Jesus is the Person who stands solitary, demarcating time as we know it. One does not squander one's time considering the One by whom time is measured. One does not abuse one's time following him whose thought, words and deeds have so deeply framed human history.

No king, president, general, scientist, mogul of commerce or philosopher has so shaped civilization as has the power of those 1,000 or so days in which this simple Peasant moved among us. A carpenter, whose only brush with the halls of civil power stood in the capacity of a criminal condemned to death.

And that is the paradox. The events which surrounded him, his teachings, or even the cataclysmic days of his death, burial and resurrection; none of these things wrought this compelling supremacy. While each of these events demands preemptive significance, it was his patently audacious claims of identity--who he is--that credentialed them.

"Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father's house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you." -- John 14:1

Somewhere in a hospital in the city of Chicago a child was born to the Rev. William Roy Morris and his wife, Addie, a beautiful child, a girl. She was the first among six. They gave her the name, Carolyn May. Ninety-four summers have come and gone, warming the face of the earth since that day, July 21, 1920. Carolyn would have been 95 just a few months from this hour.

Once her father had graduated from Moody Bible Institute, the family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he continued his studies at Southwestern Baptist Seminary. His seminary education was interrupted owing to a call from a church in Oklahoma; the family moved to that state, and during the depression years, lived in various small, dusty towns while Roy (as he was known) pastored small churches in rural Oklahoma. And there lived and ministered, during what has become known as The Great Depression.

A prosaic beginning, perhaps, but a beginning nonetheless. And Carolyn was there.

Carolyn was there.

Drab, olive-brown passenger cars swayed in discordant rhythm with clacking, dispassionate wheels rolling over hot tracks. It was an Oklahoma August in 1937. It isn't difficult to imagine the scene, forlorn with grief, disturbed by anxiety emanating from thoughts and feelings of what will become of us?

Carolyn stared disconsolately at the countryside rolling by the window, thinking the thoughts one thinks at times when a teenage girl has lost her father, who was also her dearest friend. Jeanne, her sister, sat next to her, reading a magazine, also attempting to escape the pain. Billy and Philip in the seat behind. From Ponca City, OK, to Kansas City, to Birmingham, AL, and thence, to Atlanta. The train smelled of acrid smoke, grease and noise.

My mother's husband, our father, rode the train in a casket in the car reserved for baggage. He smelled nothing. No cinders for him in his dark stillness.

"If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going."

Among the thoughts settling in my eighteen-year- old sister's mind were thoughts of the funeral, thoughts of what life on earth might be with daddy in the heaven of which he spoke so often. The funeral services in Dewey, OK, were attended by people from all over the state, the church packed like an anthill. Roy Morris had been the minister of several churches throughout eastern Oklahoma. My father believed that a pastor shouldn't stay in one church more than three years, so the family moved from town to depression-era town.

As the train pulled into the Atlanta station, the aunts and uncles in Georgia gathered to welcome us. I suppose it was a welcome. I can well imagine the doubts and apprehensions which surely accompanied taking on the responsibility of sustaining a widow and her five children, however close they had been growing up in the small county seat of Mt. Vernon, Georgia.

For Carolyn, of course, indeed for all the children, these were people she had never met. She wondered if she would like them. Suffocating heat required that the train windows remain open. She wondered if the smoke was making her face black and dirty. What would her new family think of a dirty face?

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. -- Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross

Thomas said to Him, "Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?"

After settling into an old house and a new home in Atlanta, the down payment of which came from our father's insurance, Carolyn finished her high school diploma at Commercial High School and at 18, went to work as a secretary. Up to the end, Carolyn could write shorthand at 100 wpm!

For reasons unknown to the rest of us, God invested all his creative skills in making Carolyn more lovely to look at than most of us. Hence, in the good old days when the nation's airlines hired only young, beautiful, single women as "stewardesses," Carolyn signed on with Eastern Airlines.

While in New York, at stewardess training school, the war with Japan ended. A Life Magazine photographer snapped a picture of a sailor planting a big kiss on a young lady in the middle of Times Square and printed it on the front cover of the magazine, and circulated throughout the nation. It became one of the most popular photographs of the Second World War. Carolyn witnessed that event.

While training in New York, Carolyn received word from a young paratrooper named Lavern Miller, that he was recently honorably discharged from the United States Army. He wanted her to come to California to marry him. They had dated prior to Lavern's deployment in Europe, while he was training in Atlanta. I remember those dates. On occasion, I even went along.

I remember Lavern's spit-shined boots, his razor-creased uniform, his service hat placed jauntily on his brow. He was to me, in 1942, a 5 or 6 year old boy, a magnificent hero. Turned out that he became a real American hero of that terrible conflict called the "Battle of the Bulge." He was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action, The Purple Heart, and also cited for the Bronze Star, which, due to bureaucratic glitch, he never actually received.

Apparently the call of love and marriage was too much for Carolyn, for she left her opportunity as an airline stewardess of a major airline, came to California, married Lavern and the rest is history. A history that included her sister, Jeanne, following her and marrying Lavern's brother, Carl, thus creating families of double-cousins.

They purchased a tract home, very popular in those days, in Lakewood, California, where they raised their family of three children, Nancy, Robert, and Steve. They purchased the home in 1955, and lived in it 60 years.

Lavern spent his entire career working for the Long Beach naval shipyard, and Carolyn, in addition to being a mother and a housewife, managed to accumulate more credits at Long Beach City College than it would take for a four-year Bachelor's degree.

Carolyn loved to play the piano. I can remember many an evening when Lavern, Nancy and sometimes others, would gather around the piano and sing songs that ranged from Christian hymns to the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo." She and Lavern loved to dance which included ballroom, swing and square dancing. They had a good time. They had a good time! They enjoyed their life together.

Some have called Carolyn a "strong" woman. In the course of her lifetime she had to bear the massive burdens of the nation's depression, her father's untimely death, her mother's chronic, lifetime hospitalization, struggling to start a family on a woefully inadequate income, the loss of a child, yet through it all she retained her dignity and her overwhelming desire to attend to the needs of others. For all of us in her family who have benefited from that desire, we will be forever in her debt. She was a child of her culture. She was also a woman of steel whose life radiated the sweetness of jasmine and violets.

When it comes to faith and relationship with God, Carolyn was a Christian woman. She knew and loved the Lord, Jesus Christ. And I would be remiss to her memory if I did not share with you what she considered her central focus, her guiding Light . . .

Jesus said to Thomas, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me."

The Psalmist speaks of his relationship with God . . .

The Psalmist had confidence in his faith, confidence in his God. Carolyn also had confidence in her faith, as Paul in his epistle to the Philippians writes:

For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. -- Phil. 1:6

In addition to being a coveted friend, Carolyn was a Mother and a Grandmother, and someone almost like a mother, a beloved aunt: Carolyn was a faithful companion and confidant, even in the most difficult and trying of times. She dedicated her life to caring and providing for her children both physically and emotionally. She always seemed to know how to help them to overcome problems and thrive, in spite of the problems. A mother's love is irreplaceable, which makes losing her to death an incredibly painful experience.

While sons and daughters of all ages carry within their hearts a dull and lasting ache where they once felt love and security, it is important they continue searching for the happiness their mother always desired for them.

"Once upon a time an angel held my hand,
Wiped away my tears and helped me understand.
Yes, our time on earth seems brief,
But there are lessons to be learned,
Ev'ry day God gives us
A brand new page to turn.
Every chapter full of memories,
Times of joy and tears,
For she has loved completely,
She wiped away our fears,
With gentle words of wisdom
She led us on our way,
Seeing light in everyone,
She gave them all bouquets
You know, angels come in many forms.
For me it was my mother,
Help me Lord to keep alive
Her memory here forever.
I pray that I may someday be
Everything she hoped for me,
And that smiling down from heaven,
She will know that -- she did good.
A mom's hug lasts long after she lets go.
God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers."
-- Jewish proverb

"My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart -- a heart so large that everybody’s joys found welcome in it." -- Mark Twain

In conclusion, I must say that Carolyn was my big sister.

"Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life." -- Linus, in referring to his big sister Lucy -- from "Peanuts" by Charles Schultz

The dubious wisdom of Linus aside, I hasten to add . . .

"She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. And then, of course, there are those days, in which she's the reason you wish you were an only child." -- Barbara Alpert

"Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, sisterly kindness, and in your sisterly kindness, love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."
-- 2 Peter 1:5-8

This was my Carolyn.

This was OUR Carolyn.

-- PDM