December 2

Several weeks ago I went to visit my parents for the day. It was my mother’s 83^rd birthday.

I have so much to be grateful for with them, and I am. They are both still able to get around on their own power. They both still drive which does make me a bit nervous. And both are still sharp mentally which is a huge gift. They spend a lot of time reading the daily paper and various books. My dad, who is 87 and still plays golf weekly, has recently been reading a fat economics textbook he checked out of the library! If I ever do that everyone will know that I have lost my mental faculties!

But the sure and steady signs of decline are increasingly evident every time I go visit. My dad can’t stand up straight anymore and moves with painful difficulty every time he gets out of a chair. My mom has had a hard year beginning with a bad fall on my front porch last January that took five months of recovery, and now she’s living with a herniated disc that has delivered constant pain since early June. She has been so active and healthy for so long that to see her unable to do anything but sit is hard to watch. Her legs swell badly and her strength is waning from the inactivity. It makes me so sad to watch their bodies fail them knowing nothing can be done to stop it. Yet in spite of it all neither of them complain–––another huge blessing.

I drive home each time, mourning for them and for me because I know I will lose them both in time, and because I know I am headed where they are currently. Because I am theirs genetically I know I will experience much of what I am seeing in them. When I was in my 20s, 30s, and 40s it was easy to deny the inevitable because it seemed so far away. Now it is on the near horizon. The signs are beginning already.

Corrie Ten Boom tells a story in her book, The Hiding Place, which applies to me today as I live knowing aging and death are unavoidable. (If you haven’t read this book ever or recently, it is worth reading even a second or third time.) In the early days of WWII when the Ten Booms were still safe in their own home living their own normal life, Corrie had a frightening dream during a midnight bombing raid over their city. As she and her sister, Betsie, sat in their kitchen waiting for the bombing to stop so they could return to sleep, Corrie told Betsie her dream of what she saw happening to their family. This was Betsie’s response, “I don’t know what it means,” she said softly, “but if God has shown us bad times ahead, it’s enough for me that He knows about them. That’s why He sometimes shows us things, you know—to tell us that this, too, is in His hands.”

God knows. What a great assurance. He knows what’s ahead for me and for my family, too. He has been there through Jesus. And if I can just remember this truth and not get sidetracked by fear, it is enough for me, as it was for Betsie and Corrie. He knows, and it is all in His hands.