First Portrait
My first soul-mate best friend forever came in high school. Her dad was the director of our youth choir at church. She and most all the other kids went to a rival highschool, so we didn't see each other on a daily basis. But once our friendship started we spent hours on the phone and in each other's hearts; then shared a gap year with car privileges and free time when we weren't working.
Early that fall my parents were invited to the inauguration of the new president of a small college four hours away from our home. I went along and was captivated by the beautiful Michigan autumn, the sleepy campus, and the vison of the handsome young president who would go on to reform the college. Sitting in the audience under the east campus maples shedding their full glory that sunny day, I picked up a large yellow leaf and, with my trusty Rapidograph pen, sketched the ceremony unfolding in front of us. It was later to be a prized possession, framed in the president's home office.
By the next January I made application to attend Hillsdale College, but the president's assistant visiting my parents warned them that the school (at that time) was not big on the art department, and that I'd do better elsewhere. Dreamy me--I wasn't interested in doing art as a college course. I only did it for fun. I did want a well-rounded liberal arts education, though, and, well, didn't I say I'd fallen in love with the campus? BFF made plans to enroll in the Canadian Bible college her parents had attended. So off we went, exchanging a few letters over the many miles when we had time from our school activities.
At college I set a course for getting the best out of every department, filling up the spaces with college choir and chorale, and an occasional art class. The small art department consisted of a quirky bachelor potter and an old old-maid drawing/painting teacher. I loved Joy Stewart. I learned from her to listen, for she would couch the needed piece of instruction between two praising compliments.
Karen came home from Bible college for summer break, engaged and full of wedding plans. As I watched her make the comforter for her marriage bed, we talked about her fiance and their life ahead preparing for missions in Canada. Bob came down, we had a wedding. I remember daisies. She now had a new best friend forever and I would no longer see her on summer breaks. She continued to write occasionally when we returned to our schools.
The following summer I was napping in my mom's room while she prepared our Sunday feast when I was wakened by a phone call from a girl who'd been in our choir, telling me the horrible news of Karen's death. Expecting her first child, she and her young husband had been traveling across rough terrain when the tail pipe was knocked into the trunk of the car without their knowledge. Karen, her head down on her husband's lap, napping as he drove, was poisoned by carbon monoxide. I hung up the telephone, unbelieving, and flung myself across my mother's bed in greatest grief. But in the midst of all that, tenderly, my heart was first made to acknowledge the sovereignty of God. I knew that this tragedy could not be pointless. I believe it was there I began to understand that He rules everything, always.
The next year I took an advanced painting class where we were allowed to produce whatever projects we liked. I decided to paint the lovely wedding snapshot I had of my friend, hoping to make a gift of it to her parents whom I loved. It's likeness was so perfect that it was there I understood that I had especial talent for the human face.
In sending me a photo of the painting for this blog, her dear mom wrote me that in the early hours of her grief she prayed for a different vision of her daughter than the one of death—one of what she might be experiencing in heaven. God gave back to her then a memory of Karen, running through the Oak Brook polo fields with me and my sisters where we had made daisy chains for our hair. “Her laughter and expression of 'pure joy' has stayed with me through the years....I think of her in heaven, surrounded by children and flowers and 'pure joy'.”
