Here is a post I don’t want to write. 

Dad died last month. He had Lewy Body dementia with an early onset. He was about 58 when he started showing symptons and died at 68. The last few years of his life were in full time medical care. My mother visited him every day. Every day. Every day. 

He is still teaching me about how to trust God. About a year after he was in hospital Mum found a scrap of paper in his bible that Dad had written on. It was probably the last thing he wrote. It was full of spelling errors and mistakes (which evidenced the difficulty he had writing anything) but written out twice were these words from Job 13 ‘Though he slay me yet will I trust him’. When Dad wrote that we didn’t really know what he was thinking and it was so very hard for him to communicate. As I read the scrap of paper it was like words from the grave. 

Dad knew that he was being slain – a terrible slow motion slaying that he couldn’t avoid. He knew too that it came from the God who brought him into being, who knows when a sparrow falls to the ground, and will one day make all things knew. Whatever horrors he went through, he knew they were not outside the hand of God. And like Job he would trust the one who slayed him. 

Jesus did the same thing – trusting himself to the God who slayed him on the cross. The great hope we have is not in the miracle drug or healer but in the resurrection. The God who slays is the God who raises from the dead. He is good. His purposes are beyond us. 

I miss him terribly.