“Oh, they tell me of a home where my friends have gone
Oh, they tell me of a land far away
Where the Tree of Life is in eternal bloom
And sheds it’s fragrance on an unclouded day.”
This week marks my friend Sydney Browning’s birthday. She was a year behind me in college, but way ahead of me in everything else.
She was the kind of friend you looked forward to knowing your whole life. Even as you were in the moment – laughing with her, enjoying a glass of tea and a tale of some wild misadventure, or regaling each other with the antics of someone you both knew and liked – you could smile to think of having these happy conversations with her for long, long years to come.
She was enjoying exactly that kind of conversation with some of her Texas church friends, sitting around the foyer of their church, waiting for choir practice to start, when a gunman walked in and took all those years away. He took a lot of young people’s years away that night.
Actually, he didn’t really take them from Sydney, or the others … only from the rest of us, who were somewhere safe, and content, and smiling, somewhere way back in our minds, thinking of the times we’d still have with them.
A few months earlier, not long after the Columbine shooting, Sydney had written me a letter describing a classroom discussion that tragedy had prompted among her inner-city Fort Worth high school students.
“Miss,” one of them had asked, “would you take a bullet for us?”
“I told them I couldn’t predict for sure,” she said, “but I hoped I would.”
“Why?” another student wanted to know.
“Two reasons,” Sydney said. “First of all, I am the only person in this room who I’m sure would go to heaven. Second, I am the only person in this room who has health insurance.”
It is a wonderful thing to be so sure that someone is in heaven. But then, a lot of the fun of knowing Sydney was the fact that she was so sure of so many things …
… that her children’s choir was ‘The Best Children’s Choir In North Texas’ (for so their T-shirts said) …
… that her nephews were about the finest combination of little-boy DNA God ever came up with …
… that Dwight Yoakum and ABBA and the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir all belonged in the same CD case …
… that no cowboy, no matter how good-looking, was worth fiddlin’ with if he didn’t know who Lottie Moon was. (“Just too much to teach him,” Sydney said.)
She had some things to teach all of us.
A friend of mine once told me he measures people, in part, by how they regarded his wife. “No one,” he says, “can be my true friend, unless he treats my wife with honor and respect.”
By that definition alone, Sydney Browning was a wonderful friend of Jesus Christ – because, more maybe than any person I ever knew, she loved His Bride … and treated her with the kind of genuine respect she rarely gets anymore.
Sydney dearly, passionately loved church – all of it: the hymns and the history, the doctrines and covenants, the choirs and committees and robes and revivals. The faith of good people, and the truth they believe in.
Her favorite professor, D.C. Martin, urged her to join a congregation, not just with her letter, but with her life, her love, and her service.
Following that advice, she said, was “a constant source of joy.”
Sydney herself could be a considerable source of joy – not just to family and friends, but to a great many of the restaurant waiters and third-grade singers and apartment managers and back-row ushers and Cowtown gang-bangers who crossed her crowded path. She knew how to engage with them all.
When she ate in a little café, or had occasion to stay the night in a motel, she liked to write the managers, later, and tell them how the service was. She once happened upon the Texas Commissioner of Education at an event ... walked over, stuck out her hand, and introduced herself.
“I work for you,” Sydney said. “You should know me.”
She kept a lot of us honest and laughing and on our toes. She also found ways – in a letter, in a quip, in those conversations over a glass of tea – to let us know that she took us seriously.
This was the glory of Sydney. She took people and church and life and especially God seriously.
Not many people do, really. Which is why so few enjoy life as much as Sydney did. And does.
Along with that last letter, she tucked her church’s Sunday bulletin into the envelope. “No real reason,” she scribbled in a margin. “Just thought you might want to see it.” On the bulletin were her notes from the sermon for that day – part of a series her pastor was preaching on “Lies Christians Want To Believe.”
The lie for that morning was, “Life is fair.”
“Bad things happen to Christians,” too, Sydney wrote. “But God is faithful. Even in bad things, God works for the good of those who love Him.”
Sydney believed that, and knew – as so many of us came to know anew, in the weeks after her death – that His grace really is sufficient, and that He whispers that grace in so many, in such unexpected, in curiously ordinary ways.
Through the kisses and giggles of a little curly-topped child.
In the old, favorite stories and silly habits and deep affections we share with our families.
With the thrill of His own music, soaring in our souls and ringing out, bold and clear, in our own strong, fragile voices.
Through the simple pleasure of pews, and Bibles, and good church folk.
In the familiar smiles of long-faithful friends, who know how to tease and trust us.
All of these graces, and so many more, Sydney knew in remarkably full measure … and each of them drew her, as graces should, to the Lord of love and truth, Who created her for His own.
And Whom she now knows to be more wondrous than even her sweet songs could tell.
“Make me proud to know you!” she used to holler after her students, as they streamed out the door after class.
No one ever had to say it to her.
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