Marion Graham

So many of us today spend our lives running around trying to accomplish something, experience something, or whatever. We have done this to such a degree that it can feel like we are on shaky ground. What is there to support us? Who is there to support us? All of you who had the privilege of knowing Marion Graham would have experienced a little less of this shakiness. Here was this quiet unassuming woman, who was faithfully present, faithfully acting to lift you up and knew when it was helpful to speak. It would be easy to miss it, but if you were in Marion’s life you were the better for it. In that simple and beautiful reality, her life speaks to us greatly about our life with God.

It takes a rare and special kind of faith to be like Marion, someone who was known for what she helped others to achieve. Her life was spent lifting up others and helping them to become what they were meant to be. Isn’t this something we all want and need? When she worked as a secretary her bosses would say something like, “we can only do this because of Marion”. Her husband could only do what he did because he had her support. Her kids remember her consistent guiding and supportive hand. I’m sure a few of you can remember something about this as well.

Most of us have experienced this kind of support at least once in our lives and we should be deeply thankful for it, but a natural response to that thanks should be that we live it out too. People around you need that gentle and loving support more than you may realize. They need someone to lift them up so they can become what they were meant to be.

This supporting another can be difficult and scary because it often means giving up something or putting something to the side, so someone might be lifted up, but it is so important. Marion’s whole life and our experience of it can testify to that.

Marion has pointed the way for us to know who we can be to lift up others, but ultimately, and even more importantly she has pointed us to the one who is quietly and gently supporting us even now. He is so quiet and gentle and so focused on us that he can go unnoticed. Of course, this is the God we have come to know in Jesus Christ. Looking back at Marion’s life reminds us that the relationships we need, that support us, uphold us, and lift us up are often the relationships that don’t stand out the most or aren’t the most obvious at least until their gone. God in His humility is not going to force himself into your lives, but he is there in the background trying to help you through, whatever it is.

I guess that is my first big challenge for you today. Take a look around and look for what God has brought into your life. Spend some time in quiet and ask God to come close. He is there wanting to support you, just as he supported Marion so that she could support others.

That is the thing about lifting up others. As we said before, it can be scary. Who is going to support us if we support others? Won't I just become a doormat? We can support others because we know God is always faithful in supporting us. I’m sure Annie and Don found it easier to support others because they knew the support of their mother. We have the powerful loving support of God and because of that, there is practically nothing we can’t walk into or give.

In the end, at least for the time being, we walk into death. Marion could die with trust, even in the difficulty of the last few years, because she knew the God who has given her everything and has supported her through everything, would be bringing her through this as well.

That is what we were reminded of in our reading. Not only does God support you, but He has already gone ahead of you, preparing your way. If he is preparing our way through death, into a life to come, there is literally nothing else that he can’t overcome and help us through.

What an amazing thing it is to be supported by so great a love. All of you who had known Marion have begun to experience it. Take it as a kind of invitation to experience even more with God. It also becomes an invitation to live into this kind of gentle and generous support for others, so that they too might meet God in you. Let us together hold onto the truly good things we have met in Marion so that we might share the even greater things of God. AMEN