Nursing a cold drink in a shaded courtyard, tired from tromping up and down the cobble-stoned hills of
Sure enough. There was my friend Tom Mullen, entertaining a table full of companions, no doubt expounding on the vagaries of old age and diabetes.
I stood up. “Tom!” I yelped. “Tom Mullen!”
His wife Nancy heard me first. She jumped to her feet, shrieking. Tom looked around to see what all the commotion was about. It may be a cliché, but his mouth dropped open, literally, when he saw me waving. I ran across the courtyard for a bear hug.
Small world.
I can’t believe I won’t hear that laugh again – a laugh recognizable thousands of miles across the sea, in a courtyard ringing with the melodious murmur of Spanish-speaking people. That distinctively mid-western, by-gosh-by-golly-laugh; a laugh that cloaked an intelligence a mile wide; a spirituality two miles deep.
I met Tom nearly twenty years ago at one of the very first Ministry of Writing affairs at Earlham. I was new to this business of writing, but I was serious about it. My entire life was serious, for that matter. My youngest son, Joel, had just been diagnosed with moderate mental retardation. Life was a merry-go-round of doctor and therapy visits, sibling rivalry, marriage counseling, and Joel’s daily temper tantrums.
With just one published article to my credit, I heard Tom’s announcement about the Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship, and an idea surfaced, fully formed. I’d write a book of devotions about the grief I was experiencing as Joel’s mom.
If I’d known that day of Tom’s distinguished career – Dean of Students at
I cornered Tom at the end of the workshop.
His response was vintage Tom. “What do you mean, is it possible? This is a great idea! Write a proposal!”
Tom’s enthusiastic reception of my just-hatched idea lifted me out of the doldrums where I’d been stuck for months. A week later the proposal was written and in the mail. Several weeks after that the mailman delivered the letter of acceptance.
And so began a twenty year friendship with a man who would become my teacher, my mentor, my coach, and my encourager.
Thanks to Tom I wrote my way through denial, depression, and anger, until I found God in the midst of life with disability. Along the way I published three books – His Name is Joel: Searching for God in a Son’s Disability; A Place Called Acceptance: Ministry with Families of Children with Disabilities; and Autism & Alleluias.
Thanks to Tom, I learned to lighten up and laugh along the way. He even got me laughing at one of the darkest moments of early life with Joel. I told him about the impact grief had on my marriage – how one night my husband threw a glass of milk at me and I responded by throwing a glass of wine across the room, shattering it against the far wall.
“Write about it,” Tom said, which I did in His Name is Joel. Tom then proceeded to tell the story several times in his speeches. In Tom’s re-telling, it became downright funny. This was one of Tom’s greatest gifts – the ability to make us laugh at the hard stuff.
Tom was there when the storm of grief and the desire to write collided in my life. That storm could have drowned me in my own pity-party. But Tom threw me a life-preserver called “writing as ministry.” He helped me polish the rough edges of my emotional outpourings. He laughed with me. He cried with me. And always, always, always, he encouraged me.
That chance encounter in Old Town San Juan is a memory that makes me laugh out loud. What a wonderful reminder that the kingdom of God is a place where our lives are woven together in a gossamer web as beautiful, intricate, and resilient as a dew-encrusted spider web shining in the first light of morning.
I hope you know, as you go on to the first light of your new life, Tom, that you are one of the jewels in the web of my life. I will miss you.
