Thoughts on Dad and Mom
While it is still December, I want to take this moment to express my love and honor for my dad and mom.
Dad died on Christmas Day, 2005. Mom died on December 1, 2006. Thus, I lost both parents in less than a year, and both at this time of the year. I sit here and look at my last two most cherished pictures of dad and mom and feel afresh the depths of love and gratitude I have for them and for their legacy.
One picture is of them together, both beaming with the contageous joy that marked their lives particularly in the last few years of their lives. The other is of mom and me, from when mom visited us and our church last, about 40 days before she went home to her Savior and saw the One for Whom she had so long lived.
It speaks of the kind of lives they lived that when they died, I felt orphaned, even though I was 48 years old and the father of six. I was father- and mother-less, and I felt it.
Reflecting on this has led me to two thoughts. First, I have regretted all the times I have failed to express adequately my grief in others grief when a parent has died. Until I lost my parents, I did not know how hard it is to lose a parent. People lose parents in different ways: some through death, some through their parents' divorce, some through abandonment, some through massive neglect. At some point or another we all feel orphaned, and I grieve that in the past I did not enter the grief of others enough, and I ask forgiveness again for it.
Second, I am affected by the deep mystical bond that human relationships involve. One of the reasons I believe in God is that only a mysterious, deep, mystical, transcendant Being can account for the mystical, deep, transcendant experiences of the human soul--including human relationships.
Love is profound. Marriage, parenthood, and deep friendship--even when far less than ideally expressed, are mystical bonds that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory or philosphical materialism; the idea that matter and the physical are all that exist.
There exists between humans--and I think we all have tasted this at least for a few moments here and there in life--a connection that transcends what can be explained by the chemical actions and reactions of our biological make-up.
These are matters of the spirit, of the soul, of transcendant reality. They are mystical and mysterious sign-posts calling our hearts to look above the world to the Transcendant One from Whom all such wonders derive.
Friends, if in these past few holiday weeks spent in family-love, friendship, or fellowship, you have had at least a moment or two when you've been lost in joy over a relationship, allow that to lift your soul above the here and now into the realms of glory, where God the Mysterious and the Profound dwells.
If you have loved and been loved, it is because the One who is love exists.
Dad died on Christmas Day, 2005. Mom died on December 1, 2006. Thus, I lost both parents in less than a year, and both at this time of the year. I sit here and look at my last two most cherished pictures of dad and mom and feel afresh the depths of love and gratitude I have for them and for their legacy.
One picture is of them together, both beaming with the contageous joy that marked their lives particularly in the last few years of their lives. The other is of mom and me, from when mom visited us and our church last, about 40 days before she went home to her Savior and saw the One for Whom she had so long lived.
It speaks of the kind of lives they lived that when they died, I felt orphaned, even though I was 48 years old and the father of six. I was father- and mother-less, and I felt it.
Reflecting on this has led me to two thoughts. First, I have regretted all the times I have failed to express adequately my grief in others grief when a parent has died. Until I lost my parents, I did not know how hard it is to lose a parent. People lose parents in different ways: some through death, some through their parents' divorce, some through abandonment, some through massive neglect. At some point or another we all feel orphaned, and I grieve that in the past I did not enter the grief of others enough, and I ask forgiveness again for it.
Second, I am affected by the deep mystical bond that human relationships involve. One of the reasons I believe in God is that only a mysterious, deep, mystical, transcendant Being can account for the mystical, deep, transcendant experiences of the human soul--including human relationships.
Love is profound. Marriage, parenthood, and deep friendship--even when far less than ideally expressed, are mystical bonds that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory or philosphical materialism; the idea that matter and the physical are all that exist.
There exists between humans--and I think we all have tasted this at least for a few moments here and there in life--a connection that transcends what can be explained by the chemical actions and reactions of our biological make-up.
These are matters of the spirit, of the soul, of transcendant reality. They are mystical and mysterious sign-posts calling our hearts to look above the world to the Transcendant One from Whom all such wonders derive.
Friends, if in these past few holiday weeks spent in family-love, friendship, or fellowship, you have had at least a moment or two when you've been lost in joy over a relationship, allow that to lift your soul above the here and now into the realms of glory, where God the Mysterious and the Profound dwells.
If you have loved and been loved, it is because the One who is love exists.
Labels: Apologetics, Christian Heritage, Family, Parents
posted by Tim Shorey at
9:22 AM
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