The Dregs…

Sandy is a dear middle-aged woman we met about a year and a half ago. When we met her, she lived in an apartment next door to the church with her Dachshund, Baby. Since we met Sandy, I have scarcely known a week when bad things have not happened to her. It seems that this is the way with urban poor even when they desperately try to make the right decisions.

Sandy, although undereducated, is smart. She knows how to shop bargains, how to determine what she absolutely can’t live without and how to get it honestly, and how to survive in a world that is inclined to either sweep her into the gutter or ignore her. She is also a hard worker, unafraid of the kind of work that would be daunting to some of us.

Sandy is also funny at times. When a student and I went to visit her one Saturday afternoon, she invited us to sit down and enjoy the comfort of the couches our church had donated to her. Baby wouldn’t leave us alone. He sniffed Chris’s armpit and pushed his nose into my side and neck. He was also (I am sorry to say) a Crotch Sniffer. After Sandy scolded him, he jumped off of the couch and ran to get a fuzzy stuffed animal that looked fairly bedraggled. “That’s right!” said Sandy, pleased that he had stopped annoying us. “Play with your Humpy Bear.” And he did… if you know what I mean. Chris and I looked at each other, and Sandy giggled. “Yes, that’s his Humpy Bear. I think he needs a girl dog for company.”

In the year and a half I have known Sandy, she has moved three times for various legitimate reasons of need. Also in that time, Sandy has had significant surgeries twice and has suffered various injuries as a result of several accidents. The last was this past weekend when she took a turkey out of the oven, and the flimsy roasting pan gave way. The hot turkey slid down her leg, and boiling juice streamed over her leg from knee to foot. She was admitted to the hospital two days later when it became clear that her burns were becoming infected. Yesterday Sandy was supposed to have a skin graft but didn’t. Her pain has been overwhelming, and she is too drugged to tell me why the hospital decided not to do it.  Is it because she has no insurance other than Medicaid?  I wonder.

Sandy is a poor, lonely soul often ignored by her wayward children and nearly always the one caring for her sisters, one of whom is mentally unstable and the other being, more often than not, physically worse off than Sandy.  She sacrificially gives of herself over and over again to these and others who have no physical and emotional banks from which to give back.  Relationships at church have given her a way to fill her own emotional and spiritual bank so that she can continue to be the blessing of Christ to those around her.

When I think about Sandy, I count myself blessed to know her.  And as we near the end of the Lenten season, I see her as an example of taking up one’s cross, being crushed by it, and still trusting the Father through it all.

Thank you, Sandy, for living the life of Jesus in your own world.  May Christ shed his mercy on you now and always.