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My wife and I care about Mom and Dad, and due to Mom’s faith, as weird as it sounds, even though Mom is the one dying soon, we’re more concerned about Dad. As confident as we are about Mom’s eternity, we’re just not sure about Dad.

As he faces Mom’s end, his instincts are about as reliable as a well-used Cisco system - which means, not very. His current plan once Mom is gone is to move in with a neighbor we barely know because she has a room for him, and he doesn’t want to live alone.

We’re trying to get him to move in with us, because at least we’re family. But it’s a tug-of-war. At 86, it’s hard for a man who’s live in one place for over 60 years to suddenly want to move to an all-new area where the only people he’d know initially is us.

Ultimately, though, we can’t force him or make the decision for him. He’s of sound, even if of grief-stricken, mind, and so all we can do is encourage him to live with us, pray, and wait for God to move him in the right direction.

Death tests your faith.

Once you are facing the end of your days in this life, you quickly find out how deeply you believed all those praise songs and Bible verses and sermons. Either your faith is rooted deeply or you quickly find out it was all just surfacey, good-time-rock-n-roll bull.

I suppose there are some who capitalize on grief, and if one has no conscience, they could find a lot of small business opportunities in the grief business. However, I believe now that there is definitely a place and time for grief-oriented services.

My wife and I are being cast as the strong ones in our family, the ones who will sacrifice everything so that everyone else can sacrifice nothing. Add all that responsibility to the loss we’re suffering and although we’re holding up well under the time of crisis, we have agreed we need to seek out a support group so we can work things through once Mom passes.

Marriage, like faith, takes effort and work and I’ll glad I have a wife who’s as willing to put in the effort it takes as I am.

My Dad’s way of dealing with my Mom’s approaching death is avoidance. It’s not that he doesn’t love her; it’s that he loves her so much he just can’t face watching her slip away.

“I’ve seen one person die in front of me, and it never leaves you,” Dad told me today. “I don’t want that to be my last memory of Gert. I’d never get over it.”

This is a perfectly reasonable and understandable rationale, but it can seem cold and uncaring to some people. All I can say in response to that is, wait until you’ve been married to the same person for fifty-five years and then we’ll talk.

So if Dad would rather help a neighbor with a paper route once in a while than be at Mom’s bedside every single second, or dream of Las Vegas travel instead of staying in a hospital all day long, I think that’s his perogative.

As Mom herself said, we all have our own ways of dealing with things and we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances. Judging one person’s way of coping as better or worse than another’s isn’t going to help anyone.

Yet that didn’t stop someone today from telling Dad, “Mom’s in the hospital and is going to die of cancer because of you.”

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mom’s cancer is no one’s fault except perhaps her own for spending her whole life smoking. She’s received a generous 78 years, which is a lot more than most folks who smoke.

You don’t tell a man who’s losing his wife of 55 years that he’s at fault for her death. Some things should never be said. It is the very definition of laShon hurrah.

On Friday my wife and I got the call that mom had been taken out of the home and moved into the hospital. Her stage four cancer is advancing quickly and we’re now definitely in her final days… probably her final week, at best.

While we stayed Friday night for Erev Shabbat Service in order to charge our spiritual batteries for the long, difficult time ahead of us, we were on the road home the next day and fortunately found very good hotel deals on short notice; on a weekend no less!

It’s difficult to be talking so plainly about Mom not being with us anymore in a few days; ironically, Mom is handling it better than any of us. She is a strong believer and the strength of her faith at a time like this - a time when most people would feel more like cursing God than praising Him - is humbling and an inspiration.

I never expected it when I began, but in the bar/bat mitzvah lessons I’m writing for my students, I’ve been doing a character study of David and, even without hardly trying, I’ve found no less than 11 lessons when breaking down the passages that pertain to David in I and II Samuel.

Eleven lessons is much longer than I thought I’d be able to go with this, but David’s life is a much richer tapestry than most people ever hear about in their church or synagogue. Everyone remembers the tale of his battle with Golyat or his fall into sin with Bat-Sheva; but there are many more episodes out of his life, and each is rich in insight, lessons and meaning that can be applied to how we live out our lives of faith today.

It might sound a bit odd, like a random offer of foreclosure help, but I honestly think that David’s life hasn’t been studied nearly enough. Even though I extracted 11 lessons for my bar/bat mitzvah kids from the Tenakh, I skipped a lot and highlighted only the most applicable main events that would carry relevancy for the kids I teach.

Next time through, I expect I could easily double the number of lessons.

It’s amazing how life ticks by.

Today, my wife and I reached 23 months of marriage and we’re now only a month away from our second wedding anniversary. We’re not getting there without trials. In fact, we’ve had more than our share, it sometimes seems.

From all the health things with mom, to other friends’ troubles, family troubles on her side of the family, our own newlywed adjustments, the loss of a friend at church to the same thing that’s taking the life of my Mom. Too many things to list, it seems at times.

We’re getting through and we’re blessed to have not only faith in common, but the same brand of faith in common. Yet even with all that, we struggle. We have disagreements, misunderstandings, disputes.

Sometimes it seems like it’s all too much.

But then, a moment passes and we find a way to the next moment and somehow we survive. Not without the help of Adonai; not without the help of friends and family. But we make it through.

It means more now, carries more history now than when we first met and started saying it; but it’s as true as ever between my wife and me: we’re blessed to have found each other.

That means more, I think, than any gift wrapped in custom boxes.

This Tuesday, my mother goes in for her treatment evaluation at Rochester Mayo. She’s been told to fast after dinner on Monday, in case they want to run the first course of radiation or chemotherapy on her at that time.

This is where it will start to get more difficult for us all, and probably more painful for Mom. It scares me. While I have faith in Yeshua, and faith in my mom’s trust in Him and her eternal destination, it is the losing of her that scares me, the pain she’ll be going through, the suffering she’ll endure.

It’s the prospect of the lack of her at the other end of a phone call, which will eventually become a reality for me, possibly before the year is out. Not being able to call home and talk to Mom is going to be the loss of a bit of my psychological security blanket.

I’m 41, an age where life insurance quotes aren’t looking so affordable even for me anymore. I’m blessed by having my Mom around this late in life, far longer than many get to enjoy. I’m a married man with a wife to lean on now. But is this still going to be painful, despite how richly Adonai has blessed me.

You bet it is. It’d be foolish and untruthful to pretend otherwise.

This is one of my mom’s favorite stories to tell about raising me, and a testimony to her faith, and haShem’s faithfullness. I hope you enjoy it.

When I was young, about three or four, I kept bugging my mom what day my birthday was. I knew it was in the fall, but at that age, not much more. And I was too young to understand “September 29.” But that didn’t stop me from asking her, almost every day, from mid-August on.

One day, she grew flustered with being asked so many times and, without thinking, she told me, “You see that big, white birch tree in the middle of our back yard? The day the leaves fall off that tree, that’s your birthday.”

I ran off, satisfied, and apparently stopped bugging her. But immediately after she said it, she began to regret her hasty words. So she prayed, “God, please help me. Don’t make my son grow up thinking his mother is a liar.”

Well, September rolled on and the temperatures began to decline, and yet not one leaf fell from that white birch, right up through September 28, even though they grew a beautiful golden yellow.

The next day, the day of my birthday, my mom took me out into the back yard. We had some patio furniture set up back there and there was a lawn chair under that tree. She sat down in it and pulled me up on her lap, prepared to tell me it was my birthday.

Before she even began to speak, the leaves began to fall. And they didn’t just fall; they rained down on us, covering us in a golden blanket of white birch leaves.

Mom told me she prayed a prayer of thanks that day, and promised never again to speak so hastily; while she appreciated the answer to prayer, she was never one to put God to a foolish test.

I don’t have as reliable a brain as computer memory possesses, but as I face the fact of my mother’s mortality, I can’t help but find comfort in some familiar stories she’s told and retold time and again ease my mind about the solidity of my mother’s faith.

Here’s the first one:

When my mother was young, she saw a procession of building parts being hauled by her house to a place in town where a new church was being built. As a young girl she’d been wondering where she needed to go to find God, and on that day, she felt He told her: to that very building. She made sure her parents gave her the chance to go there.

Here’s another:

Sometime later, the biggest question in my mother’s mind about God was the whole question of Yeshua’s resurrection on the third day; after all, dead things don’t come back to life. The empty tomb bothered her; it made the Gospel feel like a children’s story instead of the truth.

Well, mom had a pet frog along with one of her brothers and one of her sisters. He lived under a staircase. One day, the frog died, as creatures eventually do, and the three of them carefully placed it in a shoebox, held a funeral for it, and buried it in the back yard. But on the third day, her mind kept returning to that frog; she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

So she dug it up. And what do you know? The frog was gone. The shoebox was empty.

“That’s when I decided, OK, God, I’m never going to doubt you on anything you say, ever again,” is how mom always ended that story.

With stories like that, I have to believe that haShem has honored the faith of my mother and will welcome her into the kingdom of heaven. It’s what she’s clung to no matter how much life has changed or disappointed her in the past 70 years or so (she’s 78).

I believe God honors those with sincere hearts seeking to know and honor him; he’s not someone who’ll toss someone aside for minor issues, like the fact that she called the Son of Adonai Jesus Christ instead of Yeshua the Messiah.

It’s not in Adonai’s nature to be petty; that’s our specialty.

This past weekend, my wife and I had our first visit with mom since she was diagnosed with cancer. Here’s what we know: it’s stage four cancer of the pancreas, as well as some spots of lung cancer from her smoking habit. Today (Monday) she was meeting with another doctor who would be describing the course of treatment, care options and the like that he would be recommending for her case.

It’s a tough, grim diagnosis and a topic that makes something as common and pedestrian as door hardware seem like a preferrable topic of conversation. But as we visited, I was struck by our ability to make the time together enjoyable and fun, rather than morose and full of tears.

I suspect we were all trying to create some good memories to fall back on, once this progresses a bit more. That’s what I think. And I think it’s needed.

Mom tires too easily to go out for lunch anymore, so we brought a homemade meal to her. My wife, who is a wonderful cook, fixed up some homemade spaghetti sauce and brought it down with noodles and cheesy garlic bread. On the trip down, we stopped by a grocery store and picked up six different kinds of brownies: peanut butter, cherry frosted, mint chip, German chocolate, caramel and regular fudge. We all had a taste of each of the ones we liked.

We left the leftovers with Mom and Dad to make sure they had something nice to heat up for the next few meals. We took pictures and played cards and handheld games together at the table, talked some serious stuff but didn’t allow our time together to become dominated by the cloud of doom trying so hard to hover over us and spoil our time.

The end comes of each of us, eventually, until Yeshua’s return; with Mom, we have a warning that it’s coming soon, so I’d rather spend that time letting her know what she means to both my wife and me, creating as many good memories as we can in the time that’s left, than sitting around weeping about what we cannot change.

There will be time enough for tears in private… before she passes, and after.

Every once in a while, I run across a word for phrase in the Bible that just throws me for a loop. The most recent example came while I was brushing up on my David character study I’m writing for my Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids.

We know the Bible teaches that nothing evil can come from Adonai our G-d; as a holy G-d, nothing evil can enter his presence.

We also know that King Sha’ul’s madness was probably brought on by both the horrors of war and the rebuke he’d received from Adonai, in which G-d ultimately rejected him as king over all Israel. There’s only so much a flawed Israeli king can take, right?

And then, there it is in front of me. A verse in I Sh’mu’el states that after Adonai’s blessing was removed, King Sha’ul was tormented by, “an evil spirit from G-d.”

An evil spirit? From G-d?

Maybe it’s the translation, but… something fishy’s going on there. Could someone be playing games with our theology…? …No, probably not.

Personally, I think it’s a colloquialism, in this instance. Clearly, King Sha’ul had fallen to some form of mental illness, given that his outbursts of temper stemming from this were often violent, and that David’s music soothed his troubled spirit.

Back in the times of Moshe, or David, or Yeshua, no one used Cisco networking solutions because they were thousands of years separated from the computer age to begin with. But can you imagine what it might have been like, had Yeshua or Moshe had access to that kind of communication technology?

Sure, it’s a bit of a science fiction concept, but just imagine what records could have been archived, what messages could have been presereved, how many more people could have been eyewitnesses to the miracles of the Bible.

Of course, as King Solomon advises, there is nothing new under the sun; had that generation had access to such devices, I’m sure modern cynicism would have worked its way into the past and allowed folks to conveniently disbelieve, if that was their heart’s intent.