Only remembered for what we have done.

I feel a bit nervous about writing this post.  I can feel that difference in my heart beating, my breath – the sensation at the top of my arms that also comes when I drink strong coffee.  It’s because I am afraid you will think I am showing off – and I’m not meaning to.  Well, then, you’ll just have to see what you think.

My daughters – my clever, funny, beautiful, kind, capable, visionary dreamers of daughters – sometimes make me CDs of music compilations, and these are always treasure troves of delight.  Yesterday in our little blue car, as we trundled along through the winding lanes of Sussex, between the farmers’ fields and beneath the great trees, one of these music compilations was playing, and my girls here and there singing along.  The great thing about these CDs, of course, is that I know only some of the songs when I am given them, so they come with fresh insights and bring new shafts of unexpected perspective and beauty.

The song I carried away in my heart from our travels yesterday was this lyrical, evocative, haunting ballad from Coope Boyes & Simpson, Only Remembered (I’ll linkify the title in case you have trouble with the embedded one here).

In case you couldn’t catch all the words (by John Tams), here they are:

Fading away like the stars in the morning

Losing their light in the glorious sun

Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling

Only remembered for what we have done

Only the truth that in life we have spoken

Only the seeds that in life we have sown

These shall pass onwards when we are forgotten

Only remembered for what we have done

Who'll sing the anthem and who'll tell the story

Will the line hold will it scatter and run

Shall we at last be united in glory

Only remembered for what we have done

As I listened to it, perhaps inevitably the question arose in my mind, have I done anything worth remembering?

As I see it, the harvest of my life, my offering to God, has been threefold: raising a family, writing books, preaching in church.

This autumn will see my fifteenth book published, and also is a season when I have been preaching in church again after several years’ silence.  

I am . . . not proud – grateful . . . that so many people have written to me or reviewed online, to say how much the books I have written meant to them.  Helped them, encouraged them, deepened their faith and showed them more of Jesus.  It’s what I hoped, of course.

This next week, I have a new book out – one I wrote over two years ago that I have struggled and struggled to get published, in the end self-publishing through my agent MacGregor Literary.

The picture at the top of this post is the cover art for that book (The Breath of Peace) just to give you a taster.  So breath-takingly beautiful, a picture that tells a story indeed, it was painted by my daughter Hebe Wilcock 

I’ll tell you more just as soon as it’s out on Amazon.

Then at the beginning of November my fifteenth book is out – The Wilderness Within You – a Lent book of conversations with Jesus – my conversations with Jesus, I mean, not just from the biblical record; stories.

And this morning in an hour or two I go to my church for the astonishing privilege of preaching the Gospel, opening the Scripture to help friends understand and see the Good News in our ordinary daily lives.

Only remembered for what we have done?  I expect I shall be remembered as that rude old woman who always left church early and wouldn’t support the quiz night.  Or as that difficult, tactless psycho who would never shut up in the theology group.   Or as the one who left the ministry – put her hand to the plough then didn’t so much look back as wander off to live in the woods.

But I hope that the legacy of my life will be the family I raised, the books I wrote and the sermons I preached; because they are the best of me.   I hope I was one of those who held the line.   And I hope when the end comes I will die with courage.