Tag: Bereavement

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 ↩︎

all the way home

[5 minutes]

Thirty six years ago a baby boy was born in the same city where I first spotted the girl I would marry and who would later be his mommy. That baby was born to someone else, but that someone already gave him up to Jesus so that we could have the rapturous joy of bringing him home. That was then.

He was the answer to his mama’s many prayers and the happy surprise of his disabled daddy. He’s perfect, we said. All his fingers and toes and not a flaw to be seen. He actually favored me. I had only wanted daughters, not a son, but he changed all that with my first look. That was then.

Graham learned how to walk by steadying a pudgy hand on my wheelchair tire, trailing trustingly along as I s l o w l y rolled across the living room floor, him putting one foot gingerly in front of the other. His favorite way to travel was to perch himself between my legs and ride on my footrests, giggling and bouncing at the world in front of him. We were Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Speed Racer and Chim-Chim. My favorite way for him to ride was when Gra-Gra climbed on my lap, pulled himself upright, facing me. When he grabbed a fistful of my shirt and pumped his legs up and down, that was my signal. Off we went, doing wheelies and spinning and carving donuts in the carpet. That was then.

We could take him anywhere. He smiled at everybody he saw and they usually smiled back. Our little guy loved to sing Jesus songs and was never off-pitch. He made friends easily. He told other little boys on the McDonald’s playground about Jesus. He loved church, he loved his cousins, and he loved Christmas and Halloween and birthdays and pretty much any other day of the year. That was then.

The boy could pick up any instrument and learn how to play it by ear. Like his mama, music was inside him and moved him. He wasn’t a great student, didn’t have the handwriting skills of his mother, but he was the spark of life in every classroom. From kindergarten through elementary school, he was rewarded as the student with the most personality, aka class clown. That was then.

The angels God assigned to our Graham had their hands full. Rambunctious, daring, and always scoping out the next epic adventure, we never knew for sure if we had a tight enough hold on him. He was so adaptable, which is a good thing on the one hand, but not always on the other. Don’t get me wrong; Graham wasn’t a troublemaker, but trouble often found him anyway. That was then.

He gave his heart to Jesus before he became a teenager. I may have mentioned it earlier, but our son didn’t shy away from telling people about Jesus. He went on mission trips, laid hands on people and prayed for their healing, traveled hut to hut with the gospel, and left his only pair of shoes in Honduras for another who had no shoes. That was then.

Prodigals aren’t as rare as you’d think. Especially not the ones who grew up in pastor’s homes. Like many of us, Graham had high hopes but he got mad at a God whom he accused of ruining his dreams. He didn’t know what to do with that, where to take all that anger. It molested him, throttled him, imprisoned him. He became addicted to it, wore it all on both sleeves, and it became the death of him. That was then.

The thing about God’s mercy is that it keeps following us and hounding us and nipping at our heels. All the way home, the psalm says. All. The. Way. Home. God’s lovingkindness never lets up. I shared with another parent of a prodigal just this week the same words that encouraged Sandy and me when our beautiful son died: the power and strength and determined will of God’s hold on us is eternally stronger than our will to walk away from him.

The other thing about prodigals is that some of them, perhaps more than we think, come home. Graham sure did.

God’s merciful love did that. It followed him all the way home, praise Jesus.

Graham would be 36 today. Sandy is in Georgia this week to celebrate still being his mom. She has many things on her docket, but none more important than sitting by Graham’s graveside and reminiscing about all the “that was then” moments. It’s been almost twelve years now, but still we grieve — and that’s okay. Some years are harder than others to celebrate his birthday while mourning his passing. This is one of those years. Sigh.

Were it not for the rich mercies of Christ Jesus, we might just stay by his cemetery plot and never leave, chained to unremedied sorrow. But a hope greater than our grieving is beating in our chests and beckoning us on. We can drive away from that plot of ground, assured and at peace, because there’s a new now, not then, past the veil and scrim of this side of eternity, where Graham is waiting for us to get Home too.

Selah, beloved.

How (Not) To Comfort A Grieving Mom

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One year ago this month, nine days before Christmas, our only child, Graham Scott, was taken from this world. He was twenty-four years young. If anyone can tell you about the sustaining grace of the Comforter God, we certainly can. He’s good. He grieves with us. His love and glory is worth anything we must endure.

The real hero of the story is my wife and soulmate, Sandy. I’ve sat and watched in awe, witnessing the strength and grace of God move through her these months, like a symphony of quiet confidence, peace and contentment. Most do not have a full appreciation for what she’s gone through, not just through her only child’s passing, but in a long-running melodrama that surrounded his life – before and since.

And yet, recently, in the span of one week, two people who barely know her made suggestions that she wasn’t handling the process of grieving very well.

The first, her hairdresser who only knows her in a salon chair context every few months, mis-took Sandy’s sharing about Graham in the flow of ‘just making conversation’ and informed my wife she just “needed to move on” so she could get on with the business of living. It sounds meaner than it was.
As they say, she meant well.

But still.

The second, just a few days later, was her doctor who, because of changes in our healthcare, was newly assigned as Sandy’s general practitioner of medicine.

SIDENOTE:
The thing about my bride is, when those in highly influential or respected positions begin to probe her to open up about private matters, she becomes weepy. Say, when our spiritual father focuses on her with loving counsel, she’s apt to cry. Or, when my surgeons have met with her, she’s moved by their handling of me and becomes a puddle in the floor.

During her first meeting with her new doctor, whose name is pronounced “cruel” (but she is not), Sandy buckled when questions about her life probed into the soft tissue of her grief over Graham. And she wept.

Do you think you might need grief counsel?” the doctor asked kindly, but still wary and watchful.

Anything’s possible, of course. Lord knows, we’re open to whatever we must do to shed anything that holds us back from moving forward in our faith. But this…this…process has been so supernaturally kissed by grace. Grief counseling? Nope, not thinking that way, but, then again, one should never say never…

Listen, however you slice it, it’s been less than a year.

Yes, we still get sad. We weep at his grave. We miss him. Christmas Day might be a bummer.

And it might not.

We even laugh at his grave. We smile a lot as we remember ‘Graham stories’.

Isn’t this kinda, well, normal?

Move on?

That’s pretty much what we’re doing. Grieving is moving on. It’s when grief is drained of hope that you start regressing, and that’s not us. No sir, not by a long shot.

To tell you how good God is in His expert handling of my Lovely, a few days after this mystifying week for her, she treated her mother to her long-time dream of visiting the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. During their visit, they were blown away by having the tour, complete with intimate stories of the Graham family, given by none other than the caregiver to Billy’s mother in the final years of her long life!

The stories of “Mother Graham’s” devoted life – her many sorrows and greater triumphs and exuberant faith throughout – stirred Sandy and she knew this was a hug from the God who saw these very things in her. And, of course, she wept!

One valuable resource Sandy reached for during the tour was a card-stock flier embossed with the title:

“What To Say To A Bereaved Parent”

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I’m sure you can write to the library and request this free resource – it’s wonderful! – but let me share some of its main bullet points with you, in closing:

  • What NOT To Say:

I know how you feel.”

  • Say Instead:

I cannot imagine how difficult this is for you.”

  • What NOT To Say:

Are you doing OK?” or “How are you doing?”

  • Say Instead:

How are you holding up?”

  • Other Things NOT To Say:

You’ll feel better before you know it.”

Don’t cry.” (or, “Be strong for your family.”)

God must have needed him/her in heaven.”

At least you have other children.”

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.”

Don’t let this rob you of your joy.”

[Don’t tell the person how they should feel; only respond to how they feel]

[Don’t share personal stories of how your grief compares to yours]

It goes on to suggest offering to pray for the bereaved; to talk openly about the one who has passed; share personal stories, use their name throughout (we can testify when people use Graham’s name repeatedly, it ministers to us); listen…and be comfortable with silence.

Finally, of the MANY meaningful cards and sentiments we received, Sandy was especially moved by our friend Ken’s words. He said while everyone was talking about and remembering Graham,

I don’t want to be remembering him, I want to (still) be knowing him.”

That’s how she truly felt.

And she cried.

Over To You:

What ideas can you add, as either what TO say or what NOT to say to someone who’s going through a difficult time?