Our Days are Numbered

You tell me.  What are your thoughts about it?  Have you looked it up?  These are the questions and comments we would get when we had a question about anything, but mostly Scripture.  Dad loved to read, and talk about the Scripture.  Dad and Mom, never let us think lazy.  He would not offer an answer when the world was our encyclopedia.  We needed to bring something to the conversation and he would gladly discuss it, dare I say debate it?

People have only so many days to live, but what people do and think and ask during those days can live beyond them.  18,108 days ago, I was given to Jim and Dee Lewis, I am forever their son.  How they lived, how they loved has kept right on living in and through me each and every hour for 434,605 hours.  That’s ominous if you think about it, and thanks to dad and mom, I think about it a lot.  What will live on after you?  That’s what I ask myself.  What have I been doing for 434,605 hours?  As I look back, I think so many things.  I dislike myself more and more with every thought.  I wish I could hide.

After about the first 3,650 days of my life, Dad used to take us on Sundays to the local Convalescent hospital where we would sing, and laugh and feel sick and watch as people at the very end of their days would “Well up” as Dad would say.  They cried, as Mom played the piano and 5 kids sang “Why should I feel discouraged?  Why should the shadows fall?  Why should my heart feel lonely, and long for heaven, and home?  When Jesus is my portion, my constant friend is He.  His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.”   They cried as dad proclaimed to them that Jesus loved, could and would save them from eternal death, if they would only reach out to Him and ask Him to forgive them.  They would forever be sons and daughters.  Probably some heard, by God’s grace, and believed.  Who knows, but Dad and Mom did the work of an evangelist in those days.  That is how they lived and loved.

365 days ago, my Dad had 2 days left on earth.  24 hours earlier he left me a message because I did not have my phone with me.  “If you have time, maybe you can call the Neurologist and check on his findings from the tests. Don’t feel like you have to, I know you’re busy.”   He had lived 27,304 days the last 40 were the most challenging.

How could it be that the events of 15,000+/- days ago, singing, and laughing and crying during that simple little church service for dead people, at the end of their lives, could mean so much more to me, than it could ever have meant to them.  By God’s great grace I can look back, on those hours that formed me because of how a man and his wife, just a man and his wife, lived and loved.  And those Sundays continued on in my life and heart and mind as will that day 363 days ago when that man and his wife read together for the last time Ephesians 4:4-7 "There is one body and one Spirit--just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.  But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it."

Just 2 more days and my Dad would, fall on his knees, with his head bowed low and “well up” and cry out in anguish, mixed with fear, and ask what does all this mean? And then in my mind’s eye dad would feel the fingers on the strong hand of Jesus reach out and lift his chin toward His own face and Jesus would ask dad in reply, What are your thoughts about it?  Have you looked it up? 

He had, more than 18,108 days before, many times.  He is forever a son.