Everything I Hated About Boston, I Loved About Ed

Last night, without knowing why, I found myself trying to write about Ed Casey.

Specifically, I was trying to explain how one man could embody nearly everything I disliked about Boston and yet make me feel so completely at home.

This morning, Dave Baker texted to tell me that Ed went home to the Lord at four o’clock.

I do not believe those thoughts came to me by accident.

I think God knew before I did what this morning would bring. And in His kindness, He began returning Ed to me before I knew I was about to lose him.

Ed was everything I hated about Boston.

He had the accent, the bluntness and that particular Boston attitude that could make an otherwise normal sentence sound vaguely confrontational. In Boston, those qualities had made me feel like an outsider. In Ed, somehow, they made me feel safe.

I think I understand why now.

From the moment I met him, Ed felt like something familiar in a place where I wasn’t yet sure I would fit. I had spent almost three years insisting Boston was not my people. Then God put Boston in a church in Lakeland and made him one of mine.

I met Ed and Sandra during my first year in Florida. I was still living in Orlando and commuting to Lakeland on the weekends because, in what has now become a fairly obscure piece of church lore, I was dating the worship band’s drummer.

Some of you just remembered.

The rest of you have just received a surprising piece of Lakeland Vineyard history.

A hurricane was approaching, and I felt God tugging at my heart to find out whether any of the older members of our church needed help preparing.

In true Amy fashion, I called Connie and Andy and volunteered both myself and Steve before mentioning any of this to Steve.

They gave me a list of names and phone numbers.

This next part may be difficult for anyone who knows the current version of me to believe, but I was terrified to make those calls.

I did not yet feel like a real member of the church. I was there every weekend, but I still felt adjacent to the community rather than rooted inside it. I was the woman driving over from Orlando, the drummer’s girlfriend, someone who desperately wanted this place to become hers but did not yet know whether she had the right to claim it.

Calling older members of the church and offering to enter their homes felt less like an act of service and more like an intrusion.

So I sat on Steve’s couch, staring at the list and hoping courage might descend upon me without requiring my participation.

Steve, apparently committed to my character development, looked at me and said, “I’m not doing this for you.”

So I started calling.

No.

No.

Another no.

Everyone seemed to have things handled. With every call, I became a little more convinced that perhaps I had misunderstood God entirely.

Maybe nobody needed us.

Maybe the tugging had merely been my own need to make myself useful in a place where I did not yet know how to belong.

Maybe I could stop calling people and return to serving the Lord exclusively in ways that did not require dialing a telephone.

I was ready to give up when I reached the final name on the list.

Ed Casey.

Ed said yes.

He had recently undergone heart surgery, and he and Sandra were overwhelmed by everything that needed to be done before the storm. We would later learn that they had been praying for God to send someone to help them.

They always told us that we had been an answer to their prayers.

But they never knew that they were also an answer to mine.

I had not yet found the words to ask God for people who would make Florida feel like home. I did not know how much I needed someone to welcome me, make room for me and decide that I belonged to them.

Ed and Sandra did exactly that.

Our friendship began almost immediately. They loved us with a generosity that did not feel cautious or conditional. When Steve and I eventually broke up, Ed and Sandra refused to choose sides. They did not divide their affection or decide which of us was entitled to keep them.

They simply continued loving us both.

That was who they were.

They had made room for us in their hearts, and changing circumstances did not make the room disappear.

Over the years, my life became fuller and faster. I met Jimmy. We got married. I became a mother. My weekends changed. Time slipped through all the spaces where good intentions live, and I did not see Ed and Sandra nearly as often as I once had.

But whenever they were able to come to a special service, especially on Christmas Eve, seeing them felt like being handed a piece of an earlier life I did not realize I had been missing.

They never greeted me with an accounting of how long it had been.

They never made me earn my way back into the room.

They were simply happy to see me.

They treated me like a daughter.

There are people who help make a place feel like home and remain part of that home even when you do not see them often. Ed and Sandra were those people for me. They belonged to the Florida before Florida felt like mine. Before motherhood. Before so much of the life I know now.

Ed knew something about being given a new life.

He was never shy about sharing his troubled past or telling people what the Lord had saved him from. He did not polish the story to make himself look better. He told it so people would understand how good God had been to him.

Ed knew his life was a redemption story, and he knew the glory belonged entirely to the Redeemer.

That distinction matters.

Ed’s testimony was not that he had finally become good enough for God.

It was that God had been merciful enough to come for him when he was not.

That is the good news Ed believed.

It is the good news at the center of the Christian faith.

The gospel is not a story about broken people repairing themselves until God is sufficiently impressed. It is the story of a holy God who loved us while we were still sinners. It is the story of Jesus stepping into our brokenness, carrying our sin to the cross and paying a debt we could never repay.

It is the story of a sealed grave found empty three days later because neither sin nor death could defeat Him.

Ed did not earn his redemption.

Jesus purchased it.

Ed received the grace that had been offered to him, and then he spent the rest of his life telling people who had given it.

God did not erase Ed’s history. He redeemed it. The very past that might once have been used as evidence against him became evidence of the transforming love of Christ.

Then, as Ed would tell it, God poured out even more goodness by giving him his beautiful bride.

Ed and Sandra did not have what the world would call a flashy life. Their life together was modest by nearly every earthly measurement.

But what they had was sacred.

They had a home filled with love. They had a marriage marked by devotion. They had a life built around gratitude to the Savior who had found Ed in the middle of his brokenness, rescued him and given him more goodness than he believed he deserved.

Ed did not merely talk about the goodness of God.

He was evidence of it.

This morning, I learned that his earthly story ended at four o’clock.

There is the grief of losing someone you love. Then there is the particular ache of realizing that someone who belonged to an earlier version of your life has taken a piece of that world with him.

Ed knew the woman I was before I became the woman I am now.

He knew the version of me who drove from Orlando to Lakeland every weekend, who was not sure where she belonged, who felt a tug from God and still nearly let anxiety keep her from dialing the last number on a list.

I thought God had sent me to help Ed and Sandra prepare for a hurricane.

Now I understand that God was answering two prayers at once.

Ed and Sandra had asked Him to send someone who could help them.

I needed Him to send someone who would help me believe I could belong here.

And God, in His kindness, put Ed’s name last on a list full of noes.

Ed was my yes.

He was proof that sometimes the voice of God leads us directly through the thing we are afraid to do. Sometimes the blessing is waiting on the other side of one more phone call. Sometimes home arrives in a form we never would have chosen for ourselves.

And sometimes it arrives with a Boston accent.

I am heartbroken today, especially for Ed’s beautiful Sandra.

But Christian hope does not require me to pretend this loss does not hurt. Scripture does not tell us not to grieve. It tells us that we do not grieve as people who have no hope.

Our hope is not merely that Ed will continue to live in our memories, although he certainly will.

Our hope is not a vague belief that good people go somewhere better when they die.

Our hope is an empty tomb.

Our hope is Jesus Christ, who stood outside the grave of His friend and declared, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.”

That is not a metaphor intended to make bereaved people feel better.

It is a promise from the One who defeated death Himself.

Because Ed belonged to Jesus, four o’clock this morning was not the moment death won.

It was the moment Ed’s faith became sight.

The man who spent so many years telling people what Jesus had done for him finally saw Jesus face to face.

The body that had endured heart surgery, illness and the long indignities of failing health was no longer failing him.

The past that Jesus had forgiven could no longer accuse him.

Death did not get the final word.

Jesus did.

And the promise is greater even than Ed being safe with Jesus today.

Because Christ rose, those who belong to Him will also rise. A day is coming when all that sin and death have broken will be made new. God Himself will wipe every tear from our eyes. There will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain.

The grave will not hold Ed forever.

That is the Christian promise.

Not that death is natural.

Not that separation does not hurt.

Not that we should be satisfied with carrying the people we love only in our memories.

The promise is resurrection.

The promise is restoration.

The promise is that, because Jesus lives, death will one day die.

If you are hearing Ed’s story and believe your own past has placed you beyond the reach of God, Ed would want you to know that it has not.

If you believe you must clean yourself up before you can come to Jesus, Ed’s life testified to the opposite.

You do not have to earn the love of God. You could not earn it if you tried, and that is precisely why Jesus came.

The same mercy that found Ed can find you.

The same grace that redeemed his history can redeem yours.

The same Savior who welcomed Ed home this morning is still calling people out of darkness and into life.

Ed, thank you for being the yes at the end of my long list of noes.

Thank you for making room for me before I knew whether I belonged.

Thank you for loving me like a daughter, even across years and changing seasons.

Thank you for showing me that redemption does not always arrive looking polished. Sometimes it arrives honest, grateful, a little rough around the edges and carrying enough Boston attitude to make certain you recognize it.

I once thought Boston was simply a place I had survived.

Then God used a man from Boston to help make Florida my home.

Ed was one of mine.

And because of Jesus, goodbye is not the last word between us.

One day, when I also go home, his will be one of the voices I am listening for.

I suspect I will recognize the accent immediately.