The Best is Yet to Come
This is a guest post! I’m happy to share with you a personal reflection from my friend Meredith Bunting. It’s hard to say good-bye so I hope Meredith’s encouragement will lift your heart today.
You can find more of Meredith’s personal stories on her website (meredithbunting.com) and look for her new book on the horizon “Cutting and Pasting Truth” coming in the winter of 2022! Also, Meredith was one of my first guests on my podcast, Finding God in Our Pain. She shared her journey with chronic pain and finding holy moments in the darkest pit of isolation (https://alifeofthrive.com/2020/11/25/podcast-episode-meredith-bunting-living-with-chronic-illness/)
The Best is Yet to Come
The moment I saw my father the last time he visited me I had a sense of his history having been written. My first taste of grief was bittersweet. As I welcomed him to our home, my heart whispered “good bye.”
Dad’s eyes twinkled and his white hair pushed in billows from under his US Navy ball cap. He looked oddly frail, but trim and tanned beneath his worn freckles. Although he had been a red head as a child, I only remember his hair being black and how magical it had seemed that he could grow a beard of orange and brown.
He wore his favorite ball cap as he always had since the days he had served on the USS America. As a Naval officer of twenty-six years, his last tour aboard the new aircraft carrier had been the glory of his career. Traveling distant waterways on the glistening ship while serving his country, my father entertained military officers and dignitaries in the ship’s cabin and wined and dined with diplomats and celebrities from all over the world. For the consummate host, it had been the best time of his life.
Just a year after my parents’ visit with us in Virginia, I traveled to their home in Florida to be with my father before he died. By then the cancer that had been nesting within his body was flourishing savagely. The new foundation of faith upon which I had been standing rumbled beneath me. Life is a series of good-byes, I decided, a very sad thought indeed.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for His name’s sake.”
I had walked closely with the Lord in those days, skipping actually, as a new Christian in love with a fresh lease on life. It was hard to demonstrate my faith and not give in to my emotions when my mother called me to my father’s bedside. By then my husband had retired from the military and was immersed in a new career, so I went to my parent’s home alone where my mother, in her own suffering, turned her back on my prayers and tears.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
For You are with me:
Your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.”
I held his hand, trying to will my flesh and blood into his bony grip. Words remained garbled in his head as his ice blue eyes, filmed and weary, stared at my face until love took over and his chin trembled. Amazingly, his hair was still a full white crown.
As a child, I first learned about God’s love through the wise words and strong faith of “Gramma Rene”, my father’s mother. But Dad had always remained private about his relationship with God. Like the centurion in Luke 7, he was a man of honor and charity, but maintained a proper distance from confession. Believing my faith was enough to save his life, I prayed with him at his bedside through the long nights telling him of God’s mercy and eternal peace.
I was with him for six days trying to will him back to health. Six days of praying, coercing, and begging God to wait, reconsider, redeem the time and take the opportunity for a miracle. I read my Bible, searched for a reason, a hint to the secret that would cure my father. Beneath my anguish was desperation to know God’s sovereignty in what my faith could not grasp. What would become of the man who had been my rock all of my life? How would I go on without him? God’s silence was deafening.
“You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.”
Dad suffered fitful days and sleepless nights during my visit, but Sunday, the day I had to fly home, dawned bright and beautiful – a day of promise. By mid-morning, the hospice nurse had him washed, dressed, and sitting comfortably in his wheelchair. His smiling face had a fresh shave, and his US NAVY ball cap topped his neatly combed hair. The color had returned to his skin, the film was gone from his eyes, and his body seemed sturdy and sure. He even had a twinkle in his eye when I asked if he wanted to go for a walk! The nurse agreed that fresh air would do him good since he was responding so well to his medicine. Full of hope and renewed faith, I wheeled my father out the front door.
We walked down the sidewalk to the pathway overlooking the gulf where the boats and small ships sailed into the harbor. Dad’s words still got stuck in his head, but he didn’t seem to mind and we both enjoyed our one-way conversation. The sparkling water beckoned us closer as my father, once again the venerable sea captain, scanned the ocean with a practiced eye. I know now the Holy Spirit whispered, and I took up the cue.
“Just imagine!” I ventured. “Out there, coming toward us, that great carrier, your ship – the USS America!” I believed so hard with him that for a split second I thought I saw a gray form with the unmistakable mast of an aircraft carrier hovering on the horizon. “And you are here to salute her!”
My father’s smile beamed as he said with certainty, “Yes, and the best is yet to come!”
Those words were the ones I shared with our family and friends as we gathered together at my father’s memorial service ten days later. God had surely answered my prayers and had given my father peace. They are the same words that have comforted me over the years whenever I’ve been tempted to question God’s ways and decisions. Grief is the heaviest burden but God promises us, with Him, life is not about the “Good Bye”, it is all about the “Hello Again”.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” (Psalm 23)
