Guest commentary by Cheyanna Losey In our rural congregation, there are times when death seems to come one right after another. During these seasons an emptiness is found not only in our pews, but also in my heart. I know each of these I have loved are now in the presence of our God. I know they are no longer suffering, and I am grateful for that truth. I rejoice that they finally see God face-to-face and I long for the day when I will do the same. Each Sunday I stand in the pulpit, look out into the pews, and I see their empty spaces. There is a moment each Sunday when I cannot help but acknowledge the bitter sweetness of life as a pastor. As a pastor I get to become a friend, welcomed in the quiet hospital rooms, in the busy emergency rooms, at kitchen tables and even at the funeral home. I get the privilege of crying tears, holding hands, hearing stories of faith and even hearing those fears difficult to utter aloud to any other person. This is a call that I often … [Read more...]
Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ
by J. Todd Billings Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Mich., 224 pages In September 2012, Todd Billings was a 39-year-old husband, father of two small children, and a respected Reformed theologian teaching at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, a seminary of the Reformed Church in America, when he received a medical diagnosis of incurable blood cancer. In this book, Todd shares how he wrestled with this diagnosis in light of his Christian faith. It is intensely personal but also filled with important theological reflections drawn from Scripture and the church’s historic confessions. Of particular importance has been the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism: “Question: What is your only comfort, in life and death? Answer: I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” Todd illustrates throughout the book how he has integrated this conviction into the realities of his life while wrestling with … [Read more...]
A Faithful Farewell: Living Your Last Chapter with Love (bookmark)
by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich. 143 pages As I was pondering the impending death of an elderly woman, her daughter said, “It’s really going to be okay. After all, none of us gets out of this alive.” That was her way of accepting the reality of death. Others say it more succinctly, “We are born to die.” Marilyn McEntyre writes about the experience of dying honestly, eloquently and pastorally. These brief reflections are written in the first person, giving them an unusual clarity. McEntyre chose this method “hoping it will give the pieces an immediacy they not have otherwise, make them more a sharing of a common condition than advice from across the chasm that divides health from illness.” The reflections address nearly every situation facing the dying: from the inevitable changes in the body, to the indignities that go with increased dependence, to the opportunities of love that dying brings, and more. Each essay is layered with wisdom … [Read more...]
Blessed are those who mourn: Sharing comfort in grief
by Marilyn Washburn How do we care for those who grieve? Specifically, how can and should pastors do that care? Moreover, how do we pastors care for ourselves when we are so frequently mourning the deaths of people we have come to love? In the decades since I was ordained as a chaplain of a hospice associated with a large inner-city hospital, my thoughts about how to care for those who grieve have changed a lot. I suspect that is true for many others who have tested all that we were taught in classrooms or even in CPE. Indeed, my convictions and suggestions will probably come as little surprise to many of my colleagues; the surprise may come in realizing how many of us now share them. Perhaps articulating new insights will trigger conversations, and our changed thoughts may be both claimed and refined. Caring for those who grieve, and for myself, begins with caring for those who are dying. I now think that the best ministry to those who grieve (and the way to experience the … [Read more...]
At the font
poetry by Paul Hooker In memoriam, Rev. O. Floyd Hooker (1922–2014) We sat for ninety minutes in the room where he lay as though asleep and talked about things he said and did half-expecting him at any time to rouse and correct the memory or tell his own until they wheeled the velvet-shrouded gurney in, the folded body bag respectful at the foot, we said our last goodbyes beside his bed, and reluctant shuffled out to greet a strange new beginning. Rising, I saw his hair, not grayish-white but dark, not tousled, straying on his forehead (which he’d have absently brushed back into place), but combed in ordered rows, a straight-plowed field where, beneath, a fertile soul still nourishes still offers up the nutrients of faith and understanding. I saw his arms, not flaccid but outreached to drive a nail or shake a hand or bless or carry a baby dripping from the font out into the midst of her new family, or pick me up when I fell off my bicycle, or embrace me … [Read more...]
Ministry in the midst of tragedy
by Alex W. Evans The words of Psalm 46 are familiar to most of us: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble … The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. We affirm these words often, perhaps as a “call to worship,” or read them at a memorial service, or sing them or say them in other moments of our common life. Those words may roll off our tongues as a rote, even mindless, affirmation of faith. But what about when the unthinkable happens in our community, or in another community, as it did recently in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, or the horrific shootings at Sandyhook Elementary School, or in the movie theater in Colorado, or on the campus of Virginia Tech? On the first Sunday following the shootings at Virginia Tech in April 2007, where I served as pastor at Blacksburg Presbyterian Church, I was interviewed on CNN prior to Sunday morning worship. The newscaster asked me, “Pastor, what will be the first words that you … [Read more...]