Jesus Came to My Mother's Funeral

By Shirley Wiggins

“I will not leave you as orphans [comfortless, desolate, bereaved, forlorn, helpless];                I will come [back] to you.”  John 14:18 Amplified Bible.

God’s Word – The Holy Bible – holds many promises, many of them sound almost too good to be true.  But,  that is the Gospel --- the Good News of Jesus Christ; this is truth.

He came to earth to bring God visibly into focus for all who choose to believe Him.  God is wonderfully patient and will work an entire lifetime to allow people to come to the knowledge of Who He is in the reality of life on earth.

In the early pre-dawn hours this morning, I went on a mind-trip with my Lord.

He took me back in memory to many of the times and places where He ‘showed’ me, in many ways, His intervening work and presence in my life.

In the Summer of 1962 – about this time of year, late June, early July – in the middle of yet another most disappointing experience, He brought my  husband-to-be to my door, and so began my future’s unfolding.

I would not graduate from high school as I had dreamed of doing, but I would become the almost-child-bride of the love of my life.  Our first date was on July 15, 1962.

Our wedding date would be June 28, 1963.

That particular Saturday 55 years ago, I had locked myself in the little room behind my parents’ carport and cried and cried and cried, having been told that I would not be enrolling at the local high school that fall as I had dreamed of doing and had planned and worked to make it happen.

MHS administrators had ordered my school records from Fulton County High School in Atlanta, Georgia where I had willingly dropped out of my 10^th grade year to keep my youngest brother while my mother and daddy worked at their jobs.

After we had moved back to our hometown in the late Spring of 1962, my mother had made arrangements for an aunt to keep my baby brother so I could go back to high school.  My daddy said no, financially impossible.

And I cried, and cried and cried.

Years passed and many more tears I would cry privately into my pillow at night.  “You keep track of all my sorrows.  You have collected all my tears in Your bottle.  You have recorded each one in Your book.”  Psalm 56:8 (NLT).

Always, and usually without my conscious awareness,  my Lord intervened for me.  Much happiness, sprinkled intermittently with more tears, came into my life.

My young husband was drafted and shipped out to Viet Nam.  My daddy continued to struggle with substance abuse and deteriorated into an alcoholic.

I responded by   cycling back and forth between anger, fear for my husband’s safety, crushing, heartbreaking loneliness, and more anger toward my daddy, who died in early January 1968.

My husband was sent home from the war some weeks (months?) later.  We would have three wonderful children over the next 10 years.

My mother died rather suddenly,  and completely unexpectedly,  in 1981, while we were living in South Carolina and she in Alabama.

On June 25, 1981,  as we were driving to my childhood church for her funeral soon after she had turned age 54, the Angel of the Lord opened before my eyes this Scripture I later found to be in John 14:1-3 (NKJV):

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me (Jesus).

In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.

I go to prepare a place for you. 

And if I go and prepare a place for you,

I will come again and receive you to Myself;  that where I am, there you may be also.”

In that moment I thought His sole message to me was that He had prepared my mother’s place and had returned for her.

During her funeral as I sat on the front right pew facing the altar where her opened casket stood, I cried and cried and cried.

Then the sense of His presence came to me, picked me up, sat me on His lap as a child would be, and He held me encircled in His warm embrace.

I have no words to describe adequately, or even perhaps accurately, the peace, comfort and pure joy that filled me up – completely.

When the sense of His presence was gone, my smile of perfect contentedness remained on my face, absent any tears.

The tears and the fearful emotions of my feelings would return again and again,  for the next 10 years;  gradually subsiding, becoming less and less frequent and fervent.  My heartache healed and my mourning for my mother ended.

What did not leave me was my growing awareness of His having proven to me the reality of His Being and the truth of His Words, especially this one: 

“I will not leave you as orphans [comfortless, desolate, bereaved, forlorn, helpless]; I will come [back] to you.”  John 14:18 Amp. Bible.

I began to recognize  in the John 14:1-3 Scripture, that Jesus had issued to me my invitation to know Him personally, and that just as I had known since I was a little girl that God was real, I could know Jesus personally.

Ongoing manifestations of His unseen presence, and His power and comfort and care for me continue to bless me,  always at the times that I most need Him.  (John 14:21.)

And so I continue to learn to embrace the reality of the truth of His presence and provision and protection as the years pass.

I treasure His Word, I praise His wonderful Name, and I learn daily to trust His truth as I learn more and more about the process of walking through this life by faith, and not by sight.  His comforts calm me:  body, soul and spirit.                 Psalm 131:2.

I find that I lean more and more heavily dependent upon Him as my  birthdays bring me closer and closer to that day when my physical sight will  become my spiritual reality as He prepares me to look fully into His precious Face.

Oh, the peace that passes understanding and the love that surpasses knowledge!

 “If you really love Me, you will keep (obey) My commands.  And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter (Counselor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, Strengthener, and Standby), that He may remain with you forever – The Spirit of Truth, Whom the world cannot receive (welcome, take to its heart), because it does not see Him or know and recognize Him.  But you know and recognize Him,  for He lives with you [constantly] and will be in you.

I will not leave you as orphans [comfortless, desolate, bereaved, forlorn, helpless];   I will come [back] to you.”      John 14:15-18,  Amplified Bible.

Even so, come Lord Jesus!