My Dad's Graduation

My Mom and
Dad








This past Thursday morning, our loving Father granted the desire my Dad has expressed and allowed him to step across the boundary from time into eternity as he slept in his bed. My Mom went home two years and six weeks ahead of him. As Dad approached the boundary between heaven and earth, he often told me that he sensed my mother's closeness in such a real way that he would sometime reach over in the dark to feel the bed and see if she was lying beside him.

I told him just last week, "Dad, very soon you are going to reach over and feel for Mom and you will find that she is really there. The Lord will have allowed you to die in your sleep, and when you open your eyes, you and Mom will join hands as you step across the boundary line." My Dad choked back emotion and answered, "I hope it happens that way. I can't think of a better way to go."

I believe that's what happened on Thursday morning when my Dad passed through the thin veil that separates the temporal realm from the eternal one. My recent blog about the movie "March of the Penguins" explains my viewpoint.

My Dad has now left what C.S. Lewis called “The Shadow-Lands” and moved into the direct light of his glory.

At the conclusion of The Last Battle, (by C.S. Lewis), Aslan (the Christ figure) reminds the Pevensie children that, despite the pain of this world – the Shadow -Lands – the holidays have begun. Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands – dead. The term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning.


All of their life in this world and all their adventures in (the land of) Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One and the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.

John Owen, an English pastor/theologian who lived in the 1600's lay on his deathbed. A friend had written to ask about his health. Owen instructed his secretary to write to a friend, "I am still in the land of the living. " Stop," he suddenly said. "Change that and say, 'I am yet in the land of the dying, but I hope soon to be in the land of the living.'"

Today I find myself still in the land of the dying, but my Mom and Dad are in the land of the living... a land where "the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."

One day, I will join them and again we will laugh and love together. Until then, may God grant me the gift of living up to the legacy they leave behind by allowing me to finish well.