Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his faithful servants. (Psalm 116:15, NIV)
The week before Thanksgiving, I lost two of my helpers. To death.
In 2017, a year after I had completed radiation, chemotherapy, and two complicated surgeries to remove a nastily positioned tumor, I wrote a book called My Hundred Helpers: The Provision of God Through People. In it, I highlighted the way God brings people into our lives to meet our many needs.
In the world of golf, we know who these helpers are: teaching professionals, caddies, club fitters, cart runners, and more. They make it easier for us to play the game and may make us better at it, too.
Away from the golf course, our helpers are innumerable. They bag our groceries, fix our flats, truck away our trash, repair our many devices, and clip our hedges. We do well to notice and appreciate all of them. “Thank you for helping me today,” is an expression I’ve come to use with increasing regularity.
We will never push the bully of mortality out of the way. But we can step around it.Beyond these daily helpers, we are given those who help us situationally and even exceptionally. An oncological surgeon who knifes a cancerous tumor from the stranglehold it has on your carotid artery is certainly one of these! So are the colleagues he has in the operating room, some of whom I never met, being “under” as I was. And there are the nurses and lab techs who monitor you back to that beloved state of health known as “you’re going home.”
But because I had to travel several hours from home to get the care I needed throughout the long year that was 2016, I had other needs. One was met by way of a phone call from a reader of these devotions. She and her husband had a house near Stanford where my wife and I could stay. Another was met by a retired pathologist in my local church whose cancer diagnosis came not long after mine; she too would make the frequent trips I did, and her expertise and true understanding helped me every time we talked. These were the two women I lost two weeks ago. They died just four days apart.
Mortality plants its big heavy self right in front of us and dares us to ignore it. Usually we do. Oh, we know that death is inevitable and sometimes sudden, but we don’t think about it if we can help it. Let’s talk about our last vacation, or our next one. That’s so much more pleasant.
We will never push the bully of mortality out of the way. But we can step around it. We can come to understand that life goes on if we are bound up with the one eternal helper, with Jesus. My two dear friends knew him and loved him. And two weeks ago, he welcomed these precious women into his presence. I lost them; they lost nothing—rather, I’m guessing, they’ve gained an extra spring in their step.
(Read our related article, “A Better Bucket List.”)
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Jeff Hopper
December 1, 2020
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.