Ripples

By G. E. Shuman

I recently made a very quick trip over to Central Maine. The purpose of my trip was to attend a beautiful summertime memorial service for my great-aunt Alice, who passed away last December. I know the readers of this column didn’t know Aunt Alice, but I wish you all could have. She was an amazing person.

Because of other commitments I needed to make the trip in one day, by myself, and I was not sure if I should even go. Today I am very sure I needed to go. The service was held at an aging and beautiful Christian campground called Lakeside. Hugging the edge of one of Maine’s most beautiful lakes, with tiny cottages filled with friends and relatives of like Christian faith, Lakeside was one of Alice’s (and my) favorite places in the world. Many of those friends and relatives came to that service, to share memories and stories of how this one life had so positively affected their own. I had heard some, but not all of the stories before. At the risk of boring readers who could not have possibly known my Aunt Alice, I would like to very briefly tell you a little about this great woman.

Alice was born on July 15th, 1908, in a small coastal Maine town. Yes, I said 1908. She was only seven years old when her dear mother passed away, and Alice had to help care for her brothers and sisters. One gentleman at the service mentioned that at this young age Alice took her even younger sister along to school with her, as there was no one at home to care for her. We were also told that in those same years, Alice walked home from school each lunch time, to help prepare the meal for her family. Years later this young lady proved that even the challenges of such great adversity do not have to hinder success, as Alice earned the title of valedictorian of her graduating class in high school. After high school Alice began Bible College, only to be faced with what some would consider even greater adversity. It happened that one of her sisters, (my grandmother) soon became ill, and called Alice home to Maine to help care for her family. Alice went, willingly putting her own life and plans on hold, indefinitely. In those days a few great people did sacrificial things like that. Family meant, then, what family should mean now. What was thought could be several months of missed classes for Alice turned into many years, as her much beloved sister soon passed away. Yes, her sister died. Alice’s commitment to that family, my family, never did. She stayed in that home for twenty years, helping my grandfather raise my own father and his four siblings. As soon as the youngest was grown, Alice returned to school, bravely facing the challenges of a forty year old woman, in the late 1940’s, just beginning college. It was there that she met David, who would soon become her husband, and, one day, my great-uncle. As a couple they would find rich and rewarding success in life together. It was richness that had nothing to do with making money, and success in areas far superior to any of the things offered by this world. Alice and David were never well known, other than by those of us who have these memories of them to share, and of course, by the God of the universe, Himself. Their fame rested in spending sixteen years as Christian missionaries to the country of Japan. Then, the remainder of their lives were invested, (not spent,) in sharing God’s love with nearly every person they met.

I thought about relating these things to you as I stood on the deck at my cousin’s camp on the lake, shortly after that memorial service. Adults were inside chatting and eating. Kids were on the shore tossing rocks into the nearly still water. I noticed that the rocks made those familiar, inevitable, ever-expanding ripples outward in all directions on the surface of the lake. It is sharing an old analogy to write of the ripples of a person’s life spreading out as ripples on a pond, growing ever larger and larger, affecting everyone they come into contact with. Old analogy or not, that is precisely the way it was with my Aunt Alice. I have since thought much about this, and find it interesting that life’s ripples spread out not only through space, but also through time, touching people in ways and days we may never know of.

My Dad once said these words of simple advice to me: “If you can ever do something for somebody, do it.” That attitude, if not the words themselves, certainly came from his, and my, Aunt Alice, whom he loved as his very mother. It occurs to me that if Alice had not influenced my Dad to become the caring Christian man that he would be, my own mother may never have even married him. I, then, would have not been born at all, and you would just now be finishing reading someone else’s column.