Swallowed Up by Life

This weekend I remember my dad’s homegoing one year ago on November 3, 2023. I can’t adequately express the honor and love I’d like to show him on this anniversary, or capture the immensity of the loss my family has known as we have missed him so much this past year. There are thousands of things I could say in his memory that I know those who knew him would affirm with all their hearts!, because he was a deep blessing to so many. But the comments I’d like to make on this first anniversary of dad’s passing are in reference to dad’s experience since he left us one year ago.

Last year around this time, dad’s faith became sight. Scripture says the things that are unseen are the eternal, permanent, lasting things. Dad had read about them in the Bible, and he personally had been anticipating them. In the year or so before he died, I asked him if he thought of heaven often, and he nodded that he did. He told me he prayed nightly for God to go ahead and bring him there as soon as it was time. 

This past year since dad went home to be with the Lord Jesus, dad has been full of gladness in the presence of the Lord. He’s beheld the glory of God. He’s seen his parents and family members. He has entered his anticipated rest that Jesus purchased for him on the cross.

But maybe what comforts me the most is how dad’s earthly sufferings now must be a distant memory for him, if he even refers back to them really at all. They still feel like a fresh memory to me some days – I remember all that his illness took from him and the sadness his diagnosis brought to him and to us. But to dad, he’s not in heaven pining away for what his illness took away from him.

Wouldn’t it make sense that right now he would affirm with the Apostle Paul that his earthly afflictions were but light and momentary in comparison to the eternal weight of glory that he now possesses, a weight of glory that those very afflictions prepared for him? Dad quoted these truths (2 Corinthians 4:17) to us and believed them even before he experienced their fullness and that reality of glory for himself. But now that he’s experienced it, I know full well that dad would tell me that the sufferings of this present time (and the sufferings he experienced on earth) are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to him and to us.

I miss my dad every day, and the memories of his diagnosis and illness are still very difficult some days. But what would I do without the comforts I am given through these truths? I thank God and am filled with hope (even in sorrow) that God is currently doing the same thing for us in our present afflictions – he is working for us an eternal weight of glory through them as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For we know that if the tent that is our earthly (temporary) home is destroyed, we have a building (a permanent home) from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. In this tent, dad groaned, longing to put on his heavenly dwelling. He was burdened, for he wanted to be further clothed, so that what was mortal would be swallowed up by life. That’s how Paul describes the death of a Christian in 2 Corinthians 5:4 – “swallowed up by life.” And now that dad is away from the body and at home with the Lord, that’s the only fitting way to describe his absence: “swallowed up by life.” I miss him. I will always love him. But I am comforted with the truth he spelled out to us (on his alphabet board) before he joined the Lord Jesus in heaven: “We will be together again.”

Postscript:
Dad’s obituary from one year ago: David Dowdell Easley, Sr. (Obituary) – PawPaw’s Ponderings