Singing with Jamie

I remember the very first time I met my sister-in-law, Jamie.  She was sitting on the brick wall outside the north entrance to Seattle's University Presbyterian Church.  It was a chilly Saturday morning in early 2001 and she was helping out with a work day offered by college students preparing to go abroad for the summer.  I don't remember this, but I'm willing to bet she was holding a Starbucks Americano.  A few months later she, my brother Ned, and two others left for Turkey for the summer.  They came home with carpets and stories and Jamie's filled journals and Ned's newly pierced ears, dyed red hair, and Bono-style sunglasses, and both of them with stars in their eyes.  Shortly thereafter they started dating and I moved to Europe.  Ned called me a few months later when they were engaged in February.  Jamie and I talked on the phone a time or two and she sent me Crayola markers and cards she illustrated and a verse from Zephaniah:

 

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:

 

"Fear not, O Zion;
let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival,
so that you will no longer suffer reproach."

I get chills from the words and the song in my own heart is wet with tears.

Jamie and Ned were married the following August on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  They made promises and danced and shed tears and laughed and Ned spontaneously kissed the bride at the beginning of the ceremony, prompting a mock rebuke from their pastor that it wasn't time for that yet and charmed, delighted laughter from the gathered crowd.  Their lives continue to play like that.  Four children and eleven years later they are still singing, this time a song that mixes in sorrow but that rings clearly with their thick, abiding love for each other and echoes of profound living.  Here is her song this morning.  I love you, Jamie.

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/an-update-from-jamie.html?spref=fb