He came to say goodbye to my fourth daughter.
She had been crying that morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. So, we tucked her in, like a marshmellow, between both my husband and me.
She was sound asleep, like she is this morning.
And then I see him like a ball of light; intent, focused, looking straight at my daughter. Resurrected in part, high above my bed.
I wasn’t afraid. As far as I knew, he wasn’t dead.
Some say it was “just” a dream.
Within an hour the phone rings.
I answered. It was my mom. My dad was sick….Not six months of chemo and transfusions, injections and inductions kind of sick…
But really sick.
My spirit knew before my mind caught up….I needed to go.
I race in my church clothes. It’s Sunday morning. A beautiful Spring day. The day of His resurrection.
My little girl’s planned to go find eggs tucked in tall grass, and hear about Jesus…
Instead, they stayed home and waited for their mom until dark.
The Loss
There are some ways you never want to see the strongest-man-you’ve-ever-known. One of those is flat upon the floor, gasping for air, struggling to stand.
I picked up the phone and rang the emergency crew. Shortly after, Hospice got there. Our own attempts failed at helping him to his feet.
This wasn’t just “another setback”. My spirit knew. My Daddy was going home to be with Jesus, today…
I had to accept it.
The day was long, and my dad seemed to go in and out of life, not talking, but just nodding faintly, only to certain questions.
He had a brain bleed, and was released by Providence six days earlier, to “go home and die quietly”.
And still, I think, when you love someone, really pour your whole life into the anchor that is your soul, it’s like daggars into your own heart, to see them suffer.
You can’t breathe, knowing that person who spent their entire life caring for you, is now struggling with a brain bleed and dying before your eyes…
Dancing like a hesitant sojourner, between this life and glorious eternity.
And there, as life slowly sucked out of his body, I wanted to scream internally and make it all go away.
You come crashing with the impossible reality of the fragility of your own life and the fallable nature of your own being.
And you find, you are not able or capable, smart or strong like you thought…
But most of all, you are not God, the only one who can heal and resurrect.
And knowing “we aren’t God”, if we are all honest, can be a humbling awakening, to all of us who still have breath.
Despite all our trying, all our giving over of self the past six months, all the fighting to keep my dad alive, you find in retrospect, you are useless.
Just a vessel being used.
And in those moments, those moments your loved one is wedged between life and death; Jesus is either everything or nothing. He is either King of all, even of the pain….Or He is a worthless, something we stamp onto our lives in vain, and only use to appease our egos.
Like the warrior my mom is and the robot of good works I had become, we tended my dad his last day. We took washclothes, and eventually medicine, temperatures and plumped up pillows…
No one wants to step into THE BIGGEST Great Adventure, which is to meet the King of all Ages face to face, via the avenue of pain.
However, there is no entrance or exit into this life without pain.
A pregnant mom bellows out announcing to the world that new life is coming soon. The old often go more silently, not wailing as in their entry.
But, either way we hurt. And not only us, but each and every one of us who are brave enough to watch the great assend and decend from heaven’s fortress.
We all must go and come with some measure of struggle. Is that our great badge of honor as we press through the veil?
I have been told that it is “bad” to talk about the big ball of light that resembled my dad in the early morning, that day my Father died.
They say it is not something “good church people” should talk about. It was “just a dream” and not Biblical.
However, it was my husband that made sense of it all, not flinching, shocked or narrowed by the confinements of some religious walls.
“Jen, your dad got to spend an entire day with you. You got to say goodbye. Every single one of our kids got to say goodbye to your dad. But, this 4th daughter of ours was the only one who never got to say goodbye to your dad….”
Then, he clenched it with, “He was just coming to say, ‘Goodbye, see you later!'”
Could he be right?
Either way, my mind was more fixed on the fact that I kissed my Daddy on the head, and two hours later, before midnight, He slept, and entered the gates of heaven.
I was more taken by the reality that this world isn’t what we knew it to be….
We fight and work and put our strength in human gifts, praising the presents, often more than the giver. Then, we lift up doctors and hospitals, medicine and fallable men, thinking “Google” somehow might fix us.
Yet, nothing is in our control. We are not God. We cannot make ourselves or even moreso, anyone else, whole.
We can pray for them, yes. But we are not God.
We are just sojourners, passing through, like a vapor coming up from the door on a cold November morning. We are like a speck of dust, a piece of sand on the vast oceans on His goodness.
How foolish to think we can stop death. Define life. Put into boxes our own glimpes of understanding.
We always see in part, but isn’t it only Him alone who sees fully?
And who are we to question God, pick apart what He is doing? Put life or sickness, success or failures into some catagory, like the thousands of labels we place on other people, daily in our minds.
We are flesh, but aren’t we also fully spirit?
Mark 12:25 say, “When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”
And still, we don’t fixate on the dead, we focus on life and life abundant. We grasp for only Him and let Him confirm to our being, what is and what isn’t true.
We set down all our notions, prideful men and their speculations. Because no man is God, regardless of how much they know Scripture.
Did my dad come to say goodbye to my daughter? Or was it “just a dream”?
At the same time, I cling to what is living; my faith in Jesus, my trust in His goodness, my joy in believing that one day, I will be greeted at those Pearly Gates and my Father will be there to meet me.
Nothing is as it seems in this life.
And I think we are wise if we let go and trust only the One who gives and takes away, the Author of this Life, the One who puts breath into our lungs, and knows every hair on our heads.
Being wise in our own eyes, only leads to a dead end. Scripture, it is life-power, and it is the model, the Greatest Man I’ve Ever Known clinged to…
Not just in words, but in action.
We laid my Daddy to rest.
That day, I asked for one thing. God, show me he is watching. Let the sun shine down on us, the day that we bury my Daddy.
And as we gathered in black, I was handed the flag, and after, the sun parted from the clouds and I felt the presence of the One so much greater than I.
He is our hope. He is the one my earthly dad would want me to know and make my sole/soul home in.
My Dad’s body is turning back to dust, even as I write this.
My Resurrected Savior is the One that carries the mantle now, showing me what it means to love. To forgive. To let go. And to trust in Him, when the anguish of carnality, just seems to be too much.
Only by grace I move forward, without the man who loved me so well; my hero, my strength, my rock who never failed me.
He is watching us. I know it.
And today, He is more alive than I have ever known him.
Eternity need not be feared, when you live your life well and surrender to Jesus.
This life is but a temporary breathe, before we spend eternity in a place where love lives forever.
Do we know His love that is endless? Or will we remain in fear?
“If I speak in the tongues[ of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Cor. 13:1-3)
