The Sum of All our Days
My father-in-law, Johnny McKeagney, was a gentle man who lived his entire life in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. He passed away in 2010. He served many roles in his village of about 750 Irish souls. Officially, he was the town shopkeeper as well as the local undertaker. Unofficially, he was a provincial historian who in his spare time traipsed the rural green hills and soft glens of his county, collecting artifacts, rubbing weathered tombstones, audio recording the elderly’s stories, and drawing pictures of structures and tools and wildlife that went extinct before photography was invented. Johnny was a memory-keeper, beloved among the good people of Tempo and the surrounding townlands.
Because of his local reputation as historian, people would gift him things, old things: hand-made pottery, bog fossils, broken carts, obsolete mechanical gadgets, waterproof baskets, torn photographs, and obscure books. One day, a famer’s grown son arrived at Johnny’s doorstep with a cardboard box of such “old things.” His father recently died, as Johnny knew, and he put a few of his father’s possessions aside for Johnny, as Johnny could see.
Among the items in this box was the farmer’s battered diary, a daily journal. Now, this farmer was an undereducated man who knew the land, knew the weather, and knew his Bible without having to read it. Farmers in this area tended to be men of few words, and true to his kind, the farmer’s journal entries were remarkably brief. Each day’s entry had a single line that tracked the day’s events on the farm (a lambing, a milking, a sale, a purchase, a storm, a ray of sunshine). But consistently, each entry ended with two words: either GOOD DAY or BAD DAY. Flip, flip, flip the pages, and the journal recorded, without any predictable pattern: Good Day, Bad Day, Bad Day, Good Day. Page after page of the binary variation written with clear conviction: Bad Day, Good Day, Good Day, Bad Day.
I love this story for many reasons, but the main reason is that I don’t know how it ends. I’m sure, in my American need for quantifiable certainty, I pressed my father-in-law with the burning question: Did the farmer have more Good Days or more Bad Days? But I don’t think I ever received an answer. My guess is that Johnny never tallied them up. Johnny didn’t need to know whether the farmer “won” in the end. Johnny was more concerned about the provincial matters that produced the sum of all our days: knowing the land, watching the weather, collecting the artifacts, rubbing the tombstones, and, ultimately, recording the stories.
Since it is November again, allow me end with this: I am thankful for my good days; I am thankful for my bad days. I am thankful for soil and rain and stones and stories and the grace of the God who looks after me. I am thankful for my family and for my ministry, and I am truly and ardently thankful, if you have read this far, to have you in my life.
