His Cross Our HopeSample

“I am not going to that place!”

Agonizing considerations accompanied the realization that my mother could no longer handle my father’s declining mental capacity and physical health on her own. It was time to move my father into a nursing home. He wanted nothing to do with it and made it clear. He loved his home on the Gulf Coast and couldn’t bear absence from it. He did not age well. Dad was miserable. He repeatedly fell, broke bones, and became incapacitated. Dad would forget his incapacitation, get up only to fall again. My mom could not lift him; therefore, the paramedics knew my parents on a first-name basis.

Finally, she wrestled between guilt and feeling a burden lifted. On Dad’s first night at the nursing home, her phone rang. The nursing home staff reported my father had stopped breathing. They transported him to the hospital. The next morning, Mom realized it was time for goodbyes. I met my mother, and we said our last words to him. The doctor turned off the machines my father had been on until I could get there. Dad left his aged body.

I tearfully updated my son. Connor accurately stated, “Well, Big Daddy said there was no way he was going to a nursing home, and I guess he showed us.” We burst into laughter. My father, in his appointed time, moved from his previous paradise on earth, to his eternal paradise.

Our Savior Jesus Christ also moved to paradise taking a repentant criminal with Him. Unlike my dad, Jesus didn't have the chance to age badly, or at all. He died a criminal’s death in a Roman execution for claiming to be God. One criminal hanging at Jesus’s side believed His claim. As a result, he was with Jesus in paradise that very day. Even during a seemingly tragic day, with people all around Him behaving at their worst, fully human and fully divine Jesus accomplished deliverance: entry to paradise.

~Carol McCracken

Author, speaker, and Bible study teacher