Every year as March returns and my garden springs to life, I think of the remarkable woman who changed my life.

Her name was Celetta Randolph Jones, “Randy” for short, a beloved figure in the city of Atlanta’s business, arts and philanthropic circles. Five years my senior and leagues ahead of me in terms of spiritual growth, Randy was introduced to me by my editor, Andrew Sparks, during my first week on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday Magazine staff.

At that time in the spring of 1977, Randy was running The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation and had stopped by the magazine to introduce herself and plumb my interest in historic preservation.

“Something tells me you two are bound to become best friends,” Andy wryly observed, a prophetic remark if there ever was one. 

In short order, Randy became my best friend and confidant, the one person I felt comfortable with discussing matters of life and death, heart and soul. Our love affair was a case of what the ancients called agape, transcending romance and superficial attraction. Besides, Randy was secretly dating an Episcopal priest, which I kidded her about relentlessly. She loved to give the needle back about the young women I went out with in those seven years of our deepening friendship.

Though she never married, “Aunt Randy” was the godmother of half a dozen of her nieces and nephews and, eventually, my own daughter, Maggie.

During my first few years in the so-called “city too busy to hate,” I frequently wrote about the darker side of the booming New South — race violence, corrupt politicians, unrepentant Klansmen, the missing and murdered, and young people who flocked to the city seeking fame and fortune only to lose their way and sometimes their lives.

A life-changing moment came one Saturday night when I was waiting for a squad from the city morgue to pick me up for a story I was working on about Atlanta’s famed medical examiner. As I stood in my darkened backyard waiting for my dog, McGee, to do her business, I witnessed my next-door neighbor, an Emory University med student, being gunned down in an alleged drug hit. He died as we waited for the ambulance to arrive.

Not surprisingly it was Randy who helped me make sense of this. The morning after my neighbor’s murder, I’d opened my Bible to the Book of Matthew for the first time in years and was struck by a reference that Jesus repeatedly makes about the “Kingdom of Heaven.”  That evening at dinner, I grumbled, “So where the hell on Earth is the so-called Kingdom of Heaven?”

Randy simply smiled. “It’s already here, my love. Inside us. You just have to see it.”

I was a wee bit annoyed by her calm assurance.

Randy was a classy and calm Presbyterian with an unshakable faith in God’s grace. I was a backslid Episcopalian who hadn’t darkened a church doorway since the murder of my girlfriend during our college days.

Purely because of Randy, however, I attended services the next Sunday at historic All Saints’ Episcopal in downtown Atlanta — a place where the doors were always open to the homeless. I soon took a job writing about the suffering of the Third World for the Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief, and even made a vow that, going forward, I would only write about subjects and people who had a positive impact on life. Randy Jones was my inspiration.

I lived up to that vow, and even briefly entertained taking myself off to the Episcopal Seminary until a crusty old bishop from Alabama suggested that I could “probably serve the Lord much better by writing than preaching.”

My pal Randy gave her famous, sultry laugh when I mentioned his somewhat frank comment — and she agreed with him.

During my final years in Atlanta, Randy and I met at least once a week for lunch or dinner to talk about the events of the day and the mysteries of this world. She also spent several Christmases with my family in North Carolina, attended both of my marriages, visited my young brood in Maine and joined us for a joyous spring vacation at our favorite Georgia beach.

In many ways, she became the Dodson family godmother and probably the closest I’ll ever come to knowing a living saint — though she would respond with her sultry laugh at such a silly notion.

Over the decades, as Southern springtime returned, wherever I happened to be in the world, Randy would track me down by phone. She’d finish our talk with a couple meaningful questions: So, Jim, are we any closer to the Kingdom of Heaven? And . . . How is your beautiful garden growing?

She and I had visited public gardens together many times. Randy hailed from Thomasville, a small South Georgia town known as “City of Roses,” and knew that once I’d swapped big-city life for small-town living, I’d become a committed man of the Earth like my rural kin before me. There was no going back, she knew, on gardening or faith.

As my spiritual life grew and deepened across the years, I’d come to believe the Kingdom of Heaven might indeed be nearby. It’s no coincidence that Jesus mentions it 32 times in the Book of Matthew. His partner, Luke, simply calls it the “Kingdom of God” and makes clear — as Randy did — that it “lies within” everyone.

My favorite reference comes from the Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus’ followers pester him to explain where the “Kingdom” exists:

Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.

Wherever it exists, I have my late friend, Randy Jones, to thank for putting me on a winding path to the Kingdom within. 

And I’m not alone.

Randy Jones passed away peacefully in October 2022. Her funeral service at Atlanta’s First Presbyterian Church was packed with people whose lives Randy had touched, from business leaders to artists, from church members to childhood friends, including a half a dozen godchildren and yours truly. The sanctuary overflowed with stories of her generosity and quiet wisdom, each person recalling how Randy’s kindness had shaped their own journeys. The service was a testament to the wide effect she had not only in Atlanta but in the hearts of everyone fortunate enough to know her.

Including a former backslid Episcopalian.