Saying goodbye

Goodbyes can be frightening when they hold the possibility of prolonged separation and being forgotten.

You don’t have to be on your deathbed to feel that.

I can see it already in my two year old grandson, Eli Benson.

I let him drive my car. Don’t worry, he doesn't really drive. But don’t tell him because he thinks he does. Eli meets me at the front door with determined eyes and declares, “Eli drive Poppop’s vroom vroom.”

I stand him in my lap while he leans forward and puts his hands on the wheel. It’s okay, my hands are on the wheel too, and we stay on our quiet, dead end residential road. Our speed limit is 3 m.p.h. For entertainment we like to roll the windows down and turn the volume up on the radio. Then we bee bop to the beat of rock n’roll as we cruise down the road. Jack Kerouac has nothing on us.

Oops, I forgot one important detail.

Eli grins from the car window to his Gigi, Mom and Dad and proudly shouts, “bye,” drawing the word into two syllables, “ba-i.”

He repeats it several times, as if to say, “I’m not kidding. I really am saying good-bye. I’m a big boy now.”

Then it happens.

Eli sticks his head out the window and cranes his neck, peering back as Gigi, Mom and Dad dwindle into specks.

As if the impact of that word, “bye” suddenly dawns on him, he turns to me with furrowed brow and whispers, “Go back.”

It’s the fear of goodbye: He doesn't want to be separated or forgotten.

And neither do you.

Eli doesn't understand we will be reunited in just a few minutes; his concept of time doesn't extend beyond “now.”

We don’t like being apart from those we love, and seeing them recede in the distance brings with it the lonely awareness that a permanent separation is a possibility, if not now---someday.

You want to reach out and take them back in, turn the car around and “go back.”

But goodbyes, as painful as they can be, are also necessary if we are to move on along life’s road.

Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, where I went to college, was a 5 hour drive from my home, Altus, Oklahoma. On those rare occasions when I would come back for the weekend, I would hang around and hang around on Sunday afternoon before finally leaving. Lori, my high school girlfriend, would be there, moping around, daubing her wet eyes. It was like the trail of tears at our house.

On one of those drawn out occasions that lasted half the afternoon, my granddad, perhaps a tad irritated because my failure to exit was cutting into his afternoon nap time, pulled me aside.

“Son,” he said, “just leave.”

I didn't want to hear that, but he was right. Sometimes you just have to leave.

If we never leave, at least for a while, we are apt to miss the challenges that spur us to grow.

As someone said, “He who never leaves home thinks Mama is the only cook.”

And then there is that final goodbye, the one we dread the most. All the others are dress rehearsals for this one. And there is no escaping it.

We’re like the prisoner in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, watching as first the pendulum and then the pit threaten us. Only there is no General Lasalle and the French Army to rescue us.

We are bound to tumble in.

But succumbing to the final goodbye doesn't have to be like descending into a pit or being tortured by a swinging pendulum. It can be a warm welcome from the One who lovingly awaits us there in the Great Beyond.

I’m like Eli; I know very little about what time is, so I too want to “go back,” chaffing at the thought of “goodbye.”

After that last goodbye we are “here,” apart, and then “there,” reunited.

And how long is that, really?

The final goodbye can be the first greeting at the entrance of a joyful Forever.

After all, the origin of the word, “goodbye” is “God be with you.”

And I believe he is.

In each goodbye.

From the one with a child in the car.

To the last one on that road to the Everlasting Tomorrow.

The universal game changer

“I can’t believe they lost,” I moaned after my favorite college football team went down in defeat. “Now they for sure won’t make it to the new four-team playoff system,” I continued to grumble.

Sensing I was descending into a sports fanatic’s funk, my wife suggested we rent an uplifting movie, “Million Dollar Arm.”

Good movie, but it was about baseball, which reminded me that my favorite major league baseball team had been eliminated from the National League Playoff Series earlier in the week.

I was still working through the grieving process.

“Why don’t you go get the mail?” Lori asked. (Yes, I know, she was trying to get me out of the house.)

Bills, bills, political flyer, advertisement, personal letter addressed to Lori and me.

I opened it as I walked back toward the house.

“Just a little note to let you all know how much I appreciate your devotion, service, and prayers for my family and all the families of our church,” the letter began. The writer then shared a Scripture and closed by asking God to bless us.

Simple, to the point, and a game changer for my day.

I immediately thought of something I had read years ago about Dr. R.W. Dale, the nineteenth century Congregational minister in Great Britain.

One day Dale was in the doldrums and couldn't seem to get out from under his dark cloud of gloom, (serious stuff, I’m sure, more weighty than that his favorite sports team had lost a game) so he decided to take a walk.  Along the way, a woman approached him and declared, “God bless you, Dr. Dale.” She quickly told him how his sermons had helped her hundreds of times. And then she slipped away.

The encounter took less than a minute.  But it had a long lasting effect on Dale. He later wrote, “The mist broke, the sunlight came, and I breathed the free air of the mountains of God.”

The psychologist and philosopher William James once wrote, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

When we feel like we are appreciated, we are encouraged. And when we are encouraged, we are more likely to face life boldly.

I like to think of encouragement as the universal game changer.  A game changer changes the way something is done, or made, or perceived. It can change the landscape of a situation. It’s the transformational magic that can take a relationship or situation from average to excellent, from ordinary to extraordinary.

With encouragement, people blossom; without it, they shrivel.

Mark Twain once said he could live for two months on a good compliment.

I've found that when I show my appreciation to others, encouragement, like a boomerang, returns my way.

“What are you grinning about?” Lori asked  as I walked in from getting the mail.

I noticed she automatically returned my smile.

Handing her our letter I said, “My teams may have lost, but this is a game changer for me.”

For at least two months.

The power of words

Paula Deen was in the E!News studio recently, making media rounds to promote the launch of her new subscription based online channel, the Paula Deen Network. It’s been over a year since her multi-million dollar culinary empire came tumbling down after her admission that she used a racial slur 30 years ago.

"They (words) can be very powerful, and they can hurt, no matter how old they are," Deen told E!News.

When Today Show’s Matt Lauer asked her several weeks ago what she had learned from the experience, Deen immediately responded:   “Words are so powerful. They can hurt. They can make people happy. Well, my words hurt people.”

She is right, of course.

The trouble is remembering the lesson she learned.

When it comes to using the wrong words, I’m a repeat offender.

And I make my living from the use of words.

I don’t have room in this column to write about all the times I've said the wrong thing. Saying “I’m sorry, I didn't mean it,” can help but doesn't retrieve words misspoken. Once they’re out, the damage is done.

Someone once said, “Samson killed a thousand men with the jaw bone of an ass. That many sales are killed every day with the same weapon.”

It’s not just sales that are lost because of wrong words. Relationships and reputations can be destroyed by what we say.

We don’t think about what we’re saying until it’s too late. Therein lies the problem.

Cell phones and social media provide us all the more opportunities for miscues in language.

The other day I received a text message from a number I didn't recognize, informing me that one of my parishioners was in the hospital. I happened to be the city where the hospital was located, so I decided to drive downtown to pray for this person. When I arrived at the hospital, patient information did not have the person’s name. I needed the information quickly, so I called whoever it was that had texted me, hoping someone wasn't playing a mean prank on me.

But I accidentally called the wrong number.

A man answered, and I asked if he had sent me a text message.

“What?” he said with a hint of irritation in his voice.

Determined to find out who it was that texted me, I asked, “Has your wife or girlfriend been texting me?”

This was not a wise thing to ask the man.

He proceeded to inform me in no uncertain terms that his wife does not randomly text message men. He hung up before I could say, “I’m sorry, I just wasn't thinking.”

What we say and what people hear are not always the same, even though our intentions may be pure.

A lady once tried to compliment her minister, “Each sermon you preach is not quite as bad as the last one,” she innocently told him.

I saw a YouTube video of a blind person sitting on the sidewalk with a tin cup. Next to him was a sign that read, “I am blind, please help.”

A few people stopped to put some money in the cup.

Then a young lady passed him, read the sign, and like most of the others walked on. But then she came back, picked up his sign, turned it to the back side and wrote something. Suddenly, everyone who passed the blind man stopped and dropped coins in the cup.

What did she write that made such a difference?

“It is a beautiful day, and I can’t see it.”

Same message, just different words.

The more I realize the power in words, the more I think before speaking. And the more I think, the less I speak.

And the fewer times I have to say, “I’m sorry, I didn't mean it.”