There’ll Be No Sighing There

While I’ve always enjoyed writing, it wasn’t until after my father passed away that I truly took up my pen and got to work. My father, like his father before him, was a hard and handy man—there was hardly a thing he could not build or a household problem he could not fix. I, on the other hand, am not an exceedingly handy person (though, I’d like to think I’m becoming more of one). However, despite the ‘handy’ gene being recessive, I take comfort in the words of Irish Poet Seamus Heaney who, speaking of his own father in the poem “Digging”, wrote these words:

“The old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man. 

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.”

Digging

I began writing all those years ago out of a desperate desire to untangle the many thoughts and emotions that were beginning to swell within me after my father went home to be with the Lord. There was something in my heart that needed unearthing, and so my words got to digging.

And though the Lord has given me much more than grieving and sorrow to write about over the years, I do find that my writing so often returns to my father, to his passing, and to this subject of longing, nostalgia, and homesickness. The season of life that brought about my father’s death was not simply one season among many, but indeed the very season that shaped all the rest. Not that his death was the chief catalyst of change (for, he is now more alive than he ever was), but rather it was the Lord’s sanctifying work in and through this experience that so profoundly shaped me. I do not write these words lightly when I say that though my father’s passing was the greatest sorrow of my life, it was also one of the Lord’s greatest gifts to me and my family—cultivating within us an eternal perspective, a thirst for Christ, and a longing for that place to which all our lifelong nostalgia only dimly points.

Indeed, my writing on any other matter cannot be properly understood outside of my father’s battle with cancer and his passing not long after. Though, can it rightly be called a battle that cancer has won? People so often say, “After a long battle with cancer, the cancer finally won and ____ died.” I disagree wholeheartedly. As Norm MacDonald once said, “Both body and cancer die in the end, I’d call that a draw.” As those in Christ, we know that the one, cancer, has perished forever while the other, our loved one, has gone to be where death is no more—to me, that sounds like a far cry from defeat. In a world where cancer ‘claims’ millions of souls every year, one can scarcely say the Lord has no use of it. If cancer be the cold hand through which Christ brings many of our loved ones home into the warmth of His eternal embrace, then so be it.

Kissing the Wave

My wife, like many of you who’ve been reading along for some time now, never met my father. In light of this reality, my earnest hope in much of the things I’ve written has been to share him with you all in some way—to present a mosaic of who he was and what he meant to so many such that, even if you never met him, you could gather a sense of what he was all about. While he was here, my father’s life shaped so very many others, and I like to think that he is continuing to do so. I hope and pray I’ve accomplished that task faithfully.

That being said, my father was not a perfect man. For all the joy and warmth that radiated from him, there were times—more times than I’d prefer to admit—where my father seemed gripped by a great heaviness of heart. Looking back, it seemed as though this melancholy of soul would come and go mysteriously—surfacing now and again, perhaps for a moment, only to disappear for a season. At times, this heaviness of heart was just that—a sort of heaviness about him, an inner-sighing of his spirit. In other moments, it was as though he was quietly carrying the world upon his shoulders.

Charles Spurgeon, the “Prince of Preachers”, was my father’s favorite theologian and writer. Many Christians may not realize this, but he too suffered a similar heaviness of heart all his life. Spurgeon once professed in a sermon of his that, “My spirits were sunken so low that I could weep by the hour like a child, and yet I knew not what I wept for.”

I never realized it at the time, but I’ve now come to believe that this was in large part why my father loved Spurgeon so dearly; he saw in Spurgeon not only a theologian and preacher, but a friend. A friend who, like Christ, was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). A friend who, like David before him, was likewise caught in the vice-grip of Biblical conviction and yet still cried out into the darkness from time to time—“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Psalm 43:5). Later on in the Psalms, the writer voices his sorrow in this way:

“You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves” (Psalm 88:6-7).

When I remember my father, imperfections aside, I see a man of immense courage and faith who, echoing the words of Spurgeon, could boldly say that he “learned to kiss the wave that [threw him] against the Rock of Ages.”

“Just Like Your Dad”

Shortly after my father passed away, I made the short walk to my cousin’s house next door as I had done a million times before. As was my custom (one I learned from my father, in fact), I simply knocked on the door and then let myself in a second later. While I was in the entrance way taking off my shoes, an unseen voice circled from around the corner—“Josh? Is that you?”

“Uh, yeah, it is... How did you know it was me?” I replied, somewhat taken aback.

“It’s your breathing—you sigh just like your dad.”

I said earlier that my dad was an incredibly handy man and that, unfortunately for me, the ‘handy’ gene was a recessive one. This being the case, there are nonetheless many other things I do share in common with my father—one of them being this disposition towards a heaviness of heart, an inner-sighing of the spirit that has followed me all my Christian walk.

Ever since becoming a Christian in my teen years, I must admit that the fight for joy has been a daily battle. Indeed, there are times in which I fear this is what makes me most like my father; not his brilliant mathematical mind or deep love for those around him, but rather this disposition towards a heaviness of heart. And through every sign and ache of the soul, the Lord has remained utterly faithful and good to me. Like my father, I have “learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.” Looking at the broken and sinful world around us, it can become all too easy to give ourselves over to hopelessness and despondency. And yet, we do not lose hope—we must not lose hope.

The Word of God does not sugar-coat the fallen state of the world nor does it insist we view reality through the lens of rose-colored glasses. The Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, recognized this reality well when he urges believers to “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). It is as though Paul is anticipating the Philippians’ response before they have even the opportunity to make it—“I know life is hard, but rejoice always. Yes, let me repeat myself: no matter what happens, why it happens, or how many times it happens to happen, always rejoice!”

And why are we to rejoice always? The answer, spelled out in verse 5, is quite simple: “The Lord is at hand” (Philippians 4:5). Paul is reminding his fellow believers that eternity is upon their very doorstep; they can and must rejoice because soon and very soon, they will be in that place where dying, crying, and sighing no longer take place. We’re going to see the King soon, Paul says—so just relax, serve, and be happy.

No More Sighing There

I said earlier that part of my motivation for writing is to share my father with those who did not know him, and indeed, to also bless those who knew him best. With that purpose in mind, perhaps I can share one more angle of him, another piece in this mosaic that I’ve been trying to craft—a piece that just so happens to be the final glimpse I caught of him.

Leading up to the evening of my father’s departure, there was a shared sense among our family that the time of our final goodbye was drawing close. In the Lord’s great kindness, He slowly gathered the whole family to the hospital—nieces, nephews, life-long friends, siblings, children, his father, and wife, nearly everyone who rubbed shoulders with my father on a daily basis found themselves in his hospital room at the end.

In his final moments a song, like a warm breeze among us on that cold winter night, began to envelop around my father’s bed—growing softly until it outstretched its embrace into the rest of the cancer wing, flowing into the adjoining rooms, the nurse’s station, before finally settling in the lobby at the far end of the corridor. The last sound my father heard here below was the voice of his family, his brothers and sisters in the Lord, singing the hymn “Soon and Very Soon.” The hymn goes like this:

“Soon and very soon,

We are going to see the King;

Hallelujah hallelujah,

We’re going to see the King.

No more crying there,

We are going to see the King;

No more dying there,

We are going to see the King;

Hallelujah hallelujah,

We’re going to see the King.”

Moments after our song ebbed to a close, my father’s earthly life closed with it. He was guided seamlessly from this world and welcomed into the next with song, his hand held firmly by His faithful Savior all the way—into that place where there’s no more crying, no more dying, and at long last, no more sighing.

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Photo by Fitra Zulfy, Unsplash