Lois Marie Webb Way
November 4, 1936 – November 11, 2017
Cleburne, Texas
She turned boys’ heads.
They stopped and looked when she walked by.
One night she went to a movie with our older brother Lee Roy and me.
As we stood on the sidewalk in front of the Texas Theater in Sweetwater, waiting for the earlier show to let out, some guys we knew started saying, “How did you luck out and get her to go out with you? Which one of you is she with?”
“She’s our sister,” Lee Roy said.
The other guys hooted: “Yeah. I bet.”
Another said, “Tell another one.”
“No,” I said. “It’s the truth. She really is our younger sister.”
“She’s young all right. You’re robbing the cradle.”
Of course, she was our little sister, Lois Marie. She was about twelve. I was fourteen. Lee Roy was eighteen. We were three of the five of us who grew up together. Leta Joy at twenty was married. Leonard Morris was ten and didn’t like to be called the baby of the family. At that age, Mother and Daddy said he was too young to stay out late. He didn’t like that either.
It would be another twelve years or so before Lewis Ray, the absolute youngest in the family would be born as a surprise to everyone.
All six of us, plus Lloyd Wayne, who died in infancy between Lee Roy and me, had the initial “L” in our first names.
This led some wag to observe, “Your folks sure raised a lot of ‘L,’ didn’t they?”
My siblings and I have maintained that common “L” into adulthood and on into our senior years. Everyone, that is, except that eye-popping, head-turning Little Sister.
About the time she and Lee Roy and I went to that picture show, Lois Marie began to try to shed “Lois” and become simply “Marie.” She didn’t want to go through life as just one more in a long line of “L’s.”
A couple of years after that movie outing, as she blossomed further into physical young womanhood, Daddy relented and let her start going out with some of the fellows whose heads continued turning her way.
When she was “fifteen-going-on-sixteen,” a fellow my age named Don got her attention and managed to edge out most of his competitors. By the time he was eighteen and she was nearly sixteen, the contest was over.
In December 1952, Marie Webb became the bride of Airman Donald Jackson Way.
I was puzzled – No. Let’s say, “stunned.” – that Daddy signed the license and that Mother went along with it. When I asked her, “Why,” she said, ”They were going to get married, with or without our permission. So I got Travis (our Daddy) to agree, as a way to keep peace in the family.”
Some of you have seen Marie and Don’s wedding picture in a frame. Don in his Air Force uniform and Marie in a neat suit. She wore a hat, the only one I had ever seen her wear, other than the straw hat she had on in the cotton patch when we all were pulling bolls instead of being in school.
Her wedding ensemble also included a clutch purse and the highest heels I had ever seen on any female in our family.
Around the borders of that picture frame, you see the words to Nat “King” Cole’s song, “They Tried to Tell Us We’re Too Young, Too Young to Really Be in Love.” Also, you see the final lyrics: “And Then Some Day They May Recall, We Were Not Too Young At All.”
We lived to see they were right. When Don died last year, they had been married a few months over sixty-three years. Now we gather to thank God for the long life of our sister, mother, grandmother, great grandmother, cousin, and friend, a week after many of us gathered on Saturday, November 4, for her eighty-first birthday.
Most of you here today have been closer to Marie, geographically, than I have. Pansy and I met at seminary in Kentucky and have spent most of our fifty-two years together in the Southeast – all around the Southeast: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina, as well as some time in New York and Texas. Our two sons spent most of their growing-up years in Anderson, South Carolina. But I’m two years older than Marie, so whatever the number of states between us, she has always been and always will be my Little Sister.
Two Scripture passages come to my mind as we celebrate her life and our blessed hope of eternal life through faith in Christ.
In the first chapter of Second Timothy, the Apostle Paul writes to this younger man whom he considers his son in the faith and in the ministry. Paul gives thanks as he remembers Timothy’s genuine faith, and he looks back across two generations of Timothy’s family line, citing the influence of two godly women – his grandmother named Lois and his mother Eunice.
Paul also is sure Timothy shares this unfeigned faith of these women. As I think of these three generations, I think of three generations of our family, with two godly women, including a Lois, or Lois Marie. These women were our Mother, Vandelia, and Lois Marie. And I say to you, Garry Don, Terry, and Greg, I am sure their faith is also in each of you.
Another passage that seems especially appropriate to me today is Psalm 90.
The psalms are songs, and the singer begins here by acknowledging God as the Eternal One Who has been the dwelling place for generations among his ancestors – even before God formed the mountains, the earth, and the world.
As the One Who Inhabits Eternity, God’s time is not our time. In God’s time, a thousand years pass as quickly as yesterday. Ages come and go as a dream. They are as flimsy as grass, here today and gone tomorrow, so to speak.
Our Great God sees our sins but stands ready to forgive. As the psalmist thinks of his sinfulness, he thinks again of the shortness of his life in light of God’s eternity. Even a long life passes quickly.
He thinks of seventy years as sort of the standard length. Not that we have the promise of those seventy years, but in that period, that’s about all a person might expect to live. Then the song says, If you’re extra strong, you may live to be eighty. But if you do, you’re going to face trouble and sorrow.
Marie reached eighty a year ago, and she experienced pain and sorrow in her final months. In light of these thoughts in Psalm 90, Verse 12 is a key thought: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” The Apostle Paul expresses the same concern in Ephesians 5: “Redeem the time. Buy up the time. Make the most of whatever time you have.”
Then as the psalmist prays for wisdom, he recalls rough spots in his life, he asks God to balance the bad times with good times, to have as many good days as bad.
There’s nothing wrong with that prayer, but we have no guarantee that God will give you that balance.
We see a couple more prayers in Psalm 90. A prayer for the singer’s children: that they will see God’s glory in their lives and that his own works will outlive him, that they will be his lasting legacy.
Garry Don, Terry, and Greg, you know your mother’s loving, prayerful concern for you all through your lives. You are her legacy.
Finally, I offer a prayer for each of you, each of us, from the Apostle Paul in Ephesians and Philippians:
“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation of him: The eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling and what the glory of his inheritance in the saints” Ephesians 1:17-18). . . Being confident of this very thing, that he which has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Amen.
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