When Death Comes, Then Comes JOY

Grandpa with 1-year-old Micah in Chicago

My Grandpa W. died last Saturday.

On Tuesday afternoon Jon pulled me close and whispered soft: “Your Grandpa died. Your dad forwarded his obituary today and the funeral’s tomorrow . . .  in Chicago . . .”

It wasn’t a shock, this bitter-sweet news of the passing of my 95-year-old Grandpa, my step-Grandpa, but the only real Grandparent I’ve ever known.

This passing of old life felt bitter because I’ll never hear Grandpa tell his joke about the salesman with the toothbrush for the 100^th time, I’ll never listen to him share what he learned from This Daily Bread in the early AM, never see him hobble-walk into his kitchen at 6am to eat his orange, grapefruit, and toast, and never go bowling with him and his white-haired friends who always got better bowling scores than us 30-somethings.

I’ll never hear him tremble-tell stories about his first wife, Jean, and my Grandma Irma, and his daughter Judy, who all saw Jesus’ face years ago  . . .

But this passing of Grandpa is also sweet, sweet because this I know for sure: my Grandpa W. loved Jesus with his life.

I’ll never forget when Jon and I were young and dating and drove from Minneapolis to Chicago to see Grandpa and my college-going sisters. And that weekend while I slept on my sisters’ apartment floor in Wheaton, Jon stayed up late in Grandpa’s condo, playing him in chess, and getting beat over and over again while he “waited for your Grandpa to have a senior moment! He never had one!” And Jon woke up at 5am and rolled out of that creaky sofa bed and sat with Grandpa as he opened his Bible and read Our Daily Bread and talked about his Savior-God, talked about how he couldn’t wait to go to heaven and see Him face-to-face.

I’ll never forget the letters Grandpa sent over the years, one-after-another, writing in his wobbly script that he was “praying every day for you and your family, and I love you very much.”

When he finally lost his driver’s license, and he moved out of his West Chicago condo and into his son’s house, he left nothing behind because he’d given it all away. At the end of life, Grandpa’s treasure was in the unseen, the eternal, not the temporal, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal.

That’s what I remember most about my Grandpa: Christ was his treasure, his life, his Everything.

And the older he got, the more he breathed Jesus.

And this is my prayer: that I may follow in the foot-steps of my Grandpa, knowing and loving Jesus more than Life.

And this is my hope: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”

And this is my peace: “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”