Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-15-24

I have shared the story many times, but not here, of my mother’s passing; or to skirt the euphemism, her death. She would have been a hundred years old next year, and died a couple decades ago. The circumstances attending her death were fairly remarkable, but all the times I have shared the story my contexts were medical, statistical, and with emotions bouncing like a pinball between sad and astonishing and humorous.

But a friend recently saw them in a spiritual context. Through the years I certainly appreciated the spiritual component, but not the lessons worth sharing. Cue Paul Harvey’s “Now you’ll know the rest of the story…”

My parents had moved to Florida as many retirees are wont to do; my two sisters and I remained up north, visiting on occasion. The occasions grew frequent, however, when Mom’s health slipped precipitously. She had been a lifelong Christian, church-going and always devoted to Jesus. Not affecting her salvation but affecting her health were also unfortunate lifelong devotions to cigarettes and booze.

Smoking and drinking accelerated her decline from various ailments, although, oddly, her lungs and liver were about the only things that worked right as she eventually was placed on a hospice list. I hope it is not a “spoiler” to any reader to share that hospice is not a get-well regimen: it is, formally, a recognition that the patient is dying, and is designed to make those final days or months comfortable, not expecting a cure.

Mom was put in home-hospice care with visiting nurses; my sisters and I rotated visits to Florida to help Dad and say our good-byes. Stubbornly, it seemed, my mother got weaker, and stronger; she grew foggy, then lucid; she wasted away but hung on. Each of our “good-byes” were in fact “so longs,” as my sisters and I returned again and again.

During one of my visits a kindly neighbor said, “It must be hard to lose your mother…” I replied: “It’s almost impossible!”

However Mom did go downhill until she was barely conscious. In a virtual coma. We were able to put a chip of ice or bit of Jell-O between her lips, only a few times a day. She exhibited several of the “signs of impending death” the Hospice booklet listed. Finally for two solid days there was not a sign of life from her beyond a weak pulse.

Then one night – I slept on the living-room sofa next to her hospital bed – she made a faint gurgling sound. No other signs or movement. Almost 24 hours later, she mumbled; no discernible words, but an apparent attempt. On the next morning, there were words, but random and unconnected.

Over the next days she managed more ice chips and Jell-O and even broth. And she spoke words. Sentences. They made sense. I’ll tell you how much sense: they were Bible verses. Fragments at first, then random, then full verses, but as if in her sleep.

Bible verses! Mom was not opening her eyes or making eye contact at first; but she was reciting passages from the Bible. Soon she recognized us, spoke our names… but rather than asking where she was, or why we looked so concerned, she just recited Bible verses. Eventually, lines from hymns.

I will leap ahead, so to speak. Mom recovered her strength. The bed was put aside. She resumed a life, slowly (she moved around the house, but with a walker). She gained some weight. She never had eaten much, but now she did eat and even cooked – we all had a Florida Thanksgiving reunion where she prepared a full meal. She did not resume drinking, and I was grateful that my kids were able finally to know their Oma – sober, and tender and funny, as I had known her in my own childhood.

She lived almost a full “bonus” year before a natural death overtook her. Hospice nurses said that patients were known to live maybe six months after being “listed,” but they scarcely knew of bounce-backs like Mom’s, much less of a full year.

But when I told Mom of her “bounce-back” while she seemingly was unconscious… she was as incredulous as nurses or neighbors were. I have said that she was religious all her life, but she knew that she never had committed all those Bible verses to memory.

“Rick, some of them I know, of course. And I’m sure I heard them all in Sunday School and church, or have read them, but I never memorized all of them! I never tried to!” I read to her the verses she recited from that deathbed… and try as she might, she could not recite them from memory again. But there had been many, and they had risen from her lips, complete and correct.

This was the story I often have told – shame on me, almost like describing magic tricks or a trained-seal act. My friend refreshed me with the spiritual lesson. What had sustained Mom when medicines did not? What “filled those empty spaces”? We witnessed an example of “the Lord worketh in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” What lessons should the rest of us learn from this?

Psalm 119 talks about “hiding the Word in our hearts.”

I had known that verse, and always assumed it was a recommendation to memorize Bible verses. It is. But more than that, it tells us (in Isaiah 55) that “My Word that goeth forth out of My mouth shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.”

The power of God’s Word blessed my mother, even when it had been heard and processed casually. It accomplished things in her. It blessed us, and may it bless those who hear this story.

“Faith comes by hearing…” There is no seed that when planted cannot grow in mighty ways, multiply, and feed others. Let us just be the fertile soil. God will plant; the Spirit will nurture; Jesus will be glorified. Please be encouraged to keep the things of God close, even in “casual” ways, whether words, messages, songs; open to lessons the Bible offers, or Christian music you can listen to. Absorb. Share. Hide in your heart.

In the end, it wasn’t hard to lose my mother. She was ready, after a few more tasks – even if she did not fully know the assignments – at the End of the Way.

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Click: When I Get To the End Of the Way

10-11-21

One of the most familiar and quoted American poems of the Twentieth Century – after advertising jingles – is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Frost’s poem, at least the first and last phrases, frequently are quoted. And it often is misidentified as “The Road Less Traveled,” which title lends an air of misty fatalism instead of melancholic speculation… or a dozen other meanings. Not that Frost intentionally invited more analysis than depicting an everyday happenstance common to humanity. But one scholar, Dr David Orr, wrote a whole book deconstructing the poem. At the other end of the spectrum (and not likely addressing Frost) Dr Yogi Berra stated his unique view: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

I have been thinking about Frost’s ubiquitous imagery and symbolism (for surely he intended to evoke larger contexts). In our contemporary world, especially in America, there is so much argumentation and accusations and anger that an observer might assume that neat and clear Divisions reign amongst us; that there are two camps continuously at loggerheads. Friends or enemies, black and white, right or wrong.

Yet society’s divisions are not bifurcations – not dealing with “two sides to every story.” In practice these days, many issues are rhetorical reticulations: multi-faceted, as discernible as little cracks in a windshield, as easy to trace as strands of cotton candy. To return to our analogy, roads in a yellow wood that are overgrown by tangled brambles and vines. Most “debates” I hear these days are subsumed by ferocious tangents.

I try to keep Christ’s example as my lodestar; not to be judgmental, but for discernment, or to learn new viewpoints, or perhaps have an opportunity to witness. Even, or especially, when non-spiritual questions arise. It’s not always easy. A friend this week asked my opinion about whether to attend the funeral of an estranged in-law. Two roads diverge? Ask Yogi Berra. Not all questions are right or wrong from a Christian perspective. We can try to apply that perspective, however.

More seriously, a dilemma was shared with me recently. A friend who is an airline pilot and opposed to the Vaccine is threatened with dismissal and all that would portend, if he does not submit. This is more than a question of conscience: it is a question of livelihood. Athletes on charter flights take off masks in the terminal, and on the field, as do tens of thousands of spectators. Their jobs are not threatened. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood.

His is not necessarily a Christian dilemma, although proponents of the two alternatives might make cases. America has gotten to the point where people argue about a thousand little things, then torture themselves over two clear choices. I have many friends, from congenital skeptics to my own doctor, who vehemently oppose the Vaccine. The System is forcing us to make excruciating choices despite ourselves. And we are threatened.

Some choices we make willingly or with insouciance, even on matters recently regarded as grave. Another friend whom I have admired, and assisted, on public issues we zealously pursued, just abandoned them because they “have not gained traction”… with hardly a test of traction. I cannot criticize those choices, when a hundred factors might be at play. People are choosing, in political matters, whether to compromise or resist. Increasingly, we come to roads diverging on our pathways that once seemed straight and clear.

It is not only COVID but dozens of issues. Local school board meetings have become battlegrounds, and our own government is calling concerned parents “terrorists.” The internet should be allowed to censor and spy? We are to be under suspicion for having more than $600 in bank accounts? Can we call politicians murderers when they want to allow babies to be killed? Oh, that’s hate speech… but all we’re doing is trying to love babies.

The Lord knows I do not condemn my friends with whose choices I disagree. I have made tough decisions, and probably am making some wrong decisions right now. That is one reason God instituted prayer; and a reason that we have friends, and cherish friendships. Let us be charitable and generous to each other in these awful times.

But for Christ’s sake, literally, let us think and pray when we come to moral forks in the road.

Do you remember that old saying about not understanding someone unless we can walk a mile in their shoes? We should imagine others’ choices, not only our own, when the roads of life diverge before us.

And maybe, more often than we are used to, we can walk down those roads together.

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Click: When I Get To The End Of The Way

2-14-11

One of the only constant aspects of this old world is… Change. That is not irony; it is history. And it is not our dreaded fate; it is our lot to make of it what we will.

Two weeks ago we speculated, here, about the implausible, if not unthinkable – entrenched Arab leaders resigning and fleeing with their lives. But it has happened, and it might happen yet again. Hundreds of thousands of angry protestors, and their first act (after all-night jubilation on the streets)… was returning to Liberation Square in Cairo with brooms and garbage bags. Go figure. The predictable, in this new world, is the Unpredictable.

It is the case in America, too, down to the personal level. In a land of plenty, there is want; in the world’s most powerful economy, there is unemployment and insecurity. But the new security is not Insecurity – it does not have to be that way. And it is not a case merely of deciding to reclaim our personal destiny in the face of so many of life’s new challenges. It is a case of remembering that God is not only in control of our destiny – our careers, our families, our lives – but that He is our destiny. Our destination.

The singer Lynda Randle has pointed to the perils of accepting Jesus as Savior without making Him Lord. Two different things, each requiring a response from us. The first aspect affects our eternal destiny; the second can influence our everyday destiny, day by day, in this old world.

Mother Teresa put it another way: “God has not called us to be successful… He calls us to be obedient.”

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The songwriter Charles D Tillman popularized great Gospel songs like Old Time Religion, Life’s Railway to Heaven, and I Am a Poor, Wayfaring Stranger. Another of his classics is the song When I Get To the End of the Way, which beautifully reflects the message today. Its words are profound.

Here are the lyrics, after which you can click on a great version sung by Lynda Randle, sister of Michael Tait (of dcTalk and currently lead singer of The Newsboys).

When I Get To the End Of the Way

He loves me too well to forsake me,
Or give me a trial too much;
All His people have been dearly purchased,
And Satan can never claim such.
By and by I shall see Him and praise Him,
In the city of unending day;
And the toils of the road will seem nothing,
When I get to the end of the way.

Click: When I Get To the End Of the Way