Jacky And The Butterfly

You can't overstate the importance of recalling days when we’ve especially seen or felt God being good to us.  You can't overestimate the power and value of telling those stories again and again, especially when the day dawns dark, dreary or desolate and you feel disenchanted, discouraged or distressed.*

With this in mind, let me tell you all about Jacky and the Butterfly.  Jacky lived down in Stoke-on-Trent with her daughter.  She used a wheelchair to get about and was brilliantly honest and down-to-earth.  If ever I went to the loo at her house, she’d joyfully tell her daughter (mid-20s) that the vicar had gone to siphon the python.  And her hospitality and kindness and annoyance were legendary.  

Yes, you’ve spotted the past tense, because Jacky left us for more glorious climes than Stoke (and probably no more wheelchair use) a few years back, in 2008.  Not before she’s joined my church, caused a rumpus or two, ruffled the feathers of some of the more clean-living folk there and sparred with my reader (who sparred back).  Oh, and she was confirmed as well.

We drove a full nine miles through the darkening evening to the confirmation venue in Biddulph (or Biddulph Moor, danged if I know the difference).  And Jacky’s daughter had bought her a brooch in the shape of a butterfly.  54 small diamond-like stones shine in a filigree of goldishness.  The confirmation went well: Jacky had heard the gospel clearly and simply sometime around the minnellium (that’s right, she couldn’t say “millennium”) and a simple faith in a simply brilliant Saviour kept her through illness and beyond death itself.  She proudly pinned on the butterfly brooch with all the connotations of rebirth it brought - here indeed was a new creation! - and we drove home.

Except that a nine-mile drive later, the butterfly brooch had gone.  Vanished.  Disparu.  Jacky was crestfallen in that way that we have when we’re trying hard not to let anyone know just how disappointed we are, when we’re holding down that feeling of a really wonderful day gone badly wrong at the final hurdle.  Her daughter made her hot chocolate and I said I’d better go home.

Home heck.  I retraced the nine miles back to Biddulph (maybe) Moor in the misty midnight.*  Not in an especially heroic way, just with a sense that life has too many sad endings to sit back if there’s a chance of snatching happiness from the jaws of disappointment.  And after all, the butterfly wasn’t in the car, so it had to be on the car park back in Biddulph.  Quite possibly squashed or driven over, but it could only be gone if someone had found it and carried it away.  Monday sun-up seemed to bring greater likelihood of its further removal, so I pulled onto the church car park at very dead of very night.

Ah.  An unlit car park.  An unlit pothole-laden car park of indeterminate size, scruffing away into roughness at the edges.  Hmmmm.  It had seemed like such a good idea.  Now it just seemed hopeless.  The pubs were shut, all decent folk were home and abed and I was a nine-mile drive full of feelings of failure away from anything like sleep.

I left the headlights on a low beam and stepped out.  

And there’s no more suspense to be had, because there it was, scant feet in front of the car, glinting out of the grit.  A quick rub-down (maybe a rub-up) with a rag and it was as good as new.  Maybe slightly askew.  And the fourth nine-mile drive of the day, feeling... well, you guess.

Jacky was still up, talking to her daughter, when I rang the doorbell.  And there are days - and nights - when you suddenly realise how true the parables of Jesus are, when you suddenly find yourself inhabiting a Bible story.  Jacky’s joy at seeing the butterfly that her daughter had picked out for her... it made more sense of the woman with the lost coin (in Luke 15) than any number of sermons.  That long drive back, weary but happy, perfectly inhabited the shepherd who puts a lamb on his shoulder and brings it back to the flock.  

Jacky learned that miracles happen.  I learned that the extra mile is sometimes nine, but who cares if it’s 900 when God’s kingdom and Jesus’ stories leak through into the real real world so well.

We laid the magnificent Jacky to rest.  A service in Stoke, a committal in Stafford, a burial in Stone.  Lots of extra miles that month!  And her daughter pressed into my hand the butterfly brooch in a box, and there were no words for what that whole evening - all the way from Bentilee to Biddulph and back, a Bishop and a brooch like a butterfly* - had meant to Jacky, how far her faith had been fuelled.

It’s not down to me.  I don’t think just going home would be an option for anyone when there was a dying light to rage against.  Other people would have cycled into hell and back, let alone Biddulph, even with a flat tyre and pursued by winged monkeys to reunite those two lovely butterflies.  

That’s my story of faith today - a good good God.  I’ve seen him rejoice when he found what was lost.  He looked a lot like a fifty-five year old woman dancing in a sofa, with a smile that would melt the polar icecaps and a kiss to make you blush until Whitsuntide. 

(reconstruction: not the actual Jacky)

*clergy compulsion: alliteration alert!