For Wilshire Baptist Church
This week we are celebrating what would have been my father’s 90th birthday. He missed it by about 18 months. Actually, he missed his goal of reaching 93 years, which is what his own father achieved and what I often heard him tell doctors he wanted to reach.
One of those doctors heard that and said, “Oh, so you don’t have any desire to go further than that?” Maybe the fact she was a neurologist who said he had mild cognitive impairment was enough for him to know if he reached 93, he might be at “the end of his useful life” as the saying goes for old cars and refrigerators. And maybe his self-assessment is what prompted him to not return to us when he was in the hospital before he died. He had lost consciousness and would respond with fluttering eyelids when we urged him to open his eyes, and he would squeeze our hands when asked, but that’s all he could do.
Or perhaps that’s all he wanted to do. Perhaps he was already experiencing things more fantastic than anything this life has to offer. Maybe he was already seeing glimpses of the heaven he had talked about most of the time I knew him and especially since 1971 when his only daughter died. He lived fully and joyfully in the 51 years after that tragedy, but there was always a part of him ready for heaven.
Every year when Dad’s birthday rolled around, he would tell us how he always got short shrift having a birthday just three days after Christmas. I know he was just teasing because I don’t think he really cared. I believe he believed having a birthday so close to the birthday of Jesus was the greatest gift of all, because in Christ he received the greatest gift of all.
Many times in his last few years, as his strength and agility waned and especially during COVID, Dad would say, “I wish God would go ahead and rapture us up.” My response was, “That may be fine for you, but I’ve still got things I want to see and do.” I didn’t appreciate his eagerness to go and take us with him, but perhaps he knew the truth that, as the old song goes, “This world is not my home.”
Rapture or not, this world has not been Dad’s home for almost 18 months. He’s in heaven — wherever that is and whatever that means — while we’re still marking time in the only way we know how. On his 90th birthday we’ll share a meal that stokes warm memories — I’ll get fried shrimp and crab cakes — and we’ll tell stories and share laughs of when he was fully with us. We’ll thank God that Dad left us while he still knew who he was, who we were, and still could pray to the God who created him.
We also may shed a few tears, but I have not grieved deeply since Dad died. His departure came in small, unexpected steps, and I think my grief has followed that same pattern. But sometime in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, I dreamed he was lying in a dark room, he had just died, and I came out and sobbed with every fiber of my being. I awakened and was surprised my face and the sheets around my shoulders were dry because it felt so real. But it was only a dream, and maybe the point of the dream is that those in heaven don’t need our tears. Heaven is a place of joy and peace.
I’m reminded of that especially during Christmas when we replace the large tin-faced clock on the shelf above our kitchen window with a wooden placard painted with a cozy scene of a church in the snow at nighttime. I’m so accustomed to the clock that I keep looking up to see what time it is, but instead I see the word “Peace” painted in the night sky above the church. For a few weeks at Christmas, the clock is gone and the world is moving at heaven’s time, which is Dad’s time.