Tonight I am thinking of a family – a grieving family. Honestly, I have been thinking of them for numbers of days now as together they faced the death of their mother. Her name – Norma. She is that “Proverbs 31” kind of woman. She has been sick the better part of the 20 years I have been here. She is now whole.
Gloria Gaither quotes a piece she obviously wrote about facing the death of someone she held dear. Janice, you were so kind in your comments regarding my blog several days ago, and I want to give credit where credit is due. Gloria’s comments stopped me in my tracks as I lived them as she spoke them:
“When someone you love is dying, I’ve learned that dying doesn’t happen all of a sudden any more than being born does. It’s a process. There are signs and indications, sometimes false contractions and pain. The exact time cannot be predicted, even estimated really.
Coming into and going out of this world is not an easy thing. These are adventures like no other in the life between. No one can accurately chart the courses or predict the experience. Birth and death are unique to each person. Thank you, Lord for the privilege of walking through this passage as hard and sometimes agonizing as it is. I wouldn’t miss it.
To touch eternity so intimately – to hand off the hand I am holding into the very hand of God changes me. The glitter of glory lands on my face, too and changes the way I see things.
I remember watching my grand babies being born emerging from the embryonic fluids all powdered with the rich white coating of birth. I wanted to turn my face from the agony my daughter was experiencing but the fascination of that moment and her need for someone who had been there kept me so engaged a thousand horses couldn’t have pulled me away. My love for the two, my child and her child held me.
Now the labor of death tells me soon the passage door is opening to a place where an aging body will not be needed any more. I feel that what seems to be going away from here must in reality be a birth into a new place someone and maybe several someones will be waiting, reading the signs, anticipating. For them and for me the door will be open just long enough for me to glimpse the eternal and for them to have a strange moment of remembering of another time and another place. As heaven sent one of its treasures to us when those sweet babies were born, we are now sending a treasure we have held dear, trusting our loved one to other arms, other hearts.
Thank you, Lord.
Only at birth and at death do we get real about life…
Help me to remember!”
Going Home
Many times in my childhood when we traveled so far
By nightfall how weary I grow
Father’s arms would slip round me and gently he’d say
My child, we are going home.
Going home, I’m going home
There’s nothing to hold me here
I’ve caught a glimpse of that heavenly land
Praise God, I am Going Home
Now the twilight is fading the day soon shall end
I get homesick the farther I roam
But my Father has led me each step of the way
And now he will lead me home.
Going home, I’m going home
There’s nothing to hold me here
I’ve caught a glimpse of that heavenly land
Praise God, I am Going Home
Hearing God Speak to Me Every Day! 