Remembering my Uncle Jim

My beloved Great-Uncle Jim was laid to rest today. 

Nearly everyone called him “J. R.” Only my parents and sister and me called him Uncle Jim, and I never have been quite sure why. I remember as a young child hearing one of his congregants call him J. R., and I actually felt bad for the woman, forgetting her own pastor’s name like that. But when a second person did it, and then a third, I wondered if I was the crazy one. 

When I asked him about it, he said we four were the only ones who called him Jim but that it made him as pleased as could be and we should keep right on doing it. I remember feeling special. He was always making us feel that way.

A trip to his and my Aunt Marie’s home in Union Grove, North Carolina, from ours in Missouri was a solid two-day drive one way, including weaving through the Appalachians (which I always thought was magical, but the more car-sickness-prone among us did not), so we only made the drive every two or three years. I couldn’t have visited their house more than five or six times, but the memories there stand out so clearly in my mind.

I remember my sister and I squealing with glee while squirting Uncle Jim with tiny plastic squirt guns. My mom sent me some snapshots she found in a photo album of this exact memory. I think Uncle Jim was having as much fun as we were.

I remember sitting at our usual table at the Captain’s Galley, munching on hush puppies fried to perfection in all manner of lard, while he asked the waitress if she “knew Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior.” A Baptist minister since the 1950s, he asked this question of every waiter in every restaurant we ever ate at. As I recall, they almost always answered, “Why, yessir. Yes, I most certainly do,” which was the smart answer if they wanted to move on and refill the drinks at the next table. I think they sensed that if they said no, this man would not have passed up an opportunity to share the full gospel, the next table’s empty cokes be darned.

I remember playing a song for Uncle Jim and Aunt Marie, an accomplished pianist, on their grand piano that sat in the formal living room. In my mind, it is one of the most elegant rooms I had ever been in. Imagine! An entire room of fancy furniture reserved for fancy guests, and little old me being invited to plunk out an elementary tune from my Alfred’s Basic Piano Library book on the very keys accustomed to my Aunt Marie’s skilled fingers, all to her and Uncle Jim’s thunderous applause. I can still picture the fine blue curtains framing the big front window across from the piano and the formal entryway that I have not once used. We girls just scampered in through the kitchen door like the place was ours, sweaty, grass-stained, and bug-bitten from playing in the North Carolina summer.

I remember them serving hearty breakfasts of ham and red-eye gravy around the dining room table. They always kept these tiny single-serving cereal boxes on hand for my sister and me. I remember thinking it was by far the most fun way to eat cereal. I even enthusiastically choked down a box of Raisin Bran once because I could not resist those mini cereal boxes.

I remember trying so hard to befriend their fluffy black cat, Tiffany. My Uncle Jim would just shake his head and chuckle. Honestly, I think the only person that cat liked was my Aunt Marie.

I remember skipping outside to the apartment behind the house that my great-grandparents lived in. Uncle Jim and Aunt Marie cared for her mom and dad tirelessly for many years. My Great-Grandpa Capps did not have much interest in knowing Jesus in those days, but that did not deter the Rev. Dr. J. R. Speece, I can tell you that. He never gave up on sharing the good news of God’s love with his father-in-law. A few weeks before my great-grandpa died, he finally, simply, beautifully believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and was saved, receiving new life in his name, a lifetime of resistance covered over in an instant by the blood of Jesus. Uncle Jim was beaming at his baptism.

This morning, I called my mom, trying to catch her before Uncle Jim’s funeral. At that moment, she was sitting at the little table in the kitchen with my Aunt Marie. She put me on the phone with my aunt, who greeted me with her usual, “Well! Hello, darlin’!”, offering her unfailing delight at the opportunity to talk awhile, even on this most difficult of days.

At Uncle Jim and Aunt Marie’s house, we always felt fully welcomed and right at home, a foretaste of what Uncle Jim is experiencing in full today in the presence of Jesus. He made God’s love and delight as tangible to me as water gun fights and mini cereal boxes, and I thank God for his life well lived to the glory of God.