A Better Place

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life – John 3:16

This has to be the most famous (can a verse be famous?) verse in the Bible. This is the reference on the homemade endzone signs. It’s the Billy Graham closer. It contains within it the secret of man’s creation, fall, and redemption. I would be willing to wager that more Christians know this verse by heart than any other – not counting “Jesus wept”. The nearest contender would likely be the initial lines of the Shepherd’s Psalm. “Judge not” seems to have an edge among non-believers who never bother to finish the sentence: “that ye be not judged”.

I am thinking of this well-known quote because one of my older cousins, D.A., passed away Sunday. He is what they call a double cousin. Our fathers were brothers and our mothers were sisters – not much genetic variation there. My mother once mistook a picture of my brother for one of the other set about the same age. We lived only a few miles apart, went to the same school, the same church. D.A. was, unlike some of the rest of us, a mild-tempered, easy-going man. I mostly picture him in his younger days with the stubby remains of a well-chewed cigar sticking out of his mouth. He had a distinctive drawl – I would say exaggerated but he spoke the same way when he was a small child. It was perfectly natural for him. He did a stint in the Army, but mostly he just lived out in the country and worked and raised three boys. And that’s where the verse comes in.

His oldest son was named Mike. My cousin was a few more than twenty years my senior. I was only three or four years older than Mike. I remember. Mike was a big, blond, blue-eyed, perpetually happy kid. He had just crossed over into puberty and started to stretch in height when he began to have unusual pains in his legs. No one took it seriously at first. When they did, the results were grim. It was bone cancer. His right leg gone to his hip, he shaved off the hair that didn’t fall out right away and hobbled around the yard at fourteen calling himself ‘Kojak’, while gleefully proclaiming that he had an organ longer than his leg. We knew that no one so young and otherwise healthy, no one with such a positive outlook, with so much love and support and prayer surrounding him could possibly be beaten by cancer. Before school started in the fall, Mike died.

D.A. was shattered. He had done all the right things. He had gone to church, served his country, married the girl next door. He was not a drinker, not a womanizer, not a cheat or a thief. As far as I know he never did any harm of any kind to anyone. It was impossible to imagine him doing so. But Mike was gone. D.A. did not want to hear words of comfort. Especially, he did not want to hear that Mike was “in a better place”. There was no better place for a boy than with his father.


The years dragged on. D.A. went to church and even served as a deacon. He was mostly in charge of keeping up the cemetery – a job to which he was appropriately devoted. I don’t suppose that he ever ceased to be a Christian. That would have been to him unthinkable – doubly so for he thought as little as possible of God.

Death did not cease its harvest. D.A. saw this one pass on, and that one. His older brother, very much unlike D.A. in most ways, was diagnosed with cancer himself. Tough and unrepentant to the end, the brother refused treatment, buying whiskey by the gallon to help him endure the pain. I don’t know if D.A. got a chance to talk to him. What would he have said? Yes, God is cruel and merciless, but at least you can go to heaven to live with Him forever when you die. I’m sure the hardened skeptic would have bought that ticket.

Still his brother’s passing and possible descent into hell must have gotten D.A. to allow some thoughts in, or rather out, that had been locked down in the hole for forty years. The thoughts were bent and pallid, rat-gnawed, weak, and filthy, but they were there and they lived. Their existence was an accusation against him, against his years of living in rebellious obedience to a Master who had the right to refuse service not rendered in love. D.A. realized that, and he realized, moreover, that the Master had not rejected and punished his hateful rituals. Those thoughts had not been locked in a dungeon but in a temple. D.A. had closed the door and bolted it against them, but he was the one denied access. He began to see that what he was denied and what he denied ruled him nonetheless. The doors had to be thrown open, the windows uncovered, the floor swept, and the altar restored. He’d taken good care of the graveyard, but the sanctuary had been neglected.

I don’t know if he would have had the courage or the heart to begin except for the first ray of grace shooting through a crack somewhere to light the temple’s dusty floor at the base of a cobwebbed column. To his eyes, the column ignited into a tower of fire with a voice crying out from the midst: The one who gains the victory, him I will make a pillar in the Holy of Holies, and he shall go no more out. D.A. was stunned with revelation. All along Mike had been there, standing tall and glorious in the inner sanctuary with God’s own unutterable Name written upon him. He had not gone down in defeat; he had not been beaten. A boy’s place was with his Father.

David wept and fasted when his son was ill, but when the boy died the king rose up, ate, and resumed his duties. The people around him were confused. David replied, “He cannot return to me, but I will go to him.” A man’s place is with his Father.