Happy Birthday in Heaven, Son

Spring, 2013

The sun is warming up the day, and my boy sits next to me in our aging van. He’s chattering away like a child on Christmas morning as we bounce along Sweetwater Road. He keeps looking at the piece of paper he holds on his lap, almost reverently, then smiles out the window. I can see the reflection of his delight in the glass. Then I feel him looking at me, studying me. His smile fades.

I’ve been sullen as he’s jibbered away, unresponsive, except for a forced smile here and there along the way. He knows it’s fake. My child reads me like a book.

“Why can’t you just be happy for me, Dad?” he challenges.

He’s now fairly crumpled the paper in his unstrained fist and waving it in my face, but not disrespectfully. He doesn’t want a fight, not today of all days, heavens, and Lord knows neither do I.

“You want to know, Graham, why I’m not thrilled with this news?” I reply. “Truly?”

He doesn’t respond because he already knows.

The folded sheet in his hand is the news our son’s been waiting for. It’s an official letter from his probation office telling him he’s been cleared to move out of Georgia, that he’s to report to his new probation officer in Minnesota by such-and-such a day. Such-and-such a day was too close for my heart to accept, and so, as we took our backway home, I simply couldn’t rejoice with him. His take was I was peeing on his parade.

Perhaps I was.

“Graham,” I continued, attempting to avoid any tone of argumentativeness, “your Mom and I are sad because we may never see you again –“

He stopped me right there.

“But I’ll come back!” he offered. “Birthday, Christmas, whatever…it’s not forever, Dad.”

I pressed in a bit more.

“Son, I’m just not sure it’s necessary for you to move away for you to be safe from drugs. You know as well as I do, they’ll find you wherever you go…”

He sat back and fixed a frustrated glare straight ahead and was silent for a couple ticks. He knew he wouldn’t change my mind. When he looked back at me, there were tears.

“Dad, you just don’t know how bad it is! I can’t stay here, don’t you see? If I don’t get out of Atlanta I’ll die!”

I didn’t know it at the time but this would be one of our final face-to-face, father-son conversations. As we approached the stop sign to turn left onto Lee Road, I told him whatever happens we loved him, and I ended our painful discussion by telling Graham, “We won’t stand in your way, son; and we won’t make this hard for you. If this is what you feel you have to do, we support you.”

I pushed down on the turn signal to go into the turn.

Ironically, a half-mile back, on Graham’s side of the van, we had just passed the very cemetery we’d lay his body to rest – nine months hence – in a cold, driving rainstorm, two days before Christmas.

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Fall, 2015

Today Graham Scott would be 26, making it his second birthday in heaven.

🎉🎈🎂Happy birthday in heaven, son! 🎉🎈🎂

It’s not been a good day down here, however. I don’t think it’s about our son’s passing or not being here, necessarily. It seems it’s just life stuff. Bad days are rare for me. I mean ra-are. But I have them. Today seems to be one. I was outside earlier where and when I meet with the Lord each day, but I wasn’t feeling it.

Being in nature, listening to its distinctive rhythms, watching it unfold and spread its beauty usually does it for me. But today, silence. Birds weren’t showing themselves. Butterflies were too neurotic and preoccupied to light. Gnats and mosquitos wouldn’t stop pestering, and flies were trying to drown in my coffee. My prayers, often so easy and fluid, were limply waving at glory and getting no response.

And the Word. Why, the sure-fire solution to what ails me, kind of plopped like soggy corn flakes on my soul.

What gives, God?

My daily reading told me to read John 1 and 2, and I do what I’m told for the most part. Now, those two chapters are dynamite on steroids any other time. I mean, Jesus coming with grace and truth, grace following grace, taking away the sin of the world? C’mon. That’s the sweet spot for sure.

But today, nothing. Soggy corn flakes.

Then it happened.

Look again, Scott.

I do what I’m told, remember?

Instinctively, I knew where to look. No, not in the scriptures I just read, but to my daily reading schedule. Horror of horrors, I misread my assignment!

It didn’t say,

Jhn 1,2

It said,

Jnh 1,2

I switched the H!

I was supposed to let Father speak to me from Jonah! Not John! (No offense, John)

Okay, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere. I pretty much hurried through chapter one, excitement slowly mounting. It began to ebb a trifle when I finished, untouched yet, but I still had one more chapter to read. It wasn’t a long chapter, however.

God, please say what You’re gonna say in these 10 verses, or today’s gonna have to be chalked off. Please. Speak.

And, boy howdy, did He ever.

You know Jonah. His rebellion, his long run, his far fall. You also know chapter 2 becomes autobiographical; it’s not background or third-party perspective. We’re hearing from the man himself, and he’s describing for us what might very well be his last moments on earth, in the depths of the ocean, in the stomach of a great fish.

Now, may I insert here that I’m completely convinced and at peace – no doubting – that our Gra-Gra is with Jesus. Except for a dream of Graham screaming from the pit of hell a couple days after his death (quickly shaken off; God doesn’t use fear tactics on His broken-hearted children), I’ve swum in the grace-ocean of peace that he’s with His Savior in glory. Sandy too. This is an entirely settled matter for us.

Having said that, it sure was awesome to have God give me a first-hand glimpse into what might have been Graham’s dying moments on earth. Read these words and see if they might not also apply to someone at death’s door, swallowed in the foul waters of overdose, receiving the mercies of Jesus to cry out,

REMEMBER ME, LORD!!

Jonah 2:3-7
…the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.

Was Graham right to move from his only home? I don’t have an answer for that, but I know I can’t question God and I don’t want to second-guess my boy.

All I know is, he’s not in that cemetery we both passed by, and where Sandy and I make a regular stop to ‘talk’ to him. He really is home. He made it. God remembered him in his dying hour.

Happy birthday in heaven, son.

And say thanks to Jonah.

An Amazing Thing Happened On The Way To Our Son’s Grave

Funny thing about rainbows, they’re actually circles, not half-arcs. Obviously they look like arches to us because of our limited perspective, seeing only half the story because the horizon kind of gets in the way.
My lovely spotted the colorful band stretched over the cemetery where our son’s body was laid to rest last Christmas as we made our approach. It was our thirty-first wedding anniversary and we wanted to share our celebration with our boy. Sandy often wants me to drive the long way around Mozley Gardens to pay respects to any of Graham’s new “neighbors” before we park at his marker, so I was poking along scanning the lawns out my driver’s side window when I heard her exclaim:
“Oh honey, look!”
I followed her graceful index finger as it stretched toward the windshield.
A bow of beauty.
The Sovereign had kissed our evening by finger-painting a swath of grace over our Gra-Gra.
Well, that’s all she wrote. We were undone. Verklempt. A wet mess.
In a good way.
“I know about the promise of God to not destroy the earth with floods,” my bride offered, “but what else do you think God is saying?”
I was already in that vein, the Bible teacher in me calling up the Revelator’s vision of God on His throne in His abode of heaven. Verse three says “around the throne” was a rainbow and a quick study suggests it’s a full circle, as rainbows tend to be.
A perfect circle.
No beginning, no end. No pause, no break. No altered course, but fulfillment and wholeness.
Eternality.
God said, “look up.”
We lifted our watery eyes.
“See My initials in sweeping, color-laden script?”
We indeed saw the stamp of Resurrection.
The “all things new” seal of Certainty.
We’re two still-grieving parents encased in the drama of loss, sighing at the memories and could-have-beens, making our repeated pilgrimage to the sacred stone…

BUT WE’RE

…gently carried all the while (yet again!) by everlasting Arms that scaffold our temporal home with rainbows to remind us
that Eternity awaits,
that these eyes only see half the picture,
that the Best is yet to be,
that the grace that pavilions us in these years of dust and ash,
will give way to Endless Dawn, forever illuminated by the Sun and Daystar of our souls, Jesus the Christ and Father of Lights.
That rainbow reminded us that His exhaustive archives of eternity and our place (and Graham’s!!!) in the Eternal Story is not a half-arc (half done), but a complete arc, and – my beloved fellow pilgrim – let it serve to tell you that God wastes none of your raw materials in preparing you for His Glory. All of it goes into the flourish of His finishing touches.
Just look up.
It’s there to remind you.

A Woodshed Moment

Ah, there you are. I thought you were dead.

So I was thinking all the way through south Georgia yesterday afternoon. Actually, the ghost of my “old man” spooked me a couple times this week. Earlier in the week someone close to me spoke a hard word into my life and my self went into self-defense mode immediately. I wouldn’t even take it to the Lord to see if this was Him. I knew it wasn’t. Couldn’t be. Not from this person. Flames shot from the orbs of my eyes and smoke billowed from flared nostrils. I told my wife about it and promptly opened the screen of my laptop intending to write them the mother of all emails.

“Don’t do it, Scott,” the Holy Spirit warned.

How strange that He looks a lot like Sandy, I thought to myself.

“If you can’t support me, then leave!” I commanded Him (her).

“I’m telling you, you’ll regret it.”

“No I won’t. Now leave me alone!”

Out she walked. I fumed. Pecking out a string of words, I could feel the evil rise up in me. A mirror of sorts materialized and I saw my old self grinning devilishly, egging me on. Oh, he’ll pay, it said. And you will feel so much better. That gave inspiration for another phrase or two and yet another niggling unsettledness prompting me to go “Pac-Man” on them with my backspace key. Y’ever get so mad you don’t know who you’re mad at? That’s the place I was in. Although I never sent the email my mirrored image was dying for me to send, my heart was wrong. And the anger only festered. Yeah, I ‘obeyed’ the Spirit, but there was no life in it. The Lord had me dead to rights and was setting me up.

I suppose that ire was bubbling away inside me still as I came upon the shaved-headed so-and-so in the red car outside of Tifton, Georgia yesterday afternoon. He was in the left lane and traveling slower than Christmas so I flashed him. Immediately I saw his fist go to the air and watched it sprout a middle digit. About this time, Sandy looked up from her book when she heard me snort. Just in time, I add ruefully, to see the middle finger and me hitched to his rear bumper. It was then she looked over at me and gave me the finger, albeit with her stare.

“What are you doing?”

“I want this…this…JERK to get out of the way. Can you believe him?” my voice shrilled, looking for sympathy from my beloved.

Alas, there was none.

“Stop it, Scott!”

“What?!?” I could see immediately it was going to be my issue.

“Slow down, you’re going to get us all killed!”

“All? I think this bozo needs to die.” The words came out like toothpaste from a tube. Too late.

Sandy went back to her book. I sulked. I fumed. God bided His time. No one was speaking, not for the longest time. I’d turn to God in my thoughts with a C’mon, give me a break! Can’t you see how crappy this week has been? And I’m the innocent one in all this, but I could feel Him looking down at whatever He was reading too.

A few hours ago, the Lord summoned me. They were the first words I’d heard Him speak in my direction for some time, so I was glad. What I didn’t know was He had opened the door to a woodshed and invited me in. I was so delighted with the attention I gaited merrily inside, thinking it’s about time. I opened my journal and began pouring out my heart to him, defending myself from the get go, reminding Him I was His man and this must be persecution and all that. Instantly, He went into silent mode again. I wasn’t listening. I was doing all the talking and defending, so He quietly shut the door behind Him and cleared His throat.

I stopped. Looking around, I could tell I didn’t like this room at all. Then I had the strange sensation I’d been here before. Many times. I sat still as a stone, knowing I’d best listen as what I was about to hear was going to be the answer to my cry for so long: Lord, whatever is in me that needs to die, painful as it is, do it. Do me, Lord!

The one thing about God, He doesn’t tap dance very often. Mostly, He gets right to the point.

“You were wrong, Scott.”

“You mean, the other day? Well, I know I was yesterday. But, Lord…”

“You were wrong. I sent My servant to tell you.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“If you continue to reject his word, you reject Me.”

He showed me this in the context of 1 Samuel 2:30 (the very end of the passage). The clarity was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry, Lord.”

“Not that easy. Not to Me. To him.”

He told me I was to write this person, humiliating myself in the process, telling him I was wrong, he was right and (gulp) asking his forgiveness. He also told me what to say, no more, no less. But still I found a way to obey God and get an old man ‘dig’ in as well. That should do it, I thought somewhat satisfactorily. I wanted to save a little face at least, to hold onto some measure of dignity. Ah, but that’s the stuff of self.

(There you are, you old codger. I thought you were dead.)

“Take that out,” the Lord said. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Yes, Lord.” And I took it out.

Did it hurt to do it? Oh my, and how. But I could never want to be on the other side of God’s holiness. The woodshed is as far as I want to ever go. Funny thing how it is also such a grace-filled room. There’s some real one-on-one attention in the woodshed, some real heart-to hearts in there.

Even still, I think I’ll steer clear of it for awhile, thank you very much.