Downsizing and dying

These days I've been in Los Angeles helping my parents downsize.

They are on in years now -- in their late 80s. The one can only walk very slowly; the other, well, she asks me the same questions over and over .

The move to a senior community comes with its own exertions; the weight of moving their things is quite different from the weight I carry inside me.

In midst of moving, I get a call telling me that a good friend's father just passed away in New York.

In midst of moving, I know I'm probably myself headed for a biopsy for another spot on the roof of my mouth. What can these spots mean? I've few people to talk to about this here in Los Angeles; and my parents don't know. Why worry them?

All of this in midst of: "... do you still want this old bookcase? can we put this stuff on the curb? when is the donation truck coming ...?"

The piano I learned to play on is taken away to some Catholic church.

I've been thinking a lot about death and dying these days. How absolutely OTHER death is! And yet, and yet ...

This is what it's all about. If all of our confession merely stops short on this side of the divide, then there really is ... nothing. Better to just enjoy all these Lexuses and BMWs that seem to flourish here in Southern California. (But the drivers don't seem all that happy).

What is it going to be? Dirt ... or GLORY?

What is it going to be? Everything I've ever read in the Word: TRUE ... or ... nothing.

In midst of a thousand other displaced objects in the house, I see an old calendar with a trite saying for each month: February: Live Each Day to the Fullest. April: Help Me to See it's All Been for Good.

Help me to see it's all been for good.

I wonder: why do we humans have an instinct for better-ness? An instinct that life can be lived to the fullest, which can be missed. An instinct that assumes that, beyond this messy reality, there must be a better reality? It must be an instinct God put there. Animals don't have calendars that say: "Help Me to See it's All Been for Good."

But we have calendars that say that.

I pick up an old book about a trip the book's author made to Ephesus. The place is all a ruin now, he writes as he sits on a knoll overlooking the old city -- and he was there in 1897. There's a lot of old books laying around here.

But he then says that the words of Paul's letter written from Ephesus are still new every day. Oh may it be so! And I do take comfort that I'm all of a piece with Paul's vision; that, somehow and I don't know how, at some point in my existence I'll be able to see Ephesus as Paul saw it. And that would not be a place Northwest-KLM can fly me to.

I'll be flying some other way.

I think of old Ralph Gwinn. Ralph was so confident he was about to see God that, with joy in his voice and energy in his failing body, he led us in a Bible study from the bed he would die on a week later.

I find myself wishing for more examples like Ralph: role models of people who knew how to die well.

I hope you're reading this Ralph, or whatever it is that passes for reading where you are.

Logos2Go

Philippians 1.20 ... it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not at all be ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.