Dear Friends,

This is the sixth message in a series on my spiritual life. It is my hope and prayer that these messages will stir readers to consider their own walk with Jesus and the milestones of experience along the way.

This week’s message is two stories about experiences with my Dad, late in his life. I originally wrote these stories in my personal journal. The first one is about a visit with my parents at their home in rural northern California in the spring of 2001.

Mom and Dad taught me that our God is loving and generous, slow to anger, and quick to love and forgive. They told me about Jesus Christ who came and gave his life to save his loved and his own. The hymns and songs played and sung in our home every day provided a soundtrack for the gospel story. In the years when I was distant from the Lord, the great hymns of faith were a beacon marking the way home for me. The gospel melodies still sound in my heart every day.

Mom and Dad lived long and full lives. They are gone now, but their legacy of love lives on in the lives of their children and grandchildren.

* * * *

“Would you like to take a nap?” my Mom asks her middle-aged son.

“No, I don’t like to sleep during the day.”

“Neither do I,” says Dad.

“I never sleep during the day,” I say, “unless I’m in a committee meeting at work. Then I only sleep for anesthetic purposes.”

Dad laughs.

I reach down in my briefcase past all the work in progress I brought along because my workaholic-self can’t bear to leave it behind. I pull out my harmonica. I blow a note or two.

“Oh, you brought your harmonica,” Dad says. “I was hoping that you would.”

He disappears into the bedroom and comes out with the Hohner “Goliath” harmonica that I bought him many years ago. He sits down in his rocker opposite from me and we begin to play.

This is soft and easy music made by two men who can follow its melodic paths even in complete darkness.

“Man alive,” Dad says, “You know songs that I’d forgotten all about.”

“I love the old hymns,” I reply

“So do I and the new hymnals don’t have the great old songs,” Dad says with a note of sadness.

We play on.

Dad’s bald head glows bronze in the afternoon light of a warm March Monday. His big gnarled hands grasp the harmonica and move it across his lips like eating corn on the cob.

Through the screen door, I see a doe and yearling cropping spring grass under the oaks. The Rhodesian ridgeback dog from across the road kept the deer away from the garden for years. A month ago, she was paralyzed by tick-borne Lyme’s disease. Dad kept on feeding her after her owner died of cancer leaving the place abandoned and the dog orphaned. When the county veterinarian came to put her down, Dad watched unflinchingly, talking softly to the dog, scratching her ears until she stopped breathing. That is so like Dad, doing what needs to be done no matter how messy or difficult, but always for the sake of love.

I blow the four note ascent beginning “O Danny Boy.” “We’re going to make Momma cry,” Dad says.

We stop and replenish her Kleenex. Then we play on while she bawls and we grin and shrug. She always cries during that song, We’d be disappointed if she didn’t.

On and on we play, thinking of songs, drinking cold, sweet water from deep in the well of our life together. These songs explain our God to us, define our faith, stretch our hearts, remind us of God’s love in the dark times. We share the gift of music like a loaf of fresh bread between two hungry friends. The notes flow through us and around us to burnish our memories and our hopes to a warm patina.

The piano and organ that once stood side by side in my parents’ living room are gone. The piano is at my home where my son learns these songs and I play it late at night after long, stressful days. The organ is gone to a friend who plays it with the tender touch that my folks always insisted upon when it was played by one of us. Life has its way of returning us to the fundamentals and a 91-year-old father and a 47-year-old son playing hymns together on harmonicas is about as basic as it gets.

One of us plays the lead, the other follows, in an order dictated only by which one of us remembers the song first. Far away, the secretaries in two offices are taking my phone messages and explaining my absence. It is Monday after all. Work beckons from the briefcase at my feet, but there is a transcendent power in worship that picks us up and sets us down in secret and holy places accessed by grace alone.

We forget the melody sometimes and start over unashamed. We wander off into other tunes. We soar and hush, and finally fade away.

Then Dad asks what he always asks at the end of these sessions. “Do you know this one?” He plays and I follow into a familiar song about our fondest hope. The words are held in our souls, the melody brings them up to our minds.

My heart can sing when I pause to remember
A heartache here is but a stepping stone
Along a trail that’s winding always upward.
This troubled world is not my final home.

The things of earth will dim and lose their value
If we recall they’re borrowed for a while;
And things of earth that cause the heart to tremble,
Remembered there will only bring a smile.

But until then my heart will go on singing,
Until then with joy I’ll carry on
Until the day my eyes behold the city,
Until the day God calls me home.

–Stuart Hamblen
Copyright 1958, Hamblen Music Co., Inc.

The next story occurred as written in November of 2002. It is a story about Dad and me dealing with the death of my Mom who had died only a few weeks before. I had my doubts about sending this story out as a message . Its reference to God is indirect. It is personal and very simple. To my surprise, the response of readers was immediate and positive.

This story provides a glimpse at what it means to carry the hope of Christ in the hearts of two generations. As Moses wrote, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever…” (Deut 29:29).

. . . .

I drive with my Dad over Point Loma on a sunny, San Diego Sunday. We look at the ocean stretching out gray-green all the way to Hawaii.

Mom died a month ago. Sometimes you return to empty spaces to remind you of what is no longer there the way one runs his or her tongue over the socket of a recently extracted molar.

There are 70 years of marriage and 49 years of childhood behind us. We do not speak of these things. Our family deals with its sorrows by getting in a car and driving.

Along the way we comment on a cruise ship leaving the dock, a navy frigate in the harbor, the spot where Europeans first landed in California, and the phalanx of white head-stones in the national cemetery on the ridge. We stick to the facts.

Our Hansen forebears were practical men and women who took their losses in stride and kept going. “No fuss, no muss” living is the ethos that developed through the generations. Believe God’s word. Learn a skill. Marry for life. Do your job even when you don’t feel like it. Don’t ask someone else to do what you can do for yourself. Harvest what you plant. If your crop fails, plant again. Finish building what you start. Pay your bills on time. Worrying about a problem never solves it. If someone needs help and you can give it, then help them. Seek more for your children than you have. Don’t act like who you are not. It’s ok to cry if you are really hurt or happy. You want others to take you more seriously than you take yourself. Sit up straight and act right because of who you are, not because of what someone else thinks.

These values and virtues were worked out in the course of Dad and Mom’s life together. I was twenty years old when those principles kicked in for me. I was talking on the phone to my boss back at the University on a Sunday evening. He called me in my hospital room after surgery on my leg. My fiance had died a few hours before in an accident. I could barely breathe with choking grief and the future was a dark blank, but my first instinct was to tell him, “Hold my job, I’ll be back.”

“Oh, we can talk about that later.”

“No, I mean it,” I insisted. “Hold my spot, I’ll be there.”

This wasn’t heroism. It is a way of living. If you have breath and a pulse, you keep going after you take a hit. The alternative is unthinkable.

The man who taught me this by example was riding beside me taking in the sights. I know he’s hurting. He says so when asked. He’s no stoic. Mom and Dad were vastly different in personality, but these very principles, applied day by day, made a seven-decade marriage and built a family. They were partners for the full length of their life together. To try to describe Dad’s loss would only cheapen it by the inadequacy of words.

We ride through the warm fall sunshine for hours, exploring the coast and enjoying the peaceful fellowship of a father and son who know they love each other without a doubt.

On the way home Dad asks me to stop at a hardware store if we pass one.

“OK, but what do you need?”

“I lost my pocket knife yesterday. I had it a long time. I want to get a new one.”

I spot a store and we walk in together. We look over the choices. Dad is particular, but he finally settles for one with three blades instead of two he had in mind.

My heart is blessed by the grace in Dad’s purchase. It reminds me that you replace the losses you can and accept the ones that you can’t. The truth is that a man who is going to live and is looking ahead needs a good pocket knife. And so we move on in hope.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8)

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.