My father died early on a Saturday
morning in May, 1995. It was not sudden or
unexpected. After three months of
hospice care, he had slipped dramatically the week leading up to that morning. Our daughter Bonnie, a freshman in college at
the time, had come in the night before, and all four of us had been able to
visit Grandpa.
His
battle with cancer had begun six years earlier with the discovery of prostate
cancer. His treatment began with surgery
and an unexpected spread into nearby lymph nodes. He endured radiation, chemotherapy, and
life-saving surgery with an intestinal blockage in l992. His oncologist advised hospice care for the
three months he expected my father to have left. But God had strongly impressed me with the
centurion’s story in Mathew in his request for his servant’s healing. He
believed in Jesus’s authority and power to make his servant well even without
coming to the centurion’s house. Others
prayed for my father’s healing, and after a month in the hospital, Dad regained
strength and lived three more years.
He
died around five in the morning. Our son
had a baseball game early that day, but I don’t recall doing anything else
until the evening. In the “olden times,”
when we took pictures with cameras and pasted snapshots into picture albums, I
had kept up very well with picture taking and putting them into books, starting
back before our daughter was born. By
whose inspiration I can’t recall, but we spent several hours sitting on our
sofa and looking back over the many books, picture by picture, page by
page. We remembered so many occasions,
big and small, that included Grandpa and Grandma, because they lived nearby and
very much wanted to be a part of the life we lived. They were generous with their time and their
resources, often paying for dinners out and babysitting grandchildren. Many of the daylilies I have in our yard
originally came from Grandpa’s garden.
Those
hours that night spent looking back at our lives before cancer robbed Grandpa
of his vim and vigor were wonderfully healing and comforting for us all. Remembering him and the times we shared often
helping one another out in some way made us realize we had a lot to be thankful
for, many years of good times and blessings.
This “picture night” came to my mind as I began to write about God’s
instructions to us to remember or put another way, to “forget not His benefits”
(Ps. 103). Faced with a concern, an
illness, a challenge, perhaps an impossibility, God calls us to remember who He
is and what He has been and done in the scriptures and in our lives.
A
story I too often identify with finds the disciples in a tempest-ridden sea
with Jesus asleep in the boat. “Teacher,
do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38). Faced with a life-threatening storm, the
disciples were forgetting the man in the boat had healed the multitudes and taught
with authority. He was with them—and that made all the difference. He “rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace,
be still.’ And the wind ceased and there was great calm” (Mark 4:39).
The
temptation to fear is understandable and real when we are faced with some of life’s
unknowns or known difficulties, but God’s word tells us many times to “be not
afraid,” or to “fear not.” Turning our
attention to Jesus, His words and His demonstrations of God’s love and power
both in the scriptures and in our lives, should help us remember, to “forget
not” just what a mighty God we serve. His Spirit is alive and well, poured out to
continue the great works of God and Jesus, His son.
John
the Baptist had it right when he said more
of God and less of me (paraphrase of John 3:30).
