Just Like It Was Made for It

 Dear readers,

 It’s been a long time since I’ve posted, I know! I felt as though I’d said everything on the blog that I wanted to say. I hope my children will enjoy reading these little essays for many years into the future. I’ve moved on to making YouTube videos (TimeLapseLegoGuy).

 But I need to add a new entry, dedicated to the memory of my brother-in-law, Mark Johnson. My story, as usual, is based on a true event, but I’ve spiced it up with some fictional humor. I hope you enjoy it.

 After you read my story, please take a moment and read Mark’s obituary, beautifully written by his son Paul. It really captures the person Mark was. He and I were opposites in many ways—he was patient, I am often impatient; he took time for people, I look for ways to bring conversations to an end; I never saw him angry, but me—well, you get the idea.

 Although in our view his life was cut short by cancer, he lived his life well. I asked him, several months before he passed away, “How are you doing, Mark? I mean, how are you really doing?” He replied, “Fine. Really, I’m fine. I believe that God is good, He is always good! I really believe that! So cancer is fine if that’s what God has for me.” He truly rested in that firm belief, all the way to the end.

 Steve

 *****************************

 

Just Like It Was Made for It

By Steve Skaggs

 It was a time of change for the Johnson family.

 After working for a strange family in Florida for a couple of years, Mark and Sherrie had decided to move back out West, to Mark’s old stomping ground, because Mark had taken a position as an assistant pastor in the Denver area.

 They loaded up the U-Haul and came as far as Greenville, South Carolina, on the first leg of the trip. They had arranged to sell their car to someone here in Greenville and then head west without it.

 There was only one problem.

 To sell a car, you have to have a title.

 Oh, they had the title. That wasn’t the problem.

 The problem was that the title was in a drawer.

 And that drawer was in a desk. 

 And that desk was packed in the U-Haul.

 Not near the back of the U-Haul, oh no. Because that’s not how life works. It was all the way at the front of the U-Haul. And Sherrie said she was sure the title was in that drawer.

 What to do? Somebody was going to have to unload the U-Haul, get the title out of the drawer, and then reload the U-Haul all in one evening. Well, this looked like a job for a couple of men. Sherrie looked around for a couple of men for a long time and finally settled on Mark and her brother-in-law, me.

 “Sometimes,” she said, “you have to do with what you’ve got.”

 I don’t think my attitude was maybe the best when we started this endeavor, because I knew that every single item we unloaded that evening was going to have to be reloaded. It seemed to be rather an exercise in futility.

 Especially if we got the whole way to the front of that truck and opened that drawer to find only four canceled checks, one of the kids’ vaccination records, a dirty Kleenex, and a note from Sherrie to Mark that read, “PLEASE empty the trash TODAY!”

 Being a forthright person who was not intimidated by my brother-in-law, who was much, much older than I (basically I knew I could take him, if fisticuffs eventuated from the situation), I said to Mark, after he had backed the truck into Grandma’s yard and opened the back door in preparation for the evening’s festivities, “So you’re SURE that title is in that drawer?” I was staring up at the wall of furniture, boxes, and many other belongings that were packed from floor to ceiling.

 “Well, Sherrie says it’s there, and she’s usually right about these things,” Mark replied with a smile.

 It’s pretty hard to get Mark down, even if you have to spend an entire evening unloading a U-Haul to find a scrap of paper and then reloading it again.

 I sighed and climbed up on the bumper. “OK,” I said, “here we go,” and I began handing things to Mark, who placed them on the ground.

 “Probably we should start putting the stuff a little farther from the truck so we aren’t stumbling over it all as we unload more stuff,” I groused.

 “Oh yeah! Good idea, Unca Steve!” And there was that grin again. Was he smiling just to get on my nerves?

 We worked on this little project for a couple of hours. “I think we’re getting closer,” Mark said optimistically when we were halfway through.

 “Of COURSE we’re getting closer!” I snapped. “If we aren’t getting closer, why are we even doing this?!”

 “Oh yeah, good point, Unca Steve!” And a smile again.

 Meanwhile sweat was running down my sides under my shirt in the exact location where my love handles would someday be.

 But finally the moment came. I moved a box. Mark looked into its cavity.

 “There it is!” he cried. “I can see it!”

 “The title?” I asked hopefully.

 “No, but I see the dresser. So we’re getting closer—” I shot him a look. “So we’re getting closer, of course,” he added in a subdued voice.

 Buoyed by a sense of hope which unexpectedly sprang up after hours of dread, I helped Mark move things aside faster and faster to get to the dresser.

 Finally, there it was—and there was a little drawer on the top where the title was supposed to be. Mark began to reach for it—I thought about stopping him and saying, “Maybe we should pray it’s in there,” but then I thought maybe it was a little late for that.

 Life went into slow motion as Mark’s hand reached forward, closer, closer . . . somewhere in the background an orchestra began playing Also Sprach Zarathustra, the theme from 2001: bummm bummm bummmmmm [pause] BAH-DAAAAAAHHH!

 And on the “bah-dah,” Mark bravely pulled the drawer open. It was stuffed with papers. Mark began rooting through them. “Hm. Hey, look at this.” He began pulling papers out one by one. “Here’s four canceled checks! And this—why, it looks like Paul’s vaccination records. Wow, I thought we had lost those!” His hand dove into the drawer again. “Yuck! A dirty Kleenex! One of the kids probably put that in there. I don’t think Sherrie would do something like that. Hey, what’s this? It's a note from Sherrie: ‘PLEASE empty the trash TODAY!’ Oh yeah, I remember when she gave me that a few weeks ago. I don’t think I ever did—"

 I had had it. In my best imitation of Ralph Kramden, I waved my arms and hollered, “WILL YOU JUST FIND THE STUPID TITLE?!” 

 Mark jumped a little. “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that, Unca Steve. My bad.” He reached a hand in and rummaged around in the papers like a game show host pulling a winning card from a huge tumbler. He pulled it out, and there was . . .

 The title! The beautiful title!

 I began shaking as a result of pent-up stress. “Is it—” I gulped, “is it the right one?”

 Mark squinted to read the small print in the waning light. Then he looked up at me with a victorious grin. “It is! It is!” He began waving it over his head, and before I knew it, we had linked arms and were dancing in a circle singing, “To life! To life! L’chaim!”

 In the interest of complete safety and to avoid losing the title again (something either one of us was fully capable of doing), Mark took the title in the house to Sherrie. I could see them through the window with arms linked, whirling in a circle. I could hear muffled singing: “To life! To life! L’chaim!”

 I banged on the window. “Hey you! We aren’t done out here!”

 Mark’s muffled voice through the glass: “Oh yeah. Sorry, Unca Steve.”

 We began reloading every single thing we had unloaded only minutes before. I could hear the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” in my head as we slaved away—“Yo yo, heave ho! Yo yo, heave ho!”

And then something unexpected happened. Mark had stacked up a tower of boxes, and when I reached up to put one on top, I could tell it was going to exactly fill the space. “Wow! Look at this!”

“It was just like it was made for it!” Mark enthused.

The unexpected thing that happened was that we started to get giddy. For some reason, Mark’s reply—“It was just like it was made for it!”—cracked me up.

A few minutes later, it happened again, except the other way around.

“Hey, Unca Steve!” Then, in an exaggerated Southern dialect, “Will ya look at that!” And Mark slid a box into an opening—a perfect fit.

I replied in the same dialect: “Whah, it wuz jist lahk it was made far it!”

This struck us both as being so funny that my knees got weak and Mark had to wipe his eyes.

That little exchange helped us retain what was left of our sanity through the rest of the ordeal. I don’t know how many times we said it.

“Hey! Hey! Unca Mark, lookah here!”

“Whah, it was jist lahk it was made for it!” More laughter. It never got old.

Finally, finally we finished up. Amazingly, everything we took off the truck fit back onto the truck. Mark scootched the last box into a cavity just above the piano.

“Hey! Hey! Unca Steve! Will yah look at tat!”

“Whah, it was jist lahk it was made far it!”

I flopped backwards on the grass laughing as Mark closed the truck’s back door, ending our adventure.

Now, not every detail of this story is exactly the way it happened. But it is true that we really got to laughing about our new little phrase. And there have been other times since then when Mark and I have been in conversation, and one of us will randomly repeat that phrase. It still cracks us up.

“Whah, it was jist lahk it was made far it!”

*************************

Mark E. Johnson

April 5, 1958 — November 5, 2025

On Wednesday, November 5, 2025, Mark E. Johnson passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by his family. He is survived by his wife, Sherrie; his siblings Tim, Tashina, and Debbie; his children Paul (Michelle) Johnson, Mark (Karen) Johnson, Christina (Patrick) Goshorn, and Angela (Stephen) Scoggins; and his grandchildren Abby, Liam, Mason, Owyn, Violet, Parker, Shepherd, and Evie.

Mark was born in Denver, Colorado, on April 5, 1958. He attended Hotchkiss High School and graduated from Bob Jones University with a B.A. in Biblical Studies. Throughout his life, he served as a pastor, teacher, woodworker, and technician.

He was much loved for his genuine care and interest towards everyone he met. He saw each person as unique, interesting, and valuable regardless of their background. He could listen patiently for hours, helping them feel supported and hopeful.

He enjoyed spaghetti and spaghetti westerns, classical music, peanut butter cups, sausage biscuits, and hazelnut coffee. He could overwhelm himself with laughter at The Far Side comics, “demotivational posters,” and other off-beat comedy. He didn’t care for anything fast-paced, but he was naturally good at strategy games and trivia, drawing on his deep knowledge of history and nature. He loved the mountains and instinctively knew which way was North, East, South, or West, from which he was sure to pick the slowest, most scenic route. He would spend months navigating a scripture passage, dissecting the Greek text, and recording insights that surfaced in many future lessons and conversations.

Mark was persistently hopeful, especially when it came to people. He valued people over plans or preconceptions. He would drop anything to spend time with a loved one, friend, or anyone in need. His accepting, attentive, and extemporaneous approach made him an especially effective teacher and mentor to hundreds of people over his lifetime. He engaged with questions, adapted, and learned alongside them.

No one felt judged around Mark, but you couldn’t be with him long before he’d tell you about his own failings. He loved nothing more than to share how God overwhelmed and changed him on June 21, 2000, amidst a difficult season. He never recovered from the outpouring of God’s mercy and love towards him, as evidenced by the deep emotion and joyful tears that sprang up whenever he shared it.

Mark’s family and friends remember him as quick to ask for forgiveness, slow to find fault. He praised even their smallest virtues and accomplishments. He loved nothing more than seeing and talking about God’s love for him, and he reflected it to everyone around him. He was a warm, caring husband, father, and friend who expressed love freely and constantly. In his final days, his last words to his wife, family, and all who came to see him were the phrase he repeated most often during his life: “I love you.”