A eulogy for a very good man

*This is the eulogy I gave at my father's graveside memorial on Friday in Spokane, Washington. -- BM


Growing up, one of the things the family of the Rev. Robert Mims did a lot of was pack
up and leave places. We moved from one neighborhood to another, from one state to another. 

 By the time I was 11 years old, I had been in 13 different schools.

In each move, something would get lost. Toys. Pictures. Maybe a dish, and on one move there was a loss than made my mother cry: during the move from Spokane to Wilbur, a tiny central Washington farming town with an even smaller church, my parents’ large framed wedding photo was lost.

In the past year, my son, Rob, and I moved Mom and Dad from Lilac Plaza Assisted Living to the Cheney Care Center as their health, and dementia, grew worse. Like all the moves before, this mean some things got donated to charities, others were put in storage, and a few treasured items were lovingly safeguard by family
 
At home in Utah, recently, I finally opened boxes I’d brought back. There were Dad’s collection of several worn Bibles, his notes in the margins of passages of scriptures he’d used in sermons. A pressed flower in the pages of one Bible, and in others, handwritten notes and reminders of events and people long since passed.

Then, in a box Mom had treasured, there was a bundle of letters. Love letters, it turned out, from Dad, written while he was traveling as a banjo-playing evangelist throughout the post-WWII Pacific Northwest. They were handwritten pages filled with endearments, dreams and love for the future they would soon begin as a married couple.

Memories. Memories Mom and Dad lost, temporarily I believe, as their worlds shrank both physically and mentally over these past couple years.

As I have prayed about their situation, seeking wisdom for each decision came about their care and well-being, I wondered what happens to those memories, when we … forget.

“Nothing is lost in Me,” was the thought impressed on my mind. Love is not lost, nor are our loved ones. The ripples of blessing we start with each act of compassion are eternal; so are those comforting touches or embraces we give or receive, the wisdom we gain and share, and certainly the faith we live  and sacrifice for.

Mom and Dad didn’t need that wedding photo, as treasured as it was, to remind them of their love, nor their bond as man and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and co-workers for the Kingdom of God.

You don’t need “stuff” to keep those good things of past. We will always have our yesterdays, even when we forget them in this earthly life.

I know this: even if our memories fade with the weakness of age and loss of cognitive function, on that Last Day, Our Lord will restore those memories to perfection – and that will be a perfection that is no longer distorted by the false concepts of past, present and future we wrestle with now.

In the eternal, uncreated light of our Lord, we will have a God’s eye view. Nothing of love is lost. Nothing committed to Christ is ever gone.

So, I know where Dad is today. And, I believe he knows all about us, here, as we honor his earthly years, and we ourselves glimpse Eternity. I pray for him, and he is praying for us.

And Dad today knows as tangible truth what we believe by faith here: The perfect, infinite love of God includes, sustains and restores His children, as the prayer goes, “both now and ever and unto ages of ages.”

In our sentimental memories -- those photos, videos, letters, old Bibles, the contents of cedar chests and dusty boxes -- we have our yesterdays. But in Christ, we also have our tomorrows.

Divine dichotomy: Of pain, suffering and a benevolent God

This past week has me, again, reflecting on the perceived dichotomy of suffering and a benevolent, loving God.

Particularly, the fundamentalist, evangelical Christian God who rewards the righteous in this life; the God the fringe of the Charismatic Movement — “Positive Confession,” “Name It, Claim It,” etc. — interprets those rewards as health and wealth and little or no suffering.

I understand, and this week even weep with those who have reached their limits of pain vs. faith, because they expected something else of life from what they were taught. Finally, they chose to cauterize the pain by simply declaring there is not, cannot possibly be, a benevolent loving God who cares about each of us, especially his children who obey, sacrifice and try to emulate Christ’s teachings.

For them, it has become a case of psychic, spiritual pain management: If God is benevolent and loving, they finally ask in their suffering, the perceived lack of that divine care amid the crucibles of life is a kind of open-ended pain that can, finally, become unbearable.

A trapped animal will chew off its own paw to be free of pain and hopelessness. A human being can be understood, empathized with, yes, forgiven for lopping off the extremity of faith in his or her most desperate times.

My week is nothing akin to the suffering others have endured, both those who hang on to faith and those who run from it. I have not reached the point of amputating my faith, and in some ways it is even stronger; but that all has come with more depth, and more pain.

Yesterday, I called my sister — in a group home in Washington state, crippled by cerebral palsy and intellectually a 5-year-old — to wish her a Happy 65th Birthday. Understand, she is my “big” little sister, being three years older, and a lifetime younger, at the same time.

“Hi Mom!” she said, answering the phone, and my heart sank. My mother, in the end stages of Alzheimer’s, is in a nursing home a few miles away from my sister, no longer able to talk, care for herself or remember any of her children, her husband, brothers, sisters.

Mom would not be calling. Her world has imploded to one of sleep, food, playing with dolls. Her body lives; her spirit has all but departed.

“It’s your brother, sis,” I said. The disappointment in her stuttering voice was tangible, and my eyes welled up.

I tried to keep it upbeat. Sang to her. Happy birthday. I could hear her, in that peculiar moaning stutter of her’s, upset. Mom’s denouement has been particularly hard on her; how do you explain memory loss to a childlike mind that only knows her mother, her bedrock in life, doesn’t know who she is?

Abruptly, she said, “Bye,” and the phone disconnected.

Last night, my Dad called, fear and despair in his raspy, almost 93-year-old voice. “Bob! I can hardly see anything anymore!” His macular degeneration has suddenly accelerated. I promised to call the medical staff for him, something he could have done . . . but in his terror forgot, reaching out to his son for help.

His maddeningly helpless son, 800 miles away. I called, asking for an expedited exam by the eye specialist to determine what, if anything, can be done.

It all felt like a massive, growing mountain before me: The mother who was a constant source of prayerful support and stubborn faith, gone; the father who spent his life preaching the gospel, sacrificing to do so in one tiny parish after another, in the twilight of life without his wife, stroke damage limiting his mobility, and now going blind, fearing the darkness to come; a sister who needed her mother, not her brother, on her special day.

So, I begin to understand how some people of faith can finally stumble under skies that seem to have turned brass to their prayers. And, I find myself amazed, and not a little humbled, and yet remain faithful.

It is the perspective of eternity, of knowing there will be plenty of pain in this life — but we are not alone in it. It is believing that like a morning fog, that pain will, someday soon, give way to immersion in the Love that is beyond this veil of tears.

Angel Vasko wrote about that a few years ago for CBN, after dealing with her mother’s prolonged, painful illness and death. (To read the whole article, visit http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/prayerandcounseling/Vasko_Trust_in_Tragedy.aspx)

“What is the lesson here God?!”  she said.  “Do you want me to know that life is hard and that people suffer and then die!!!? I get it!”

Vast concluded that, “I still have so many questions and I have so much to learn.  But in my heart of hearts, I just want to run into daddy’s arms and have Him hold me.  I want to have a pure heart.  I want to have a simplistic faith again.  Most of all, I want my first love, Christ, to know that I still love Him wholeheartedly."

In our finite existence, happiness and sadness, blessing and loss, joy and pain come, and not always in equal portions. But life is, perhaps thankfully so, brief as it is changing.

On the wild, wonderful, scary ride that life is, it is good to have, as Solomon once wrote, “Eternity in our hearts.”