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The author reminds us of what I think deep in our hearts we already know, but so easily forget: that whereas our tendency is look outwardly beyond ourselves, happiness has more to do with our inner attitudes that we recognize.

There is much wisdom in our Judeo-Christian tradition as well about the art of happiness, or contentment. Both of our lessons this morning speak to this art.

In our Old Testament story, Jacob is a prime example of someone who is highly ambitious, focused on improving the external circumstances of his life.

Born a twin, he comes forth from his mother’s womb second, clutching his brother Esau’s heel. This grasping becomes a symbol for Jacob’s personality. Jacob will be highly competitive, grabbing for all he can get; a schemer constantly focused on improving his lot in life.

As a youth he will take advantage of his brother Esau in a moment of hunger to buy from him at the bargain-basement price of a bowl of lentil stew the family birthright that was his brother’s as the first born son. Not long after that, with his mother’s help, he will steal the irrevocable blessing that his blind and bedridden father Isaac had intended to give his brother. In the years to come Jacob will lock horns with his similarly competitive uncle Laban, eventually prevailing, coming forth from their battle of wits a wealthy man.

Jacob’s restlessness makes him, in a certain sense, the prototypical American, continually striving to improve our standard of living, constantly comparing ourselves to the standards enjoyed by our neighbors.

By neglecting to cultivate the inner attitudes required for happiness, we Americans often find it strangely elusive, despite the fact that the “pursuit of happiness” is written into our bill of rights, and that our national standard of living surpasses the great majority of people living upon this earth.

The findings of researchers in the field of what is called “positive psychology” point to this out to us. Ask the winner of a multi-million dollar lottery a year after his or her winfall, and they are likely to tell you that they’re no happier — maybe even less happy — than they were before they became rich. In fact the perceptions of personal happiness of big time lottery winners tends to be slightly less than that of persons who suffered a major spinal chord injury — both a year down the road.  Whereas both persons have had major shifts in the outer circumstances of their lives — the lottery winner presumably for the better, the spinal chord injury person for the worse — the latter alone has been motivated to develop what could be called their spirituality.

We live in troubling times in regard to the collective outer circumstances that are our national economy. The rising cost of oil and gasoline, the rising unemployment and inflation, along with the falling housing market and the decline of the stock market — it all spells trouble with a capital T.

Something is shifting in America. The down turn in our economy does not appear to be just one more little bump in the road before we once more continue onwards and upwards. For the first time ever the assumption that our standard of living will always rise — that our standard of living will surpass that of our parents, and our children will surpass ours — for the first time ever this assumption is becoming highly suspect. Naturally, there is much anxiety abroad in the land, understandably so, especially over the loss of homes and jobs.

There is, however, an opportunity here if we’re willing to embrace it.

Let us return to the story of Jacob. He so aggravates his brother with his competitiveness that it becomes clear he’d better leave town, lest his brother up and kill him. He leaves home in a hurry. He taking nothing but his birthright and his blessing. Homeless, destitute, he spends his first night on the road sleeping out under the stars, a rock for his pillow.

In this state of possessing nothing outwardly, he is blessed with an extraordinary interior vision in which he beholds all these glorious angels ascending and descending a stairway to heaven. He awakes and declares, “God is in this place and I did not realize it.”

We, too possess a birthright and a blessing as God’s children, and we, too, live at the very doorway of heaven, and do not normally realize it.

In Anthony Bloom’s book, Beginning to Pray, there is a story about an old woman who came to her priest for guidance because for a long time she had not sensed the presence of God in her daily prayers. He advised her to go home and to sit quietly in the chair in which she usually said her prayers. Don’t do or say anything, he instructed. Just take notice of the place.

The woman thought it was the silliest advice she had ever received, but nonetheless she did as instructed. She came back the next week elated, her spiritual blockage resolved. “In all my years, I had never noticed what a marvelous little house it is that I live in.”

“This is the very doorway of heaven, and I did not know it.”

We have this preoccupation in America with owning things — the assumption being that we can enjoy the pleasure or beauty of something only if we declare it ours and nobody else‘s. Where did we get this idea?

For many years now, the most popular leisure activity in America has been to shopping at the mall. Whatever happened to taking a stroll in a public park, going to a library or museum, joining with friends to play a game?

Out there in the wilderness, Jacob received a gift, and a lesson — one it would take a long time for him to incorporate. The best things in life can’t be bought. The best things in life or already here, now, waiting to be discovered.

In order to find contentment, it is necessary to come to an understanding of the difference between entitlement and grace. Jacob finds himself in unfamiliar territory. The wonderful thing he has been allowed to witness didn’t come to him from striving, working, conspiring or finagling. It came as a gift, not an entitlement.

If I approach life from a sense of entitlement — that what I have in life is mine because of how hard I’ve worked, or simply because of my superior goodness — then happiness will remain elusive. When things don’t come my way, I will feely gypped. When good things do come to me, I’m just getting my due. And without gratitude, there is no real happiness.

And if I feel entitled to what I have, I’m not likely to give it away, either. And giving is another key to happiness.

If truth be told, life itself is grace — a gift. We aren’t alive because we are entitled to life; we are alive because God chose to bless us with life.

Let’s turn now to the Gospel lesson. Once again, we have one of Jesus’ parables, which have this lively way of speaking to us in an endless range of ways. A man plants good seed in his field, but at night an enemy comes and adds bad seed to the mix. Overtime, wheat and weeds grow up together. The servants are alarmed. They want to start tearing out the weeds. The owner of the field says, no, let it be. You start pulling out the weeds and your liable to pull out the wheat as well.

It seems to me the human condition is pretty well summed up here. In the field of every persons’ life there will be both wheat and weeds. This is a universal principle applicable to every realm of our lives. Life is messy. Your home can always be improved upon, your job won’t be perfect, nor will your spouse. Forget about perfection in churches.

How are we to respond to this fact?  Well, we do what we can to strengthen the wheat and limit the weeds, but past a certain point, a preoccupation with the weeds is going to get in a the way of appreciating the wheat. The servants in the parable are in danger of such obsession. The owner is wiser. Let it be.

In the end, happiness is found in living compassionately. Love is required. You can’t really love others unless you recognize that we’re all in this messy thing called life together — that there are weeds and wheat in all of us.

These inner attitudes of happiness need to be cultivated because there are forces in the world that have a stake at keeping us discontent. Happiness goes against the flow. Capitalism, for instance, requires that we be willing to shell out our money in an a misguided attempt at rectifying our discontent. If you’re not concerned with surpassing your neighbors, or at least keeping up, where is the motivation to shop? If Americans are content with what we have, the economy won’t be in hyper drive, generating all those profits.

But eventually, though, the fact that the Emperor has no clothes gets discovered. Maybe that’s what’s happening now.

The first sermon involves a lament about the difference between Jesus and the Bible, or a discourse on “why I’m not a fundamentalist.” We know Jesus through the Bible. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” But sometimes the Bible can obscure our view of Jesus.

The lesson this morning tells of Jesus going out of his house to sit by the sea, where he speaks to large crowds of people. Vs. 3 reads: “And he told them many things in parables.” A lot hinges on this question: Why did Jesus teach in ‘parables?’Parables are little stories involving ordinary human beings, in ordinary settings doing ordinary things. They often have a surprising twist. Parables are not the same as an allegory, though people often try to interpret parables as if they were allegories. In an allegory, every piece precisely represents something else. Parables, in contrast, are intentionally ambiguous, resisting a once-for-all-time interpretation. A parable has a quality of being “alive,” inviting new insights — new ways of hearing the parable each time we hear it.

So, why did Jesus use parables so often in his teaching? Apparently he liked the way they provoke thought. They coax the listeners to participate — to climb inside and see life in new ways. Parables have a way of catching hold of our imaginations. It has been so for me.

So this is my assumption: Jesus used parables because he found them to be the best method of communication when speaking about God and God’s kingdom — subjects, which, by their very nature, are tough to speak about directly and don’t fit into tidy dogmatic formulas. They have the potential of helping us catch a glimpse of God’s presence in the midst of ordinary life — God in the muck, so to speak.

Go with me now, and I’ll show you something that strikes me as downright devious, right here in our very own Bibles, and you can decide for yourself whether you agree or not.

The first part of chapter 13 has Jesus talking to the crowds in parables, telling first the parable of the sower and the seeds, concluding with the invitation,

In the next verse (10) , however, we hear about a private meeting that allegedly took place between Jesus and his disciples. In this instance, the disciples represents the apostles — that is, those who had authority in the early church

after Jesus was no longer there — an authority derived from the fact of their closeness to Jesus when he walked and talked on this earth.

They ask Jesus, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” It is interesting that they use the word “them”; a distinction is already being made here between the crowds and the special disciples.

Jesus’ answer? “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” (vs. 11)

Wait a minute! According to this, Jesus isn’t using parables because he likes the way they communicate. No, precisely the opposite: he’s using them to obscure the truth – to keep it hidden from the ordinary people.

In verse 18, Jesus is depicted as privately explaining the parable of the sower.

He turns it into an allegory. The seed represents the word of God, and the various locations into which the seeds fall represent various levels of receptivity to the Word in the hearts of people.

Afterwards, in verse 24, Jesus tells another parable, apparently again to the crowds. This one is about wheat and weeds growing together in a field. He follows this with a couple of shorter parables.

Then, in verse 36, once again we are told that Jesus leaves the crowds behind

and meets privately with his disciples, who ask specifically for an interpretation of the parable about the wheat and the weeds. Once more, Jesus turns a parable into an allegory.

What I am suggesting here is that the parables themselves come straight to us from Jesus. The private interpretations, however, aren’t from Jesus; rather, they were made up by the first followers of Jesus. Confronted with the frustratingly ambiguous nature of parables, they probably thought they were being helpful explaining it all to us. Nonetheless, what we have here would appear to be the first step by the apostles towards consolidating their power, rendering ordinary people dependent upon them:

It also takes us off the hook from having to wrestle with the parables the way, I believe, that Jesus intended.

Now, the second sermon. 

The most common way of hearing this parable is the one that the Gospel writers tell us we should hear it. They have Jesus secretly explain that it is all about the soil. What kind of soil do the seeds land in? There is good soil and there is bad soil; which will you be?

This is certainly a valid way to hear the parable, but it is not the only one, nor is it, perhaps, even the best one. The reason I say this is that if we ask the question, who is the main character in the story, in the sense of who is actually doing something? we realize that the primary character is actually the sower — the one tossing out all those seeds.

God is, ultimately, the great seed planter. This morning, however, I am inclined to ponder ourselves as sowers of seeds. If we are made in the image and likeness of God — the great sower — then it seems appropriate for us to climb inside this parable, putting ourselves in the place of the sower.

Here is a question that often captures my attention, and I suspect yours as well:

Perhaps the question presses itself upon us as we age: These years I have been dwelling upon this earth — have I used them well? Have I made a difference? Or have I just been taking up space?

To use the language of the parable, have any of the seeds that I have cast out into this world taken root and brought to harvest anything that lasted?

In light of this question, the lives of two quite different persons caught my attention this past week. I never met either of these people; they both lived to an old age, passing from this world within the past decade.

The first is a remarkable woman that Bob Keller sent me an article about, marking her recent passing at the age of 98. (“A True Angel Has Passed,” by Roy Exum.) I had never heard of her, though when I read her story, I felt as though I should have — that everybody should hear the story of her brave life.

Her name was Irena Sendler, and she was a social worker in Warsaw when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939. She is attributed with single handedly rescuing over 2,500 Jewish children from the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. She won the trust of the children’s parents, smuggled them out of the ghetto, and then, with help from the underground found foster homes for the children to stay with until the war was over.

At one point Irena was arrested and tortured, and although the torturing she endured was so brutal it would leave her unable to walk without crutches for the rest of her life, Irena never gave up the information that she alone knew regarding where the children had been taken.

When the war finally ended, Irena successfully reunited all of the children with their families. In most instances, this meant their extended families since more often than not their immediate family had all died in the holocaust.

Irena’s life caught my attention in relation to this question of, “Have I lived a worthwhile life?” If anybody can answer this question with a whole hearted yes, it would seem to be Irena Sendler. Thanks to her, 2500 Jewish children survived the holocaust.

The impact of her life, of course, is directly related to the moment in history in which she found herself. In a time of peace, her accomplishments probably wouldn’t have been so striking. But at a critical moment, Irena took action where so many failed to, and as such she is a remarkable inspiration for the rest of us.

I am struck, however, by words that Irena spoke regarding the meaning of her accomplishments:

“It is no cause for praise. We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little… this regret will follow me to my death.”

Although it would be hard to find someone else who so clearly “made a difference” with her life, Irena was keenly aware of the places she failed — the places where the seeds of her life fell on rocky ground.

This, it would seem, is part of what it means to be a human: to regret the seeds that were not planted.

My own reflections on the significance of my life are puzzling and humbling.

At times I have put a lot of time and energy into something that, in the end, seemed to come to nothing. Other times, I was simply at the right time and place, and did or said something so simple, requiring only the slightest expenditure of energy on my part, but my action lead another to give me feedback implying that what I did had been invaluable to them.

Sometimes I’ve done harm where I thought I was doing good. At other times I’ve done good when I thought I was doing harm.

In the end, of course, it will be God who answers these questions, not me.

The second person whose story caught my ear is that of a man who spent a good portion of his life as a preacher, and as such I can more readily identify with him, though unlike myself he was a Baptist, serving several churches in rural Georgia and Alabama.

His name was Howard Finster. (I am indebted to Barbara Brown Taylor for much of what follows regarding Finster.) “After preaching 4,625 sermons, after presiding at more than 400 funerals and 200 weddings, Howard conducted a survey at his church and found out that no one remembered anything he had said.”

(I will not put you to a similar test.)

As far as Howard could see, all those tens of thousands of words that had come out of his mouth on behalf of God and God’s word had simply shriveled up and died.

“So he retired from preaching and began fixing things instead — television and bicycles, mainly — until 1976, when an inner voice from God told Howard to paint sacred art.

“I cain’t,” Howard told the voice, “I’m no professional.”

“How do you know you cain’t?” the voice demanded, and Howard’s career as an artist began.”

Before he was done, Howard had become famous as an American folk artist. He is reported to have made 50,000 works of art. In the 80s he was commissioned to draw two album covers for famous rock bands (REM and Talking Heads), which he did, filling the drawings with Bible verses.

In his mind, God was inspiring all he did — God was speaking through his work, though often the meanings of what he meant to be saying through his art were as frustratingly difficult to nail down as Jesus’ parables could be.

He left behind a 3 acre museum of a sort that he called “Paradise Garden”:

Here is Barbara Brown Taylor describing the art work in this overgrown garden, which she describes as being “both beautiful and bizarre.”  

“The hand painted sign on Finster’s front porch sums it up, at least for him, and this is what it says:

and put them together night and day;

Washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.’

Barbara Brown Taylor goes on to write,

“The man is excessive, to say the least… I look at his garden, and I want to weed, neaten, organize; I want to ask him what everything means and post helpful signs for those who come after me. But Finster has already posted signs of his own. ‘I built this park of broken pieces to try and mend a broken world,’ says one, while another reads,  ‘It’s watermelon time; get your knife; eat, shout and shine.’ 

“He once said, ‘What I do talks. I figure when I’m deceased my work will be talking same as if I was here. Jesus used things that was familiar to people to get the subject over to them… God’s message is getting around.’”

What does it all mean? Heck if I know.

But Howard’s life speaks to me, in so far as he tapped into a God-given vein of creativity and went with it, trusting that God gave him that creativity on purpose, and we would all do well to do the same.

If you are using the creativity that God has knit into your soul to do good things — whether it be for playing music or for organizing closets or whatever — then your life is part of the harvest of God, and it is participating in ways we cannot never know for sure.

In the end, this beautiful and bizarre parable that Jesus told long ago is comforting. It suggests an image of God as the happy seed-tosser, who doesn’t worry much over seeds landing in out-of-the-way places. He just goes on slinging those seeds, trusting that enough will take root to bring about a wonderful harvest.

And we, made in the image and likeness of the happy seed-tosser, are called to do the same.

A sermon preached on July 6, 2008 based upon Matthew 11:16 – 19, 25 – 30, entitled, “Getting Out of Rhythm.”

The Gospel lesson got me to thinking about the natural rhythms of creation. There is night and there is day, repeated continually. There are the tides and the seasons. There are the rhythms of our bodies; the beat of our heart, and the rest in between. Our breath: inhale, exhale, over and over again. There is sleep and there is wakefulness; work and rest.

The beginning of our Gospel lesson alludes to another rhythm of human life, and that is the rhythm between play, celebration and rejoicing on one end, and grief and mourning on the other. Life leads us into both, over and over. The story at the core of our faith expresses both poles: there is the crucifixion and there is the resurrection.

Wholeness involves finding the rhythm of life, the balance that allows us to go easily back and forth between the polarities that life requires of us.

Part of what is meant by sin is the loss of this rhythm. In the Gospel lesson, Jesus refers to people in his day who had lost the rhythm; they weren’t free either to play and celebrate or to grieve and mourn. John the Baptist came calling people to mourn with him, and they said he was too dour. Jesus came calling people to rejoice with him, and they called him a drunkard. They are stuck between the two poles, unable to enter fully into either. They have lost the capacity to be in the moment, to be spontaneous.

Children tend to be far more spontaneous than adults; more capable of entering into whatever the moment calls for. This is another part of what Jesus meant when he said that “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of God.”  Watch a small child, and over the course of an hour you will likely see them weep over a boo boo or a disappointment, and laugh and giggle with extraordinary abandon, both in ways rarely seen by adults. As we grow up, draw back from such immediacy of experience in order to protect ourselves from such vulnerability to loss, but in doing, we also distance ourselves from raw joy and celebration as well.

From the very beginning of the Bible, attention is given to the rhythm of work and rest. God works and God rests and then God devotes one of the 10 commandments entirely to the keeping of the Sabbath, the day of rest, because left to our own devices, we human beings will neglect that part of the rhythm of life. We will work ourselves to the bone.

So the commandment to honor the Sabbath is a good gift given to us by the God who created us and loves us.

And yet, just like everything else, we human beings can take something good and turn it into something bad. In Jesus’ day, the Sabbath was often experienced as another burden -as something to obsess about in regards to doing it right. It was a day for play or for laughter. It was a time when you had better watch your step lest you do something that might cross over into the category of work. For instance, heal someone. And so the absurdity of Jesus getting criticized by the Pharisees because he practices compassion on the official day of rest.

2000 years later, we aren’t likely to encounter someone attacking us for working on the Sabbath. But we are no less out of rhythm — indeed, the case can be made that our society is far more out of rhythm than past generations were.

Many of us find it very difficult to shift out of the work mode — there are always more problems to be solved, or more money to be made, or more chaos to bring order to.

The “on” button gets stuck; we can’t turn it off. We try to stop working, and we find our mind continues to race, and so we require television or the internet to distract us from our work. Stillness seems intolerable. We can’t seem to rest — not in the depth required to restore our souls, and yet we’re not fully engaged in our work either, even though it seems at times as though working is all we ever do. Our attention can’t focus, and we make mistakes in our work. We lose our creativity and imagination to find new and better solutions to problems, and we lose our temper with the people around us, creating more barriers to overcome.

In some instances, our bodies — recognizing that the person in charge has forgotten how to push the “stop” button — conspires to brings things to halt by making us sick, or causing us to have an accident. Maybe we need to listen to the wisdom of our bodies.

As we get stuck in the work mode, in our fantasies we swing to the far end of the opposite end of the pendulum and imagine ourselves giving up work altogether. Ah, if only I could win the lottery, then I wouldn’t have to work another day of my life, and could lie on the beach of some Caribbean island for the rest of my life.

We long for retirement for the same reasons, or maybe we even long forward to death, because heaven comes to represent for us the place where we don’t have to do any more work.  (I knew a woman whose sister died at an early age. She was very comforted one night when her sister appeared vividly to her in a dream, describing life in heaven to her. “We have jobs to do here,” she said. Errands to do for God.)

But these fantasies simply reveal that we’ve lost the rhythm. Both work and rest are good gifts from God, and we need both in order to be whole. And were these fantasies actually come to pass, and we were to actually win the lottery, or be put out to pasture in permanent retirement with no work to do, our once overworked souls would soon discover a great emptiness — longing for something worthwhile to do, some way to make a contribution, some manner in which to express our creativity.

And so it struck me that when Jesus addresses these weary, overworked people, he speaks not of being put out to pasture but rather of a “yoke.” “Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me…” It’s balance, not an endless vacation that we need.

Learn from Jesus how to live a balanced life in harmony with the rhythms of creation.

He worked, but he also rested. He spent time with others; he spent time alone. He played, and he also wept. He was fully present to his life, never hurried.

For some of us, summer can be a time of rest. This is good. While we take time to rest, let us ask ourselves, what would it mean for me to live a more balanced life? Learn from your breath: you breathe in, you breath out. You give and you receive.  Return to your God-Given rhythm.

Darren wanted me to make sure I mentioned Bunny’s wonderful sense of humor. How could you not speak of her humor? What would Bunny say if she could speak to us now? Probably,

Bunny was a wonderful story teller, and there is no shortage of stories to tell. Part of her legacy to you are the stories she has left you with — so many stories. I hope you will enjoy your Bunny stories for the rest of your life.

Here’s one that Darren told me Tuesday that I think incorporates a number of the components of her extraordinary life:

Five years into their marriage, Bunny’s husband John developed a very serious form of diabetes, which meant it was not uncommon to have to rush him to the hospital. One leisurely, summer day Bunny was sunning herself in the privacy of her backyard, dressed rather scantily. She heard the phone ring. She went into the house to answer. It was her friend Nora who was calling to tell Bunny that inexplicably she had a bad feeling about something in connection to Bunny, and she had no idea what it was, but she just had to call to share the feeling.

Because she had come into the house to answer Nora’s call, she discovered that John, who had earlier had come inside to take a nap was in the midst of an intensive diabetic shock, shaking on his bed. This was what Nora’s intuition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was about. Bunny rushed John to St. Joseph’s Hospital where his life was saved. You didn’t need to convince Bunny that God had worked through Nora’s phone call to save her husband. God was very real for Bunny.

The story has an amusing twist that follows. When John was safely in the care of the doctors and nurses, Bunny, still scantily dressed from her sun bathing, entered a phone booth in the lobby of the hospital to call family members to let them know what was up with John.

An indignant nun came to the door and knocked vigorously. “Young lady! I demand that you leave the hospital immediately. You are dressed most inappropriately!“ At which point Bunny launched into the nun, informing her that, “Well, if she had known that afternoon that her husband was going to go into diabetic shock and almost die while she was sunning herself in the yard, well she might have dressed a bit more appropriately.”At that point, the nun was wise enough to retreat. Bunny wasn’t one to mess with, particularly when she was in the midst of caring for someone she loved.

One of the stranger parables Jesus told involves a poor widow who suffers from some injustice in her life. She goes to the local judge to plea for justice, but the judge, caring neither for God nor human beings, ignores her. The poor widow does not give up. She comes back every day to knock on the unjust judge’s door, until finally he gives into her plea. Jesus commends the faith represented in this widow’s life, and concludes by saying that if that unjust judge gave into the widow’s plea, won’t God answer those who call upon God’s name day and night? (Luke 18:1-8)

I like to picture Bunny as that poor widow.

I sat with Darren for two hours on Tuesday, and he told me the uncensored version of his mother’s life. We don’t often get the opportunity to hear peoples’ stories in much depth, and frankly, Bunny’s story left me awestruck by the courage of this woman.

There were a lot of extremely hard times that Bunny went through, reaching back into her early childhood, and there is something truly remarkable about her capacity to shine her light through it all — to keep laughing, to persevere, to keep her utter devotion to her family and friends, who were for her more precious than gold.

Bunny’s wonderful sense of humor was part and parcel of an extraordinary determination to live in the face of a lot of things in her life that might have tempted many another person to simply give up.

Following John and Bunny’s wedding in 1950, they tried for 14 years to successfully carry a pregnancy to full term. An accident that Bunny had suffered as a five year old girl had made child-bearing difficult for her. Despite the tremendous grief and heartache she endured in those years, she never gave up trying, determined to bring a child into this world, and finally, in 1964, she successfully carried a baby to term (ten months, in fact), and no little tiny baby either, a 10 and a half pound baby that Bunny absolutely delighted in, naming him Darren.

There wasn’t one day in his life in which ever Darren doubted his parents’ love, that they would do anything for him, and that he was their pride and joy.

Darren wanted to make sure I thanked all of you who were so important to Bunny. Bunny would adopt people, or sometimes people would adopt her — it was often hard to tell which came first.

If you were a friend of Bunny’s, you were a friend for life, and everybody through the generations of your family was a friend of Bunny’s as well. You meant so much to her.

We all loved seeing Bunny at that glorious 75th birthday party that Darren and Andy threw for her.  She shone like the sun.  The best moments of our life (and that was surely one of them) give us just a taste of what is in store for us in heaven.

Bunny knew she was loved, even though the stick she sometimes played suggested otherwise. She truly knew she was loved. And she loved you. That love remains. Love is the one thing that never, ever ends. “I will not leave you orphaned,” said Jesus. One day you will see one another again.