Mom's Most Exciting Moment
As I write, I am sitting by the bedside of the woman who gave birth to me sixty-two years ago. A few minutes ago, 10:15 AM, December 13, 2009, Eileen Patricia Beckwith left her physical body and entered the presence of God. The scriptures give us clear certainty that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.[1]
I could not blame mom if she were a bit cynical or bitter from some of the disappointments in her life, but her gracious spirit has been radiant even as her health declined. Mom never met her mom. She often spoke of wanting to locate her real mother. When she was a few weeks old, she was adopted by the Orwall family in the Chicago area. Years later, her adopted mother, Margaret, developed some of the first Burger King restaurants in the United States. Her adopted father, Solomon, was a Secretary to the Vice President of International Harvester, Vice President of United Benefit Life Insurance, a Who’s Who in Chicago 1931, and he ran for Congress but was defeated. With the stock market crash of 1929, he lost most of his wealth and committed suicide on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1933. Mom was eight years old. Following this, she was shuffled from home to home. How she ever learned to be a mom is beyond me since she rarely had one.
She raised six of us in lean years and difficult times. My father, Walter, bought a Chevrolet dealership in 1961 which turned out to be a family nightmare. Mom kept the books and had to break the news each month of how much money we had lost. Tempers flared daily and money was often the subject of conflict. Six months after purchasing the dealership, it caught on fire—half of the structure was destroyed. That winter, a howling South Dakota blizzard cracked the six large plate glass showroom windows. In vain, we attempted to secure the windows as the glass from one window after another crashed around us. The terrifying sound of the howling wind and crashing glass still resonates in my mind. The following summer, an enormous hail storm hit with little warning. Hail nearly the size of baseballs left huge dents in thirteen new Chevrolets. We finally sold them at a sizeable loss as “dimpled darlings.”
Mom rarely knew when dad would be home or if he would be home, and she spent untold sleepless nights wondering where he might be. One morning, he showed up at 8 A.M. after being gone for the night. He had attempted towing two vehicles behind his pickup—the towed vehicles veered into the ditch and the pickup rolled. The pickup cab was crushed level with the hood and box. Peering out of the crushed cab, dad somehow drove it home.
The blizzard of March 1966 was considered one of the most severe of the century. With the storm approaching, dad left for a 135-mile trip to Rapid City, and mom spent the next three and half days wondering if he was alive. While others travelers were stranded and died in their vehicles, dad found refuge in a stranded semi-truck. Meanwhile, the furnace in the basement at home started leaking heating oil as flames leaped out of the furnace. Terrified, mom expected the house to go up in flames at any minute.
Dad took delight in visiting the dumps of South Dakota to bring home various things that mom considered worthless junk. In attempting to haul a cast iron furnace home from the dump, it fell on him, and he nearly lost his life before being rescued. Before dad’s death at age 59, he had filled three houses with bicycle wheels, refrigerator motors, fenders, bumpers, transmissions, ball joints, hub caps, shock absorbers, mufflers, manifolds, heater fans, engines, generators, steering wheels, and thousands of other things of questionable value. In addition, he had collected 50 to 75 junk cars that were kept in a cow pasture.
Mom had marvelous grace and patience through all her trials, but everyone has a breaking point. After scrubbing and waxing the kitchen floor, my brother Gregg came tromping through leaving a trail of mud. Her frustration peaked--mom went outside with a shovel, scooped up a load of fresh mud, and threw it on the kitchen floor.
Mom developed breast cancer in 1997, and following a lumpectomy, her prognosis was good. However, in December 2000, the cancer moved to her spinal column and bones. The medical community generally said she had only a few weeks to live. With extreme curvature of the spine, she refused to give up. During the past nine years, she has amazed us all.
Despite the many hardships, there have been some exciting moments in her eighty-four years. After high school graduation, she was accepted into the Three Arts Club, an exclusive boarding place for girls to study art, and also did some modeling for a catalogue company while doing commercial art with Vogue-Wright Art Studio. She was gifted as a sketch and water color artist, and her art work has been a blessing to many. She and dad met in Chicago and on July 1st, 1944, they were married. God blessed their marriage with six children, and she often told me of her immense joy at the birth of each of her six children.
None of these events matched her joy when she surrendered her life to God. In 1953, with tears streaming down her face, she went forward to receive Christ as Savior and Lord. As a six-year old, I followed her down the aisle a few minutes later. Never a complainer, she communicated warmth and compassion to others. She lived in the freedom of the forgiveness and grace of God and gave this same grace to others. God filled her life with remarkable patience and strength to walk through many difficult times.
Some think of death as the end, the terminus, but God designed us as eternal beings--He planted eternity in our hearts.[2] Why did God design our bodies to decline as the years pass? If our bodies became healthier, stronger, better looking, and our minds, hearing, and eyesight became clearer and sharper as we grew older, we would want to hang around in these bodies forever. The Bible calls the body a tent. Tents are fragile, leaky, temporary--intended to be folded up and put away. God designed our physical decline to get us ready for the main event--eternity. With each new ache and pain, an eternity with God sounds better all the time.
A fellow-sufferer, ancient Job said, “All the days of my struggle I will wait, until my change comes. You will call, and I will answer You; You will long for the work of Your hands.”[3] This morning, at 10:15 AM, God called . . .
Eileen, come on home. Everything is ready for you. You’ve been living in a tent. Now you’re going to live in a mansion. You’ve known pain and struggles, and now you’re going to be set free from pain and death. I will wipe away all your tears. I made you and designed you to spend eternity with me. You will live forever in my presence. Eileen, come on home!”
As I looked at my mother’s tired, frail, weakened body now lifeless, my spirit soared as I realized she had just experienced the most exciting moment of her entire life—she entered the very presence of her Creator, Almighty God. She experienced what the Psalmist expressed: “And when I awake in heaven, I will be fully satisfied, for I will see you face-to-face.”[4]
Pastor Dave Beckwith
[1] 2 Corinthians 5:8
[2] Ecclesiastes 3:11
[3] Job 14:14-15 NASB
[4] Psalm 17:15 TLB
© 2009 Dave Beckwith
I could not blame mom if she were a bit cynical or bitter from some of the disappointments in her life, but her gracious spirit has been radiant even as her health declined. Mom never met her mom. She often spoke of wanting to locate her real mother. When she was a few weeks old, she was adopted by the Orwall family in the Chicago area. Years later, her adopted mother, Margaret, developed some of the first Burger King restaurants in the United States. Her adopted father, Solomon, was a Secretary to the Vice President of International Harvester, Vice President of United Benefit Life Insurance, a Who’s Who in Chicago 1931, and he ran for Congress but was defeated. With the stock market crash of 1929, he lost most of his wealth and committed suicide on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1933. Mom was eight years old. Following this, she was shuffled from home to home. How she ever learned to be a mom is beyond me since she rarely had one.
She raised six of us in lean years and difficult times. My father, Walter, bought a Chevrolet dealership in 1961 which turned out to be a family nightmare. Mom kept the books and had to break the news each month of how much money we had lost. Tempers flared daily and money was often the subject of conflict. Six months after purchasing the dealership, it caught on fire—half of the structure was destroyed. That winter, a howling South Dakota blizzard cracked the six large plate glass showroom windows. In vain, we attempted to secure the windows as the glass from one window after another crashed around us. The terrifying sound of the howling wind and crashing glass still resonates in my mind. The following summer, an enormous hail storm hit with little warning. Hail nearly the size of baseballs left huge dents in thirteen new Chevrolets. We finally sold them at a sizeable loss as “dimpled darlings.”
Mom rarely knew when dad would be home or if he would be home, and she spent untold sleepless nights wondering where he might be. One morning, he showed up at 8 A.M. after being gone for the night. He had attempted towing two vehicles behind his pickup—the towed vehicles veered into the ditch and the pickup rolled. The pickup cab was crushed level with the hood and box. Peering out of the crushed cab, dad somehow drove it home.
The blizzard of March 1966 was considered one of the most severe of the century. With the storm approaching, dad left for a 135-mile trip to Rapid City, and mom spent the next three and half days wondering if he was alive. While others travelers were stranded and died in their vehicles, dad found refuge in a stranded semi-truck. Meanwhile, the furnace in the basement at home started leaking heating oil as flames leaped out of the furnace. Terrified, mom expected the house to go up in flames at any minute.
Dad took delight in visiting the dumps of South Dakota to bring home various things that mom considered worthless junk. In attempting to haul a cast iron furnace home from the dump, it fell on him, and he nearly lost his life before being rescued. Before dad’s death at age 59, he had filled three houses with bicycle wheels, refrigerator motors, fenders, bumpers, transmissions, ball joints, hub caps, shock absorbers, mufflers, manifolds, heater fans, engines, generators, steering wheels, and thousands of other things of questionable value. In addition, he had collected 50 to 75 junk cars that were kept in a cow pasture.
Mom had marvelous grace and patience through all her trials, but everyone has a breaking point. After scrubbing and waxing the kitchen floor, my brother Gregg came tromping through leaving a trail of mud. Her frustration peaked--mom went outside with a shovel, scooped up a load of fresh mud, and threw it on the kitchen floor.
Mom developed breast cancer in 1997, and following a lumpectomy, her prognosis was good. However, in December 2000, the cancer moved to her spinal column and bones. The medical community generally said she had only a few weeks to live. With extreme curvature of the spine, she refused to give up. During the past nine years, she has amazed us all.
Despite the many hardships, there have been some exciting moments in her eighty-four years. After high school graduation, she was accepted into the Three Arts Club, an exclusive boarding place for girls to study art, and also did some modeling for a catalogue company while doing commercial art with Vogue-Wright Art Studio. She was gifted as a sketch and water color artist, and her art work has been a blessing to many. She and dad met in Chicago and on July 1st, 1944, they were married. God blessed their marriage with six children, and she often told me of her immense joy at the birth of each of her six children.
None of these events matched her joy when she surrendered her life to God. In 1953, with tears streaming down her face, she went forward to receive Christ as Savior and Lord. As a six-year old, I followed her down the aisle a few minutes later. Never a complainer, she communicated warmth and compassion to others. She lived in the freedom of the forgiveness and grace of God and gave this same grace to others. God filled her life with remarkable patience and strength to walk through many difficult times.
Some think of death as the end, the terminus, but God designed us as eternal beings--He planted eternity in our hearts.[2] Why did God design our bodies to decline as the years pass? If our bodies became healthier, stronger, better looking, and our minds, hearing, and eyesight became clearer and sharper as we grew older, we would want to hang around in these bodies forever. The Bible calls the body a tent. Tents are fragile, leaky, temporary--intended to be folded up and put away. God designed our physical decline to get us ready for the main event--eternity. With each new ache and pain, an eternity with God sounds better all the time.
A fellow-sufferer, ancient Job said, “All the days of my struggle I will wait, until my change comes. You will call, and I will answer You; You will long for the work of Your hands.”[3] This morning, at 10:15 AM, God called . . .
Eileen, come on home. Everything is ready for you. You’ve been living in a tent. Now you’re going to live in a mansion. You’ve known pain and struggles, and now you’re going to be set free from pain and death. I will wipe away all your tears. I made you and designed you to spend eternity with me. You will live forever in my presence. Eileen, come on home!”
As I looked at my mother’s tired, frail, weakened body now lifeless, my spirit soared as I realized she had just experienced the most exciting moment of her entire life—she entered the very presence of her Creator, Almighty God. She experienced what the Psalmist expressed: “And when I awake in heaven, I will be fully satisfied, for I will see you face-to-face.”[4]
Pastor Dave Beckwith
[1] 2 Corinthians 5:8
[2] Ecclesiastes 3:11
[3] Job 14:14-15 NASB
[4] Psalm 17:15 TLB
© 2009 Dave Beckwith