Saturday, July 25, 2027
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Talking with Mom in her bedroom
When you go to bed, make the sign of the holy cross and say:
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Then kneeling or standing, repeat the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. If you choose, you may also say this little prayer:
I thank You, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your dear Son, that You have graciously kept me this day; and I pray that You would forgive me all my sins where I have done wrong, and graciously keep me this night. For into Your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things. Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me. Amen.
Then go to sleep at once and in good cheer.
Mom, when you prayed this prayer in the bedroom you had been sleeping in since building a new home on the foundation and basement of Dad’s parents’ farmhouse, I loved you so much. You were born before the Great Depression, and your parents’ taught you and sister Mary Lou to pray this prayer way back then. It became as much a part of you as your wedding vows.
You and Dad built that beautiful bedroom (and the rest of the house) in 1975 (I think). You took time to choose carpet that still looks good in 2026. (That’s more than fifty years!) The carpet ran from the family room around the counter into the kitchen, and you protected the beautiful baseboards with your life when anyone vacuumed in there.
John and Dad built a Christmas Declaration Sign out of plywood and painted it brown. It was about two feet tall and thirty-two feet long, and somehow every year they got it wired it to the four white pillars in the front of the house facing Illinois Route 10. Night and day, it shared Dad’s sentiment … two spotlights in the snow …  JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON.
Our lives all took a turn when Dad visited his alma mater for a Kogudus retreat (Kogudus is Estonian for “renewal”), a mostly Lutheran weekend full of music, informal talks about the Apostles’ Creed, the Lutheran eucharist, letters from home, all with farmer friends from home in Lincoln who were completely unaccustomed to this kind of thing … sleeping in a University of Illinois fraternity house, waking up to guitar music and the smell of bacon and eggs … two nights and three days away from the farm, away from the chores, away from the everyday life Dad had been living since his World War II years in the Philippines. No cows to milk, and time in the afternoon to take a nap. Family and friends who weren’t at the retreat wrote love letters to the one who was, and everyone read their letters after lunch on Saturday.
And thereby Dad’s life was transformed. Forever after he invited his wife and sons and daughters and grandkids to retreats like the one that blessed him in Urbana. And for decades he rarely missed a Saturday morning renewal of the vows he took at his first Kogudus retreat.
Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me. Amen.
On the wall where you could see it when you first woke up, a painting first given to Aunt Dena in 1901 when she was just five years old, hung on your wall. Two little nineteenth century cherubs, boy and girl in Victorian playclothes  chasing each other near a cliff, the edge obscured by grass and flowers and weeds. A tall angel all dressed in white, apparently invisible to the kids, kept them safe. They would not be falling from that cliff. And neither would you or Dad.
The painting was on your wall until you died in 2021. Dad’s lungs gave out in 2001, and he spent more of his time in that bed of yours than he wanted to. His active life cutting weeds and planting corn and getting up at 5 and napping in the afternoon for twenty minutes and at last some quiet time in the evening in a wooden rocking chair … kind of disappeared, and he was in bed with oxygen … a lot. We “visited” him in his bedroom and you snapped a picture. And then soon after his 80th birthday, on Thanksgiving of 2002, Dad died.
Now you slept on your side of that same bed, and you slept there for twenty more years. The carpet in the kitchen got vacuumed. You kept on buying a couple quarts of oysters after Thanksgiving, and our Christmas Eve oyster stew and spinach ball dinners kept on keeping on, not always on the ideal day once our family began to spread out … your Christmas shopping trips to Landauer’s and Spurgeon’s in downtown Lincoln continued for awhile. After your sister Mary Lou died, after your friend Everett passed away, after you finally consented to just write checks for Christmas and try hard to get the right checks in the right family envelope … you died too.
But for years before that, your house was full of kids at Christmas. On our Christmas Party Night, always, quietly, grandkids crept away down the carpeted hall to play. Some of us waited to wrap our presents before dinner, and we found a carpeted bedroom somewhere to hide and wrap, hide and wrap. There was carpet on the floor of nearly every room, soft, quiet, sound-dampening carpet.
Sometimes you wandered down the hall by yourself, looking in, smiling your impish teacher’s smile, and then returning to the dining room and family room full of people, sometimes playing the piano, where at last we sat down. Someone read the Christmas story and  there were tons of presents, white elephant gifts galore. And the kids played on.
Everyone left at last, and the house was all-of-a-sudden quiet. You wandered back down the hall, past the wall of family pictures, to your bedroom. Aunt Dena’s painting was still on the wall. The angel looked down on the children, maybe your parents at first, who were born in the 1890’s. Nobody now or then was falling off any cliffs.
Night after night for almost fifty years you slept in that bed, half of that time with Dad, and then so long alone. Accompanied by the angel. Praying the prayers from Luther’s Small Catechism until on one night, at least, a few months before you died, I “tucked you in.” You didn’t want to go to bed yet; you knew I’d be leaving and driving back to Urbana after you were asleep. You got up, peeked out the bedroom door once or twice to see if I had gone.
You were just like my new four-year-old friend Weston, and I guess like every kid, not quite sure whether to succumb to the sweet solitude of sleep when … when … there’s still something going on out there! (Like tonight … it’s 4 AM … and I am enjoying your spiritual company far too much to sleep right now).
But that night I tucked you in, you prayed the prayer, and I wept. Remembering now, I weep again. Angels watching over all of us. Restoration of memories, and they are as real as they can be.
Although they go forth weeping,
carrying the seed to be sown,
They shall come back rejoicing,
Bringin’ in the sheaves.
Good morning, Mom, now it’s 5 AM. Dad is just getting up. It’s good to be with you again. One of these days you will, like Jesus, begin talking back to me. And I will be grateful. And I will love you.
In the morning when you get up, make the sign of the holy cross and say:
In the name of the Father and of the  Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Then, kneeling or standing, repeat the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. If you choose, you may also say this little prayer:
I thank You, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your dear Son, that You have kept me this night from all harm and danger; and I pray that You would keep me this day also from sin and every evil, that all my doings and life may please You. For into Your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things. Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me. Amen.
Then go joyfully to your work, singing a hymn, like that of the Ten Commandments, or whatever your devotion may suggest.
(2 Corinthians 4, Psalm 126, John 15, Matthew 20)
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