Tainted Meat

My wife was trying to make herself lunch this morning. We just rolled into town last night from a long vacation out of state with family and friends. The lunch meat she thawed was found to be disgusting. We had frozen it a few months ago after my dad's passing. We had purchased it for a gathering of people saying their fare-thee-wells to their brother, father, husband, elder, and friend.

My father was an honorable man and an excellent father to his four children. My mother misses him every day. He was an elder in his church for over forty years and had a legacy of helping people hear the good news of Jesus.

My dad loved people in his quiet way. His relationship with Jesus changed him. He was raised in the chaos of his mother's making. He loved her but did not want to live like she did. My dad insisted that he would not live in a constant state of fighting and bickering that had defined his childhood. When he was fifteen, he decided to be baptized into the Christian faith. Four years later, he married my mom. Their early years were interrupted by the Korean War and nuclear weapons. (That is a story unto itself.)

Then jobs, houses, and four kids came along. Those early years were difficult, and Jesus was kept on the back burner. After we moved when I was fifteen, we changed churches, and Jesus was invited into my father's everyday world. Both mom and dad began reading their Bibles every day, trying to get through the entire book in a year. That act of faith sprouted into forty-six consecutive years of reading through Scripture accompanied by a long list of people both mom and dad prayed for every day.

Countless thousands of people were held up in prayer to our loving Heavenly Father by my parents— my mom still does this each morning, even while missing her husband. All the people they pray(ed) for have issues and problems that only God can solve and redeem. Some, like the tainted meat from our freezer, seemed beyond hope, beyond help. As it turns out, these folks were not too far gone for God to reach. The promise of God is to make the old—tainted flesh new in Christ. How do I know this? Because I was a tainted man loved to Jesus by humble parents gathered around their kitchen table every morning having a discussion with the King of all Kings

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