I have to share something with you. I don't believe there is anything so bad that you that you have done that would keep you out of heaven. Not asking for God's forgiveness will. I think even Osama bin Laden could have made it to heaven if he simply and sincerely asked forgiveness.
My mom had kidney disease and passed away in 2002. Eleven months after her, we lost my dad to a massive heart attack. I guess he just couldn't stand it without her. I didn't really grieve for Mom properly before Dad died, because I tried to be strong for Dad. So that was kind of a double-whammy for me. I got to help take Mom to the doctor, stayed with her at the hospital (she had four stays at a hospital in Dallas. Sometimes I slept in the lobby overnight.) Dad's heart attack was unexpected.
At that time, my youngest sister babysat the kids for me during the week and went home on weekends. Dad usually came into town to pick her up. He called on Good Friday, 2003, and said he wasn't feeling well, and asked if someone could bring her home. When we got there, he looked awful...sort of jaundice looking, and I asked a couple times if he wanted to go see a doctor. He wasn't a big fan of those, so he said no. The next day, my sister found him on the floor in his bedroom. One of my brothers and I rushed there after she called me, and tried to talk him into getting up. He couldn't, and we called an ambulance We spent approximately two weeks with him in the hospital, on a machine and not really responding. All they could do was keep him heavily medicated, and wait to see what healing his heart could do on its own. When his kidneys started to fail—which I knew by the color of the urine in the bag—we knew he wouldn't want to stay around like that. My aunt basically took over and sent me home. I was with Mom when she died. I watched her go. I would've stayed with Dad too, but think exhaustion had kicked in and the fact that I was losing my best friend was hitting me hard. They said it was like he fell asleep when he died. Mom was different. She had told me that there was a wedding going on in the nurse's station of the ICU she was in. All I saw was the nurses, etc. I suggested that she didn't have her glasses on and maybe she was just seeing the white doctor's coat, but she insisted that the bride passed by the door to her room. A few minutes later, she bolted up in bed, looking up, then sank back down and the machine flat-lined. Was it angels she saw? She also talked about cows outside and that the hale needed to be baled. We were in Dallas. No cows, no long grass. At the cemetery when she was buried, one of my sisters pointed out the cows in the next pasture and the bales of hay, and said “look, the hay got baled.” I was seriously left to wonder if death is not merely part of the journey, and God, in his mercies, allowed Mom to see that it was okay to travel this part of the journey.
Now fast forward a bit. It was almost Easter 2004. I had started going to church again. They started talking about Lent, and that its a time of giving up something so we can sort of understand a little better Christ's sacrifice for us when He gave up His life. It hit me that it was almost a year since Dad died. I didn't know if I could take it. Anyway, right before Lent one evening, I prayed about what should I “give up” for Lent. Some people talked about giving up cokes or chocolate...you know, some favorite food. I was reading in the Bible about the shepherd who goes to look for the one lost sheep...
“What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.” Matthew 19:12-14
Now, keep in mind that Dad's death hit me hard. I felt like for most of that year, I was just going through the motions so to speak. Nights were restless. I often had dreams about going back to the funeral home to “wake up” my Mom and Dad so they could go back home. When I read that passage in the Bible, I felt that God knew right where I was. He knew where I was at with the grieving. He knew when I was awake at night missing them. He knew that I was angry that I couldn't do a thing to help Dad. He knew that I blamed Him for taking Dad from me too soon. He knew, that like a lamb caught in a briar bush, that I needed help getting out of all this. I felt that evening that He was asking me to give up Dad, to acknowledge he was gone and allow the grieving to end.
So that is what I tried to do. That night—that very night that I prayed about it—the deam about Dad dying. It was as though a building he was in was bombed and he was in the rubble and was dead. In this dream, I didn't try to "wake" him. Instead, I left him there to go do the things I needed to go do. I have never had another dream about going into the funeral home and trying to wake either him or Mom up again. I finally, that Lent season, got some needed sleep, and some peace. More importantly, I learned that I wasn't alone in it. God walked with me through the grief process and helped. Sure, I miss Mom and Dad, and can still cry over them, but I'm not trying to hang onto all that. I'm not stuck anymore. Life gets hard, but there is a Helper. We only have to ask.
