I’ve never considered the year I walked my dad through cancer an act of hospitality. It was many things, yes—but hospitality? I don’t often link hospitality with lament.
My summer reading is currently challenging my concept of Christian hospitality. Genuine hospitality isn’t always tidy. In fact—it’s often quite messy. For me, walking my dad through lung cancer six years ago was an act of obedience. It was forgiveness. Deep down I knew how much I had been forgiven as a believer and like-wise forgiveness was something God had called me to extend towards my father. This extended forgiveness was anything but natural and every ounce awkward, as you can imagine. To those around me, the reception of this service to my dad was mixed—at times even misunderstood. It was confusing. This was a radical forgiveness that didn’t make sense. By the world’s standards, I didn’t owe my dad anything. In fact, there were others who had been more like a father to me than he had been. No—I didn’t owe my dad anything. But I did need to forgive.
Some backstory you have to understand is that I entered the foster care system at the age of 10. You can read a little about that here, but the main take-away is that the removal from my home marked the last time I lived under my dad’s roof. As I aged-out of the foster system years eroded-away familial lines and relational sentimentality.
While removal from my home was not by choice, living at home had not been a cake walk either. Those that knew my dad don’t typically recall kind things. My dad was a deeply broken man that sadly, as the saying goes, hurt out of hurt. My dad left a wake of transgressed people throughout the years. There were so many relational bridges burned that by the time cancer stared him down at 66 he had little left by his side to navigate it. As my dad’s daughter, I was in the front line of those he hurt and knew it well. We only visited together perhaps once a year for an hour as my little family would roll through his Midwestern hometown on our way to Colorado for vacation. It was an obligatory visit, one that was painful. In truth I dreaded these visits. My father wasn’t easy to talk to and years of bitterness had eaten away his ability to relate to others or to me well. In all sense of the term, my dad was a recluse. I thought for years he preferred it that way. Cancer revealed how wrong I was in this assumption.
There truly is a sacredness in walking someone through a terminal illness and then sitting beside their deathbed. Pretense is stripped away and little matters save the awareness of the measured time you have left together. Rosaria Butterfield stated that, “We prepare for our heavenly home recognizing that only two things will last forever: our souls and God’s Word.”
This was the truth my heart knew keenly in those hard days with dad. Those were moments when very little was said between us except “I’m sorry,” “I love you,” and “I forgive you.” Sometimes actions uttered words we couldn’t say. Some of the most difficult hours I spent by my father’s deathbed were ones he was unaware of. I would sit and painfully analyze every inch of one of his large hands lest I forget what it looked like—all the while fighting the urge to just grasp and hold it tightly. I remember being so frustrated with myself, that such a small act was so difficult. But it wasn’t a small act—it was the physical posturing of a heart truly embracing forgiveness and freely giving it. It was seeing my own tight-clenched fists and being willing to let it all go—all the past, all the pain, all the wrongs ever done. It was a simple-yet-hard act of letting myself love my father. There was a grace extended and a grace received when I finally physically took my father’s hand that only God could orchestrate, only God could render possible. Six years later I am coming to understand and believe along with Rosaria that yes, sitting beside my father’s deathbed was hospitality. Not the kind that I could manufacture or supply—or even afford. It was hospitality made possible only because of the strength God himself supplied in my weakness and in my dad’s.
But why write this? Why share this? Why not just jot it down in some journal somewhere for my eyes alone? Because spending a year extending deathbed hospitality to my dad opened my eyes to see things I can’t unsee—realities that need sharing. My dad was lonely—absolutely. He admitted as much in one of his counseling notes I found after he passed that, “loneliness was unbearable.” My dad spent years suffering alone and suffering in silence. However, here is the hope that I hope you see. What my dad realized in his last year of life was that God was bigger than the darkness he spent years living in. Often, I say that last year of my dad’s life was the year he became a different man—a softer man. He was able to receive forgiveness—and extend it. The very disease that brought my dad to his knees rescued him for all of eternity. Before, I really had no idea what God was doing or what role he wanted me to play in that hard year. Now—six years later, I have truly come to believe God was using my physical presence to remind my dad he wasn’t alone. When I learned of my dad’s illness, I was one of the few able to be there with him in practical and tangible ways. I was deeply convicted that no-matter what, my dad couldn’t walk cancer alone. I had no idea at that time what my dad really thought of being alone—I just knew I couldn’t leave him alone. And my dad—he didn’t die alone. He died with me beside him.
God walks beside us. God walks with us—through the mess and muck of life. He often walks with us as we go about our own way refusing to acknowledge His work and presence in our lives. We are, after all, created in God’s image. All of us. Too often we don’t do a very good job of bearing his image. Sometimes we deny it altogether. But our denial of this reality doesn’t make the reality of God any less true. Many of us spend a lot of our days walking in solitary confinements of our own making. We think we are living whole, free lives, but this can’t be a reality until we have embraced the truth of Christ’s redemptive work on our behalf. We must wrestle with and come to terms with that in order to truly grasp a hold of peace. Hospitality extended—I think most especially where lament is present, allows God to pry open tight-clenched fists and open eyes to life-saving hope. This side of eternity, we all need a little hope—God portioned hope.
“Not everyone can come to Christ in the fullness of life—while the world, the flesh, and the Devil are raging and strong. But anyone led by the Spirit can come to Christ on the deathbed, when the flesh is weak. Anyone. Even my mother. But who will lead the way? Who will proclaim the fullness of Christ in the presence of this weakness? If you are not at the deathbed, you can’t offer hospitality. Hospitality always requires hands and heads and hearts, and mess and sacrifice and weakness. Always.” — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
