My aunt Ruth Jarrell died recently, after my Divinely arranged meeting with the Executive Director of Silent Blessings.  She and my uncle were full time missionaries in the British Isles.  He died suddenly either before I was born or while I was an infant.  My memories of Ruth are few and short.  I remember watching her fix her hair for the day – she used a ruler to arrange her long hair in a roll on the top of her head.  I remember the summer I spent with my grandparents, and Ruth joining us for the week of camp meeting.  She was friendly and playful, and there’s an interesting conversation we had with my grandpa.  I was in my early teens, and there was a budding puppy love between me and a boy I met at camp.  Ruth told me about marrying Arthur, Grandpa’s brother, when she was just 13.  Grandpa told her not to encourage me, and had a few words for me on the subject as well.  I remember sitting in the back seat of the car with Ruth, and her nudging elbow and conspiratorial grin.  She was a sincere missionary, and just as sincere of a human with personality.  I’ve thought of her over the years, and occasionally got word that she had returned from the field, settled into a house, and was aging.

When mom called to let me know she was gone, I wandered through these few memories again.  I heard a gentle whisper, “the mantle is passed”, and began to wonder who it was and how many generations back that someone prayed “may there always be a missionary in this family”.  You see, my grandpa is the only one of his brothers to have had children, and the last one living (well, the last to go).  Of his three sons who could carry on the family name, two had daughters.  One of the granddaughters married, and then there’s me.  There will not be any more Jarrells on our branch of the family tree.

Like Simeon and Anna long ago, Ruth lived long enough to see the next missionary in the Jarrell family.  It’s a loose correlation, I know, but there’s a significance there for me.  I wish I had kept in touch well enough to have shared with her that the closing months of her earthly life were during the opening months of my assignment.  The prayer, whoever may have prayed it, that the Jarrells always have a missionary, was being fulfilled.   Imaginative person that I am, I envisioned a party, perhaps in Grandpa’s mansion:
Gather around y’all, and watch this.  She’s having meetings, signing papers, getting assignments.  At long last and after many years of prayers, she’s a missionary.  It’s not hard to imagine Grandpa hosting such a gathering, or the people he would invite, or the smiles around the room.

The mantle is passed.  Pray I wear it well and faithfully.