Monday, November 6, 2017

Revelation 7:9-10

 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ 

Standing

I saw my father yesterday. It was remarkable since he died in late September 2003. But I saw him clearly and full of life.

He wore those rimless spectacles that were so common in the 1940s and a blue shirt open at the collar. A wave of his still-black hair curled and fell across his forehead as it did in the years before it thinned out.

He was no longer weak, in bed, his legs and body wasted from polio, calling for my mother because he was dying and couldn’t stand to be alone.

He was young. It was still those years before my sister and I were born, years I know only from weathered photos. But there he was … standing, among a great crowd, looking surprised at the commotion of ecstatic joy surrounding him.

He tried to join whatever it was they were singing, his soft bass voice stronger than in the years it was barely a whisper for the damage disease had done to his lungs. But now he sang, startled by the sound of his own voice, startled to be there ... free from everything that had bound him.

And I saw him, my All Saints gift, standing again as once he had, his sorrow long gone, the distance between us no longer great. Then I stood, with him, and sang of a Love that will not let us go.

Pr. David L. Miller