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Holy Week resources and reflections

Nothing!

AT THE VERY LEAST WE FELT a sense of responsibility … maybe even God’s call. As I wrapped up an interim, my husband quit his job, we sold our home, put everything in storage, moved in with his spry 87-year-old mother and began constructing an apartment for us above her garage. The plan was to help his mom out (you know, keep her off the riding lawn mower, and off the eight-foot ladder hanging Christmas lights and cleaning gutters). Little did we know how much providence was guiding our steps. Within six months, mom was diagnosed with stage four metastatic cancer. Eight months later she died at home, the two of us by her side.

While walking with this octogenarian during her last eight months, I was amazed by her will to live. I expected her to accept death a lot sooner. I imagined if I was her, I sure would. But who knows? A fireman- EMT friend of mine responded to a call from a 95-year-old man who had collapsed. As they loaded him into the ambulance, my friend wondered out loud, “Boy, who wants to live to be 95?” To which the nearly unconscious man whispered, “Someone who is 94!”

One of the quintessential things about my mother-inlaw was her love of games. Ask her kids: she was a bit of a card shark who showed no mercy. Ask her grandchildren: she was cutthroat. You played the hand you were dealt, period. Ask her great grandchildren: She was out to win! After she died I found a scrap of paper on her dresser listing the highest Yahtzee scores recorded among family members over the years. At the top of the list? “June 2001 — Mom — *626 points (*4 Yahtzees).” Yep, she wrote it down.

That desire to win pretty much nipped at her heels until her dying day. Death was hard for her. I think she struggled to accept it because it felt like losing. She did not want to lose this exquisite gift called life. She did not want to lose the people she loved. For her, for all who loved her, her death was a wrenching, enormous loss.

And yet. And yet … As mom took her last breath, I had this overwhelming sense that she was free … whole … alive … a part of God’s New Creation. There was this almost palpable sense in the room that God’s love is stronger than death.

That assurance echoed in a Scripture I read later that morning, Romans 8:31-39 (the assigned reading for the day in “Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals”), where the apostle Paul asks, “Who can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus?” In the face of death, what can derail God’s gift of grace? What can sabotage salvation? What can frustrate God’s plan to mend the entire universe? Answer? Nothing. In fact, “We are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” The Greek word here is superlative; we are not just garden variety conquerors, but “more than conquerors,” “super conquerors” in Christ. Which means mom did win. Again. Big time. In Christ, we all do. Because nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing! Not your sin. Not your guilt. Not your stubbornness. Not your stupidity. Not your selfishness. Not your weaknesses, not your inadequacies, not your failures, not your addictions, not your divorce. Not your past, not your present. Not your illness. Not your cancer. Not your life. Not your death. Not anyone’s death. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (which, I might add, does not mean nothing is not trying)!

So if anyone ever asks you what that Presbyterian preacher daughter-in-law had to say at Marilyn Armstrong’s memorial service, just go ahead and tell them “nothing” … absolutely nothing!

Heidi H Armstrong Narrow

HEIDI HUSTED ARMSTRONG serves as an interim pastor in the Pacific Northwest.

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