Dear Old Blighty

Take me back to dear old Blighty!
Put me on the train for London town!
Take me over there, Drop me ANYWHERE,
Liverpool, Leeds, or Birmingham, well, I don't care!

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Well, I do care, actually. I'm off to the old ancestral home in Birmingham, UK for 10 days starting Oct 7th. I'll be visiting me dear old dad, who is a very sprightly 85 this year. He was a postman for 29 years, which is a large part of the secret to his abiding vigour. I haven't seen my Dad in 12 years, but think it would be fair to say that I will seem to have aged more to him than he to me.

Anybody who took the time to read my post "Happy Birthday to Me!" will be aware of the sort of relationship I had with my parents for most of my life. I was provided for, but not nurtured. Three squares a day and a roof over my head was my father's idea of love. It was all he knew. He came from a brutal family by today's standards, and it's a miracle of grace that he did not acquire that sort of abusive, selfish raw survivalism that must have characterized his own parental family as they emerged from the back end of the industrial revolution and waded through two world wars. The sins of the fathers are indeed visited on the children to the third and fourth generation of those that hate God.

As a very small child I will always remember my father - a sensitive and intelligent man, brutalized by his own family, denied opportunity for an education by which to channel his intelligence and curiosity, devastated by the horror of war - sitting with his head in his hands in utter despair while his physical and emotional health lay fragmented around him. He came back from the trauma of the war, having survived a nasty wound, to the prospect of a life in a dingy factory, filing brass appliances and inhaling metal dust into his hardening lungs. He left England a callow youth and returned 6 years later as a a married father of one, with another on the way, to a post-war England of social upheaveal and dislocation.

But God (just like the "but Gods" of scripture) - even though my Father did not know Him - led him to a life changing decision which, while a hard one to make at the time, eventually brought him back to a measure of health and vitality. He became a mailman.

As a kid I wasn't really aware of most of this. Like all persons who were ever born, I was a moving, breathing centre of self-absorption. Life may have been puzzling and lonely, but it was MY life and I was caught up in it, whatever it was. I overheard his dabbling with Marxist platitudes and the fallout from late 19th Century rationalism as it shook its way down through the halls of learning to the common man. There was even a brief flirtation with the Bible. Though he was not truly aware of it, cynicism oozed from his damaged heart and wafted in waves over the tiny onlooker that was me.

Then there was the teenage years in which I, already lost in a world that made no sense and provided no loving comfort, rebelled even against what comforts I did have. I left home twice in my teenage years either in anger, or without any thought for what my actions might do to my parents. Fiinally there was the big departure. I didn't understand it at the moment, but I took the geographic solution to my own pain and followed my employer to Canada, where I have lived ever since.

In the nearly 40 years that have followed, almost all of my family correspondence was with my mother. Dad didn't write. Oh, I'm sure he hungrily devoured every word in every letter - but writing was just not his thing. He and mom came to visit us seven times over the years and it was heart-warming to see the gradual changes in my father. He was not completely transformed by any means, but he did change. There was less anxiety, less depression, less cynicism as his circumstances and his health blossomed. By this time he was probably able to see the wreckage I was making in my own life and family - and so it goes.

Then, about 6 years ago, Mom started to show increasing signs of Alzeimer's Disease. She is now institutionalized. Dad visits her every day. He talks to her; takes her treats and nourishing food; tells her jokes and plays music for her. And all the time he has no idea if she even knows who he is. It's poignant, pathetic and endearing all at once.

Now, I don't want this to seem like a carping cesspit of self-pity. It is what life has handed my father and me. It is what God has ordained in love that we should seek after Him in the midst of our tribulation. There are untold numbers of people and families out there who have had it much, much worse than we. There is real evil abroad in the world and it works in a myriad ways. All of it tells of the wrath of God upon a sinful world and the love of God calling upon men everywhere to repent.

In my case, God brought the effectual call. He dragged me out of the world and into the kingdom of His dear Son. It took years, with spurts of fanatical religion interspersed with abysmal backsliding - all of it paid for by the Lord Jesus Christ in His love for me, as He gave up His life on the cross. Two steps forward and one step back was all I could manage as I lurched towards the understanding of His grace and His love. I still wrestle with it. There is, deep within me, a residue of anger and hate and resentment - of puzzlement, of disbelief. There is a remnant of a refusal to accept that I am loved, because I never truly experienced it from human sources in the way we all yearn for.

But the faith of Christ is greater than all this. There are periodic paroxysms of pain, but they are for my good and God's glory. In the hands of my loving Saviour they have become the very means of my sanctification. This is no easy believism. It is the trenches. It is the knock 'em down and drag 'em out warfare of the soul. It is a daily battle. But it is the Lord's battle and He has won it. What I must do is to walk in His victory. By His grace, I do much of the time. And when I stumble He is there to lift me up in due time and set me back upon the path.

So, when I go to Blighty and visit me dear old dad it is carrying the love of Jesus that he has never known. It is in the humility of understanding that I cannot save him, no matter how much I love him myself. I can display to him Christ in me, and that by grace alone. I truly don't know how to do this. I know what I am and I am partly afraid that I will give my old nature room to be seen. And I must trust God in it all.

Remember me as I force myself into that pressurized aluminum tube and rumble off into the sky later this week. Say a prayer. Pray that, if in God's grace I arrive safely, my Father will see Christ and not me. Pray for my death - not an aeronautical death, but a death of ego; a death to all the vestiges of the "me" that I invented throughout those years of wandering lostness.