2 years ago
Geoff and Sharon Thompson
I've been putting this off for ages Mark.
Sorry.
Forgive me.
I've been building up to it.
Some things need time.
It is less painful to speak to you in prayer, than it is to look at your page and face your image and acknowledge...you have actually gone.
I woke up this morning (Lisa's birthday (29?)) and felt a violent urge to speak to you immediately (if not sooner) through this space.
So, you have taken that next step.
(One that we all have to take sooner or later...not yet, not yet, I'm not ready tee hee)
At first I didn't know you that well, only that Lisa loved you,
and any one that Lisa loves, I automatically love: that's standard.
So I loved you but I didn't really know you.
Then you brought us the wonderful Isaac (I believe Lisa helped a little bit on that score, but I'd have to double check), and I observed your gentleness with him, your patience, firm when needed, your kindness, and I loved you all the more for that.
Then you got ill.
(Strange but true, and inspiring) your diagnosis seemed to release something in you and and in those last three years I felt that you were no longer 'loving', you were simply Love, you were no longer living, you were life itself, and you were free, man you flew, I felt such infectious joy from you and how you lived, and I thought: 'that's how we all need to live.'
You showed me how to live Mark, without the petty considerations and boring restrictions and tiresome resentments that life seems to clothe us in.
We spoke, me and you, without human filters, the pretenses, the stifling politeness that places barriers between interactions, and stops the full expression of Love. We talked about things and beings and densities 'beyond'; you had experienced them because of you were forced to live in extremes, I had experienced them because I am just strange :)
You made me want to be brave Mark, because I know deep down I am not a brave man. You excited me to explore life at the very dangerous edges, you encouraged me to exhaust my potential, wring it out, leave nothing in the cloth, and not hide my delicious strangeness under a bushel.
Your example said to me, "be city on a hill" and do it now, now, now, what are you waiting for (you crazy fool), it is later than you think.
I will honor you Mark, and I will (do my very best to) be, if not a Light, certainly a better man. And please don't worry about Lisa, she is protected, her family are beautiful and tight and loyal, her mum is a rock, probably the most selfless women I have ever met, her siblings are aching to help her (when she asks, you know Lisa rarely asks), they would move heaven and earth for her, and she is full to the brim with faith, this kid, man, is spilling over with Love.
I am waving you off Mark, I am waving you off....but I know, I am certain, that just over the horizon, there are friends, and friends and all manner of friends who are waving you home.
You are going home lovely man.
God is blessing you.
Geoff and Sharon Thompson
