Thy Kingdom Come (Dedicated to Sarah Chidgey Hughes)
This week I stood along side my Ecclesia community to mourn the passing of and celebrate the life of a dear sister, Sarah Chidgey Hughes. I have never experienced death in such a way before. At only 28 years of age, an aggressive form of cancer claimed Sarah’s body. But even in the midst of intense suffering and pain, there was never a moment that her ailments dampened her soul or the selfless love that she so freely gave to everyone she came in contact with. More people wanted to attend her Memorial service last Saturday than could possibly fit inside of our church building. The service was also broadcast live over the internet with an excess of 400 viewers from all over the world tuning in. While we mourned the loss of her companionship, two things became glaringly obvious – that Sarah was dearly loved here on earth, and that she was now fully known and loved in the presence of the creator of Heaven and earth.
It was in August of 2010 that I received an email about Sarah’s diagnosis. At the time I was away from home spending some time with my grandparents in Gulf Shores, AL. The email provided me with a link to Sarah’s blog with an entry that detailed the beginning of what was obviously going to be a long, difficult struggle for Sarah and her fiancé, Eric. I distinctly remember reading her words aloud to my family with tears running down my cheeks and a huge baseball of a lump in my throat. As I read, my spirit was stirred. I sat by the ocean that night in contemplation thinking about this loving, sweet-spirited girl and the seemingly undeserving afflictions she was encountering and yet graciously accepting. One introspective question kept finding its way to the surface as an awareness as my own selfishness and apathy was brought into light – “What am I doing with my life that is worth anything at all?” It was this question that started me on a journey that has changed the trajectory of where my life is headed and intertwined my spiritual formation with Sarah’s story.
Sarah continued to chronicle her journey over the next 9 months through a blog (http://www.sarahchidgey.blogspot.com/) and the spirit of courage and love with which she embraced the path set before her caused her story to spread like wildfire to people literally all over the world. Each day at the close of her blog entry she would sign-off with her signature phrase “shine bright firefly, shine bright” and her reader’s comments and words of encouragement would pour in. Many comments began with the words “You don’t know me, a friend told me about your blog…” and contained the phrase “Your story has changed my life”.
Whether you knew Sarah personally or not, you would soon learn something about her that was apparent to everyone – Sarah was special.
These past few months at Ecclesia our pastor, Chris Seay, has been taking us through a series of messages about Heaven. We have been meditating on the values of the Kingdom of Heaven – the Kingdom in which we were created to live and thrive in. I suppose it was the combination of this week’s events and our meditating on Heaven that brought me to the realization of an idea I had been trying to articulate for a long time – the only things we can do that really matter and have eternal significance are those in which the values of Heaven are made known here on earth; values that give us a glimpse of another reality in which we are invited to live.
Elizabeth and Dustin Hatfield are my dear friends and leaders of the small group I have been attending for the past year and a half or so. It was in their home that I first met Sarah during a time when she was living with them. A few months after she had moved in, Sarah learned about her diagnosis with stage 4, terminal cancer. Because of this, she and Eric decided to move their wedding plans up to the following weekend, giving them only a day to finalize their arrangements. Within 24 hours, the community of Ecclesia came together to throw for Sarah and Eric what many would call the most beautiful wedding celebration they had ever seen. Soon after, Sarah began a long process of treatments that after many months did not show any improvement in her condition. Eventually a tumor wrapped itself around her spine and resulted in the loss of her mobility from the waist down. It was determined that the treatments were doing more harm to her body than good, and Sarah was told she was going to be sent home to enjoy the rest of her life.
At the time Sarah and Eric were living in a 2nd floor apartment where Eric was carrying her up and down the stairs. Knowing that it was no longer feasible or safe for Sarah to live in the 2nd floor apartment, Elizabeth and Dustin conspired with Sam and Bennett Walton, another newlywed couple in the small group, to arrange a house swap. The plan was that Sam and Bennett would move out of their beautiful first floor townhouse and into Elizabeth and Dustin’s 3-story townhouse. This would open up the Walton’s place for Eric, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Dustin to move in together and collectively help care for Sarah.
I was deeply moved when I received word of the plans for this house swap and continually battled tears when the thought of it would cross my mind. “This is how community ought to be!” I kept thinking. I felt so deeply honored to be a part of a community whose members were demonstrating selfless, inconvenient love for one another. My friends were putting aside their own desires and displacing themselves from where they were most comfortable to care for a very sick young woman and to hold up the arms of her loving husband. While they professed that they had only done what anyone would do, I knew that their actions of love were not from this world. I knew the community I was experiencing and the tears that continued to come were rooted in the soil of the Kingdom of Heaven being shown here on earth.
Jack Wisdom, one of the elders who speaks often at Ecclesia, is a successful lawyer here in Houston, but also a bible scholar who not only attended seminary just “for fun”, but also graduated at the top of his class. He often uses a phrase referring to this or that as being a part of “the bogus world’s system”. At first I wasn’t quite sure I understood what he meant by this, but I have come to identify with this phrase as it has become clearer to me what the values of the Kingdom of Heaven are. I have heard the Kingdom of Heaven referred to as “the upside down Kingdom”, meaning it’s values are opposite of the world’s in every way. Where the world values greed, the Kingdom of Heaven values generosity. Where the world values retribution, the Kingdom of Heaven values mercy and grace. Where the world values success and exaltation, the Kingdom of Heaven values humbleness and meekness. Where the world values independence, the Kingdom of Heaven values community. Where the world values the love of self, the Kingdom of Heaven values the love of others. The list goes on and on. Jesus came to turn the world upside down – to tell us that the first should be last, that we should love our enemies, and that we should lose our lives to find them.
I began to understand that in my own search for meaning, the things that I had come to believe were of real significance were all instances of the values of the Kingdom of Heaven being manifest here on earth. I had never thought of it in such terms before.
Shane Claiborne says “Conversion is not an event but a process, a process of slowly tearing ourselves away from the clutches of the culture.” Surely this is what it means for us to have a renewing of our minds. Slowly we stop seeing the world through the paradigm of American culture and begin to see it with fresh eyes. Slowly we begin to understand that the things the world tells us to pursue will really just leave us with emptiness, loneliness, and heartache. But Jesus offers us another way to live. He says, “Let me show you a different Kingdom, whose pursuit will not return void.”
This is why Sarah was so special. This is why thousands of people have followed her blog and why more people wanted to attend her memorial than there was possibly room for. Sarah understood what it meant to live inside of the Kingdom of Heaven. She lived it’s values every day in ways both big and small.
In one of the last entries in Sarah’s blog, Eric wrote to tell the many who were following her story that Sarah’s time on earth was short. “Currently, she is having few lucid moments, and the ones she is granted are spent straining for those three precious words that exemplify her life… “I love you.”" Eric would later recount that over the last 9 months as all of the peripheral fanfare that made up Sarah’s personality was stripped away, one thing remained – a gentle, quiet love that could not be extinguished. Underneath it all, Sarah was love at the very core of her being, and it was this love that Sarah had used as the foundation to build her life upon. As her earthly body faded it became increasingly evident that a light was shining brighter and brighter from within. While in her presence during her last days I was never more convinced that we are absolutely spiritual beings who are temporarily encumbered by these bodies of flesh and blood.
Around 10:30 last Wednesday morning, Elizabeth sent out an email to update our small group on Sarah’s transition. In her email she said that at 4:15 that morning Sarah passed from this life to the next to the sound of Eric’s singing, and reminders of how much she is loved. I choked back tears as I wondered what it must have been like to hear Eric singing love and comfort to his bride in the early hours of the morning? My guess is that any person on this earth would be moved to many tears at the witness of such an event. Tears not of sadness, necessarily. But tears brought about by the overwhelming tangible presence of love that could pierce even the hardest of hearts. I can only imagine that it must have been one of those rare moments, where just briefly Heaven and earth became indistinguishable as a result of that overwhelming love filling the room. The lines between our present world and the one that is to come blurred – by love that is not of this world, but from the next. It really was Heaven on earth.
A friend posted on Sarah’s Facebook wall the words “Jesus, thank You for giving us Sarah. Sarah, thank you for showing us Jesus.” Story after story has poured in of the Jesus that Sarah showed. Everything from adopting refugee families, to sending little notes of gratitude and love to individuals she barely knew, to helping terminally ill individuals find comfort and joy in their last days. Hundreds, maybe thousands have claimed that knowing Sarah has changed their lives. What more could a person hope for at the end of their life? Sarah accomplished much within her short 28 years here on earth. I can only hope that my own life will contain even a fraction of the meaning and significance that hers so obviously has. I left a message of my own on Sarah’s Facebook wall, “Shining brighter now than ever before. Congratulations Sarah, on a fight well fought, a race well run. “
I suppose it is in the company of death that the frailty of life becomes evident and the reality of eternity becomes known. In the days that followed Sarah’s passing from this life into the next, Heaven and earth didn’t seem like they were all that far apart. In a recently conversation I had with Elizabeth, she said this of Sarah’s legacy – “We prayed and asked God to heal the body of one girl. But instead He used her story to heal the hearts of many. And that is a story we have to keep telling.”
And so Lord we pray, our Father in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen
In loving memory, dedicated to Sarah Hughes. Thoughts and prayers for Eric Hughes and the Hughes and Chidgey families.
Kevin
