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| Dad and Mom the first day He checked into Stanford on July 17th |
Most who read
this blog know that my father has been fighting leukemia for the past seven
months. On Jan 25th that
fight ended and Dad found himself at home in God’s love embraced by Jesus …for
real and forever. Yesterday we paid tribute to his life. Some have asked if
I would share what I shared at his memorial service. The following is what was shared.
On
January 9, I sat down with my dad and asked if he could tell the world
anything, what would it be? He said
three things…
“Following
Jesus doesn’t always lead us to a place where we want to be.”
In
fact, I noticed a Lenten devotional from last spring in His bible that said as
much. It seemed God was preparing him
before he ever knew he’d be taking this journey.
It’s
easy to assume if we follow Jesus and do what’s “right” that it will lead to a
“blessing” we expect. The truth is my
dad was angry about cancer at first, and the way it was stealing his life. He
felt cheated and so did a lot of us. There were many dark days. Yet, through a disease that was taking my dad’s life far sooner than he wanted, he was learning the “blessing of following Jesus was actually Jesus… not necessarily good
circumstances. And the gift of following Christ was not his presenTS wrapped up in neat little bows set pristinely upon a shelf. Rather, it was his presenCE
that comes near when everything else goes dark and life begins to unravel those pretty bows and burst out of our tidy boxes.
I suppose that’s why he also said to me during the same visit,
“Michellie, Don’t
fall too in love with the world. Wear it loosely.”
Dad was
beginning to understand how his despair (and ours) is often rooted in our
commitment to the very temporal and unpredictable things of this place called
earth. We strain after our dreams and
demand our rights. We spend time
climbing the corporate ladder, and dusting off old trophies.
But
loosening his grip on those things allowed my dad to surrender himself to the story God was writing. He encountered
God in that surrender even when the journey did not lead to a place he “wanted”
to be. In the struggle, he found the
blessings and goodness of God. It showed
up in the presence of friends who stayed by him as he weathered these last few
months? It sometimes appeared in the
night as God brought a company of heavenly hosts to hover and attend him in his
fear. It showed up in care-givers who gently
came along side to comfort his pain. It
showed up in strained relationships now made whole. And that was a big deal to him. My dad said one more thing that day…
He said, “I
wouldn’t let lousy relationships go unattended.”
"I
wouldn’t put off conflict. I would have
been less angry.
I
would pick relationships over everything else and I would do it more."
I
asked what everything else was and he said, “My rights, my expectations, my
ideals, my pride. There
is never a conflict so big that it should eclipse the relationship or our ability to love in it. Never.”
My dad
didn’t say this because he always got it right.
He said it because he did the heart work when he got it wrong.
Lastly,
as I consider the eternal home my dad now enjoys, perhaps if he could say
anything to us now, he’d tell us how complete and beautiful it is – that what
seems incomplete to us now here on earth, is already made whole in eternity; and God’s promises are all true -
every one of them. He’d tell us God is gloriously
good, and how he is at home in His love - a love that is every bit what we’ve
imagined, even more! He’d invite us to
taste it, to trust the journey and know that even when it takes us down paths
we’d rather not travel, chances are it’s in those dark places where we will
find God in the way we’ve always longed to know him.
