Missing Dad

Posted by Christian St John in Faithblogs | 0 comments

Last year my father passed away.  I had just given up my pastoral position and before I knew it I was back in my old stomping ground of Guernsey, UK, to spend one final week with my father.  It was a strange time to be sure; I didn’t show much emotion at the time, in fact I stayed pretty Vulcan throughout the whole experience.  There was so much to be sorted – funeral arrangements, sorting through his things, helping my step-mother through her initial grief, and so on.  I didn’t really have that much time for personal grief.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that it all began to sink in.  And since then I have gradually worked through my feelings – the sadness and joys, the up’s and the down’s, the regrets and good memories.  I miss my dad and it’s taken some time for me to put into words how I’m feeling. It’s a journey, that for the most part, I have had to go on alone; I’m sure that anyone who’s lost someone knows exactly what I mean.  No-one can walk down the grief road for you – it’s a long, and often hard journey that we must all at one time make.  And eventually, hopefully, the pain fades away, but I don’t know that the loss ever will.

Earlier this week I watched an episode of the brilliant sitcom According to Jim that really spoke to me.  In the show Jim’s wife, Cheryl, loses an uncle (her dad’s brother) and she then begins to go through a grieving process.  Jim does everything for her, from cooking dinner to making her cups of tea, to help her through her time of grief. However, after a couple of week’s of waiting on her hand and foot, Jim comes to the conclusion that she’s putting one over on him and milking the situation to take it easy for a while, especially when he finds out that she wasn’t particularly that close to her uncle.

So in true Jim fashion he confronts her with about as much tact as a nuclear strike. Then Cheryl pours her heart out to him telling him all the good times she remembers having with her uncle as a child. As it turns out, she wasn’t really grieving her uncle, in as much as she was grieving her dad who had passed away several years earlier – she had just been too busy with two young children to really grieve her father when he died.

In the past I was of the opinion that someone should grieve for a while and then move on and get over it. But since last year I have experienced first hand that the grieving period can take a while. And you know what, that’s okay. Take all the time you need. I am. And as I walk along this road one passage of Scripture has helped me many times through my time of grieving, Revelation 21:1-4.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”"

You know, we will all feel pain in this life. We will lose family members, friends, and loved ones. And we will hurt and mourn and cry. But there is coming a time, a time promised in God’s own Word, when we will never hurt or mourn or cry again. Oh what a time this will be. Never again will we have to lose those we love, as death will be no more. Praise God!

And this is the hope I cling to through my time of grieving. In fact, this is the hope of millions of people all over the world, hope for a joyous life that will never again feel pain or loss. A life that will never end. A life forever in the presence of God!

Christian St John M.Div, BChM, ACS
February, 2009

Picture by Simona Balint