Remembering

Over this past weekend and the beginning of this week, I have been remembering. I have known these days were coming, but as I remembered, the days took on more significance than I had previously thought that they would. Let me explain.

Saturday, June 7, was six months from when I last saw my dear wife, Christine. That occurred when I said good by to her in our kitchen as she left for Marquette, MI, to represent WCMA, the church planting ministry that I lead, at Lake Superior Christian Church. The next day, Sunday, June 8, was six months from the day of the accident on her return trip from Marquette that would take her life on earth. I spent the day after her accident at the hospital in Green Bay where she had been taken and remained unconscious until her death early the next morning.

As I remembered these things, I realized that there is an interesting anomaly to these events. Each of those four days six months later were the same day of the week and the same date of the month as they were six months earlier. Her accident was on Sunday, December 8; six months later was Sunday, June 8. She died in the early morning on Tuesday, December 10; six months later was Tuesday, June 10.

Exactly six months prior to the time that I last saw Christine, she and I were with a group of seventy-six other people in the ancient city of Ephesus on June 7, 2013. It was Sunday as we walked through Ephesus. We left the ruins of the old city that day from the area in front of the theater of Ephesus where the apostle Paul narrowly averted being the object of a riot. We walked up a slight incline to the ruins of the second century Church of Mary where we held a communion service that I was privileged to lead.

This weekend I remembered the events of six months ago and my forty years with Christine, just as six months before her death she and I, along with our fellow travelers, remembered, in the city where Paul walked, the death of our Savior. On the Sunday six months after Christine’s accident and one year after our communion service in Ephesus, I preached on the Lord’s Supper from 1 Corinthians 11. That sermon and text had been planned, without any thought of the connection to the events I have described, as part of a series in 1 Corinthians.

Remembrance is a necessary and important part of our experiences in life – both the joyful and agonizing ones. In the past six months, I have rejoiced at the life Christine and I have had together and the eternal life that is now hers, while also agonizing over how much I miss her. I have agonized over the events that led to her death, while rejoicing over the things that God is doing in my life and the lives of so many others who have been touched by her life and death. It is an irony of the highest magnitude, but memory brings both joy and agony.

Yet, such memories of our lives with the ones we love should be superseded by remembering the death of our Lord. Those memories, too, bring both joy and agony to our hearts: joy because Jesus gave himself for us, and agony because of the terrible suffering he endured to bring us forgiveness. Every time, we come around the table of the Lord and eat the bread, the body of Christ given for us, and drink from the cup, the new covenant of Christ’s blood, our memories should draw us to our Savior.

Jerry Sittser in his book, A Grace Disguised, describes how he received communion after the tragedy in his life of losing his mother, wife, and one of four children in a tragic accident in 1991:

“For three years now I have cried at every communion service I have attended. I have not only brought my pain to God but also felt as never before the pain God suffered for me. I have mourned before God because I know that God has mourned, too. God understands suffering because God suffered.”