The past two weeks or so have been a dizzying whirlwind of events for the family. Basically my grandfather (father's side) suffered a broken hip from a fall at home, which got him warded at CGH for a routine operation. Well, one thing led to another and his heart stopped just a few days before the scheduled operation. While he was revived, certain complications developed/saw a resurgence and six days later (this past Monday), he passed away from aspiration pneumonia.
What we thank God for though, is that just after he took a turn for the worse, he made a conscious decision to finally accept Christ and get baptised, ninety-one years into his life, and just six days before passing away. While i was never close to him, the point that he was first admitted i realised that it could possibly be, to put it rather crudely, 'now or never' for him, so to speak, and so while my prayers for his salvation up till that point had been admittedly particularly sporadic at best, they became, well, far less sporadic.. And praise God, the prayers of us as a Christian family were answered by God in a wonderful, timely way, with us being blessed by many assurances that his decision to accept Christ was not one made in a period of deliriousness (a state which he frequently was in) but a conscious decision in a state of lucidity.
So when all's said and done, while definitely a death is a time to mourn, how wonderful that for us as Christians, it is also a time of rejoicing, for the person who dies is now in a better place, somewhere that I'm sure looking forward to going to. And although for many of us, it's not something that may seem to be coming anytime soon, i suppose that the example of my grandfather, who was stubbornly reluctant to accept Christ until just about the very end, shows that not now does not necessarily mean never eh :)
No comments:
Post a Comment