Thursday, July 14

---

READ: Psalm 23

Even when I go through the darkest valley,
I fear no danger,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—they comfort me. Psalm 23:4 (CSB)

---

I memorized Psalm 23 when I was in Cheryl Rempel’s grade 3 Sunday School class. In my 8-year-old version there wasn’t a “darkest valley” there was a valley with deathly shadows.

Why would you have kids memorize a Psalm with scary images like that? It’s because there is a Shepherd that they need to know if they are going to navigate life’s treacherous waters. Memorizing Psalm 23 as a child prepared me for 2007.

The year started with being told that we had lost our baby. February brought healing to Tara and in March her dad pulled through a tough season in his battle against cancer. In June my friend died by suicide. In July Seth was born and Tara ended up in the hospital with a record-setting blood clot – which led to a year of intense emotions and physical healing.

Finally, Tara’s dad passed away on November 10, 2007.

I was in the hospital with Tara, her sister Joanna, and their aunt – dad’s sister – when he slipped into eternity. It is the strangest feeling to be in the room when someone passes away. It is altogether terrifying, gut-wrenching, peaceful, and numbing. If the person was sick, as Terry was, you want to be grateful that the suffering is over, but you are in anguish.  

It taps into every existential question and emotion all at the same time.

I have said, half-jokingly, for many years, that death is tremendously inconvenient. It doesn’t wait until you have a few days off from work. Death demands that you stop.

Stop everything to face it. When death arrives for a friend, you pause your life so that you can be there for them. Because the other indifferent, callous reality is that when death demands that you stop to face it, no one else must.

Life goes on for the rest of the planet and everything in you screams that it should just pause, even for a minute, because someone you love is no longer here.

But life does not stop when death stops you. And that is why it is so incredible to see a church packed with people who have chosen to pause their lives to honour the person who has walked life’s darkest valley.

I loved Terry. He was a dad that complimented my dad because he was different. He fixed everything himself. And the great thing is that he had three or four different versions of every tool which meant he had duplicates that he was slowly passing on to me. I didn’t want them all at once because I didn’t have a hot clue what half those tools did, but when he passed away many more tools came to my garage.

He was very gentle but had strong opinions under that soft exterior. Opinions about politics, church, faith, and morality. He also had opinions about doing things properly… like the correct way to hook the wires in an outlet around the polls on the switch.

He worked his entire career for Manitoba Hydro. A grade 9 drop-out, he worked his way up through the company acquiring skills along the way. His last role was in fibre optics – he knew how to splice glass threads no thicker than a human hair. And he had no use for the dumb young engineers who came into the company fresh from university who had all the answers and not an ounce of wisdom.

Terry lived with conviction and died with courage, and we miss him so much. Of our kids, only Malachi got to meet him. He and Papa had a very special bond, that I wish my other kids could experience.

Losing him was the closing chapter of the year from hell. A year that sent out ripples of trauma that we are still bumping into.

Death is almost irresponsibly inconvenient. Life is indifferently unrelenting.

And our Good Shepherd is in it with us. Never leaving. Never abandoning. He is never inconvenienced, nor is He indifferent.

My prayer would be that this is your experience with Him as well.

---

New Psalms – Cory Asbury sings, “Death Where is Your Sting” on his Reckless Love album. And one of my new favourite bands, Girl Named Tom, put Psalm 23 to music. It reminds me of Steve Bell and his band Unlikely Icon.