Grace Community Christian Church

 

Archived Things Above

Tuesdays with Morrie (12/1/00)

When I finished the book, I laid it on the table, sat there a moment, & began to cry. I don't mean a tear or two, but heaving sobs, from deep within. It was a silent weep, certainly not discernible to my sleeping family's ears, but a thorough one nonetheless, & one that I've yet to figure out. It was over in less than a minute; I sopped up the tears with the sleeve of my robe & returned to catch what little sleep I could. It was 5:00 in the morning, & I'd just read Tuesdays With Morrie straight through in two hours & fifteen minutes.

It's not a particularly long book, only 192 pages. A friend had given it to me weeks ago, & there it sat amid my stack of pre-slumber reading material until this night, when insomnia refused to budge & my mind needed to get itself around something in order to slow its racing.

Nor is it a particularly spiritual book, at least not in the sense that it points to Jesus & the Bible for ultimate meaning & hope. The book is written by Mitch Albom, a sports journalist & former college student of Morrie Schwartz, a gentle sociology professor, & chronicles the tender coming-together again of the two of them years later as Morrie's life is gradually & cruelly winched away by the unrelenting jaws of Lou Gehrig's Disease. Jewish by birth & eclectic by choice, Morrie permits Mitch, over several weeks, to interview him & share his final leg of the human journey with the world.

So what was it that hit me so hard that dark November morning? Perhaps it was the tender love that was so evident between these two men. Perhaps it was coming with the author to the realization that life is fleeting & in the end, only a very few things really matter, like loving & giving back & serving & appreciating beauty, all values that are biblically compatible. Perhaps it was Morrie's courage to let strangers inside, to shelve pretentiousness, to be real & vulnerable. How often do you see that in today's culture of glitzy self-reliance?

Perhaps it was just sheer physical & emotional exhaustion combining with a tearjerker book & the late (early?) hour.

And just maybe it was something else altogether, & I'll never know for sure. But you know what? It felt good! I'm not normally an emotional kinda guy, & I don't go around slopping my eye water all over everyone that'll listen to me. But for a few moments, I felt fully human again. Did you ever feel like something inside you had died, & you didn't know if it would ever come back to life again? But all of a sudden, one day, it was there? Oh, maybe not in full bloom, & maybe not dragging behind a plane at the beach for all to see, but still, in a small, virtually imperceptible way, there?

It was a neat gift at the end of a long day & an even longer year, & I found myself thinking over & over, "He's so right! He's so close! He's describing what God wants the church to look like!" And while I was grateful for the lessons Morrie taught me, I was even more grateful that I actually know the God he could only guess at.

Get it. Read it. And let his gift lead you to the greatest gift of all.


Jim Dewar --