It's Christmas Night and My Dad is Enjoying a Pepsi and Ice Cream

It’s Christmas night, and as I glance at the clock on my laptop after helping my dad eat some ice cream and polish off a “Pepsi,” I notice it’s 11:11. I’ve read various places that seeing 11:11 is a sign that angels are near and/or listening to your prayers, which makes me feel happy for both me and my dad.

It has been a wonderful Christmas day with family for the first time in about six years, and tonight my dad ate, perhaps not what some would consider a lot, but he ate—a half scoop of ice cream and one and a half cups of “Pepsi.” It was actually Coke. He had asked for Pepsi; however, as there was none in the house, I improvised. Christmas miracles do happen.

It had been nearly two weeks since my dad last ate a meal or drank more than a few sips of anything. Everything we’d try to give him he either refused or spit out. By early Friday morning, just two days before Christmas, he had to be taken to the ER as recommended by his doctor so that he could be given fluids by IV. He was discharged about 12 hours later with the recommendation that we contact a local hospice for aid as there was nothing really that the hospital could do for him.

I can appreciate that hospices have helped many hundreds of thousands of people dealing with “terminal” illnesses and their family members prepare for what might seem to be the inevitable. I have no doubt that those people and their families are grateful for the aid they received, much of it in some cases at no cost to them. However, I feel quite strongly that my father would not want this for himself.

Before the dementia seemed to take over his mind, my father was a minister who believed in and preached life. He believed and taught that death, sickness, and disease are enemies of God—that it is not now, nor was it ever intended to be, His plan for us. My father believed that sickness, disease, and death should be fought against with prayer, not conditions we should peacefully accept and embrace. He believed that it was intended for people to live until a ripe old age and himself often stated he intended to hang out here until he was at least 100.

My father took very seriously his calling to “heal the sick and raise the dead.” He preached fervently to his congregation and to anyone else who would listen about the healing power of God. My father did not accept death or sickness as God's will as some do, so when it happened under his watch, it hurt him deeply as though he had failed God.

I recall after my oldest brother’s death and years later my nephew’s death, my dad spent hours in prayer at home and before the altar at the church where he was both pastor and founder crying out to God in repentance and seeking answers for how the "enemy satan was able to gain a victory," as my dad would say. He did the same after learning of the death of any member of his church or anyone else he had prayed for to be healed or in some way set free. He wanted to know "how we lost this one," because he steadfastly believed even in the face of failure that it is always God’s will to heal and restore life and when it did not happen, the failure lie with his own or the person’s lack of faith.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” I listened to my father intone at the beginning of the funeral services over which he presided. And at some point after he would take to the pulpit to deliver the message of consolation to family and friends, he would boldly declare “and the last enemy to be defeated is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:26)

It is not easy to hold onto faith in the face of apparent defeat—when everything you see and all that you hear is demanding that you just accept “reality.” Not easy at all to continue to believe what you cannot see, at least not with your physical eyes. The dementia that appears to have taken over my father’s mind is taxing on him, on me, and on my siblings. A once strong, proud, independent, and intelligent man is now dependent on hired caregivers and his children to feed, clothe, bathe and otherwise care for him in the way you would an infant, and struggles to string two coherent sentences together. People talk to, around and about him as if he has absolutely no awareness of what is going on at all. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, even though I know that the essence of who we are is consciousness or what some might call spirit.

Determined as I am to remain steadfast in my belief that healing is always possible, I must admit there are many days I have felt my faith waning, especially over the last few months of this year. The objective reality that I perceive/experience day-to-day with my dad tells me to give up and make peace with the situation. My father in his right state of mind would tell me I have my eyes fixed on the wrong thing—to judge by appearances only is to judge in error.

Yet, I know at my core miracles do happen. I’ve read and heard countless stories of people professing various religious beliefs or none at all who were at death’s door, doctors and family members having given them up for dead, and who experienced miraculous healings and went on to live many years afterward. I hear and read these stories and ask if it happened for them, then why not…?

"Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick." James 5:14-15