Looking For Lydia? Where Did I Come From?

I took Dean Robertson’s book on my recent dive vacation. I’ll admit it cut into my focus to add to my own writing project, but the questions she posed haunted me for several days…

The women in her book had several common bonds: aging, a Bible study and shared residence at the Lydia Roper Home. As Dean led them through a study of women in the Bible, the complexity of how “life showed up” shone through the pages of the Bible and Ms. Robertson’s book, Looking for Lydia, Looking for God.

“What did she want? What did she get? What did she lose? What are the compromises we make? Are they enough? Do we, perhaps, find even more than we hoped for?”

Those are the questions threaded in the reveal of the lives of the residents of the Lydia Roper Home. Just as the women of the Bible made their mark from birth to death, the core group share their road maps. They shared decades of history growing into women, motherhood, careers– and unanswered prayers that changed pathways.

Dean Robertson tries to learn more of the woman, Lydia Roper, the namesake of the home originally dedicated to care for widows of Civil War veterans. The author is driven to answer the above questions and trace the footprints of Lydia during her ninety years on earth. Dean takes a dusty jewel of a woman’s life and discovers the refraction created in those around her.

My favorite summary of her search is:

“Looking for Lydia is like looking for God, and you’re doing both. We are all looking for Lydia. We are all looking for that something we may or may not find, but the search for which defines our lives. In the course of that search we find frustration, disappointment, loss, and grief, but we also find much that we didn’t expect– work and love and relationships and joy.”

Thanks, Dean Robertson, for allowing us to look and learn about a piece of your life.

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