{"id":2070,"date":"2011-11-10T01:00:57","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T06:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/simplelife\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2011-11-06T23:03:40","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T04:03:40","slug":"tribute-to-a-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/simplelife\/2011\/11\/tribute-to-a-friend.html","title":{"rendered":"Tribute to a friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time I saw Dolores Norley was at an annual meeting of ARC in Daytona.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was impressed\u00a0by how friendly she was and by her small frame and<\/strong> by her extremely large pocketbook.\u00a0 I\u2019d been told for several years that this woman was the best\u00a0lawyer specializing in disability law\u00a0in the US and perhaps the world.<\/p>\n

We had brought our Special Gathering choir to sing at the community event.\u00a0 As the choir director, I was included in the invitation.\u00a0 Special Gathering is a ministry within the mentally challenged community.\u00a0 We do classic ministry, discipleship and evangelism.\u00a0 The purpose of our choir is to educate the local church to the spiritual needs of people who are developmentally disabled.\u00a0 Special Gathering was a fledgling effort in Daytona at that time.\u00a0 Our desire that evening was to help educate the professional community and parents to the ministry.<\/p>\n

I tried to NOT be impressed standing before Ms. Norley\u00a0but I couldn\u2019t help\u00a0myself.\u00a0 However, it wasn\u2019t her legaleeze that\u00a0made a lasting impression but the woman.\u00a0\u00a0Here was this\u00a0tiny blond frame standing before me, chatting as though we were long, lost friends.\u00a0 Obviously, she felt sorry for me because I was totally at a loss for words.\u00a0 Therefore, she was comfortably\u00a0picking up the conversational slack.<\/p>\n

It was more than a year later that Special Gathering received\u00a0an annual newsletter from her.\u00a0 You know it was the\u00a0Merry Christmas kind.\u00a0 My name (how could she even remember my name?)\u00a0 was included\u00a0in the greeting.\u00a0 When I began a Special Gathering program in DeLand several years later, her son, Greg, was one of our first members.\u00a0 Again, she treated me as though I was not only her equal but one of her best friends.\u00a0 From those comfortable\u00a0days, we did become good friends.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We had supper together.\u00a0\u00a0We shared a love for gardening and soup and her garden and soup were the best.\u00a0 She gave me the key to her house and insisted that I drop by\u00a0her home\u00a0whenever I needed a place to stop and do my work or just recoup.\u00a0 She invited me to attend conferences with her and to share in the animated conversation that\u00a0often engulfed her front porch.<\/p>\n

It seemed that someone was always at her home.\u00a0 They were usually people stopping by to share a few hours, a few days or a few weeks.\u00a0 She was generous with her stuff.\u00a0 But most of all, she was generous with herself.<\/p>\n

She did not often talk about legal matter but she often spoke about her personal struggles and joys.\u00a0 In one of our last conversations, a friend of her for more than 50 years was visiting.\u00a0 They were planning a peace march to protest the Iraqi war.\u00a0 Laughing but serious, she admitted that one of the great disappointments of her life was that with all the peace marches that she had attended, she had never been arrested.\u00a0 During the years that I knew her, I witnessed the decline of her health and the eventual blindness that claimed her eyesight.<\/p>\n

After five years of working in Volusia, we hired another person to take my place in DeLand.\u00a0 He found the same loving friend in Dolores that had captured my heart.\u00a0 At times, I wish I\u2019d learned more about disability law from this wonderful mite of a woman.\u00a0 But the lesson I learned was immeasurable.\u00a0 I learned about being a friend.\u00a0 She taught me the joy of taking the risk to love people instantly and include them\u2013and their warts\u2013in my life from the moment I meet them.<\/p>\n

Dolores didn\u2019t ignore my warts.\u00a0 She often challenged me at board meetings and on her front porch.\u00a0 \u201cI can\u2019t blindly agree to that,\u201d she would say.\u00a0 \u201cWhy would you do that?\u201d\u00a0 she would inquire in the privacy of her home.\u00a0 Somehow, I knew that my answer\u2013no matter how lame\u2013would be met without her rejection of me, as a person.<\/p>\n

Dolores has been dead for several years.\u00a0 I still miss stopping by her home and finding her in a dimly lit front room, sitting\u00a0with a bright lamp struggling to decipher an article or letter.\u00a0 I miss her soup.\u00a0 But most of all I miss her friendship.<\/p>\n

Do you have a friend, like Dolores?\u00a0 Can we all aim to be that kind of person?\u00a0 Should\u00a0 we even\u00a0try to be that kind of person?\u00a0 Is the world different now and would this kind of friendship be too risky?\u00a0 Or would we all\u00a0benefit from this type of acceptance?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first time I saw Dolores Norley was at an annual meeting of ARC in Daytona. I was impressed\u00a0by how friendly she was and by her small frame and by her extremely large pocketbook.\u00a0 I\u2019d been told for several years that this woman was the best\u00a0lawyer specializing in disability law\u00a0in the US and perhaps the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5,20,182,40,287,186,49,8],"tags":[690,325,324,699,720,715,701,694,689],"class_list":["post-2070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autism-spectrum","category-christianity","category-church","category-disability","category-faith","category-faiths","category-hope","category-inspiration","category-mentally-challenged-community","tag-autism-spectrum","tag-disability-law","tag-dolores-norley","tag-faith","tag-friendship","tag-hope","tag-inspiration","tag-intellectual-disability","tag-mentally-challenged-community"],"yoast_head":"\nTribute to a friend - A Simple Life, a Childlike Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/simplelife\/2011\/11\/tribute-to-a-friend.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tribute to a friend - A Simple Life, a Childlike Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The first time I saw Dolores Norley was at an annual meeting of ARC in Daytona. I was impressed\u00a0by how friendly she was and by her small frame and by her extremely large pocketbook.\u00a0 I\u2019d been told for several years that this woman was the best\u00a0lawyer specializing in disability law\u00a0in the US and perhaps the…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/simplelife\/2011\/11\/tribute-to-a-friend.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"A Simple Life, a Childlike Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-11-10T06:00:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2011-11-07T04:03:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/simplelife\/files\/2011\/11\/Dolores-Norley.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Linda G. 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I was impressed\u00a0by how friendly she was and by her small frame and by her extremely large pocketbook.\u00a0 I\u2019d been told for several years that this woman was the best\u00a0lawyer specializing in disability law\u00a0in the US and perhaps the…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/simplelife\/2011\/11\/tribute-to-a-friend.html","og_site_name":"A Simple Life, a Childlike Faith","article_published_time":"2011-11-10T06:00:57+00:00","article_modified_time":"2011-11-07T04:03:40+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/simplelife\/files\/2011\/11\/Dolores-Norley.jpg"}],"author":"Linda G. 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