Heaven

I am realizing that my world view is a fairly positive one. I truly believe that God has called each of us to be faithful and to leave the results to Him. I’ve watched my parents live this way for 41 years. Every day they do what they believe God would have them to do. They did so in raising my brothers and I and my brothers did not “turn out” they way they hoped or dreamed. But they still keep being their parents and loving them day by day, doing what God has called them to do, faithfully, praying for them every day, and leaving the results to God.

My mom was a teenager when she first felt that God was calling her to work with the Navajos. She dreamed of being a teacher. But each day she did what she believed God was calling her to do. She went to a Bible school after high school that did not give degrees. She then served God through her church for years, working and living in a “deaconess” home as a single woman, even though she had been in love with my Dad since she was 13. By the time she was 33, she was able to marry him (see the story here). She then gave birth to three kids and began a day care so she could stay home with us where she (and we) loved an extra 6 kids a day (with only 2 under 2). When we were all school age she got a job as a paraprofessional in our elementary school where she stayed for many years.

In 1992 she and my father went with their church in Denver to Sun Valley Indian School on a “Work and Witness Team.” They fell in love with the place and six weeks later moved (at the ages of 70 and 63) to volunteer their time. My mom did the laundry for 150 kids for 40 hours a week. They ended up selling their home in Denver and buying a double wide trailer so that they could work at the school as long as possible. After about three years of laundry, and at the age of 66, my mom told the administration that her back was getting too bad to hang out and fold clothes. She asked if there was something else she might be able to do.

At that time she was asked if she might like to teach. SInce the school does not require a college degree, she would be able to do so there. A Pre-First position was open, and she accepted it. So, at the age of 66 she began to work as a teacher to the Navajo (and other Native American) children. Her goal is to teach until she is 80 and she turned 76 this year and is still going strong. She has to rest more, and teaching is about all she does (she used to be the volunteer queen of every church we’ve been in), but she is thrilled to be living her dream.

My life is what it is today because my parents chose to do what God called them to do every day and leave the results with Him. If they would have done things differently or gotten in a hurry, life could be very different for me. For one thing, had they married out of high school, I would be 57. No thank you. Also, had my mom decided that she needed to go to college instead of be home with us, the attention we received may not have been enough to give me the strong base I have. Or had she not done day care, i wouldn’t know it was possible for 9 kids to be under the same roof peacefully for hours at a time.

God gave her a dream and she trusted God with that dream and did what she needed to do for 50 years before she saw that dream come to life.

And so I can’t help but believe that a similar task is mine -- to faithfully do what God has called me to do every day and leave the results to HIm. In parenting my children, who don’t all appear to be “turning out” I cannot lose faith and think this is the end -- after all my brothers are 40 and almost 39 and my parents still believe and pray that God will transform their lives some day. If my parents haven’t lost hope for them, how can I be discouraged when my oldest is only 18?

The song “Thank You" by Ray Boltz was overused when he first wrote it, but I really think this is a descriptor of what Heaven will be like. I think we will spend eternity meeting people who our lives have impacted that we didn’t know about. I believe that a vagrant, who stopped by our church and Bart gave money to out of his pocket, will come up to him in heaven and say, ”I don’t know if you remember me, but about 10 years after you paid for a night in that Comfort Inn for me, I remembered your gesture and it brought me back to God.“ Or a hurricane survivor might come up to us and say, ”I just found out that it was the fact that your family gave up pizza for a month and sent money to UMCOR that got me back on track after Hurricane Katrina. That gesture is why I’m here.“ Or maybe some one will come to us in timeless eternity to say to me ”My great grandfather was a student at BWC when you were Dean of Students. Your chapel speeches turned his life around and for generations we’ve all been serving God faithfully.“ Or maybe it will be something as simple as ”I used to watch you struggle with your kids when I worked at Pamida and wondered why anyone would adopt so many kids. The more I thought about it the more I realized it must have something to do with your faith, and so I headed back to church. Since then my life was very different and now we’re here in heaven together.“ Or Bart’s sermons, or my speaking engagements, or articles we have written, or even our blogs, might have someone we’ve never met or don’t remember coming to us in heaven to say, ”That was the key to my life turning around. Your faithfulness changed my life.“ And I certainly hope that I meet some of the kids that I’ve matched who will credit the home I found for them as the turnaround piece of their lives.

I could go on and on, but a reader with average intelligence has already gotten the point.

So that is why I can live through bad days, bad weeks, bad months, bad years (like the last one) because I believe that results are not my responsibility. Evaluation is only necessary in programming and grant writing. Life cannot be evaluated with numbers and stats because we don’t know all the details.

My parents are an excellent example of daily faithfulness and I intend to live like them.

I intend to every single day get up and faithfully do what God has called me to do. I know that I won’t do it all perfectly, but I’m going to keep doing it every day. I am going to keep praying, keep hoping, keep believing that it is making a difference, even when I can’t see that it is. And I’m going to leave the results with God.

I realize that this is getting quite lengthy, but I must close with a tribute to a very dear friend who went to Heaven on Christmas day of 1990. He was my pastor and had struggled with a lifetime of pain and illness while still doing all that he could to change the world. After a kidney transplant failed when he was about 25, he had to decide if he could go through another one. He chose to do it and then spent the rest of his life dealing with the pain, discomfort and struggles that came from this -- ultimately dying from complications of the disease. When I worked at the college, I would stop by and visit he and his wife on nights when I had had a particularly bad day. Their tradition was to light candles and reflect together at the end of each day together -- instead of watching TV. I loved to join them for that time. He was a dreamer and had ideas and plans of how to impact the world, but his time on earth was way to short and he knew he didn’t have time to accomplish them all.

I believe he was around 45 when he died. I’m almost that old now. But even at the end of his life, which none of us would view as ideal, he used to quote this verse:

God Is, God Knows, God Cares
nothing this thought can dim;
God always gives the best to those
who leave the choice with Him.

I know now that if he could believe that in the midst of pain and knowing His life was short, how can I believe anything less?