Extended Interviews
Mary Jenson
Author of Over Salad and Hot Bread: What an Old Friend Taught Me About Life
Probably the most significant event in my Christian life was not God getting me through the suicide of my father or the cancer death of my mother, though He did. It wasn’t the various and sundry crises of my children or my own fear issues, though He was there. It was the period of time when I decided to pray about my lack of passion for God and the day He gave it to me.
For years I had heard Dr. Bright admonish that we not lose our first love as per Revelation 2. I knew exactly what he was talking about but had no personal experience with that “first love.” I came to Christ out of obedience. I was a first born, after all. I loved God out of duty, experiencing feelings only during high emotional times—Christmas, Easter, memorial services and occasional sunsets.
But one day I’d had enough. I knew God loved me despite my lack of feelings, and I knew I wasn’t consciously withholding anything from Him. I was doing what I could with what I had. But I also knew I didn’t want to go on, year after year, in the same way. So I prayed that He’d give me that passion I was lacking. Period. I’m not sure how long I prayed that prayer. I bet God was waiting for it, though, because it didn’t take long for Him to answer. One day I realized that I loved Him. He’d given me a joyful, grinning, all-absorbing, body-, soul-, and-spirit-filling, feeling of love that has not gone away for an instant in five years.
This is proof to me of so many things: that God appreciates the role of emotions in our lives; that He can change our feelings not only about Himself but about other people, even those who have done us wrong; that He wants to be loved and He wants us to participate in that love. Sometimes “losing your first love” is an admonition not to find something that is lost, but to discover something waiting to be found.
God orchestrates our relationships. Most of us can point to people in our lives who were there for a season whose presence taught us something, maybe something we didn’t even realize we needed to learn.
Nancy was that for me. Seasoned by sun and wind, bent over like a tire jack, and a contemporary of my mother’s, we became fast friends in the late 90’s. So “fast,” in fact, that we decided to write a book together about intergenerational friendship. We had all the time in the world and no real deadline, so we worked sporadically, getting distracted by all sorts of easier pastimes. Like lunch.
But not far into our writing, Nancy was diagnosed with breast cancer that was already deadly. She chose not to treat it and she died just a few months later. The book was left in my hands. Pressured by time and word count, I began to think back on the impact Nancy had on my life and discovered three huge lessons in those short five years: she was quick to challenge any negative words I had, quick to admonish me to stop thinking about myself, and equally quick to encourage me to get involved in other’s lives. I knew my weaknesses; God used Nancy to get me to finally deal with them.
The attitudes Nancy gently drilled into me will carry me the rest of my life. My tribute to her came out in Over Salad and Hot Bread: What an Old Friend Taught Me about Life. It’s my documentation of growth, my testimony to how God uses friends in our lives—whether we recognize it at the time or not.
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