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​A heavenly welcoming committee

6/27/2016

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I just came across a list I started years ago of the friends I’ve made at the nursing home over the last 16 years. What great memories! I can still see many of them in my mind’s eye, still recall conversations we enjoyed, events we shared, gifts we gave each other.  
 
A handful of these lovely people have left for other places – their own houses, or assisted living facilities, or even their childhood homes. But most have escaped this earthly veil entirely, many of them to the eternal life that Jesus promised all who repent and trust in Him.
 
I went through my list slowly, thinking about how much I’ve missed each one, realizing anew that I will surely be seeing this one and that one again when I die. Maybe there are even ever-changing welcoming committees in heaven, so that every believer is greeted by the brothers and sisters in Christ whom he knew and loved on earth.
 
What a happy thought that is – one that makes the prospect of death’s process even less frightening, since they’ve all been through it and emerged whole, healthy and joyful forevermore.
 
Of course, the most overwhelming sight will be of Jesus Himself – “the One who died for me,” as Jimmie Davis wrote in the beautiful gospel hymn “I Bowed on My Knee and Cried Holy.” After all, as the apostle Paul assured believers in 2 Corinthians 5:8, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.  
 
But how wonderful it will be to see all these old friends once again, rejoicing in “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
 
If you’d like to expand your own heavenly welcoming committee, why not begin visiting folks at a nearby nursing home soon? Here's how to get started.
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Loving what you see in the mirror

6/17/2016

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This is a picture of my Granny, snapped sometime in the 1950s. She would have been in her mid to late 60s then -- just a few years older than I am now. 

Meta Foth wasn't a beauty by today's standards, was she? Overweight from all that good German food, wearing powerful glasses to make up for the removal of lenses clouded by cataracts, and owning a "house dress" wardrobe tiny enough to fit into the little closet in her bedroom, right next to mine.

She was no great genius, as far as I know. She had run a florist shop with her husband in their native Germany, and they opened another here in Plymouth, Wis., after immigrating to the Land of Opportunity in the 1920s. But by the time I knew her, she was living with us in Green Bay. She liked her soap operas and her afternoon naps, and greatly enjoyed her weekly bus trips downtown to the restaurant on the top floor of Prange's department store. She was somebody there; the waitresses knew her name (Granny, not Meta) and on those glorious occasions when she took me along, I could tell that they all liked her very much.  
​
I don't remember her having a great sense of humor, or being one to roll around on the floor to play with her grandkids, either. She was old, after all.

But oh, how I loved her. 

And love her still, of course. She left this earth in 1973, having already buried three of her four children. But I can't wait to see her again in heaven, healthy and happy and finally being every bit as important as the next person, because she is, like everyone else there, a child of the King.

In the meantime, I look in the mirror and see signs of her there, as well as of my dad, one of the three children she buried. It reminds me of the most wonderful childhood, and the most wonderful parents and Granny, anyone could ever want. It's pretty hard to get too upset about wrinkles or jowls or bags when they all point to such happiness long ago -- and, even better, to future joy forevermore. ​
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Beauty for ashes

6/15/2016

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Way too often, sadness, loneliness and fear are the order of the day for the elderly. But it doesn't have to be that way; anyone, at any age, can enter by the narrow gate to full confidence that the best is yet to come forevermore.   

Until then, consider this excerpt from Heaven Without Her (p. 243):

"In honor of our trip to Wausau with my mother’s ashes, Jenny had given me a CD by a Christian singer named Crystal Lewis. Jen pointed especially to the title song, “Beauty for Ashes,” which reassures the child of God that He will heal all sorrows:

He gives beauty for ashes 
Strength for fear 
Gladness for mourning 
Peace for despair

"It took me a while to make the connection, but I finally realized that this chorus was based on Isaiah 61:3 -- part of that hope-tinged passage that someone had read at my mother’s funeral. 

"I listened to this song again and again. It was true: He was giving me beauty and strength, gladness and peace. 

"But it’s only the beginning of what promises to be the happiest ending of all."
​
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Waiting for the other shoe to drop 

6/11/2016

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Sadly, some elderly nursing-home residents spend their last days waiting for what they think is the worst. They’ve lost their parents, spouses, siblings, and friends, and now they are just waiting for their own deaths – too often with dread. 

The good news is we can occasionally help. 

For instance, the problem is sometimes (and increasingly) plain old unbelief. 

“I don’t buy any of that heaven stuff anymore,” a new resident told me, with great sadness, a couple of weeks ago. “When we die, we cease to exist and there’s nothing we can do about it.” 

She’s a reader, so I gave her a copy of Heaven Without Her and she promised to read it. It’s my prayer, of course, that she will be pointed towards the narrow gate (Matthew 7) by the evidence it presents for the truth of Christianity -- or at least come to see that eternity is worthy of both consideration and investigation. 

Sometimes end-of-life fears are the result of unbiblical theology.

Not all that long ago I found a 100-year-old woman sobbing in her room. “I’m afraid of dying,” she confessed through her tears. “I’m so afraid of Purgatory!” I gently showed her from scripture that if she repented and trusted in Christ, she could count on being “absent from the body, present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5). Did these truths relieve her fears? It seemed so at the time; but she suffered a massive stroke and died soon after our discussion, so I won’t know until I get There myself.

Occasionally even the faith-filled elderly fear death -- not its reality but its mechanics, in particular the prospect of pain. 

Fortunately, we really don’t have to deal with overwhelming pain anymore, thanks to modern pharmaceuticals. In two decades of hanging out at “my” nursing home, I’ve only seen two people suffer greatly, in both cases because they refused medication to relieve it. 

But even when that relief is incomplete, it’s possible for the dying to rest in the knowledge that God is at work in and through them, and that eternal bliss is just beyond the horizon. 

I’ve seen this attitude time and time again in Spirit-filled Christians. What a blessing and encouragement it is to spend time with those who are waiting patiently not for the other shoe to drop, but for joy forevermore!

originally posted 6/27/14
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"If your God is so good, why is there so much suffering?"

6/6/2016

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If you've been a follower of Jesus Christ for any length of time, you've no doubt heard this question time and time again: "If this God of yours is so good, why does He allow all this suffering?"

There are many answers to this question -- but my favorite is that suffering can lead to eternal joy. 

I experienced this phenomenon myself, first hand: It was 16 years ago that the Lord called my 87-year-old Christian mother home to heaven, leaving me, a committed atheist, utterly heartbroken -- and desperate to know if she'd been right after all, if she might still exist somewhere, and if so, how I could get there, too. 

It was my intense grief that forced me to consider what Jesus Christ called, in Matthew 7, the narrow gate to life. And it was that same grief that propelled me through 15 months of fierce investigation, until I could at last bow my heart to Him with complete confidence that He is indeed God and did indeed die to pay the penalty for my sins and yours. 

Stories like mine underscore one of the primary reasons that our Creator allows pain and suffering in this world: For some of us, it's the only way He can get our attention.

Sometimes this suffering afflicts atheists and agnostics only indirectly, with the actual pain being borne by their beloved believers. Many of the friends I have called on at the nursing home over the years, for example, have suffered relentless pain -- yet their faith has remained steadfast for all to see. Could such circumstances be designed to draw their dear unbelievers through the narrow gate to their sides?

I certainly can't know, and the Bible does alert us to many other purposes for affliction. But I have seen this particular scenario play out more than once, with the lost being gloriously saved as they watched their loved ones find supernatural solace in the Lord.

I guarantee that, for these elderly believers, it's worth any price to see family and friends become heaven-bound -- even when that price is profound suffering in this life.

For they know, as the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4, that "Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." 

Adapted from a 5/31/14 post
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The old who know too much

6/3/2016

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Do our minds seem to wear down as we age only because we know too much?
 
That’s what the latest research seems to say: Our brains become increasingly sluggish not because they’re deteriorating, but because we’re packing ‘em so full of experience and information.
 
So say authors Wayne D. Gray and Thomas Hills in an article entitled “Does Cognition Deteriorate With Age or Is It Enhanced by Experience?” -- a review, apparently, of a landmark book entitled The Myth of Cognitive Decline.
 
At least I think that’s what Gray and Hills are saying when they claim that “our poorer memory for names as we age, over the last several decades at least, is a result of the massive cultural proliferation of novel names alongside the increasing number of names experienced over a lifetime.”
 
Right. We forget Mary’s name because of the proliferation of Kukulas and Thiagos and Zelias. 
 
“Pretty much any cognitive theory with which we are familiar would have to predict that the more things you have in memory the longer will be your search time,” write Gray and Hills. They quote Myth: “’In information theoretic terms…. a measure of processing speed that ignores information load is meaningless.’”
 
Is that kind of like our Pastor Joe says, that all the information is still there in our brains – it’s just that the librarians in charge of retrieving it are slowing down? (To which I would add: These librarians store all this information in First In, First Out [FIFO] order, rather than Last In, First Out [LIFO] order, which is why we can remember what we were doing on July 4, 1959, but don’t have a clue what we had for lunch yesterday.)
 
This fuzzy old brain of mine may be too information-packed to adequately decode ultra-smart academic language like this:
 
“Many things covary as we grow up and grow older,” they write, “and, just as in the nature versus nurture debate over childhood development, a rush to judgment obscures and confuses the search for mechanisms and for the achievement of scientific, as well as personal, understanding of the changes that we all pass through.” 
 
I think that means something along the lines of this: “Old people are encyclopedic in their knowledge rather than deteriorating mentally – so let’s not judge or disrespect them or toss them aside because they don’t seem to be as smart as we younger folks. Really, they’re practically geniuses.”
 
But you know what? These thoroughly educated researchers are missing the point. We are not valuable because of what we know. We are valuable because we are the Creator’s handiwork, because He loved us enough to die for us, and because He has commanded us to love others as we love ourselves and to care for widows in their affliction. 

Of course, such commands will only be embraced by His children – that is, the born-again who have repented and trusted in Jesus. So perhaps it’s no surprise that, in an attempt to make us act godly without bringing God into the picture, we see the world’s experts building elaborate Rube Goldberg patches and workarounds  for issues that are only problematic for those on the wrong side of the narrow gate. 

Here's the truth: As the 2nd law of thermodynamics predicts, our aging brains are wearing out. But that does not decrease our value one iota in the eyes of our Creator. And His are the only eyes that matter.

Originally posted 3/20/14
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    Kitty
    Foth-Regner

    I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, a freelance copywriter, a nursing-home volunteer, and the author of books both in-process and published -- including
    Heaven Without Her.

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