"He's With Jesus, Now"

We rushed back to Phoenix as quickly as we could. The phone call was to tell us that my grandfather had only a short time to live. We had decided to go ahead with a long-planned vacation to Portland. We stopped in San Jose to pick up my sister to go north and visit my brother. My mother even traveled with us. My father stayed in Phoenix, though, to be with his father, who was failing quickly from cancer. We had no idea how long he would live, but we felt confident that he wouldn’t go down hill so rapidly that a quick vacation couldn’t be squeezed in.

But as cancer so often does, when the end was near, it came quickly. We were actually on our way south from Portland when we got the phone call. We decided to keep driving straight through to Phoenix, making only a brief stop in San Jose to drop off my sister’s husband.

We arrived in Phoenix and together, my sister and I, went directly to the hospital. My father was there at the bedside with his mother, my grandmother. Grandfather was pretty much in a final coma. Quietly, almost reverently, we all talked. Mostly grandmother kept talking to grandfather and to God, like a three way conversation. We just listened, and waited, and wept, and hoped with her.

Within just a few brief hours my grandfather finally passed away. My grandmother knew instantly when he had breathed his last breath. With a big gasp, and through a flood of tears, she said it. Quietly, but with the most profound assurance, she exclaimed, “He’s with Jesus. He’s in heaven, now, with Jesus!”

Her simple, yet profound faith, made an incredible impact on my young mind and heart. I was already a youth pastor. I was graduated from a theological seminary. The fact of eternal life and the blessed hope was already part of my message. But it changed. With deeper faith, more passion and clarity, my message would never be the same. Because I made it back from Portland just in time to see, to hear, and to experience the deep, deep faith of my grandmother as she helped to issue her husband from this life into the presence of Jesus.

I heard another story recently, of another elderly widow, one who had lost her husband only just the day before. A good friend was talking with her, trying to be supportive and understanding, and encouraging. But this godly woman said to him, “yesterday is the day that he had been looking forward to since the day he trusted Jesus.”

The apostle Paul wrote it, and we can all agree, “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)