My Dad died this last weekend.  We, his family are spending our week going through his things and arranging his final fairwell.  He is a Christian and was ready to go, almost.  There were some unfinished projects and some conversations that were left too late.  Never the less it has occurred to me that a man can be known not only by what he left behind but who he left.  And as I see us all working together to complete and finish projects for him  and hear from so many people whose lives he touched.  I realize that he did do the important things.

A man can also be known by the sayings he sticks on his wall.  I have not understood how telling those scraps of paper I have stuck on my office walls were until I started to see all the scraps of paper on my Fathers walls.  The following handwritten poem was right next to Dad’s computer where he sat for hours every day.

In one’s lifetime

There are many deaths;

There are as many resurrections;

There is the death called failure;

There is the lifting up into success,

There is the death called weakness;

There is the resurrection into strength;

Let us not count the tombstones of defeat.

Let us remember the resurrection,

Into new life and promise.

————–

He is now able to breathe the fresh clean air of heaven, but I am going to miss him.

David Bowman