This bright Wednesday in April marks six months since the beautiful October afternoon on which I received the news of my father’s death. Six months, and I have still not shared the story on this blog. Life has been continuing since then with events in such rapid succession that my heart seems just beginning to catch up. For anyone out there who may still happen to check in on this blog and is even interested, here at last is the sequel to my last post.
On that terrible day, Wednesday, October 14th, David was still recovering from a life-threatening illness for which he had been hospitalized in intensive care. In the midst of preparing for a wedding we were hosting in our home three days later, I had just finished a birthday luncheon for a dear friend. The phone had rung during the party, but I did not check the message until the last guest was gone.
The news was beyond my ability to fathom. My father, who has traveled by air, sea, and land in all kinds of danger in the Middle East, Africa, and South America, while making a midmorning drive up the road he has traveled thousands of times, was met less than two miles from home by a frenzied young motorist who crossed over into oncoming traffic at a speed that took both her life and my father’s in an instant. It did not matter that he was in a full-sized Landrover rather than his VW, nor that the airbags deployed. The devastation took hours to clear, and was given priority coverage in the local papers, radio and television.
Most amazingly in the mangled wreckage, his dear, kind face was spared, and we were granted the mercy of seeing him in death with the dignity that accompanied him all through his life. I referred in my November post to the goodness and mercy that was present even in “the valley of the shadow”. To describe these mercies in detail could fill pages.
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My first thought after I began to comprehend what I was hearing in that first phone call was of the vacancy on the earth left by a man of such rare character and conviction. The personal grief and loss was more than any one of us were prepared to fathom, but more than that, beyond our loss was the desperate need of the world for men like him.
“And there was silence in heaven for half an hour…” (Rev. 8:1). We here on earth cannot begin to comprehend such a silence in a place where worship and singing in greatest crescendos perpetually reverberated through all space. Yet even here on earth there are times and events of such deep impact that silence is all that is possible.
“The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silent before Him.” These words of scripture sung in a reverent old hymn are another of my earliest memories of my father’s voice.
Silence was the tribute paid to him as his funeral began, my brother seating my mother almost as one would at a wedding, and then a solemn processional down the aisle through the many hundreds who had gathered, with first David and I, carrying flowers, then my sister and her husband, with flowers, then the next and the next, all seven of his children with spouses, then the firstborn grandson of my parents, Austin, with his family, and the first granddaughter, back from Kazakhstan, and the next, from Australia, and the next, and the next, and the next, until the beautiful cherrywood casket crafted by my brother-in-law was heaped and mounded with blossoms, the wordless witness of our forty-seven lives to a saint who, though he lived the simplest life imaginable, without the titles and degrees by which the world measures achievement, walked in a greatness of character and stature of soul surpassed by few.
And for me there has been a long silence internally following this profound loss, a stillness compelled by the homegoing of such a man. Every time I have thought of reducing the towering thoughts and emotions filling my heart to mere words, I have been able only to return to silence, waiting, listening, pondering, resting as before in the great everlasting arms. “How are you doing?” my dear friends have asked. “Fine”, I have responded. And that is the truth. Fine, yes; yet my inner being has been focused, at attention, honoring the man who shaped me in the earliest years of my life, pondering the ongoing significance for me of what he loved, fought for, and lived for.
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With my mother recently, coming across the last birthday card I sent my father, I stumbled upon the key for which I have been waiting, and today, six months after he left, I am able finally to unwrap these thoughts.
I knew that when I would have something to say, it would be about gladness. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” begins the hundredth psalm. “Serve the Lord with gladness”.
GLADNESS. That is the word that stood out above all else as I thought about his life in the hours following the news. It is what I would have said about him at the funeral if I could have cut through the numbness in my heart. Gladness was the glow that permeated his words, his actions, his waking, his sleeping. I have called it endless initiative, vitality, zest, undiluted love of life, energy of soul, buoyancy of spirit. But as each of these swirls together in the glass and begins to separate into its individual color, I see that the joy of the Lord—his constant daily joy in who God is, and his joy in belonging to the Lord—was the deep spring from which all his vitality flowed, the clear water--to carry on the swirling colors analogy--in which all his energy found its medium. His was the joy of a life lived constantly in the light; the uncompromised, clean fear of the Lord that kept him free from all other fears.
He was not a charismatic man, nor did he have an iota of appreciation for charismatic expression. To raise his hands in worship was for him an act of obedience that broke with his deeply conservative bent. Yet his was a life suffused with joy in being yoked with Christ.
This gladness pulled him out of bed and onto his knees every morning of his life, for many years long before dawn. It kept him poring over the beloved treasury of the scriptures late into the night hours, brought songs to his lips day and night, brightened our household with his homecoming, and early in life awakened in my own heart a deep hunger for purity and reverence. This gladness in his Eternal God filled life with delight, whether in a sunset or a child’s innocent sweetness, the antics of a baby goat or the completion of a building project. He delighted in the work of his hands in the same way he delighted in the richness of a passage from Isaiah. Because he so served the Lord with gladness, his left hand did not keep track of his right hand; there was never a counting of the late nights spent exploring the scriptures with a visitor, nor the times those nights concluded with a hike to the nearby stream to rejoice over the baptism of a new believer (including myself, and one by one over the years, each of my siblings).
There was a costly aspect of this gladness as a true follower of the Christ of whom Isaiah said, “…and He will delight in the fear of the Lord.” In his dedication to the way of Christ, he experienced the suffering of choosing, again and again, between what was most comfortable and what he read in the scriptures. His uncompromised commitment to the fear of the Lord led him out of the denomination he loved deeply, and into a lifelong mentorship at the feet of Jesus. In his quest to be completely true to Christ and His word in all ways possible, he sometimes walked alone, and his love of the truth led to great travail of soul on behalf of countless others, especially his children and grandchildren.
One day I sat down and began to list the passages of scripture that he especially loved. The list goes on and on and on, weighted with the Psalms, the prophets, the letter to the Romans, the book of Hebrews, the letters of Peter and John, the benedictions, the prayers of Paul; how he loved and delighted in these truths and nourished his soul continually with them! He carried them on index cards to memorize as he worked, he placed them on his walls; he sang them, he recited them at the dinner table, and their richness is forever imprinted in my heart with sweetness, because of all the times I heard him read or recite those passages with a gladness and a tenderness that saturated the very words with a living dimension.
“For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings.”
“For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren…” How he cherished these words!
“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot be touched by our infirmities, but one who has in all things been tempted as we are, yet without sin…”
“Although He was a Son, He learned obedience by the things He had suffered. And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation…”
“This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil…”
“Hence also, He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.”
“For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens; who does not need daily to offer up sacrifices first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people, because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself…”
“Since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful…”
“Consider Him who endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye grow weary and faint in your minds…”
“And coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected by men, but choice and precious in the sight of God,…”
“But like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’”
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light…”
“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, think on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do; and the God of peace shall be with you.”
“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee, because He trusts in Thee.”
And the benedictions:
“The Lord bless you, and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up His countenance on you, and give you peace.”
“And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you. To Him be dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
“Now to Him who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy, to the only wise God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory and majesty, dominion and authority, both now and forever. Amen.”
And with especially vibrant emphasis:
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.”
“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.”
You are quite forgiven if you glanced over these words, having gotten the general idea, yet I share them as but the “tip of the iceberg” of the treasury of his heart, because to this day, when I remember these words and many others–which I do with little effort, having heard them so ardently articulated from an early age—I hear them in my father’s voice, with his gladness in the truths therein resonating and adding rich emphasis to every word.
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It was in going through boxes of memories with my mother, that she came upon the birthday card I had sent this vibrant, rugged, great, earthy, simple, loving, wholeheartedly faithful and victorious champion at his last birthday, that became the key to unlock my “logjammed” heart. I was amazed and grateful as I read, that I had been able to touch that gladness while still unaware of the path before us all, as I wrote on the eve of what would be his final trip to Africa:
“Daddy Dear,
“Blessed be the Lord who has brought you safely to the fulfillment of your 78th year!! Seventy-eight years of blessing, fruitfulness, fellowship with the One who created you and brought you into the world, fellowship with His Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. “Through many dangers, toils and snares you have already come; ‘Tis grace that brought you safe thus far, and grace will lead you home. “ And what grace this has been, that has taught you to live righteously and godly in this present age, so that you have created a faithful inheritance for your children and your children’s children! It seems altogether fitting that you would be given not only the physical strength but the vision and spiritual energy to make another return to Kenya, and not alone, but with Mama by your side, and two generations accompanying you. Riches, wealth, and honor of the truest kind are yours, and may the Lord grant that the riches of harvest may only continue and increase through all your remaining days on earth and into eternity!
“I have been pondering this week the words regarding Jesus: ‘You have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows.’ What an amazing truth it is that though in this world loving righteousness and hating evil is not the easy road, that in the end it produces an oil of gladness that permeates our being. May there be much oil of gladness upon you in this year ahead, and may goodness and mercy follow you all the days of your life! I so continually give thanks for you.
With love always, …”
