Good Friday is always a strange day in my family. Thirty-eight years ago my father was told his cancer had metastasized and was terminal. My father was the most pious man I knew or have known. He never drank, I never heard him utter a vulgar word, and if the church doors were open, he was there. I never understood his faith till much later in my life and even then his walk was always better than my talk.
He was sentenced to death on that Good Friday and watching him die changed me forever. He believed he would be healed, and he was not. I think many of his dreams were unrealized, yet there was calmness about him that I never could grasp. When he found out he had just months to live he didn’t pluck things out of his bucket list to check off to make his life feel more complete, rather he read the bible cover to cover, twice, to make sure that it was. Did he do it to “get right with his maker?” No, that had been settled more than fifty years before, in his childhood. He did it because he didn’t want to enter his Sunday, look into the face of his Savior and be overwhelmed by what he didn’t know about Him.
He didn’t read because of fear he wouldn’t be accepted, but in the anticipation that he already was. The day before he died I was by his bedside and I knew his time was short. In the weakest of whispers he asked for my mother and when she came to his bedside she bent over to hear him, then sat by his bed and took out his bible and read to him from the Psalms, his favorite. In my youth there was a dichotomy to the Psalms that perplexed me. One chapter would talk of God and His unfailing faithfulness, while the next would plead as to why God had forsaken the writer or his people. I realized later why Psalms was my father’s favorite; I hadn’t lived long enough to understand that dichotomy personally. Now I have.
My father’s prayer for healing on this side of the grave was not answered, his most important prayer was, his five children are all Believers. His prayer has become mine, there is nothing more important. It’s still Friday for me as it is for everyone, I’m glad I know there is a Sunday coming. My father’s was June 1st, 1975. I am “eternally” grateful that I got to see the Friday of my father’s life but just as importantly, the hope of his and now my Sunday.