Over the years, the friendships Nanci and I enjoyed most, like with our friends Steve and Sue Keels, and Paul and Michele Norquist, are the ones where we laugh and have fun together but also talk about the things that really matter. Those kind of friendships are worth seeking out and preserving. (Michele went to be with Jesus on January 1, 2022, two years after this photo taken on Maui. Nanci joined both Jesus and Michele nearly three months later, on March 28, 2022.)
Our friends supported and loved us through the last four years. Nanci wrote in her journal, “So thankful for friends and family who have prayed and cared so much for me.” Anticipating a scan, she wrote, “What God does is always good. Whatever God does is always in the best interest of all involved. All=me, Randy, Karina and Ang, the Dans, my grandsons, my extended family, my close friends, those with whom I come in contact, and anyone who knows my story.”
Nanci also wrote this in her journal:
It is a mercy from God to me that I regularly face my mortality. It is a mercy that I struggle constantly with feet and hands that don’t work right; with energy levels that prevent me from many activities. The mercy in these things is that these are God’s tools used to keep my eyes on Him; to live with His perspective; to anticipate with greater zeal my eternal home; and most importantly to fall deeper in love with Him. It is only by His grace that I am not resentful of Him, questioning Him, mistrustful of Him. I get depressed; I get afraid; I get very weary, but by His power and compassion I do not waiver in my faith of Him.
God does all things well.
My assistant Amy sent me an email that described “the Jesus-honoring way Nanci loved her life.” Then she followed it with the asterisk you do to correct a typo, and it said “lived.” Except it totally made sense as Amy typed it, because Nanci loved her life. Not that there was never sadness—of course there was. But she loved her life, she loved God and God’s world and her family and friends. Nanci had an ability that she and I cultivated over the years together: she could see through the Curse, she could see in her mind’s eye the Eden that preceded it and the New Earth that will follow it. She knew the Curse was abnormal and death and suffering are temporary. She knew the world is temporarily now at its worst. She lived with one eye on Eden and the other eye on the New Earth. And that infused her with perspective and joy.
Nanci’s love for Jesus and for her family and friends comes through in these videos of some of our dear friends that were shared at her service. These were also our pastors and their wives. We have done life together, and they were all a big part of Nanci’s life that she loved:
