To me, he’s always been John Boy.
Like the Waltons, “Night Mary Ellen. Night Grandma. Night John Boy.”
For 32 years, he’s been my very own John Boy, my younger brother of 12 months and 13 days. With a smattering of freckles, a glint in his eye, and a trademark blond rooster tail, John Boy was everything I am not. Brilliant, mischevious, dyslexic, John Boy failed his final high school math exam…but successfully answered the university level bonus question. He was the only student who did—and he spent the whole exam to prove he could do it. That’s John Boy.
A trouble-shooter welder single-handedly fixing the world, John Boy has never married, always lived hard on the edge, and often questioned, wondered, sought. He called me on Friday from his cell. A call I have been waiting 17 years for.
“Ann, I..uh… just prayed with a pastor…and asked God to forgive my sins…and I am overwhelmed with this beginning new.”
My John Boy who lived to prove that he could do it alone, had come to the place where he realized he couldn’t. He needed the One who could.
Who has words when a grown man breathes his first breaths as a babe in Christ? My brother, my John Boy, is now my brother in the Lord.
And I cried with the angels.
