The Long Missing

I was so fortunate that when I was born, I was born to two people who had been saved by Christ, not primarily saved from sin, or saved from hell, or saved from moral transgressions, but Christ had saved them from the most hellish and dysfunctional of family life.  Both their fathers, our first image of God, were terrible alcoholics, and both died at the age of 41. Drunk.  

So my parents raised me as someone who would actually die if they didn’t have Christ to save them from the life they were raised in.  Two young people who knew only two ways of life: hell or saved by Christ.  It made for me an immersive experience in Christ in the church by two people who had been truly saved in salvation and saved from their lives on earth.  My early life was in many ways idyllic. Were there problems?  Yes, tremendous problems, hurtful, exceedingly difficult, but I lived through them with two parents who never wavered from a total commitment to Christ, home, and church.  They had limited resources, no family to fall back on, scarce opportunities, but they had all of Christ because they gave up all of themselves to have all of Him.  

As a child, this was my bedrock.  As a young man, they remained my bedrock for understanding Christ even though I was racing down the highway to hell, seemingly bent to get there.  But they never wavered.  Love, admiration, and acceptance were all the bedrock of my young man years.  Did they become exasperated by my life?  Yes!  My mom once told me she would walk the backyard at night and pray, “Lord, take him home or me one!”  But she never backed down or walked away.

In my mid-life, they were my silent Big Rock Mountain.  Always there.  Always strong.  Always the ever-present help in seeing faith lived out in their greying years.  My constant and greatest example of what it meant to live a prolonged and consistent walk of salvation.  

Now they are gone.  And all they have been for me is all they are to me.  They are in me as much as the forest soil is in the tree.  I am my Mother and Father’s son.  I was not saved from them but by them.  They were the ones who brought me to Christ, and the memory of them still demands I go to him and him alone.  Only he can save me and mine.    

Mom and me.