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Finishing Strong – On the Anniversary of My Mom’s Glorious Homegoing

November 4, 2014 admindeb 4 Comments

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed – always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. – 2 Corinthians 4:7-10

My Mom was a young 72 when she was diagnosed with cancer. We were overseas at the time, and I wanted so to be home with her. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – supposedly “the best kind of cancer you can have”. Highly treatable. Long remissions. Often cured. Mom would die after 3 years of intensive, and sometimes experimental, chemotherapy. She never caught a break. Yet, she didn’t look at it that way.

Her journey with God in those days was other-worldly. The Mom I knew loved to serve people, and cancer would not stop that. She had grown up poor and with a dad who could be mean when he drank. She dreamed of college but it was never meant to be. Instead she became a student of life, and she never tired of that. She was a beautiful blend of Mary and Martha – wholly satisfied whether “sitting at the feet of Jesus” or serving the needs of those around her. I love that she was my Mom.

She taught me how to live…and she taught me how to die. We were home in the States when Mom’s cancer finished its course in her. She never spent a night in the hospital throughout those three years. She stubbornly guarded her time at home and had the will and the support (of my Dad, family and friends) to endure from home…and there was God, holding her tight against the storm.

Mom never prayed for healing, but we did. Mom prayed that this cancer, the illness and all that was part of it (including a devastating Shingles-related neuralgia), would bring glory to God. Her prayer was answered, and ours, ultimately, in Heaven.

Her dying took three days. If you had known my Mom, you knew a person that was all about life – helping and encouraging others, pointing them to God, determined, in faith, to make sense of what seemed utter nonsense. She continued to be about that until she went into a coma the last day. While she was awake that final weekend, I asked her (over and again) how she was. One time, I remember, she nodded a bit, and whispered, “I’m O.K.” It was her face that spoke volumes. Forehead lifted, blue eyes bright, an almost sunny expression. That “I’m O.K.” was accompanied by an almost delighted look of marvel…of wonder. Like, “Wow! I’m really O.K.!” God was meeting her at the point of her greatest need.

Mom and I have always had amazing talks about the deep things of God and life. She told me one time that she envied us our certainty of His call to a life overseas. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard God speak so clearly to me,” she lamented. In the last days of her life, it came to me to ask her if she heard God speak to her lately. She answered right away, with that same look of wonder, “All the time!” If cancer had to be the instrument of such grace, then it became a gift to her.

Mom entered Eternity during the reading of 2 Corinthians 4:7-10 (see above). Her young pastor and his wife came unexpectedly that evening, rushing in, wide-eyed, as if on a mission. We brought them back to her room, and they sat with us, around her bed. She had been unresponsive all day. Her pastor opened his Bible and began reading. Mom had this sweet habit of knitting her forehead and shaking her head, in response to something that touched her heart. As he read, after being quiet and still all day, she knit her forehead and breathed her last. We all felt transfigured in that moment.

Today marks 12 years since Mom went to be with the Lord, and I miss her today and every day. She was so spent when she left us, yet gloriously whole at the same time. A bit of prose from Henry Van Dyke always comes to mind in thinking of her Homegoing.

Gone From My Sight by Henry Van Dyke

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side, spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,
hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me — not in her.

And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices
ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

Mom taught us how to live…and she taught us how to die. She “fought the good fight…finished the race…and kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7). For us, there is still a race to be run.

Thanks, Mom, for showing us how it’s done. See you at the Finish Line.

When it’s all been said and done
There is just one thing that matters:
Did I do my best to live for truth, did I live my life for You?
When it’s all been said and done
All my treasures will mean nothing
Only what I’ve done for love’s Reward
Will stand the test of time.

Lord, Your mercy is so great
That You look beyond our weakness
And find purest gold in miry clay
Making sinners into saints

I will always sing Your praise
Here on earth and ever after
For You’ve shown me Heaven’s my true home
When it’s all been said and done
You’re my life when life is gone.

Lord I’ll live my life for You.

Mom’s Irises

YouTube Video – When It’s All Been Said and Done

Memory of Mildred Byrd McAdams

We Are Not Our Own – Thoughts on Physician-Assisted Suicide

Family, Parenting, Walk with God

The Father I Never Knew – On Father’s Day

June 15, 2014 admindeb 6 Comments

I was five years old when my parents divorced. By the time I was six, my father was completely out of my life. Their divorce came after more than twelve years of marriage and four children. I won’t go into the reasons of why their marriage unraveled. Neither my mom or my dad are here to tell their side. In the mid-50’s when people divorced, there was no court-mandated child support. In our situation, Mom worked, and until she married again years later, we lived on what she was able to provide.

This is a picture of my father – Guy Anderson Stephens.

It’s the only one I have. In those years, pictures were taken regularly, even in poorer families. So why there are no pictures of my father, I cannot say. My Mom said he was a handsome man, charming. He grew up, one of three siblings, on a sizable farm and his family was well-respected in the community.

My mother, Mildred Jane Byrd, was beautiful and smart. She was the middle child of five. The only girl. Hers was a hard childhood with the Great Depression just one of the factors making her family poor. She had great dignity in the midst of her circumstances and continued so all her life. I love my mama and feel very grateful to be her daughter and friend. When she and my Dad married, she felt confident her hardest days were over. It was not to be so.

When my parents divorced, we became a family of 5. My Mom, my older brother, Robert, me, and my two younger brothers, Dwane and Wade. Wade (not in picture above) was just a baby when we drove away from the house that last day. This picture was taken later, not on that bewildering last day.

The picture above shows us with our grandmother and cousins in our uncle’s convertible. It’s possible he was as poor as we were, except for the car. I’m holding my youngest brother. Our older brother must have felt great responsibility toward us, with Mom working long hours. I think, too, he felt the loss of our father the most acutely.

For reasons we will never know, our father didn’t stay long in our lives. Some months after the divorce, he took us to a county fair. He bought a bear for me at one of the concessions because he wasn’t able to win it. Then there was the Christmas following – that one glorious, magical holiday when he brought presents and it seemed he would always be close. And then he never came back.

He attended our older brother’s high school graduation years later, but I didn’t see him. And that was that.

Once I learned how to write, I would send him letters (at his parents’ farm) – telling him the news of his children. For a couple of decades I wrote, imagining my letters helped him stay connected with us, maybe lessening his loneliness for his children. He never wrote back.

The last letter was to announce the birth of his first grandchild.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, but after that, I didn’t write any more.

Years later, after many more births of grandbabies he would never know, I talked to him once on the phone. Someone told my mom that he was in a nursing home and not well. I called him, thinking we could visit together…one last time. As we talked briefly, he thought I was my mom. Too many years had separated us. I did not make that visit.

The funeral home leaflet said so little. It was sent in a note to my mother after the funeral. We did not go. His death seemed to have happened to some other family. He would be grieved by those who knew him. His parents and siblings and others – these were his family…strangely, we were not.

The longing to know my father and the rest of that family passed with the years apart. As far as we knew, he nor his family (original or remaining) ever tried to communicate with us over these more than 50 years. Until recently.

His last surviving sibling died this Spring. Aunt Pauline. And we have been tracked down, so to speak. Two weeks ago, I spoke for the first time in all these years to a cousin. She is the executor of Aunt Pauline’s estate and we are remembered in her will. I will meet her this week. She remembers meeting my Mom nearly 70 years ago, when my Dad was courting her She commented on how beautiful and tall she was. What a kindness this may turn out to be.

To finally close the gap on all those years of not knowing that family…my other family. It may be that I won’t really learn much about this father, but I am continually learning more about the Father I have in God. He has never left me. This is one of His countless tender mercies.

[From the leaflet from my father’s funeral]:

In the Digital Age, the Family Photo Album Fades Away