Margy

My years at Emory & Henry College were the most amazing years of my life. People will tell you that you make your lifelong friends in college. While I have some amazing friends from high school, I will certainly agree that my closest friends matriculated with me in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains.

One of my closest friends was actually a faculty member. Trevor was a recent graduate of the music department and was returning to Emory after his graduate work at Eastman. Trevor was intimidating to me long before I met him. I heard stories. People loved him. I didn’t know how to take this. It was my second year at Emory and I was really starting to feel like I had found a place to call home. The last thing I needed to deal with was the favored son returning home.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about Trevor. He became an amazing influence and someone who I knew I could always talk to, vent to, and have fun with. It wasn’t long before I learned something tragic about him. Trevor’s mom, Margy, was killed in a car accident on her way home from a football game on campus. This happened while he was a student, five or so years before I ever knew him.

Today marked ten years since her death. And while I never met Margy, I was undeniably impacted by her life. Our chapel piano and choir robes were in her honor. Every note from that piano was sacred. Every time we put on or robes was a reminder of a life lost. But the biggest influence that Margy had on my life was her legacy that lived on through Trevor. Just this week I thought of Margy while I was rehearsing a song at church. It is a song that the Concert Choir performed in Bluefield, West Virginia…her home church. Trevor was at the piano and his father and brother were in the congregation. Tears blurred the vision of most people in the church when the words of the spiritual hit all to close to home. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child…” I have no idea how Trevor made it through the song…

Through a sermon by of one of Trevor’s classmates I have been revived in a forgotten lesson. “Don’t live for yourselves. It will disappoint you and you won’t be ready to go when the time comes. Die to yourselves. Live for something much greater than yourself. Live for love and for the God who showed us true love on the cross.”