The Day Dad Died
On Monday, I shared with you the near-death experience of Julian of Norwich and the vision she had of our Lord Jesus’s suffering on Calvary’s cross. I’ll share more details next Monday.
Today is Thursday and the day when I share some of my Personal Reflections on my experiences as a pastor and follower of Christ. And in light of Julian’s near-death experience and vision, I thought today might be a good time to share a story from my father’s life.
My father joined the Navy at fifteen years old. Like many in his day, he lied about his age.
Dad loved the Navy. Since his mother died in childbirth when he was only two years old, and since his father was a traveling salesman, there wasn’t a whole lot to keep him at home. Truth be told, he and his siblings would have been foster children if they had lived today.
Anyway, it was during his days as a co-pilot bomber, flying off Naval aircraft carriers, that my father almost died from an explosion on his ship. He lay near death’s edge for days. That’s when he experienced a life-changing vision. Although, to be honest, the life-change was several years in the future.
In his vision, Dad was thirty-three years old. He was living in a white brick house with a white picket fence. That’s all the details I recall, and it may be all there was to the vision, but it was enough. What imprinted this vision so clearly in my father’s heart and mind was the fact that, in the vision, he died.
Fast-forward to my father at thirty-three. He’s out of the Navy and working hard at building two businesses from the ground up. At some point, he hires a personal secretary. Margie was a large, heavy-set woman and Pentecostal Christian with no more than a high school education, but her love for the Lord and her knowledge of Scripture was immense.
There is no doubt in my mind that God used Margie to bring my father to Christ. Here’s how it happened.
As he tells the story, one evening, as Dad pulled into the driveway after work, he suddenly realized that he was living in that white brick house (red brick which had been painted) with the white picket fence. The exact same house as the one in his vision. It shocked and scared him. It sounds crazy, I know, but up until this point, that vision on his death bed had been forgotten.
Meanwhile, Dad and Margie spent time together talking about the Lord and what Jesus had done for him personally through his cross and resurrection.
Then, one morning on his way to work, my father passed an old Black man selling vegetables on Spring Street in downtown Atlanta. (Keep in mind that this was pre-civil rights days.) As he tells it, he had passed this same man countless times without ever really noticing him. But this day, he not only noticed the man, he stopped, got out of his car, and bought some vegetables from him, handing him more than enough money to pay for his purchase.
“As you have done it unto the least of these my brothers” are the words Jesus uses to describe those who demonstrate compassion to the oppressed and downtrodden.
That day, as my father got back in his car, he felt the presence of the Spirit of Christ and committed his life to Jesus then and there. His life was forever changed. And yes, he died. He died to his old life. He was reborn to live for Christ.
There’s a lot more I could tell you about my father. Growing up like he did and joining the Navy at fifteen, he was a tough guy. In fact, he was the second-best boxer in the middleweight division of the Naval forces in the Pacific. My mother tells the story of how he would come home and do “white glove inspections” of her cleaning! My brothers both describe how much harder he was on them than me, and my friends used to tell me that my father was the scariest man they ever knew. But over the years, we all witnessed this tough, self-made man become one of the gentlest and compassionate people we knew. In fact, my children never knew the hard man I did. They still find some of the stories I tell about Granddad hard to believe.
I believe there are events in all our lives, small or large, that God uses to draw us to Him. And I believe there are people whom God uses to point us to Christ along the way. This is true both before and after we trust Christ as Lord and Savior. We simply need to open the eyes of our hearts, looking carefully and prayerfully for what God is doing in and around us.
In Christ,
Dan
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