Every Day Is A Blessing

For Stevie C. who asked me to speak at his homegoing celebration:

This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. My brother Steven would want me to share that thought with you this morning. He would want me to remind you that despite our tears and sorrow, we have good reason to celebrate today.

We can celebrate because Steven is home. His long night of suffering is over. And our long night of watching him suffer is over. The body that failed him has died. But Steven himself is more alive than we. And we will see him again. This is the great hope that sustained our brother Steven. This is the great assurance we share as people of faith.

Some will dismiss our belief in things we cannot humanly perceive as quaint, naive, even delusional. But how then will they explain the courage, the perseverance, the unfailing sweetness of spirit that Steven displayed throughout a long and grueling illness he knew would ultimately take his life? What we have witnessed over this past year, in both Steven’s and Craig’s responses to inconceivable hardship, has been nothing short of supernatural. I asked Steven once how he did it, and he said, “In the middle of the storm, in the middle of the typhoon, you just close your eyes and say, thank you.”

We have a saying in our family: It matters how you finish. And what we mean by that is, it really doesn’t matter what you accomplish or accumulate in this life, how high you rise in society or business or government, none of that matters if you throw it all away in the end. And conversely, it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make along the way if you learn and grow beyond them. Because in the end what matters isn’t what we’ve done, but who we’ve been. What matters is the content of our character.

When I think of Steven, I will think of a man no more perfect than any of us, but a man of character and commitment, an extraordinary father and a wonderful friend. I will think of a man of faith, who died as he lived, counting every day a blessing and every blessing a reason for thanksgiving. When I think of my brother Steven, I will think of a man who finished well.

How Dark the Sky Without His Sun to Light It

For my father’s funeral service:

Good morning and thank you for joining us today to honor my father, to celebrate his life here with us and to rejoice in his glorious new life. Thank you for being his friends and especially for loving and supporting him and Weyburn during these past few difficult years of illness. It’s good to be back at Holy Trinity. As most of you know and many of you remember, Karen and I grew up here. Life has taken us each in different directions since then, and when we come back to Hickory now, we find so much has changed. Someone else is living in the houses we lived in; they’ve knocked down our old elementary school and turned my old high school into a museum! But here at Holy Trinity we can still feel we’ve come home.

Our father felt at home here, too. And no wonder. He and our mother first joined this congregation when our family moved to Hickory in 1956, more than half a century ago. And I feel safe in saying that few, if any, have loved this body of Christ more or served it more enthusiastically. Did you know he even planted and tended many of the trees and shrubs you see on the grounds outside? It was a special gift of his. He had a way with living things; he understood the natural world as well as anyone I’ve ever known.

He practically grew up in the woods of upstate New York, taking every opportunity to hunt, fish and trap just outside the tiny village of Dolgeville, and in the great Adirondack forests nearby. He claimed he often terrorized his mother by standing on tiptoe in a second-floor window to see if the creek was high enough to ensure a good fishing day. Arthur William Millers was the youngest of eight children in a rollicking Lithuanian immigrant family—and the first to earn a college degree.

After wartime service in the Marine Corps, he cashed in his G.I. Bill benefits and enrolled at North Carolina State College (now NCSU), picking a major—forestry—that would take him back to the woods. In 1950, having acquired not only a degree, but a bride, my mother, Lucille Campbell, he found a job with the North Carolina Forest Service.

Daddy eventually transitioned to a desk job in municipal government, and contributed greatly to his chosen community of Hickory over a 27-year career with the City of Hickory. But he was always happiest out tromping through the woods, preferably with fly rod in hand.

I blame my father for my own love of nature, the reason I live in a California canyon populated by rabbits, rattlesnakes and mountain lions, a place vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires, and a place of spectacular natural beauty where I feel truly at home. It was my father, after all, who took Karen and me hiking and fishing all those Sunday afternoons at our grandparents’ farm down in Iredell County, and on summer Saturdays under leafy canopies alongside his favorite Blue Ridge trout streams.

If we managed to hook any keepers, Karen and I liked to watch Daddy clean our catch. He always took a moment to point out the various organs packed together so neatly inside our fish, glistening in healthy shades of pink, red and brown. Sometimes we’d find a golden sac of eggs wedged in there, too. The lesson was clear. Surely there was purpose behind such perfection. A creator behind such a well-drawn creation.

Everything in my father’s world was like that. Everything fit together, ran in cycles, conformed to a pre-ordained order. Tides rose and ebbed; seasons came and went and came again; trees grew in concentric circles that gave away their age and told what kind of weather they’d seen—a fat ring for a rainy year; a skinny ring for a dry one. Animals were born understanding their destiny and equipped to fulfill it. If everything went as planned, each species found its niche, creating a delicate balance. If not, nature had ways of restoring its own equilibrium.

What my father was really teaching us, I discovered much later, was how to live in harmony with nature rather than in defiance of it. Like him, I grew to sense the raw spirituality of the natural world, the primordial ties that bind us as homo sapiens to every other piece of the planetary puzzle. Like him, I came to understand that wonder leads to worship. And worship makes us whole.

The night before Bob and I got married, right here in this sanctuary, Hickory lay in the path of a lunar eclipse. Daddy and I sat side by side on the back steps of the red brick house where Karen and I had grown up and watched the earth’s shadow steal away the moon, hold it hostage for a while, then give it back. I don’t remember for certain now, more than three decades later, but I imagine my father slipped a sermon in there somewhere. Or maybe, by then, my last night of living in his home, he didn’t need to.

Seen or Unseen, Love Is All

For the past several months, I've been busy saying goodbye to two of the most important men in my life. On Jan. 9, my incredible father, Arthur W. Millers, slipped away from this life into the unseen reaches of eternity. And last weekend, March 8, my beloved friend and brother in Christ, Steven C. Collins, joined him there. The services that marked their journeys home could not have been more different--or more joyful. The common denominator here was faith. Faith that this life is only a tiny slice of all that is. Faith that despite all we see and experience to the contrary, beyond our human senses, we exist, now and forever, within a benevolent reality.