Run The Race!

I wrote this in early January for a NCCBA newsletter that goes out each month.  Thought I would share it. 

Lord willing as you are reading this my wife and I will be in Israel, embarking on a Holy Land tour.  Amazingly this trip was a gift from a person in our church.  It was a trip that almost didn’t happen.   My family and I went home to Michigan for a quick trip after Christmas.  We were on our way back and just crossed the Michigan border and were stopping for lunch when we received a call.  It was one of those calls that you think you will ignore till you get done eating.  Problem was my phone rang, then my wife’s rang and then mine rang again and then you think I guess I better get that.  So I answered the phone and it was my aunt and she dropped a bomb, "I’m up here at the hospital your dad is in the ER.  They aren’t sure what’s wrong and I will keep you updated when we hear something."  At this point my mind was going in a million different directions and I had a million questions.  Should we go back?  Is he going to die?   What about church services Sunday?   Is it really that serious? So 15 minutes or so went by and I got a call from my sister saying that my dad had been acting really disoriented and confused that morning and his blood pressure was sky high and he had had a couple seizures. The last seizure he stopped breathing and they had to put him on a ventilator. And they think he might have had a stroke or was having bleeding on the brain.  At this point it was an easy choice. So I called the chairman of the deacon board and told him what was going on and he told me to turn around and go back no questions asked.  We got to the hospital and I have been at the side of hundreds of hospital beds with people but I was not ready for this one.  This one was completely different.   I got there and there was my dad on a ventilator, looking so vulnerable.  They were running all kinds of tests and had no clue what was going on.  All they said is he was very sick and in critical condition.  We left the hospital late Friday night with many unknowns.  On Saturday morning we got there and the nurses said they wanted us to start to talk to him as they were going to try to get him off the ventilator and wake him up.  I left the room for 15 minutes and I came back in and I saw my dad with no tubes down his throat, eyes opened, and he gave me a “Go Blue” son.  Now I knew we were moving in the right direction.  It seemed like they did every test possible and never found anything seriously wrong.  We left on Sunday morning to go home and they eventually sent him home on Tuesday.  There was one thing that really hit me hard through all of this.  At one point after my dad was out of ICU and in a step down bed, it was just my oldest sister and I in his room and he looked at us and said,

“One day you guys are going to have to be strong and hunker down because I am not going to make it.”  These were sobering words for me to hear.  Up to this point our dad had been the strongest man I have ever known.  Up to this point he never had anything seriously wrong with him other than things like a cold or the flu. And now out of the blue, here he is telling us he understands the reality that he is in the latter phases of his life and he understands his mortality and that we must also.  That really made me think and ask some questions.  Am I doing a good job as a pastor helping people get ready to die and am I helping the people who love them get ready to say good bye?   Do I help them have an urgency to enjoy and grow in their relationship with those they love, while there is still the chance to do so?  And do I realize this and do I take enough time to do this?   If my dad did die could I say that I loved him all I could, that I said all I needed to say, and that I held nothing back from having the relationship with him that I should have?  And ever deeper than that, the question that really came to my mind is, do I really consider every day a gift of God and make the most of it?  I was reminded of this as we began our trip home and as our middle child said, “dad you always say we will be here one minute and the next minute we won’t. That’s  true for granddad too."  I thought to myself, out of the mouth of a child.  Thanks daughter for reminding me this!   This is true for me and for you also.  The reality is one minute we will be here and the next minute we will be gone.  When that becomes reality what will we leave behind?  What will be our legacy?  What will they say our life was about?  The reality is that some of us reading this right now might not see 2013 and if that is the case will we have made our lives count.  I know it wears us down to continue to run the race.  But I encourage you all to press on and to run the race today and this year like it may be our last.  If it is, at that point it will have been worth it all!