Held in mercy's hands

Lutheran, The, Nov 2003 by Miller, David L

Eternal rest grant him, O Lord; may your perpetual light shine on all your saints

O blessed saint, now take your rest; a thousand times may you be blessed. Thus was my September prayer as we laid my father to rest on a hillside just west of Warren, Ill.

On a brilliant autumn day, we committed him-LaVern Henry Miller-to the eternal mercy of God, which long had held him. A tractor, grain wagon and a combine provided a fitting backdrop across the wire fence surrounding Elmwood Cemetery.

Yet today gratitude, not grief, most grips me. An irrepressible urge to say "thank you" wells unbidden from hidden depths of my soul. Thanks, I say, for the courage of small things that my father's life personified. This is not a small but a great courage, rooted in a profound faith.

Crippled by polio at 29, post-polio syndrome insidiously stripped him of all strength. It took him an hour to dress himself in later years. When he could still walk a little, he dragged his broken body from bedroom to chair four or five exhausting steps at a time, sweating at the strain, stopping to catch his breath. At the end, disease stole everything away.

Some live in the noonday light. People see what they do and cheer them on, celebrating their victories and commiserating in defeat. Dad lived in the near darkness. His was the courage of those who quietly do what they can to make life as rich as it can be under circumstances over which they have no control.

He did the small, hidden things that need to be done to ward off the immobility of despair when no one would have blamed him for giving up. So it is: The greatest things, the most beautiful and profound acts, are done in out-of-the-way places when no one is watching.

In retirement, with one barely working hand, Dad became an accomplished woodworker. In the beastly cold of winter, he daily struggled to the garage, turned on a space heater and crafted oak boards into graceful and practical items that adorn dozens of homes in several states. Creative joy carried him on to see what beauty and wholeness might still come from weary arms and trembling hands.

Even now I see him running his hand over the gorgeous grain of red oak and wonder: Did he ever fully know that the real beauty we saw was not what he made-but him? Did he know the true wonder was not a work of wood but the labor of his gentle soul, which knew that no matter how much disease and weariness strips from you, no matter how much you lose, life can still be full and profoundly worth living?

For who knows what beauty and love lie waiting to be received among the broken pieces of a life you didn't choose? God surprises. Grace is real and unpredictable. Incomprehensible mercy haunts our days. There's always more-more life, more beauty, more hope, more wonder, more joy, more than we think or can imagine. Such is the courage of small things-and its faith.

Each of us is thrown into existence. We don't choose our family or the circumstances of our birth, nor do we pick the culture or times that mold us mind and soul. No matter how strong or accomplished we become, events occur, accidents happen and diseases come-over which we have no control.

So it was for my father. he didn't know on that September morning, 49 years and one day before we laid him to rest, that it would be the last day he would be able to bend over and pick up one of his children. I was that child.

So it was fitting that the last time I saw him I bent over his bed and held him in my arms. I whispered a Psalm and a prayer in his old ear, and we prayed the Lord's Prayer. I marked his forehead with the sign of the cross and told him: "Imagine. Imagine your bed is the mercy of God into which you can simply rest. Imagine our blessed brother Jesus sitting aside your bed watching, always watching, his hand on your arm, holding you as I hold you."

My father answered not with words but tears, that universal language of longing for the Incomprehensible More for whom all words are inadequate. Rest there, dear one, where hearts are brave, arms strong and broken legs dance.