Dealing with Doubt

Salvation

When an aging parent dies without a clear confession of faith, you are left with a myriad of unanswered spiritual questions. Is it wrong to hang on to the threads of hope?

A nightmare in the daytime still haunts me. Soon after my sister and I graduated from college, married, and set up our own homes, the flaws in our parents' marriage split into fissures of irreconcilable differences. Dad had entered a pattern of nights away from home punctuated by drinking bouts that caused him to become sullen and noncommunicative. My sister suffered through these years because she lived close to our parents and stayed in constant contact, while I lived in Columbus, Ohio, two hundred miles away, and made visits once or twice a month. For me, the full revelation of marital breakdown came shortly after I returned to Michigan in 1961, to assume the presidency of Spring Arbor College. Dad asked me to meet him at a drive-in restaurant outside of Jackson, Michigan. Looking across the hood of his white convertible, he got right to the point, "I'm divorcing your mother."

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   Keeping my composure, I asked, "Is there another woman involved?"

   "Yes," Dad confessed. "Although that's not the major reason for the divorce. I haven't told you before, but I only married your mother to give you a name.

   Anger must have flushed my face as I fired back, "Dad, you can't hurt me now. I'm my own man."

   When Dad did not answer, I kept the initiative by asking a prickly question, "What about Christ?" Like Peter of old, Dad uttered his denial, "I never knew Him. All of those years... I was playing a game."

   With the memory of him meeting me at the altar when I went forward to confess my sins and invite Christ into my heart, I fired a parting shot: "I'll never believe that for one minute. You were my model, and you led me to Christ." Spinning on his heel, without a word he walked away and essentially out of my life for the next fifteen years.

   During those years of estrangement, my father and I never talked about religion. We both knew that the subject would only widen the gap between us and close down even the niceties of superficial conversation. I suspect that the subject haunted him as it did me — always lurking just beneath the surface and keeping us from talking about anything more than golf and grandkids.

   Even though I finally told my Dad "I love you" just a week before his fatal heart attack, he died without us ever talking religion again.

How do you handle the death of a parent who has either denied the faith or refused to accept Christ? Our emotions immediately collide with our reason. Each of us wants to claim eternal life for our parents whether or not they openly professed their faith and lived a Christian life. Yet our theology makes it clear that those who die in their sins without Christ are lost. In my case, I could not get over Dad's denial of Christ in the Faustian setting of a parking lot at a

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drive-in restaurant. As far as I was concerned,  he might as well have drawn three circles on the ground and sold his soul to the devil.

   In the days after Dad died, I searched in desperation through my memory for the slightest hint of faith restored. His return to church as an Episcopalian and faithful service as a warden in that church helped some, but not much. The bias of an early age held fast. I reasoned that he became an Episcopalian to justify his divorce, cigars, and vodka. Not content to leave the matter in God's hand, I needed a stronger thread of evidence upon which to hang my hope.

   God surprised me. Not one, but three threads of hope were given to bolster my hope in Dad's salvation. Although I wish that he had confessed his faith to me in order to cancel his denial, I understand how he might have felt compelled to speak the right language and do the right things to convince me. Instead, he left me with three surprising threads of evidence that I have woven into the confidence that Dad died in Christ.

The Thread of Scripture

I tugged with hope on the first thread as Dad lingered as a vegetable in the hospital. When I was at their home between hospital visits, my stepmother went into the bedroom and brought out a dog-eared and khaki-colored copy of a soldier's New Testament. A jackknife was strapped to the book by a rubber band. Immediately I recognized the blade that Dad used to teach me how to carve a whistle out of the green twig of a willow tree.

   "I know that your dad wants you to have these," my stepmother explained. "He read the Bible every morning of his life."

   Totally taken by surprise, I could only mumble "Thank you" and flip through the pages with the hope of finding a marked passage. There were none, but the frayed edges assured me that Dad had read the Word over and over again. Although the New Testament and a pocket knife constituted the sum total of my material inheritance from

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Dad, it was enough. He left me a thread of hope to believe that he did in death what he could not do in life — let me know that his denial of Christ was a temporary lapse for which he repented and from which he had been restored. Later, when I wrote The Communicator's Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, I discovered the depth of Christ's forgiving love in a phrase that is easily overlooked. After the Resurrection when Jesus sent Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome to the disciples with instructions, He said, "But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you' " (Mark 16:7, emphasis mine). To single out Peter by name is the special invitation that always comes with Christ's forgiveness. Otherwise, none of us would blame Peter for assuming that Christ's instructions to His "disciples" did not include him because he had denied his Lord and violated His trust.

   Because of the New Testament that is still in the top drawer of my desk, I believe that when Christ instructs His disciples to meet Him, He will add a special invitation to my father by saying, "and Loren too." Come to think of it, isn't that the personalized invitation on which we all must count? Who has not sinned and come short of the glory of God?

The Thread of Prayer

Another thread of hope became woven into the first one at Dad's memorial service in the Episcopal church. When the priest gave the homily, he recalled a pastoral visit with my father within days of his heart attack. As the conversation during this pastoral visit turned to spiritual things, the priest remembered one sentence that he used to eulogize the life of my father. Dad told him, "When I can't sleep at night, I don't count sheep. I talk to the Shepherd."

   Again, my mind groped for understanding. Was this the same father who had told me not to pray at his dying brother's bedside? Was he playing word games with the priest, or was God giving me

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another thread upon which to hang my hope? Ever since that memorial service I've regretted my reluctance to go to the priest and press him for details. Then again, maybe I didn't want to know more. If I had forced Dad's words into the mold of my expectations, I might have found reason to doubt the sincerity of his confession. God Himself seemed to tell me to leave well enough alone. A thin thread of hope is far better than no thread at all.

The Thread of Witness

Now I had two interwoven threads upon which to build my hope in Dad's salvation — reading the Bible in the morning and praying to God in the night. I held on to these thin threads for more than ten years after Dad's death. Then the puzzle took a twist that either closes the case or compounds the mystery. While I was speaking at a leadership conference for life-fitness managers in Orlando, Florida, a delegate came up to me and asked, "Are you related to a Mac McKenna in Sarasota?" I told him that my father, whose friends called him Mac, had retired in Sarasota but died more than ten years ago. The man admitted that he hadn't seen "Mac" for many years, but remembered him among the retirees of Sarasota as "the preacher." I fumbled with my doubts about my Dad being identified as "the preacher," and not knowing whether the title meant ridicule or respect, the man went on to recite instances when "Mac" spoke his faith to others, gave comfort to men in crisis, and often offered grace at public functions. Other than that, the man knew little about "Mac McKenna" — not his first name, his address, or his career before retirement. Even when I described my Dad in detail, he varied between "Yes, that sounds like him," to "I don't really remember." A shroud of mystery fell over my anxious questions. Was I chasing a ghost? Finally I realized that the man had nothing more to offer. Based upon circumstantial evidence, "Mac McKenna," known as "the preacher" in Sarasota, Florida, might well have been my father. Only

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faith can see in this incident another fragile thread of hope that reaches across the gap between my father "the prodigal" and my father "the preacher."

   Three threads of faith make a strong strand of hope. Woven together, they make a composite memory of my father as a person who not only read the Word and prayed to God but practiced his faith in word and deed among his peers. Aren't these the qualities we expect of a Christian? For me, only the retraction of his denial of Christ is missing. But who am I to assume that he owed me his confession? Perhaps I am part of the problem.

   With this insight, I leave my father's eternal destiny in the hands of a loving God. Of course, my most fervent prayer is that I might have had full assurance of Dad' salvation. But I am also willing to rest on the weight of the posthumous evidence. Certainly, if the scales of divine judgment were tipped on the side of the evidence, I believe that Dad confessed Christ and entered His presence at the time of death.

The Stories of Others

Since grappling with the facts, faith, and even fiction regarding Dad's salvation, I have paid close attention to the stories of other persons whose aged parents died without the full assurance of their salvation. It is an understatement to say that once you become sensitized to these questions, you find person after person who lives daily with the same doubts. Within the short period of two weeks, I heard three colleagues speak their hurt of living with alcoholic fathers who died with their salvation in doubt. One colleague told of his compulsion to return to his hometown. When he arrived, he learned that his homestead, filled with memories of his drunken father's abuse, was scheduled for demolition. As he collected artifacts of his boyhood home, he forgave his deceased father for all the physical and emotional abuse that he had suffered. In his case, he needed to forgive his father after death

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without knowing whether or not his father had ever asked forgiveness of God.

   Another colleague spoke her despair after scheduling a visit to her home at Christmastime with the intention of telling her alcoholic father she loved him despite the fact that he had rejected her and abandoned the family. Before she arrived, however, her father died tragically in an accident along a freeway. In a drunken state, he had stalled his pickup truck on the road, pulled over on the shoulder, and, ironically, was hit by another truck that went out of control. When I asked her if she had any evidence that might suggest repentance, she sadly shook her head and said, "No, I've had to work through all of my feelings after his death."

   Still another colleague told a more hopeful deathbed story. His father lived into his mid-seventies without a change from a lifetime of spiritual skepticism and substance abuse. Lung cancer, a natural consequence of chain-smoking, caused the man to review his life and his relationships. Step by step, he rewalked the path back toward reconciliation with his children and his God. When the cancer spread and death neared, my colleague traveled to Florida to visit his father one last time. After a cordial visit that kept distance between father and son, my colleague said good-bye and left the hospital. On the way to the airport he felt compelled to turn around and go back to the hospital in order to hug his father and say "I love you." Although he sensed that both he and his father wanted to express their love in those last moments together, a show of affection had become so alien to them that neither could make the first move. As with all of us, my colleague will live with the regrets of not following his impulse. Instead of turning around, he went on to catch his plane and await word of his father's death.

   The bad news came to him framed as a good-news story. His sister stayed with their father during his last moments. Shortly before his death, when he was too weak to speak, he kept pointing a finger upward toward the ceiling. No one could figure out the meaning of

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the gesture until the sister concluded that he was signaling his readiness to go home to heaven. Taking him in her arms, she whispered, "Daddy, it's all right. You can go home now." Instantly he relaxed, fell into a peaceful sleep, and died in her arms. Although my colleague had to accept the substitute of his sister's arms for his final hug, he rests in the assurance that a finger pointed upward signaled "All is well."

The Theology for Doubt

Are there any principles that we can draw from these varied experiences of children whose parents died without a formal, public confession of faith in Christ? As I have reflected upon my own experience, and added the perspective of others, I come to these guiding thoughts for those who must live with the same question.

Be Wesleyan regarding the word of the Holy Spirit in the lives of aging parents who are nonbelievers. As an alternative to the theology of Calvinists, who preached that those whom God elected for salvation or damnation were categorically either in or out of the kingdom, John Wesley offered the theology of "prevenient grace" with the meaning that the Holy Spirit works in the lives of nonbelievers, "nudging" them toward salvation in Christ. Whether he used the term or not, C.S. Lewis personally illustrated prevenient grace in his autobiography Surprised by Joy when he remembered the small encounters with the Spirit of God that eventually led him to Christ. Most of us will identify with similar encounters in our spiritual journey. When we recall all of the providences that led to us to Christ, prevenient grace is the best description we can offer.

   Why not watch for those "nudges" of the Spirit in the lives of parents who are nonbelievers? Although the satisfactions may be small, we cannot let our impatience short-circuit the work of the Holy Spirit. My guess is that the most difficult case for evangelism is between a child and a parent. To confront a parent with the claims of

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Christ and ask for a decision may be our driving desire, but the reversal of roles may be more than either we or our parents can accept. The situation may be analogous to the physician who tries to treat his or her own family: The loss of objectivity can hinder healing. Evangelism may require some objectivity as well. We may know how to lead our parents to Christ, but our emotions can get in the way. Furthermore, we must assume the Holy Spirit can do His work without us. While we need to be ready for the divine moment if the Holy Spirit beckons us to stand at the intersection for our parent's salvation, our first course of action is to pray for the evidence of "prevenient grace" at work in their lives and then rejoice in the knowledge, however small it may be, that the Spirit of God is nudging them toward redeeming grace.

Be an optimist as you weigh the evidence of God's grace at work in the lives of aging parents who are nonbelievers. Pessimism is the natural reaction to parents who seem trapped in years of skeptical disbelief or sinful habits. As we learned in introductory psychology, the personality of a child is permanently shaped by the age of eleven or twelve. Add the cardinal rule that executives use in selecting their staff, "Past performance is the best predictor of future performance." Mix in Jeremiah's question, "Can the leopard change its spots?" (Jer. 13:23, paraphrased). Fill out the picture then with the findings of chaplains in hospital settings. By and large, deathbed conversions are temporary responses to panic. Most often, the onset of illness only speeds a person along the path they walked for a lifetime. If they are religious, their faith deepens; if they are secular, their stoicism gets stronger. The sum total of these predictors is pessimism about the salvation of parents who come to old age without confessing Christ.

   Only the grace of God can make the difference. All of the predictors that lead to pessimism are human. They are not false, and, if limited to the human dimension, they are true. Divine grace, then, is the intervening variable that changes the equation in favor of optimism rather than pessimism. By faith, we can believe in grace and

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see every evidence as an affirmative sign pointing to hope despite the odds from a human perspective. Never give up hope. Grace is the free gift of God that we can neither earn nor predict.

Be Calvinist regarding the will of God in the soul of the nonbelieving parent. No matter how strong our faith or how confirming the evidence, we must ultimately commit the eternal destiny of our parents to the good will of a loving God. Jesus spoke that trust in His final prayer from the cross, "Father, into thy hands I commend in spirit." With that declaration of trust, He covered every contingency of limited knowledge and lingering doubt. We must do the same with our parents when clinching evidence of salvation is not in place at the time of death. "Father, into your hands I commend their spirit" is the declaration of trust in the sovereign will of God, which we cannot second-guess. Each of us must count on grace and mercy to give us the benefit of the doubt.

Be a realist regarding the truth that salvation is in Christ alone. Truth does not contradict grace in the will and work of God. However strong our desire to wish a nonbelieving parent into the kingdom of God, we must hold on to the inescapable truth that there is no salvation outside of Christ. Otherwise we find ourselves on the slippery slope toward universalism, which cancels the scandal of the Cross. While we may not know whether or not a parent, such as my father, trusted in Christ alone for his salvation, we do know that our hope turns on that confession. If so, we may have to resign ourselves to a dilemma that will never be resolved this side of eternity. On one horn of the dilemma, we exercise the faith that finds hope in bits and pieces of evidence that grace was leading our parent to Christ. On the opposite horn, however, we cannot neglect the reality of God's truth — there is no salvation outside of Christ. Once the dilemma is posed, we must then rest in the promise that in God's providence, both truth and grace will prevail.

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