" I Want to Talk to God ! "
The heart-wrenching cry of the elderly man rolled across the hospital room: “I want to talk to God”. Looking on the emaciated, eighty-five-pound body, his daughter held a hand she didn’t remember having held before. “Go ahead, talk to God, you can talk to Him through Jesus.” She began to pray to open up the way of communication between her dying father and his Creator. All his life, God had been a far away figure. Oh, he had known the ritualistic theology. His belief in God was a twisted trust and mistrust of priests and religion, Jesus Christ and UFOs. His “bible” had been the Blue Book. Twenty seven years had not erased the picture, in her mind, of her father in the 60s speaking so enthusiastically about UFOs. His inquisitive fascination with the mystics of the Incas and the search for Mew and Atlantis and inter-terrestrial connections, seemed to linger before her as if it was just yesterday. All of these beliefs clearly re-confirmed in the past year during her four visits to the lonely little house he had built, with his own fragile hands, in the woods of Frontenac county. This was Saturday evening. The doctors had declared the previous Tuesday night his last. But, a week prior, on hearing of the sudden illness of her father, Diane had immediately contacted some local Christian pastors to visit the dying man at the Ottawa hospital. She sent a mailing to all her contacts in the Christian community at home in Toronto, and asked for their fervent prayers. On the Wednesday morning, a chaplain who kept her informed of her father’s health called her at work. “He’s had a good night sleep. He seems to be doing better today.” Later that night, another phone call came to her home; this one told her what had happened the night before —the night that had been declared his last by the medical officials. On that Tuesday evening, two fervent Christian brothers who had been contacted through the prayer network some days earlier, were led of the Spirit of God to his bedside. As the dying man was in a coma, drifting closer and closer towards death, they began to pray. The prayers intensified as they lifted their voices, their hearts weighing under the burden of the critical moment. So intense and loud was the intercession that some of the visitors were offended and verbalized their disappreciation and “concern” about “waking him up”. It wasn’t until the daughter’s visit, on the following Saturday, that another link of the chain of events was revealed. Shortly after her arrival in the hospital room, on that cold sunny December day, she began to read the story of Christmas from the book of Mark. Out of respect, she gave a few moments of silence after each chapter for her listening father to speak, should he not want her to go on. Often, she thought her reading might be ignored by her father in his still quietness; but with each pause, his urging to continue confirmed the hunger in his heart to hear the Word of God. Someone had visited him earlier that day and had promised to bring him back “holy water” on his next visit. Excitedly, Diane hastened to read him the passage in the Bible about the “living water” that is Jesus, explaining that nothing else is needed — just Him. Then she turned to the Psalms. He stopped her when she read the scripture about “the pains of hell”. A loud, desperate cry, “Oh, yes” brought on the conviction that he spoke from experience. It was a cry resounding to the depth of her soul. In her spirit’s eyes she saw her father being literally scooped out of hell that previous Tuesday evening when the two God-sent men prayed so intensely. Now, in the last moments of his life, the elderly man had a painful recognition of the possible reality of God and his need for Salvation. Seven years earlier, Diane had come to know God in the person of Jesus Christ; she had been praying for her father, and the rest of her family. For the past three years, God had been stirring her to look up this man she had removed from her life. This man who, when she was fourteen, had broken up her family in such a painful and dramatic way. This man who had left her childhood memories scarred with meaningless sketches and silhouettes. Here she was, by his bedside, in the final hours of his life. She stopped praying for a moment, to let the seventy-year-old man talk. “Keep praying, keep praying” his unrelented cries prompted her. With a desperate, tearing voice, his face lifted upwards as far as his frail, bed-ridden body could allow, he began to pour out words and sentences. Clenching his daughter’s hand, his mumbled cries continued flowing to heaven, recognized and understood only by His Creator. He was talking to God. The bellowing stream of words returned to quietness after a few minutes, leaving the weak man exhausted on his hospital bed. “Are you tired?” He nodded. Drifting further into sleep, he softly said, “I want to go to sleep”. She left him relunctantly to begin the long drive from Ottawa to Toronto to return home. She felt his end was so near. At the same time, she knew that God could heal her father. She was expecting a resurrection from his sick bed. Back in Toronto, she asked the Lord to show her the work He was doing. She asked God to direct her to a church that would preach the power of the resurrection that Sunday morning. She and her husband drove to their usual church and as they sat in their usual pew, Diane felt that something wasn’t right. In her heart, she sensed the Spirit of God telling her that this wasn’t the place He wanted her to be. In spite of the time to the service running out, they left and followed the leading of the Spirit to another church some fifteen minutes away. To her excitement, the strong message of the resurrection was being preached. Not a resurrection from physical sickness in this life, but a powerful resurrection from this life to another of eternal glory. She knew then that her father would be all right. That Saturday afternoon when she had left him at the hospital was the last time she had seen her father until the funeral day. Only then, did she hear the rest of the story — the part that made all the travailing, exhausting prayers worthwhile. She heard that the day after “resurrection Sunday”, the day her father passed away, he had awaken feeling better. He ate breakfast and talked about different things. “He had color”, someone said. “He was a different man”. She knew without a doubt that her father had been saved. The resurrection the Lord spoke to her about that Sunday was the resurrection into a safe eternity — the seal of God’s faithfulness given to her by God Himself. At the very last moment of his life, her father was prayed through the pearly gates of heaven! And he made it right with God by accepting Salvation through Christ, the only Way to the Father and to heaven. Jesus said no-one comes to the Father but by Me. (John 14:6) A personal note from Dr. Diane: This man was my father. And this situation was too close for comfort. Some say, "Not now, when I'm good and ready, I'll come to God". Looking back on my father's narrow escape from eternal death at the age of seventy years old, it came to me that each one of us, on this earth, has a certain percent chance (or opportunity), throughout our lifetime, to get saved. Taking out any premature death by whatever means and based on the average lifespan of the human being as being seventy years, and considering the fact that man needs only to make a choice for salvation, I calculated the lifetime opportunity of mankind for Salvation to be as follows: At birth man has 100% opportunity for salvation, ahead of him. This percent drops to 50% at the age of 35. At 50 years old, 29% is left. At 60, only a 15% chance hangs in the balance between an eternity spent in hell or in heaven. At 65, a narrow 7% is left. That is the same as saying that you have a 7% chance of surviving an operation or of getting well from an illness. At 69 years of age, only 1% remains. At seventy, 0. That's how close my father was -- on the very edge of being lost forever into the unquenching flames of hell. There is a story of a man who stopped his car, on his way home one night, to pick up a drunk lying on the side of the road. The man brought the fellow to his home, cleaned him up and put him in a warm bed for the night. In the morning, he fed him breakfast and kept him in his home further, until he was fully restored.Some months later, the same individual was caught by the authorities for stealing. He appeared in court and the Judge pronounced the due sentence upon him. "But Judge", the criminal cried out, “don’t you remember me? You picked me up one night and brough me to your home and helped me and restored me.” The Judge looked at him and replied, “I was your saviour then — now I must be your judge.” So, don't be caught unaware. Jesus is there right now as your Saviour with wide open arms to take you in. Just like the thief on the cross next to Him who beleived on Him and said, "Lord remember me when you are in Paradise." Jesus knowing his heart that he was sincere said, "Today, you will be with me in Paradise." /dmh End of this article "I Want to Talk to God"
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