The cell phone rings just as I park the car in front of a multi-story building. Few things in life are as difficult as the sudden news of a person dying. It's all so opposite from the entrance of life, coming through the long, slow, welcome swelling of a mother's stomach that promises a new life. A birth brings the joy of family members gathered around, the sudden laugher, and sometimes tears of overwhelming emotion, like touching the soft smooth skin of a healthy newborn.
Tears at the time of death are so different. They hide many complex emotions. A mother grieves for her son, who has passed prematurely. She stumbles from the memories of the past to the agony of her daughter, who now is a single mother. She tells me of the man, whom I had never met. He leaves a young daughter and a son, two years younger.
Her daughter is grieving and upset and unable to sleep, but she is now the family's breadwinner. The boy attempts to shrug off his pain. When she asked, "How are you?" he answers his grandmother, "I'm fine." Nothing more. We all know he's not fine, but where is the key to open this lovely young boy's heart so that he can share the pain and loss of his dad. Who has that key hidden away?
The phone call came while driving, while we were delivering Christmas cheer. My wife has made several batches of her famous granola, the breakfast I never get tired of eating. We are delivering bottles to many people we've come to know in our community over the previous two years, up until when the Gathering Place had to shut down like everything else during the Covid-19 crisis. And I'm speaking with a grieving mother.
Inside the building, my wife is passing a Christmas gift into the hands of a lovely young woman from Africa. She saw family members being brutally killed in a war no one knows about or wants to hear of. It seems that no one in our land has time to hear about Africans having been killed in uprisings. In this case, over one million persons. We have enough of death here. I can't imagine the anguish resulting from a complete breakdown of governments. A million people, actually far more than that...my mind goes numb. I can't imagine the faces or any details.
But I can imagine a widow's pain. This phone call brings me close to a woman who has experienced too much in her life. Those of her husband and two children were too many deaths, infants who left short memories before being laid to rest in the black earth. For half an hour, I listen and ask a few questions, and gradually the story comes out of her son-in-law's sickness. Her questions never stop. "Should we have done this? Could we have done more?"
And the dreaded questions and doubts gradually shed more light on the situation as trust is built over the invisible network of radio signals between her phone and mine. "There were no prayers. No Bible reading. Just dust sprinkled over his feet. Will he be judged by God because the ashes were not sprinkled on the casket over his head? I shared with my son-in-law how he could come to know God, to kneel beside his bed and ask for forgiveness for his sins."
Details flow out, sadness filling the space between us, the love and comfort of the Holy Spirit beginning to flow as a tiny stream of peace that will bind us, who until half an hour ago, were strangers. Now we are sharing deeply, thanking the Lord for the common friend who wanted her to phone me.
A rush of holy awe overwhelms me. The mystery of faith. The conviction of eternal life. The welcome invasion into my time table, my schedule open to His leading, to His call to share and minister. And we begin to think of what a funeral might look like under the circumstances. My wife closes the door, having delivered words of comfort and the best granola this side of excellence. Tomorrow we'll plan the funeral, wondering how to celebrate a life taken away after a year of declining health.
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