Last week, my friend said he wanted to understand Parkinson’s spiritually.

I didn’t realize it then, but when we were together this week, I said. “Marc, you already understand Parkinson’s spiritually. It’s in the book.” I opened it and turned to the last chapter. Then I read back to him the words I needed to hear about suffering.

It begins like this: “I get up every morning and thank God for Parkinson’s. I don’t know why God allowed me to have it, but it has changed me. It has certainly humbled me…” And it continues on, a message of truth and wisdom and hope for a grieving, or a seeking heart.

I finished reading, held the book in my lap and asked what his favorite hymn was.

“Oh, he has 100s,” my other friend, his Nancy said and laughed. 

Then he said, “Day by Day”. Then I said,

“I don’t know that one.” 

But I do now. We sang the beautiful hymn three times during my visit. All three verses. Now it’s my new favorite. I can’t stop humming it. Hymns are beautiful things to stay stuck in your head.

When my mom was preparing to go to Jesus, she said, “Get the Plymouth Hymnal.” She wanted to sing to Jesus. When both my parents were waiting for Jesus to come, Marc and Nancy were there, singing hymns with us. So now it’s my turn.

And then he told another story…

“There was a farmer who once came to me,” he said. A farmer? I leaned in closer so I wouldn’t misunderstand a word. “He told me about his children. How they all had stomach issues.”

“What kind of stomach issues?” I asked.

“Appendicitis,” he said. “This man,” Marc added, “had eighteen children.”

Eighteen? Did I hear that correctly? Maybe he said eight…?

“He would hold the child in his arms and carry it down to the barn…”

“To the barn?”

“Yes, nearby or somewhere on the property…”

I imagined the wheat fields, the farmer with the child, weak in his arms, the sweet scent in the breeze, the barn that stored stacks of hay and tractors and saddles for the horses out in the meadow nibbling grass.

“The farmer would hold each of those children in his arms, and he would wait… until Jesus came…for the child. Oh, how that man suffered.”

“Did you know the man?” See, sometimes it’s as if Marc is speaking in parable to make a point. But that was the point, a real man holding a real child waiting for a real Jesus to come and take him Home. Or her.

“Oh, yes,” he said. 

“Did he go to Eastbrook?”  

He nodded. 

We sat still then. Stock-still, as if the breeze in the fields had suddenly ceased with the child’s last breath.

“Marc?” I said, thinking about all the people he had held. All the hospitals, funerals and services, all those he and Nancy have held in their arms, in their prayers and in the singing of hymns, waiting for Jesus to come. “You’re that farmer.”

 

O my people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from of old—what we have heard and known, what our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power, and the wonders he has done. Psalm 78: 1-4.

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Photos: New York Public Library, Racim Amr, Annie Spratt from Unsplash.

Day by Day (and with Each Passing Moment)” is a Christian hymn written in 1865 by Lina Sandell several years after she had witnessed the tragic drowning death of her father. It is a hymn of assurance used in American congregational singing. Sandell-Berg was a prolific Swedish hymn writer.