What Death Teaches Us

 This sweet moment between Brooks & his Great Papaw Bowen was taken just an hour before he went to be with Jesus. In a rare toddler moment, Brooks sat and looked at him for over five minutes and reached out his hand to caress his Papaw's hand so gently.  There wasn't a dry eye in the room!

"For He knows how weak we are, he remembers we are only dust. Our days on earth are like grass, like wildflowers, we bloom and die." Psalm 103:14

I read this verse in Psalms the night before we lost him.  I prayed for the Holy Spirit to fill me with something.  Encouragement, promise, hope, a reminder that this life is all but temporary.  Without fail, He led me to this.  A verse that sits one below a favorite of mine, one that is embedded on my heart and inscribed on a bracelet Dale wears. 

As we spent our days bedside, with one of the first men I'd ever fallen in love with, I was flooded with emotions and thoughts about life and death.  Life teaches us lessons time and time again, but death, do we ever stop to think in the midst of it that it is worthy of teaching us as well?  I've never experienced death before, and yet I wasn't surprised to see that God would use such a time to speak to my heart in a way that I knew would change me, encourage me, and challenge me.

Earth's treasures are useless. Matthew 6:19 Don't store up treasures here on earth where moths eat them rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal.

As I sat and touched his hands I could picture him fiddling with a pocket watch. Cleaning it, opening it, winding it.  I thought about all the hundreds that he had collected.  One of which he had given to me one Christmas.  I had held onto that pocket watch for dear life during all of life's moves, travels, and even a jeweler once who offered me more money than I had to my name at the time.  I thought about how I would wear it the next day and that one day I would get to pass it on.  And in that sense, that treasure didn't seem completely useless to me, because forever I would remember him by it.  But that pocket watch, like the hundreds that surrounded it, sure didn't matter as he inhaled and exhaled his last numbered breaths. It pierced my heart so deeply.  It was a reminder of my word for the year, contentment.  The reminder that no amount of stuff matters when we're breathing our last breaths.  What an image to be emblazed in my mind for when I struggle with material desires. A final lesson from my Papaw that wouldn't be forgotten.

Enjoy your precious life. Ecclesiastes 9:9 Live happily with the woman you love through all the meaningless days of life that God has given you under the sun.

I could picture him bickering with my Mamaw in a way that I knew meant he loved her.  He would argue his point and look at you and wink.  Even in those last years when Alzheimer's had set in and you weren't always sure he was aware, at just the right time he would look you in the eyes and wink when she would say something sassy or accuse him of doing something just to spite her.  As I sat and watched him breathe I could picture memory after memory of him enjoying life and bringing us all along for the ride.  Death has a way of pressing pause on life.  It allows you to say no to every other committment you have in a second to be there as you savor final moments.  In that moment, I could almost hear him whispering to me to not wait for death again to press pause and enjoy my precious life.  My baby, my husband, my own Daddy.  To soak in the beauty of each every day moment under the sun.  

Eternity matters.  1 John 2:24-25 So you must remain faithful to what you have been taught from the beginning. If you do, you will remain in fellowship with the Son and with the Father. And in this fellowship we enjoy the eternal life he promised us.

January 10th, 1991 he obidiently followed Jesus into the baptismal and was raised from the dead.  He was different from then I'm certain.  I don't remember those early days of his Christian life, but I knew where he kept his Bible and I knew where he could be found on a Saturday night.  In the back of the middle section of church.  He was a quiet servant with a gentle heart.  

In the final hours of his life I looked at my own Dad with a weary heart and asked why God hadn't already called him home.  Why he had been stripped of his identity & memory yet still resided in this earthly body instead of the glorious new body that I knew awaited him.  I didn't expect him to be able to explain to me God's plan, but I yearned to understand.  In a way only Dad's can, he looked at me with tear filled eyes and told me he believed it was because God was giving us a chance to remember the importance of salvation.  A time to openly talk about it together, a time to share it with those around us who may not quiet understand the message of Jesus and the promise of eternal life, a time to draw near to Jesus so he may draw near to us.  Eternity matters, and in the final moments of life when grief rushes in, only the promise of Heaven can provide hope that there is more than this.  

As the roses from his funeral slowly wither and fall, I am reminded daily of the verse the Holy Spirit gave me that cold Thursday night.  Just like flowers, we bloom and we die.  Oh how I long for my bloom of life to be filled with treasure that cannot be lost, memories that cannot be forgotten, and a hope of eternity with my sweet Papaw and many, many others.