Forty years ago today, September 3, 1983, my mother, Della Mildred Hendrickson Caneday, passed away. At the time, I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In late August 1983, I received word from Dad that Mother had just a few days to live. I expected that I would not be able to get home to see Mother before she died because of the driving distance. I had to resign myself to the thought that the last time I saw her was now past when I saw her earlier in the summer. So, on August 29, I wrote Mother a three-page letter, which Dad would read to her. Of course, the letter was of a personal nature, fitting for a young, appreciative but sorrowing man to his mother. Here is one brief excerpt from the letter.

We, both Lois and I, appreciate your oft-repeated prayers for us and for our two boys. Both John and David have fond memories of visits to the farm. They have been praying for you regularly throughout your struggles with cancer. We have taken the occasion to give them instruction from Scripture on the distress that the righteous endure in this world, the death that comes to them as well as to the wicked, and the glorious hope of the resurrection.

I offered words of consolation to Mother. I quoted two great hymns from the Trinity Hymnal: (1) “Jesus, they Blood and Righteousness” by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, and (2) “When This Passing World is Done” by Robert Murray M’Cheyne. The former of these two was sung at Mother’s funeral by one of my cousins and his wife, whose tenor and alto voices harmonized beautifully. Then, I closed the letter with the following paragraph.

May the God of all consolation grant unto you the patient endurance and faithfulness that is necessary in the hour of your great need. Our prayers have been continually with you, night and day, and they remain with you as you contemplate your near departure. The day of resurrection beams brightly upon the horizon. Praise God that there is a reunion in sight for all those who love His appearing. Hold fast to Christ Jesus, who alone is your righteousness, and He will give to you the crown of righteousness, which He will award to “all who have longed for his appearing.”

Meanwhile, when I folded the letter, placed it in an envelope, and mailed it, I did not know that an application I had submitted to Bethlehem Baptist Church of Minneapolis several weeks earlier would trigger events that would put me in Minnesota within a couple of days. The church had advertised a new position was opening. I received a call from the church requesting that I make an impromptu trip to Minneapolis for a series of interviews. So, I quickly arranged to make the journey. I arrived at MSP Airport, where John Piper, little known at the time, met me and brought me to the old Curtis Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, where I would stay for two nights. I spent the next two days, September 1-2, in numerous interviews.

Truly, as William Cowper’s hymn affirms, “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” John Piper and the folks at Bethlehem Baptist Church had no knowledge that God was working behind the scenes, prompting them to call me for interviews so that I could be in Minnesota at Mother’s bedside as she breathed her last. No, the position for which I interviewed was not offered to me. In fact, before the series of interviews concluded, John Piper let me know that the church would likely suspend its plan for the new position because an associate pastor had just submitted his resignation. So, they would be filling that position first, which the church did. Though I believe my demeanor did not disclose it, throughout the interview process, it seemed evident to me that the Lord was pleased to appoint a battery of interviews for a possible ministerial call to bring me one last time to Mother’s side to minister grace to her with Dad and three of my siblings as she passed from this realm into the presence of her Lord.

When I booked my flight from Grand Rapids to Minneapolis, I scheduled a few extra days following my battery of interviews with the hope of seeing Mother one more time. So, after my rigorous schedule of interviews was completed, my sister, a nurse who was a member of Bethlehem Baptist Church, picked me up, and together, we traveled to our childhood home in Taylors Falls, Minnesota, to spend the weekend with Dad and Mother. When we arrived on September 2, my oldest brother’s birthday, which passed without proper notice, Mother was lucid but obviously moving steadily toward death. Calls were made to our other two brothers, one in Texas and one in Oklahoma, urging them to come home promptly, if possible, to see Mother alive but certainly for a funeral in a few days.

We spent our time with Mother in the living room where her hospital bed was situated. Throughout the night, all five of us—Dad, my sister, my brother, and his wife—kept vigil. We gathered around Mother, singing hymns, reading Scripture, and praying. Few things can unify or divide a family, like the imminent passing of a loved one. Unity and harmony were evident even in the parts our voices took while singing. We took turns slipping off to bed to catch a few moments of sleep. We each returned to Mother’s bedside, surprised but grateful to find her still present with us.

As I stood beside Mother’s bed, the most important event in the whole world was transpiring before my eyes. Yet, outside the homestead, the world continued on its course, oblivious to the momentous event we were experiencing. Never had I felt so alone, so helpless, so aware that I also had doubtless passed by homes where loved ones were on the verge of leaving this life while others kept vigil.

Darkness passed. Morning dawned. Mother was still with us but fading. We were grateful when my brother and his family from Oklahoma arrived after driving through the night. We were all present when Mother, awake and speaking softly, gasped her final breath. Then, whatever tears remained flowed freely. My sister’s nursing skills took charge. She had dealt with the passing of many patients, so she mindfully addressed the needs of the moment and prepared Mother’s body for the mortician’s arrival.

Twenty minutes after Mother passed away, my youngest brother and his wife arrived from Texas after driving throughout the night. They found Mother’s body still lying on her death bed since the mortician had not yet arrived. They had news they had hoped to share with Mother before she died, but alas, that was not to be. Their news? They were expecting their first child. Such is life in this sin-blighted world. Death’s sorrows and the delights of anticipated birth and a passing birthday commingle inseparably.

Missing from the family were my wife and two sons. Lois had to pack for the three of them, make flight arrangements, and travel to Minnesota on her own. I had to change my flight home to coordinate with my family’s flights. Such mundanity intruded, reminding me that the world’s course continues without pausing even for a second to take notice of the passing of a great woman, my Mother.

Little did I know that September 3, 1983, was but the beginning of a year filled with repeated sorrows. Christmas 1983 would be the last one spent with my wife’s dad and mother. Within a period of ten months, our two young sons, five and three at the time of my mother’s death, would lose three of their grandparents. Life’s traumas of that year had a profound impact on me and my family. Many years later, I recounted it in an article titled, “‘Everything Is Vapor’: Grasping for Meaning Under the Sun,” published in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (2011). Here is the pertinent portion.

Nearly three full decades ago, a young ministry intern with his wife and two sons sustained waves of setbacks, afflictions, and anguish compressed in a few short years, sufficient for a lifetime. Life’s storms pounded with incessant breakers. Economic stagflation depleted resources. Sudden unemployment taxed ingenuity. Petty pastoral jealousy thwarted vocational pursuits. Debilitating rheumatic fever with complications panged the body. Six hundred miles separated the young family from three parents/grandparents who suffered irreversible diseases that would terminate in untimely deaths. Infrequent long drives for brief visits had to suffice. Three funerals to mourn departed loved ones took place in less than a year. Acquaintances rebuffed lamentations of grief with trite consolation as they mouthed the familiar verse: “All things work together for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28). Discomfited, friends pulled away. Aloneness intensified grief and affliction. Desire to reinvigorate vocational pursuits required a cross-country move. A home sale incurred financial loss. Living on a shoestring too short failed to make ends meet.

To this Christian man, others seemed either oblivious to suffering or ill at ease and quick to suppress the grief of those who suffered. He wondered to what extent he had behaved the same way toward others until waves of grief broke over him, transforming his perspective. Early during those turbulent years, with sensibilities rubbed raw by suffering, these acute travails drew him to Ecclesiastes to seek and to understand Qoheleth’s counsel that he might anchor his faith in God’s wisdom so that he could provide spiritual stability for his young family. This turn to Ecclesiastes came because a brief portion read in J. I. Packer’s Knowing God some years earlier stuck in his memory. Packer offers a three-paragraph summary of the message of Ecclesiastes, the gist being,

the real basis of wisdom is a frank acknowledgment that this world’s course is enigmatic, that much of what happens is quite inexplicable to us, and that most occurrences “under the sun” bear no outward sign of a rational, moral God ordering them at all…. The God who rules it hides Himself. Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it. Rarely does it appear that there is a rational power behind it at all.

(Knowing God, 94)

What Packer states intrigued that young man, for it seemed so right. Yet, as the young seminary graduate plunged deeply into reading Ecclesiastes and researching the scholars, he found that Packer stood almost alone.

He came to realize that Packer rightly understood Ecclesiastes, that true wisdom acknowledges that grasping what takes place under the sun leaves one with a handful of air. All is vapor. Endeavoring to comprehend all that God does under heaven is alluring but elusive. Such comprehension dissipates like vapor or eludes like a butterfly. The more one chases it, the more it flies away, escaping one’s grasp. If efforts to grasp all that God is doing under the sun is as substantive as grasping air, true wisdom takes the posture of self-abasement before God who is in heaven (5:1ff) and contentment to accept what God ordains as fitting.

Forty years later, all that I have rehearsed above remains vividly and indelibly imprinted on my memory. The Lord has blessed me richly throughout these forty years, not the least of which is that I have seen three more birthdays than Mother did.