Psalm #13: 5 & 6
Preached: 2010 Des Arc First UMC Nursing home Apr 18,2010
This morning I awoke with a new ache and pain.
This is nothing new and I know that most of you are like me.
You have pains and aches in places you did not even know could ache and have pain in them.
As I grow older I wonder why my body is failing me.
I wonder what I did so bad that I should not still have the body that my mind thinks it should be.
My mind tells me that I am just a young man, but my body and my appearance tell me something different
and when I get new aches and pains it is trying to remind me that either I need to change something in my life or
I need to take better care of it or it will give out long before I feel my mind will.
My father had a heart attack when I was about seven years old.
I remember being taken over to my aunts and uncles to be taken care of while he recuperated.
I did not know how bad it was until later, thank God he did recuperate and lived another thirty years.
But while I was away at a school in Ohio, he was going in to have a bypass operation on his diseased heart.
He had several massive and minor strokes on the operating table and he came out of it completely paralyzed except for his tongue and his eyes.
My mother, a former nurse could not accept what had happened to him and made sure medical science did everything in its power to keep him alive.
I remember sitting in his hospital room about three weeks after the operation, the doctors were talking to my mother about her needing to move
my dad out of the hospital and take him to the VA care facility.
I mentioned this to him and I could see in his eyes this is not what he wanted.
He did not want to live like that and was so stubborn about it he worked his feeding tube out of his mouth and stomach with just his tongue.
I knew then that he was not going to get better but my mother did not want to give up.
I guess that is real for us today too. Sometimes we are too stubborn to accept that we cannot do everything ourselves just the way we want them done.
We forget that we are not the ones that are in charge of everything on this world. This world and everything around us does not
revolve around our desires and us. We have to put our trust in something greater than ourselves.
My dad had gone through World War II without ever being wounded although he was in the Battle of the Bulge
and many other campaigns of the war. He had never been a vocal man about what had happened to him in the war
but had come back changed from when he went over. He had sent money back to his parents during that time to safeguard
it for his future and they had spent it instead upon trying to save their farm. He had left a small town in Kansas and
could no longer live in those conditions. He had gone to work at the Santa Fe railroad and was willing to do any job that
entailed to support his family. He and my mother shared parenting working opposite shifts so someone was always available
even after his heart attack. He worked hard all of his life and when He retired at 62, he was ready to be with his wife of
40 years for a good long time. This did not happen for he died when he was about 67 years old.
He had worked hard all his life and had little to show for it except three sons and a wife and a small house in a small town.
He had worked so hard he failed sometimes to see the people and things around him and failed to show that love to others until the
last few years of his life. He did not express his love to anyone verbally only through his actions, and never in all his life tell
any of his sons what he really thought of them, and for that I will always feel a loss. However, this is the way he learned it from his family.
I before my son died told him how much I thought of him, that is before he got into drugs, and how much Debby and I loved him.
I did the same for my daughter; the problem is they did not hear it. In both my father and sons cases,
I have to believe in God’s unfailing love and grace for them and for me.
We want things our way when bad things start to happen to us we wonder why we feel left alone and abandoned,
when we should be remembering that God actually is always there for us and will rescue us from our enemies, and our biggest enemy is
our own self-desires. We need to instead of asking where you are God when we have aches and pains, sing his praises and
know that He is there for us and with us.
Christ came to this earth for one reason and one reason only. “To show us the Face of our God, our creator”.
He wanted to show us that he loved us and will always love us, enough to have come and suffered for us even unto his
own death that we might have life eternal with Him.
No some of us are in pain and some of us are not where we wanted to be at this time in our lives.
However, we are in a place that we can still be of use to God and to each other.
Our friend Nancy was given one year to live when she came down with cancer.
She has fought and lived with her pain and her decaying body now for over 5 years, and is fighting right now to stay on,
as long as possible and praise be to God she looks good for what she has been through.
That is not an act of self-centeredness but an act of believing in a power greater than herself.
Some people would have given up, but she is showing us all that we all can be of use with God’s help to care for ourselves,
and with those around us, and even in her state she can and does testify to God’s Great power and His love. So you too are able to do this also.
In addition, He will bless you all of you in this endeavor.