Good morning…
This morning in extra measure my soul lifts loving prayers for 93-year-old Betty Skinner. Today she and loved ones will lay to rest Bryant B. Skinner, Sr., a lifelong resident of Jacksonville, Florida, who died on March 10, 2019 at the age of 96. As Bryant’s obituary reads: “He married Betty Walthour of Birmingham, AL, in 1948. They had many happy years together and raised three sons and a daughter. Betty was a strong and dedicated supporter of Bryant’s many adventures.”
During my quiet time hours, I flip through the book chronicling Betty’s life, The Hidden Life Awakened by Kitty Crenshaw and Dr. Cathy Snapp. “She was bowled over by romantic love, and on June 12, 1948, Betty and Bryant married in a beautiful church ceremony,” I read. “Bryant took his young bride back to Jacksonville to begin their family. She was quite immature and their backgrounds were very different. He was from a powerful, rough and tumble, mostly male family in Florida that placed a high premium on work and productivity. She had been raised in the more genteel culture of the Deep South, where women were not supposed to be anything other than pretty. Because of that, Betty had no concept of what it meant to do work of any kind. The early years of their marriage were good, but when the newness wore off and ordinary life set in with its schedules and demands, their radically different personality differences caused their relationship to splinter. Betty had married a man whose voice was as strong as her mother’s.” (19)
I read a few more details: “Bryant loved parties and frenzied activity of any kind, including ball games, fishing trips, and gambling junkets. And he was always building things; not just houses but whole communities. He quickly became a successful businessman whose bottom line was, “What did you get done today?” Betty had a very different agenda. She was as compulsive about her need for privacy as he was about his need for people and productivity. She loved solitude and quiet, gray days and sunsets, and simple things such as walking on the beach and listening to the soothing rhythm of the waves. She had a sense of the possibility that there could be a rhythm and a balance to life because she saw it in nature and longed for it in her own world. She had no language for these contemplative yearnings at that time, just a gentle tug in her heart to ‘be’ rather than to ‘do.'” (20)
Having read and re-read, taught this sacred book and taught it again, I scour the pages for one memorable word. Button. I search for the word button. On page 88, I find the button story written in Betty’s own words: “I was beginning to learn a little about authentic love, and God patiently encouraged me with moments of heightened perception. I called them little aha moments; so that’s what that means! I remember one day in particular, shortly after I got home (from her hospital stay for clinical depression at age 42). Bryant had this habit of putting his shirt on the bedpost if a button was missing. He wouldn’t ask me to fix it; he would just put it here subtly saying, ‘Get it done.’ Well that brought out the resentment and anger in me that I could possibly muster. I had recommitted to the marriage and to learning how to love him, but there I was, pacing back and forth across the room looking at that shirt hanging there and experiencing the depths of negativity. It was just destroying me. I walked over to the sliding glass door feeling absolutely no sense of communion, totally drowning in a downward spiral of negativity when, suddenly, for the first time in my life, I felt the Spirit of God speaking to me. He was saying, ‘Betty, you’re still not getting it are you?’ I answered, ‘No, Lord, I’m still not getting it. I’m a long way from it today. This button thing has really got me down. I can sew the button on but I can’t do it in love, there’s no way.’ Then the little inner voice said, ‘Betty, let Me tell you something. You are not sewing that button on for Bryant, you are sewing it on for Me.’ God was saying to me, ‘Get your attention, get your focus, connect with My love,’ and it powerfully spoke to me. I can’t truthfully say that I was able to sew the button on in love that day, but it was a start and a huge help. If I sew the button on but I’m not sewing it on in love, then I’m just coping; I’m just getting by to please Bryant. I’m not free.” (89)
Betty’s wisdom sums up our learning: “It is not enough just to overcome. We must overcome in the Spirit of Love. In the restoration of the ruin, in the completion of the work we must endure. We must finish well. The sweetness of the fruit bears witness to our faithfulness to the task. In the strain we find our strength in Him.” (89)
Today I pray for Betty and for all of Bryant’s loved ones as they gather at 11:00 am at the First Presbyterian Church of Jacksonville to celebrate his well-finished life. May they each experience the sweetness of the fruit born in strain as they find their strength in God.
“Don’t work for the food that spoils. Work for the food that stays good always and gives eternal life. The Son of Man will give you this food, because on him God the Father has put his power” (John 6:27, NCV).
…Sue…
