Easter and Mother’s Day

This is the first Easter without Mom and I am grateful that the day we remember our living Lord precedes the day we remember moms living and deceased.  I know the dynamics of all the lunar stuff which determines the placement of the Christian holy day among the other 364 possibilities in the year.  I’m also acquainted with the origins of the annual Mother’s Day observance and why it is later in the spring than Easter.  Recalling and recalculating all the historical, astronomical and mathematical items which place one big day on April 24 and the other on May 8 this year can have someone auditioning for a migraine.

All that heady stuff isn’t my reason for celebrating the sequence of dates on my calendar, however. 

February 2010 found the Autry Clan traveling from the points of the compass to the tiny dwelling Mom and Dad where by then calling home.  Later we would move to a non-descript church building for cake, ice crème and a lot of smiles.  We were relishing a day fewer families reached in previous generations.  Mom was 80; an octogenarian for the more sophisticated.  All looked well.  A tragic automobile accident in 2006 had almost claimed her.  A lung spot in 2009 suggesting the dreaded “C” word proved a false alarm and four generations of our bunch were now here for the big day.  No one trades such occasions for Solomon’s fabled mines. 

Fast forward to August.  Mom elected to let her surgeon remove the lung’s mystery spot.  Consistent with all the previous pathologies it was not cancer, just a granuloma by which the lung had protected itself from a previous infection by walling it off from all the healthy respiratory tissue.  She had a relatively short surgery with an excellent prognosis.  I, the eldest, was soon on a flight back to the Commonwealth.  I would soon be grateful that planes flew both ways.

One trip became many.  The short visit became longer ones.  Friendly conversations with long unseen relatives and friends were now trumped by graveyard talk.  All those items many check off so officiously on advance directives were now more a part of our conversation than where to lunch.  Consultations and conversations about taboo topics like ventilators, feeding tubes and ending life support now dominated our words and aged our faces.  Speculation spiraled down into sorrow when a cancer appeared “out of the blue’ in another body part.  Mom was dying and now the love of a son could only express itself in a boy forced to watch the wretchedness of the one who gave him breath fight for her life’s breath.

Early afternoon Saturday, October 2 Mom’s struggle ended.  All three of her boys busy with other concerns in her acute care room turned without prompting to watch as she drew her final breath.  It was surreal and scripted all at the same time.  Three sons were motherless and a faithful husband of nearly 54 years was companionless. 

You see, Easter is more personal this time.  I have believed the Easter story on some level all my life.  I have preached it with gusto for decades.  But it is personal in a way only my readers who have been here before can capture.  Because Christ lives Mom lives also.  Because Christ lives I shall live also.  Because Christ lives I shall see Mom again.

Mother’s Day will be embraced with joy because Easter comes before it and conquers all our fears.

“Don’t be afraid…I was dead, but look – I am alive forever and ever.” (Rev.1: 17-18 HCSB).

This article originally appeared in The Daily Press.

What Do I Do?

You’re in a bit of a jam.  You have a big decision to make.  Your very life could be shaped by what you choose.  The voices around you seem confused at best and maybe even competitive.  Your emotions are swirling.  What do you do?  How do you make a decision?

There is little sense and much nonsense tossed around even in Christian communities about knowing the will of God.  Some treat the will of God as some grand mystery discovered by only the most select mystics among us while others prefer to demystify the will of God by reducing it to elemental forces converging on our lives.  These polar opposites have left an entire generation of believers wondering if anyone knows how to know the will of God.  The logic is simple: If I don’t know how to know the will of God then I can’t know the will of God.

How sad that so many find themselves in this spiritual, mental and emotional quagmire.  Life’s greatest discovery is finding the will of God and life’s greatest achievement is following the will of God.  Every one of us can confidently seek and find God’s specific will for us at any crucial turn.  We do not have to wander wondering if we will just happen to intersect God’s will as we fumble and bumble through aimless experiences occurring randomly and successively across the years.  Life need not be rudderless. 

The will of God is found in the confluence (or dovetailing if you prefer) of four things: (1) The principles of the Word of God, (2) The peace of the Spirit of God, (3) The people of the church of God and (4) The providence of the sovereignty of God.  Any one of these taken in isolation may cause us to make shipwreck of our life.  How so, you ask?

Obviously God is never going to contradict his Word and will not direct us to do something in opposition to it.  Our problem comes when we are so anxious to do a certain thing that we tear through the pages of God’s Word looking for any text that appears to support whatever it is we are about to do.  There are 1189 chapters and about 773,700 words (depending on your translation) in the Bible.  That’s a fertile field for the imaginative believer to pick a text from!  Often we treat the Bible like a spiritual Ouija Board generating strange vibrations certain to be God’s iron clad will for us today.

Perhaps you heard about the guy whose life was a certifiable mess.  In desperation he grabbed a Bible and prayed, “Alright God, I’m going to open this Bible and whatever verse my finger falls on will be your will.”  He opened the Bible and his finger fell on “Judas went out and hung himself.”  He thought, “That will never do” and he tried it a second time.  This time it said, “Go thou and do likewise.”  His frustration was growing and so he gave it one last whirl.  This time it read, “Whatever thou doest do quickly.”  You see, a text without a context is a pretext!  Fallen, finite minds find faulty foundations for all sorts of silly things even in Scripture.

Part of the fruitage of the Spirit is peace and so if I am walking in the Spirit I should be walking in peace.  My problem may come, however, when I look in the mirror, have a conversation with myself but leave convinced I’ve had a talk with God.  Our emotions are a tangled tussle of the tender, the tough, the tormented and the triumphant and are suspect guides in this wasteland we call life.  “Let your heart be your guide!” well-intentioned-but-not-so-bright coffee shop counselors opine as they take another sip of an overpriced latte.  Problem is The heart is more deceitful than anything else and desperately sick – who can understand it (Jer. 17: 9 HCSB)?

What I think is the peace of an unerring God may be the impulse of an impetuous spirit all mine own.  There are lots of cautions to be heeded when evaluating a major decision but none as dangerous as the internal one which often sends us spiraling down toward an unstoppable disaster.  “But I loved him and I thought he loved me!”  “It just felt so right but now I feel so bad!”  “I knew there were problems but I was sure in my heart they would work out!”  Sound familiar?  We’ve heard them and a hundred like them.

God put us in a world rushing toward 7 billion people, in a family of some size and in His church as well so we did not have to figure all this stuff out in a vacuum.  We are to turn to others for advice in a pinch.  God said, Without guidance, people fall, but with many counselors there is deliverance (Prv. 11: 14 HCSB; cf. 15: 22; 24: 6).  We don’t need a hundred counselors but we do need a number who are mature in their faith and vested in our success spiritually.

What fairly bright chaps learn is that if we go to certain people we will get certain advice!  If I want to be told to do a specific thing I have my heart set on then I just go to the “counselors” who will tell me to do that thing.  I conveniently avoid the other possible advisors because they might say something contrary to what I want to do.  This has going on for centuries (e.g. 2 Chr. 18: 1 - 27).  Honestly, why bother to inquire of people who are known to think and talk just like we do?

The principles, peace and people of God can be warped to my wishes and so can the providence of God. “Can I strong arm God into doing or not doing something,” you ask in your best theological tone?  Of course God is no man’s debtor or slave but we can look at His providences with a pronounced case of spiritual myopia.  Our nearsighted perspective prevents us from seeing the big picture – the God picture – in our quandaries.  I may look at a given situation and sigh, “That will never happen!”  I may also review a set of circumstances and exclaim, “This is done deal!”  As a matter of fact, I have done both only to have God prove me patently wrong!

What appear to be eternal barriers to accomplishing something fall like dominoes before the God of heaven and earth.  What present themselves as open and never-will-be-closed doors of opportunity slam so tightly and quickly that I must jerk my foot back before my big toe is caught in the door jam.  The same God Who opens doors closes them (Rev. 3: 7).

Well, if all these approaches to the will of God are fraught with failure where is the serious saint to turn?  As I said, it’s in the confluence of all four.  “Blessed are the balanced,” Warren Wiersbe has been saying for a generation.  Every one of these items is biblical big time!  Taken together they provide the balance I need for making a major decision. 

When I prayerfully and with yieldedness seek the will of God expressed in infallible Scripture, and surrender to the guidance of the indwelling Spirit Who saturates my soul with peace, and listen attentively to savvy and spiritual confidants and observe the providences of God about me I’m braced to make a choice.  When all four line up together I can say safely, “I have found the will of God,” and that’s good to know.