It's All About Him (21 page)

Chapter 22
ROOTS

Remain in me, and I will remain in you.
No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine.
Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
I am the vine; you are the branches.
If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

John 15:4–5

I
got the call on a Wednesday afternoon in June 2005.

“Daddy fell,” my sister Jane said. “He broke his leg. I think I you'd better come to Newnan.”

My father was ninety-one years old. Obviously, I knew that he wasn't going to be with us forever . . . but still, he had come through three major surgeries in the past three years, and I assumed he'd come through this medical challenge as well. I didn't realize that the time had come to say good-bye.

I took care of some arrangements and got to Newnan the following morning. Daddy was in intensive care in the hospital there, sedated and dozing. My mother and sister were in the room with him, and my mama's face was weary with worry. At eighty-four, she had been by his side, in sickness and in health, for the sixty-seven years of their married life.

“Mother,” I said, “let me take you out to lunch while Daddy's sleeping. You need a little break from being in the hospital room.”

But my mother didn't want to go to lunch with me. She told me she'd go instead with one of my dad's caregivers, who was also a family friend. That seemed strange to me.

“Okay,” I said, teasing her. “If you love Janna more than me, that's just fine.”

They left . . . and my mother's uncharacteristic “rejection” of my lunch companionship gave me the gift of private time with my father—time that I would never have again.

Fishing in Heaven

I pulled the hard hospital chair close to his narrow bed. I sat with him for hours, holding his hand. I watched his chest rise and fall with each shallow breath. I thought about when I was a little girl and I'd ride on his strong back, laughing, while he galloped across our family room like a pony.

The nurses brought his lunch, and Daddy roused a little. I gently scooped tiny spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and brought them to his lips, but he had a hard time swallowing. I tried to help him sip apple juice through a straw, guiding him as tenderly as he had once tended me as a child.

He dozed on and off throughout the afternoon, then mumbled to me through the oxygen mask that covered his nose and mouth.

“Nisey,” he whispered, “do you know what Jesus said to Peter and Andrew?”

I was surprised. Daddy knew the Bible, but we had never spent a lot of time sitting around discussing the New Testament.

“Why, yes,” I said slowly. Daddy loved fishing, so maybe it made sense that he'd be thinking about the disciples who were fishermen. “I remember. Jesus told Peter and Andrew to follow Him, and that He would make them fishers of men. And so they left their nets and followed Him.”

“That's right,” he said, smiling. “Fishers of men.”

Those were the last words my father said to me. Hospice nurses say that dying people often speak in metaphors to signal to the living that they're about to pass on, and I realized from my dad's words that death wasn't threatening to him. A lifelong fisherman, he was simply preparing for his journey across the last great river, smiling at Jesus and thinking about fishing for men. It was a great comfort to me.

There was no place for us to sleep in intensive care, so later that night we prepared to go home for a few hours. I went to my childhood home with my mother and fell into bed. At 1 AM the phone rang. “Your father isn't responding,” the nurse told me. “I think you'd better come to the hospital.”

I helped my mother get ready, and we drove quickly through Newnan's dark streets. My sister met us at the hospital. We sat with Daddy, holding his hands, rubbing his head, letting him know that we were there with him, even though he could not respond.

The attending nurse encouraged us to tell Daddy whatever we needed to say to him, for it would be our last chance. I was so thankful that God had chosen to answer my frequent prayer that Daddy would not die alone. As sad as it was to realize that this was the end, I was also grateful that God was choosing to take him before he became bedridden. I pulled a chair as close as I could to his bedside so that I could hold his warm hand. I knew it would soon be cold.

After about four hours his respiration changed. I knew it was time to tell my mother the truth that I had kept from her for the last few hours. I bent down beside her chair and tried to comfort and prepare her for what was coming, just as she had so often done for me.

“Mama,” I said, “the nurse says that Daddy is not going to wake up.His breathing will get more and more shallow, and then his heart will stop. It won't be long now.”

My heart broke as I heard my mother pleading with the nurse. “Are you sure?” she kept asking. “Are you sure he's not going to come out of this? Isn't there anything else you can do?”

As Jane and I sat holding our daddy's hands, our mother bent over him, speaking tenderly into his ear and smoothing his hair. I heard her say all the things to him that I had so longed to hear my parents tell each other back when I was a child.

“I have loved you all my life,” my silver-haired mother told Daddy, her tears falling on his wrinkled cheek. “You have been a good daddy to your children. You have been such a good husband. I love you.”

Then, as dawn broke and a new day began,my father slipped away. I imagined him talking with Peter and Andrew firsthand, swapping fishing stories.

An ending . . . and a new beginning.

A Love That Lasted

Almost seventy years earlier, when my father was twenty-three and my mother was sixteen, they had met at a gas station, introduced by mutual friends. My dad was interested enough to ask my mother if he could see her again.

“I'll be singing at church tonight,” my mother said. “If you want to see me again, come there!”

He showed up at church for the service that evening, and my mother's sweet soprano captured his heart. They married, and many years later, when I was a tiny girl, I remember my mother singing solos at church. Forty-something years after that, right before my father's death, my friend Ame was digging through the church archives and found old tape recordings of my mother's melodies. So at Daddy's funeral service, we played my mother singing, from back in 1965, “When God Is Near” and “When Jesus Comes.”

As I sat in the church service and listened to my mother's young voice singing those old hymns, it felt like I was outside time for a moment. The music reminded me of when I was five years old and my daddy was invincible, the tireless worker who overcame all kinds of tough obstacles to provide for his family.

I was older now, a mother myself. My mother was now a widow, and my daddy lay still in a casket. It was so strange.

As the service closed, we all listened to another special recording. Alan had known that he wouldn't be able to sing at the funeral without breaking down, and so he'd gone into the studio the day after my father's death and recorded a song with only his longtime producer, Keith Stegall, accompanying him on piano.

“Through death into life everlasting/ He passed, and we follow Him there,” Alan sang. “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full on His wonderful face . . .”

The Place That Shaped Me

The long, black limousine drove us to my parents' house from the county cemetery where we buried my daddy, near the stone that marks my brother Ron's grave. As we passed through the streets of Newnan, I thought back on the memories of my hometown.

There was the Dairy Queen where Alan and I had met . . . the high school where I had cheered . . . the church where we were married.Here were our parents' homes, where we'd eaten countless Sunday dinners and celebrated birthdays, births, and weddings. The familiar places in this little town were as much a part of me as my accent, my opinions, and my tastes. Here is where I had started to become
me
. As Alan's old song once put it, “where I come from” is the place that had shaped me for as long as I had known. These were my roots.

But as I reflected on my origins in those sweet-sad days after my father's death, I knew that I had deeper roots as well. I remembered Mama Jack, my daddy's mother. My grandfather died when my father was young, but Mama Jack lived past her hundredth birthday. When I was little, she was a short, plump woman with bright blue eyes and long, silver hair that she wore twisted into a bun. She had a well-worn black leather Bible, and even in her nineties, she read through it again and again, without the need for glasses.

“You have been my refuge,” the thin, wrinkled page read in my grandmother's book of Psalms. “You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.”
¹
I could see that some of the blessings I was receiving, even in the aftermath of my father's death, were because of my grandmother's faith. What she had prayed for her descendents was creating a legacy of faith that would be passed to the next generations. I thought about Mama Jack's sweet, devout spirit . . . and I purposed to spend more time sinking my roots down into the Bible that she had so treasured.

I HAD A LEGACY OF FAITH AS SWEET AS THE OLD HYMNS THAT WE SANG AT FAMILY REUNIONS, AS DEAR AS MY MOTHER'S SWEET SOPRANO, CAUGHT IN TIME, SOARING OVER MY FATHER'S FUNERAL.

Her prayers had shaped me. I had a legacy of faith as sweet as the old hymns that we sang at family reunions, as dear as my mother's sweet soprano, caught in time, soaring over my father's funeral. It was stronger than the forces that had shaken me over the years, and it was a heritage I could pass on to my children.

“Your statutes are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart,” says Psalm 119:111. Before I really got into Bible study, I would have found a statement like that as dry as dust. But over recent years I had turned from regarding the Bible as a boring history book, and started seeing it as an intimate love letter from God to me. The more I got into it, the more it got into me. I found that it was active and alive. It pierced me with its truths, and it had the power to actually change my life.

To change the metaphor, the more I studied God's Word, the more I found hidden treasures that had been there all along, but I hadn't had the eyes to see them before.

Sometimes friends will say, “Well, that's great for you, Denise, but I just don't have any desire at all to study the Bible.”

I understand that . . . but what I've found is that when I ask Him, God gives me the feelings I can't drum up on my own. When I just don't want to read God's Word, I pray for Him to give me that craving. I pray that He'll make me want to seek Him, because when we seek God, we can be sure of finding Him.

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart,” Jeremiah 29:13 says. “I will be found by you” (v. 14). Even after times in my life when I had given my attention to other things, like fame, money, and looking good in other people's eyes, God's promise for me came true. He said, “But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
²
Jesus put it even plainer in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
³

God is not some remote, unknowable force. He can be found, known, and enjoyed. He offers the unique, fulfilling relationship that we all long for, down deep.

I've found that the more I dig into the Bible as His love letter to me, the more I develop a passion for it, and for Him. When my heart is cold and unwilling, I ask Him to change it, and incredibly, He does. As my days unfold, I make sure to schedule uninterrupted time to read God's Word and pray. It's a discipline to do so . . . but when I do it, it fulfills my deepest desires.

Connecting with God

Years ago, if I had a free hour in the afternoon, I would have read a magazine or played tennis or perhaps eaten cheesecake and then gotten on the treadmill. Now, though I still love tennis, reading, and cheesecake (not necessarily in that order), I'm drawn like a magnet to spend even more time with God. When I'm in the car, taking the girls to school or to a basketball or volleyball game, I listen to Christian music . . . though, of course, I also have to get in my time on the country music stations!

Often when I'm in the car, I pray out loud, hoping that anyone who sees my lips moving will just assume I'm talking on a cell phone. One day I felt an odd urgency to pray specifically for a woman named Valerie. Her husband, Scott, the relative of a close friend, had been having some health challenges. It was strange, though, because I felt the urge to pray for Valerie rather than for Scott. Later I found out that at the exact time I was driving along, praying for Valerie, Scott was having a seizure . . . and Valerie was uncharacteristically calm and able to deal with all his needs without panicking.