Immediately

A stirring passage from a post Wednesday at Charlotte was Both:

I was driving, Katie was in the front, and the boys in the back, of course. This is Michael’s car we are driving now, since it was the better car - the day he died, a notice came in the mail announcing it had been paid for. I saw the Bible he had on the ledge against the back window, and told Joseph to grab it and hand it to Katie.

Without thinking much about it, I told her to start reading from the Gospel of Mark. Why? There was a consciousness about it - both Michael and I love the Gospel of Mark. We liked talking about it. He was fascinated by what it reveals about Jesus and his disciples, especially in contrast to the popular view that what we have in the Twelve and the Master is a merry band of fellows completely in sync at all times. Well, when you read the Gospel of Mark, you see how false that image is. The apostles, besides being generally clueless, were also generally confused and intimidated by Jesus most of the time.

So I had her read aloud and after a couple of chapters, I stopped her, to see if she was paying attention to what she was reading.

“What word,” I asked, “are you reading over and over?”

She thought about it, and studied the pages.

“Immediately?”

A+.

Euthus. The Gospel of Mark is infused with a sense of urgency. Immediately he got up. Immediately they went out. Immediately.

And then…immediately the thought came to mind of how much this characterized Michael. As his friends said Sunday night, Michael was all about immediately. He was the one who got things going socially. At work, where ever he was working at the time, he was all about creatively assessing a situation, coming up with responses to those situations, getting this going and working hard to motivate others to get off their tails, get past their hesitancy and fear, and just do it. Immediately.

It struck me, partly in sadness, that it also characterized his way of going to Christ at the end. Immediately.