Stop and say hello

The ask

“Tell me again the name of the town you’re from.” The request came from John Ortberg, a relatively new friend I was playing golf with. Both of us were preachers, both of us had grown up in Illinois, though in different parts, and both of us now lived in California.

When I told him he asked me if I knew Herb and Iva Jean Bayley, a couple who lived there.

“Of course,” I said. “Everyone knows them. They moved there just after I left for college, so I don’t know them well, but I know them.”

“Next time you’re back home,” he said, “stop and tell them hello for me.” And I said I would.

The fact was that I rarely went back to Illinois. My father had passed away several years earlier, my brother had moved to Virginia, and my sister had been lost in an automobile accident more than 40 years earlier.

I was not without real family there, though, because later in life my father, a widower, had married a local woman who was a widow, giving me new sisters. Still, there were very few occasions when I returned to the small town where I grew up. I doubted that I’d be able to do what John had asked me to do, but I remembered it.

About four months later, though, a reason came for me to go home. My step-mother was going to have an important birthday — she was turning 90.

By the time I arrived my calendar was full. I had “places to go and people to see” for every moment of the three days I’d be in town, and I was looking forward to it.

As I drove down Main Street, running late to have dinner with family, I realized I was passing the home of John’s friends. “I’ll call them,” I thought, “and tell them John said hello.”

My conscience spoke up and said, “You could have called from California, and that isn’t what John asked you to do.” I turned around, pulled into the driveway, and knocked on the door.

The blessing

The lady who answered didn’t recognize me, nor I her, but she wasn’t Iva Jean. So I said, “I’m Lewis Greer, George’s boy, and I stopped to say hello.”

Her face lit up with recognition and she told me her name and said she remembered me from when I was a little boy. Right behind her, I noticed, was a lady wearing a robe, and she was smiling. It was Iva Jean, and she was inviting me in.

Herb was sitting in a chair eating dinner off of a TV tray. He didn’t get up, and I recognized his advanced Parkinson’s disease immediately. But he nodded to me, and smiled when I said hello. (I assumed the lady who had answered the door was there to help care for him, and that was the case.)

Iva Jean sat down in her chair and said it was great to see me and asked me why I had stopped.

I told her about John’s request, and she said, “You mean Johnny?” As it happens, my friend John was the son of her friend John. The families had been neighbors in northern Illinois and very close. So these were John’s parents’ friends, and I totally understood that relationship — my parents’ friends became my friends, too.

Still standing, my duty fulfilled and dinner waiting, I said I needed to let them get back to their meal and get on to mine. Iva Jean asked me to wait another minute because there was something she wanted to show me.

She retrieved her billfold. It was one of those long wallets that could hold a checkbook, and it was well used. She opened it and pulled out a newspaper clipping and handed it to me. I had seen the article before, but not for many years. The date on it was June, 1971, and there was a picture included — a high school yearbook headshot of a girl who had been killed in a car wreck. It was my sister, Jane.

Why did she still carry that clipping? I didn’t have to ask. In the next few minutes I learned things about my sister from Iva Jean, Jane’s singing teacher, that I would never have known if I hadn’t stopped to say hello for John.

More beauty

One more beautiful thing happened that evening. As I got to the door and turned to say goodbye, I noticed the caretaker off to the side and crying a little. When I looked at her she nodded toward Herb, who had gotten out of his chair by himself and, without help, was shuffling toward me to shake my hand. It was something he never did.

A few years later Herb lost his battle with Parkinson’s, just as my own father had almost a decade before. Iva Jean and I exchanged notes a couple of times and I saw her briefly once. Every time she said, “I still have that clipping!”

Being a person of faith, I would call that visit a “divine appointment.” The wonder of it all is impossible to explain otherwise.

But my point is this: like many other people I am not big on going to visit someone. Meet for lunch? Sure. A round of golf? Count me in. Stop by a house, or even a hospital or a nursing home just to say hello and visit for a while? Not so much.

There are few things, however, that are equal to “visit someone” when it comes to doing good. It takes effort, it takes intent, it takes genuinely caring about someone else, and it takes a little courage.

Since that amazing evening years ago, I’ve done better about visiting. I’m still not great at it, but now I get it.

Perhaps there is someone in your life that could use an “in person” hello. And who can say what blessings might flow in both directions from that friendly act?

Visit someone. Do good. It’s in you!