our neighbor. We can learn to be our best selves in even a small challenge, but if times become tougher, then the opportunity will be greater.
If you heard Nana tell about the Depression, then you do not think most Americans have known hard times. If you heard Nana talk about “the country,” you appreciated the marvels of the age, but if you went to church with Nana you knew there was a deeper reality. Nana talked to God and God talked to her: I am sure of it.
She may never have “found herself,” but at the very end of her life when all the pain threatened to overwhelm her, God found her and comforted his aging child. If you are about to dash off, pop off, despair, or fling it all away to “find yourself,” stop. Consider that you are not lost to God. He is there and He will not be silent if you turn to Him.
I know, because at my worst Nana suggested this to me and it made all the difference.
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