Dolores McNab and the Funny Girl

I am in possession of what I think is a quick wit and what I know is a huge mouth. I was having a very funny day a little over seven years ago, and there was no reason for me to interrupt my streak of hilarity at choir practice; so I made a joke about the new choir director liking desserts to my new friend. I think we were having a dessert party after practice the next week, and our new minister Fred was quite excited about it, so I suggested that he did look like he liked desserts. My new friend laughed and good-natured-ly agreed. Only later did I find out that my new friend was his wife! That's right, I made jokes about the new minister to his wife and, amazingly, that was the start of my friendship with Dolores McNab.

When we left for Australia, Dolores helped me with my estate sale and then promised me that she would come visit. I hoped she would. Last week she and Fred fulfilled her promise when they came to Brisbane just to see us. We saw them for a day, and we had a great time swimming in the hotel pool and sharing some really nice Italian food and Baskin & Robbins ice cream. We caught up, and then we Mizells drove back to our house while McNabs continued what was a long overdue holiday. Seeing my old friend reminded me of all the ideas I have absorbed from her, and I have been thinking about what Dolores's friendship has meant to me for the past week.

For a few years after that first fateful joke, Dolores sat beside me every Wednesday in choir practice. I occasionally had to take time off for pregnancies and babies, but Dolores was always there to welcome me back. We talked in the back of the Alto section, and I think Fred often gave her warning looks (I avoided eye contact), but talking to me was always more important to her than listening to the basses attempt their parts. Dolores and I worked together for a year with a small group of the college students at church. (I think, in hindsight, that God placed her there as supervision for me while I was attempting to mentor people with even less life experience than myself.) Over time Dolores became a friend and mentor that I would go to for advice or to bounce ideas off, but mostly, I watched and listened to a life well-lived, and unknowingly, I absorbed some of her ideas and attitudes.

If you look around at any church, it is easy to find older women who can teach you how to decorate your house, dress well, or how to follow all the unwritten social rules so that you can fit in well and represent your family respectably. There are a few who would be glad to hand you their neat and tidy set of legalistic rules about living a Christian life. There are plenty of women who can guide you to planning the perfect women's event with perfectly decorated tables. It is not difficult to find women who complain about their (perfectly good) husbands or throw their hands up in frustration about their out-of-control teenagers or young adult children. It is quite easy to find women who think of their faith as an accessory to their life, but very, very difficult indeed to locate someone who sees her faith in the Christian God of the Bible as a lens for viewing her life and family. Dolores is the rare kind of Christian woman, the kind that lets her faith permeate through every bit of her experience. That is the kind of woman I want to be some day, maybe when I am fiftyish (although I know what I am, and I might need more time).

When I was struggling with my own feelings of insignificance in staying home with little dirty kids and mountains of dirty laundry, Dolores leaned in and said that she had a very hard time with those feelings too. About 25 years ago, she told God, in her characteristically frank, no-frills style, "Well, God, I think the most important decision I will make today is whether to wash the whites or the colored clothes. I'm just going to do it to the best of my ability, to honor you in the small stuff." This is not a Prayer Book kind of a prayer, but if it was good enough for Dolores, it was good enough for me. I still pray that prayer when I have difficulty having a positive and thankful attitude.

When I was struggling with having two, and then three little girls, and when I was thinking very hard about what I wanted to teach them and how, so that they would know, even in a shallow culture that their heart mattered more than their appearance, Dolores jumped in again. She told me, "whenever anyone would compliment the beauty of one of my girls in presence of the others, without noticing the others, I just told the girls that people look at the outside, but God sees our hearts. What is on the inside is more important than the way you look." I absorbed this speech at least 5 years ago, and my girls get a similar reminder several times a week. They will for as long as they live with me.

I have watched Dolores behave in a respectful manner toward people in authority even when she fundamentally disagreed. I have observed her not caring or even noticing whether she met with the approval of people, even people that others considered important. I have noticed her serving others in the background without ever looking for recognition or praise. I have been nearby while she has loved and shepherded her girls through high school, university, marriage, and the motherhood of now three grandchildren. I enjoy hearing about how her girls still like to be together as adults. I have seen her marriage with Fred, one characterized by affection and friendship, by shared goals and mutual respect. I know what she has sown, and I see what she reaps; and I want a life like that.

I know Dolores isn't perfect. She would tell me she is still a work in progress and that God isn't finished with her yet. I know that's true, but I really appreciate how she took the time to share some of her life and wisdom with a loud, funny, uber-opinionated girl who needed a little guidance in the youngest stages of marriage and motherhood. Dolores's girls and her husband know how great she is, but seeing her on my side of the ocean, reminded me. Dolores would most definitely have censored this piece on my blog, if she could have, because she sincerely doesn't like the spotlight; but when a woman lives a good life, a life marked by consistent loyalty to God and the application of His truth to the minutia of the everyday, somebody really ought to say something. Today it's me. The legacy of Dolores' life and faith lives on, not only in her girls and in her marriage, but in mine. I don't look a bit like Dolores in any physical way, but I hope that one day that my life and faith will resemble hers, and that I will be able to bless my girls and maybe even someone else the way Dolores blessed me during the early chapters of my married life.

Proverb 31: 28-31 says--

Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also and he praises her. Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.