go home

[5 minutes, 852 words]

A friend passed away unexpectedly this week. I say unexpectedly, but, in reality, Frank had been in a long battle with cancer. Cancer may think it won, but, in the end, Frank did. Frank is free from pain, from endless treatments, from uncertainty, from death.

I only heard about his passing last night as I sat with the men of my Thursday night Bible group. The announcement from our leader caught me like a sucker punch to the gut. Try as I might through worship, I couldn’t focus. Frank had often led our worship before he got sick, and kept with it through much of his sickness. Frank was eighty-two, hard of hearing, and often lost his place in the songs, but we could easily give him grace; Frank loved Jesus more than anything. He also loved the old hymns and many of us old Baptists appreciated his playlist.

Earlier yesterday, before I knew of Frank’s promotion, I was reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter nine.

“But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” — then he told the paralytic, “Get up, take your stretcher, and go home.”

So he got up and went home.

Matthew 9:6-7

“Get up, Frank. Go home.”

So he did.

My friend had been looking grayer and he’d been losing a lot of weight lately, but none of us thought it was time. My last conversation with Frank was to ask him to pray for me to be able to drink my coffee straight. He said he would. He asked me to pray for him to find some kind of special heat-resistant tape for a computer machine he was building. Mundane stuff. Coffee creamer and computers.

Then he was gone.

His last text to me was two weeks ago:

My dear Bro. Scott, trusting you are feeling better with a successful outcome. Will continue in prayer for complete healing. Your Bro. Frank

I’ve been sick myself lately, but nothing like Frank. I have a gall bladder that has to come out, kidney stones that need blasting, a fluid collection near my spine that needs draining and assessing, and osteomyelitis that needs treating. I only mention these things because Frank was really burdened for me.

I know. I’m thinking it too. A dying man, sad for his sick friend.

I confess that the original idea behind this post wasn’t about Frank; it was about me. More pointedly, how I heard that scripture yesterday morning. It actually happened to Frank, though.

“Get up, Frank. Time to go home.”

I still don’t know what time he departed this mortal coil, but I think it’s pretty cool to imagine it may have been around the time I was writing these words in my Bible notes:

1/28/26

This familiar scripture hits a new way this morning: it is my “Rise in the New Day, Scott, and go Home…because it’s time.”

Lord, I reach out my hands in faith to you.

Command it, dear Jesus. Just as you commanded the sickness to leave the centurion’s servant¹ and commanded the wind and the waves to stop². How I long to hear these words. May it be soon. In Jesus name.

Instead, my buddy Frank got the call. That’s okay; my day will come. I’ll just miss turning around and seeing a sweet-natured, smiling Frank in his Sunday spot two rows behind Sandy and me. I’m going to miss how he would light up about what supplements are helping him and all the scientific breakthroughs in cancer research he’d been reading about.

One last thing. Frank and I shared a lively discussion on a recent Sunday about how the joys of heaven will be “compounded” throughout eternity. Frank was intrigued. Any conversation about heaven interested him to no end.

“I’d like to know more about that idea, Scott,” he said. “This discussion fascinates me.”

He asked especially for scripture to help him understand it even more. I shared a few with him on the spot³ with the promise to add more that week.

I texted Frank back on the following Tuesday with a longer exposition, and included a quote I had read that put the entire idea of the exponential increase of heaven’s joys into a beautifully poetic image that Frank and I could see.

“Like waves incessantly crashing on the shore, one upon another, so the ages of eternity future will, in endless succession, echo the celebration of sinners saved by grace, all to the glory of God. There will not be in heaven a one-time momentary display of God’s goodness, but an everlasting, ever-increasing infusion and impartation of divine kindness that intensifies with every passing moment.” (Sam Storms)⁴

Well, Frank, is it so? Is it like that so far? I think Frank might say something like, “Oh, Scott, you have no idea.” One of these days I will get to, but for now I wait in hope for my time when the Master will say,

“Get up, Scott. Go home.”

And I will.

Selah, beloved.

1. Matthew 8:13 ↩︎
2. Matthew 8:26 ↩︎
3. Eph. 2:7; 3:16-20; Rom. 11:33; 1 Peter 1:4 ↩︎
4. www.desiringgod.org/messages/joys-eternal-increase-edwards-on-the-beauty-of-heaven ↩︎