Dear Bro,
Even at age 65, life remains so interesting, and things manage to keep changing faster than I can keep up. I’ve been reflecting on life a lot lately. Something about being this age and being able to collect Social Security has prompted it.
You know I’ve taken up painting; I love it. As I was contemplating life, I realized a person’s life could be described in a similar fashion to the layers in a landscape image. Yes, life is kind of like a picture. If you haven’t seen Bob Ross paint a landscape, you should watch a few of his episodes, and you may see the similarity too.
You create a painting by starting with background colors to set a tone for the scene. Then you start adding layers as you work your way to the bottom of the painting and the closest element you want people to see as the center of your painting.
Look at the picture above, the light blue in the sky and darker blues forming the mountains with a brighter green in the foreground. There are many layers that make this picture. And reflecting on my life, I realize I have had lots in my background that has made me who I am today.
The longer I live, the more I know this is correct. I have had asthma my whole life; it may have started due to having pneumonia as an infant. I don’t know for sure, but it has affected many things I have done or not done my whole life. I can’t remember not having asthma, but it is just one thing that has made me who I am.
Looking at me today, I am writing articles for Whosoever, leading a Bible study, and preaching on a regular basis for our church. I am an office manager for a law firm and enjoy the people I work with and for in doing my job. I must like my job; I have been doing it for 20 years now.
This is what people see, but they don’t know all the stuff behind it that made me into this image. But if I were a picture, they could see the many layers that formed me.
In my background, I remember that before I turned 10, our family went to church regularly. I loved it. I knew Jesus loved me, because the Bible told me so. Yes, that song still sticks with me.
I knew that prayer was important, and I prayed every night as I lay in bed before falling to sleep. Somewhere I picked up on the fact that my prayer needed to have certain parts to it, just like the Lord’s Prayer has parts. I still remember it:
Dear God, thank you for today and all you do, and may you be with me tomorrow. May you bless my mother, father, brother and Blackie [our dog] and all our friends and relatives. In Jesus’ name I pray.
Then I would say the Lord’s prayer. I did this for years.
I still pray when I go to bed, but it sounds a bit different. I still pray for my friends and relatives and my pets, but I pray for my church and do so with more purpose now. Wow, consider this as you would a picture: It was a paint-by-numbers prayer, then I learned as I aged how to paint without an image already created for me to follow.
People can’t see all that I lived through as I grew and aged. Another color in my background is the fact that our family moved because of our dad’s work.
When I turned 40, I realized I had moved an average of every two years throughout my whole life. That pattern started with our parents, and I kept doing as such for many years afterward.
I’m not sure if it was Mom’s death that prompted it, but my decision to move to Georgia turned out to be the best one I could have made at the time. I love it here — I love the hills and mountains, and the big city of Atlanta. I’ve loved it so much that I surprised everyone by actually buying a house here.
As we age, we have many mountains and hills to cross. Look at the picture again — see all the hilly waves in the blue-green background? Each hill or mountain has been an accomplishment, a trial that I was able to hike through and then conquer before moving on to the next challenge. Some of these challenges are health, some are personal, some are financial, some are dealing with the deaths of those you love.
Let’s look at the picture again. You see some hills are very tall and others short. Life’s challenges come and impact us differently. One of my larger mountains was everything that revolved around our mother’s illness and death.
We were both in our 30s when Mom had her stroke. You had relocated to Texas, but you moved back to Illinois to help Dad with the business. I was there too, working. I was using my computer skills at an educational library while I worked on my master’s degree. So many challenges and so much change as we lived through those seven years between the stroke and her death. It was a mountain of things to deal with, but we got to the other side with new insights into life, love and so much more.
I’m not sure which mountain above is the women’s liberation movement and its impact on my life. But I know I broke the gender barrier as a field technician at ERT working on their electronics and air monitoring equipment. I was doing something I enjoyed and was good at. But I moved on as life kept rolling on, and I wanted to teach. So I signed up to get a master’s degree and earned it.
Mom’s death had a different impact on my life. I sought counseling to deal with the loss, but not just the loss — I wanted to find the answer as to why I wasn’t married yet. I didn’t get it. I was brought up that I should get married and have kids, but I really didn’t date — or even want to. A family for myself never materialized in my life.
I belonged to the groups of singles at church, so I was trying to meet someone. What was the answer?
I compare this to the trees on the left front of the picture — whatever it was, it was hidden by the green there. I have already shared the question that changed my look and my picture: “Have you ever thought you might be gay?” The answer: Let’s just say there was a massive tree on the right of the picture that the answer chopped down so I could see a whole new world I had not known or considered being part of: That of being gay — a lesbian! It opened a whole new world — or, in the picture, a whole new panorama to investigate and paint.
Life is amazing. We learn each day, every day of our lives. We encounter many things each and every day that will influence us in one way or another.
I would like to think my faith in God has led me to a life of love for everyone. I find that I am now considering why I have made the choices I have made.
Here’s one example: Meals. Clean your plate and you can have dessert. I loved dessert. So why did it have to be after we ate? Why did the plate have to be cleaned? Lately, I’m often enjoying dessert first because I want to make sure I have room for it. I also have determined that if the meal is too big, I can have leftovers. Now when I go to a restaurant, I order anything I want, and if it’s too much (which it usually is), I can take it home and have a second meal from it. A win/win if you ask me — and I got the dessert I wanted, too!
I hope this finds you knowing you all are loved by me and by God. You all are still in my prayers. I love you, bro.
Love,
Alyce
The longtime Vicar of Education for Gentle Spirit Christian Church of Atlanta, Alyce Keener (she/her) has felt a twofold calling from an early age toward teaching and toward God. Her religious education started in earnest at her first vacation Bible school, which spurred the realization at a very young age of how important God and Jesus were in her life. She began to pray daily and later began studying the Bible in earnest in college, where she became involved with the Navigators, later taking classes at Moody Bible Institute. Born in Ohio, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Illinois, and was active in local churches, serving on a missions committee, helping develop a church library, leading educational programs and directing a young adults program.