‘Blessed assurance’ when Daddy died

Daddy died last week.

The folks at the nursing home said he passed peacefully on Monday morning, March 6, about the time I was emailing his religion column to the newspaper in his hometown of Wrens, Ga.

I’d been doing that for some time as Daddy passed through “the long goodbye” of dementia. It came to a point that he would sit in front a computer screen, but nothing would come out. After that, I would type in his weekly columns from years gone by. They covered a lot of different biblical stories, but they all ended the same: with an invitation to change. “Trust Him!” were the last words, published on the same day as his obituary.

There were a lot of exclamation points in his life. He seemed to always be in a frantic rush in his two Presbyterian pastorates and then a lifetime as an independent missionary. He made mad dashes to the post office to mail out his columns; he preached on the radio and in churches and jails; he spent decades transcribing the Bible into rhyming, metered verse called WordSing; and he went on scores of short-term mission trips worldwide.

I wrote about him on Father’s Day when he was 75. The previous year, he had crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific four times.

When Ronald Reagan died and we were thinking about the fall of the Iron Curtain, I wrote about Daddy sneaking Bibles into Russia in the 1970s. Slipping through customs was a miracle. He was with a man who had escaped the Nazis by hiding in a casket in a Warsaw funeral home, and by hiding in the woods, almost starving. Everywhere he went with Daddy, he would slip extra food into his pockets. He couldn’t help it, and you couldn’t blame him.

But on this day, he might be blamed for stuffing into his pocket an anti-Communist newspaper in Yiddish he’d picked up on the streets of New York. It caused quite a stir, but the Bibles in Daddy’s heavy coat went undiscovered. When Reagan died, a retired CIA analyst on Hilton Head Island told me that, yes, the Iron Curtain fell in part due to an underground resistance fueled by the likes of free people sneaking in Bibles and (we didn’t tell Daddy) rock’n’roll.

Many of you have expressed condolences, and every word is appreciated. But this is not a moment of sadness. Daddy’s spirit never left. He tried hard to talk, especially to Mama, when I left his room for the last time. But his body was worn out. He was too weak to lift his head. It was time.

We sang the 23rd Psalm at his funeral Friday afternoon. And as our family always says goodbye, we sang the 121st Psalm. Daddy loved music. His father was a preacher who, with six kids, raised his own choir. Many of his old columns that I typed on Monday mornings included references to hymns and hymn-writers.

Daddy once had an an old Volkswagen bus with a bumper sticker that said, “I’m Bound For The Promised Land.” In a long-winded eulogy, I said that his coffin — adorned by a Scottish tartan blanket, his last Bible opened to Psalm 23, and a small bouquet of fresh flowers held together by a ribbon — should have had a bumper sticker on it that said, “I’ve Found The Promised Land.”

That was the faith and hope of everyone there. It seemed to us that he prayed without ceasing, and lived totally by faith — spiritually, physically and intellectually.

We buried this child of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the red clay of a Georgia churchyard. Surely, he’ll be at home with the whine of 18-wheelers roaring just beyond the fence on U.S. Highway 1.

On Saturday, I went to the nursing home to pick up Daddy’s personal effects. As I went out back to get the two cardboard boxes, I passed through the dining hall.

A man was just starting a religious service for a few residents in attendance. Daddy and Mama led weekly services for more than 18 years in the same room, long before Daddy became a resident himself.

One resident was waving his arms as if he were directing the Westminster Abbey Choir. The leader turned on the background music, and I stopped dead in my tracks as he sang “Blessed Assurance.”

“This is my story, this is my song,

Praising my Savior all the day long.”

This story was originally published March 14, 2017 at 8:59 AM with the headline "‘Blessed assurance’ when Daddy died."