Well Done My Faithful Servant: Remembering My Father

My father was a Southern Baptist Minister.  September is the anniversary of his death.  His death pushed me away from God for a while.  Not because I did not believe, but because I was scared.

His death was a slow suffering death.  At the age of 12, he began smoking.  He contracted TB and developed serious lung issues in the military immediately after WWII in Japan.   As long as I can remember, he had problems breathing. 

In the last couple of years of his life, his brain became tortured from lack of oxygen.  A calm, gentle man with a great intelligence outwardly became hurting, angry, and frustrated.  At one point before his death, connected to a ventilator, he could not talk so he suffered even more.

I remember him lying there and dying.  The ventilator breathing for him in a constant rhythm: woosh-click, woosh-click, woosh-click.  It was the hardest thing to go there and visit my father, the man I loved so much.  I did not want to see him small, fragile, and struggling to live.  Suffering and dying at 55 years old, I did not want to remember him that way.  So, I ran and hid from it.

I only wanted to remember his good times.  I wanted to remember his largeness, his laugh, his smile, his hugs.   I wanted to remember his life for God, the love and kindness showed to everyone.  I wanted to remember the lives he touched.  Changing rough, grumpy, callous people with his presence.  Always ready with a prayer.  Preaching in the pulpit, sharing Christ's message, not for money but for love.

He told me that each and every person has their own relationship with God.    Some have a deep relationship and some only a casual acquaintance.  The God a person's life could be the God of the Bible or maybe a god they thought was God.  A god fashioned to fit their lives.   His ministry was to guide them to a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  He was only part of a person's journey to a relationship with Christ.  A relationship found in themselves.

Twenty years later, I lay in a hospital bed, with a ventilator breathing for me.  Woosh-click, Woosh-click, Woosh-click.   I was alone and quite with God.  The first time I had been alone with God for some time.   I remembered my father's funeral.  The sermon came from Matthew, the parable of the "good and faithful servant."   As the minister closed the funeral, he said God was welcoming this man with "Well done my good and faithful servant."  

I looked at the crucifix on the wall, Christ suffering for the sins of humanity.  There in the hospital bed, my father's message continued twenty years after his death.  Mr father had been only part of my journey with God.   In the example of my father's life of faith and suffering death, God spoke to me in the woosh-click of the ventilator.  

Forgotten over the years was the understanding offered by my father.  I had taken what God had given me and made it into what I needed it to be.  My father's gift of faith and example had been buried.  I had done this because I was scared like the foolish servant who buried what the master had given him.  

Christ's parable tells us to take the gifts and talent God gives us and build his kingdom.   The greatest thing God gives us is the simple example of our lives.