Inheritance of Hope - Devotionals
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Intentional Legacy (Part I) - February 2009 PDF print email

All your sons will be taught by the Lord,
and great will be your children’s peace.
Isaiah 54:39

As I raise my children, I have often found comfort in Isaiah 40:11, “He gathers the lambs in His arms and carries them close to His heart; He leads those with young.”  Yes!  I have definitely felt that gentle leading as I have struggled through the marathon of parenthood.  Ashlea, our first child, was not yet two-years-old, and I was pregnant with Luke when Deric and I joined with two other couples to form a small Bible Study group to focus on the spiritual struggles and intentions of raising young children.  We chose as our first study guide a book called Your Heritage: How to Be Intentional About the Legacy You Leave, by J. Otis Ledbetter and Kurt Bruner.  This wonderful book discussed how we all receive a legacy from our parents or from those closest to us during our childhood.  Some legacies are harmful, hurtful and mean.  Others gracefully and fully demonstrate the unconditional love felt for us by our Heavenly Father.  Most, however, are a mixture of both, with parts that have proven to be a tremendous blessing and other parts that we hope will be different when passing a legacy to our own children.  It is our job as parents whose desire it is to raise our children as God would have us raise them to examine our legacy, continue the parts that have brought blessings and create new legacies that share the importance of what we most cherish.

Deric and I were especially blessed to come from two families who both passed beautiful legacies filled with blessings and promise.  As we worked with our friends through Your Heritage we began the intentional process of combining these legacies, supplementing a few additional aspects of our own and eventually creating a legacy uniquely ours to pass to our children.  The key word being intentional.  What struck me the most about this study was the reminder that our efforts to create and gift this legacy to our children must be a very intentional act.  How can they enjoy and understand our traditions if we do not share and explain these traditions?  How can they believe in our beliefs if we do not talk with them and explain our reason for these beliefs?  How can they share our morals if we do not speak with them about and, most importantly, model these morals?

As thought provoking as this process was, it was, of course, only the first step.  The process was meaningless if we failed to take the time to implement our legacy.  As excited as I had become about sharing an intentional legacy with our children, I put only bits and pieces into action.  Much of what we had decided regarding the passing of our legacy I put aside, along with the text we had read and the “Milligan Family Legacy” we had written up and agreed upon.  I believed that the children were yet too young to benefit from my attempting to pass on this legacy, and I thought I had so much time.  How wrong I was!  Yes, my illness did shock me into realizing that we do not have a written guarantee that we will always be available to our children to guide them and encourage them through life.  But I have also come to realize that it is when our children are still quite young that they are most attentive to the legacy we wish to leave.  It is then that they are a willing and captive audience.

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The Road Not Taken (Part II) - January 2009 PDF print email

This month’s devotional is a continuation of what was shared last month. I am pleased to give you an opportunity to read a bit more about the courageous journey of our dear friend, J.P. Mellis, whose hope is always to give all the glory to God. – Kristen Milligan

In Middle School I was taller, stronger and faster than most of the other boys my age. One late August morning in 7th grade physical education class my team embarrassed the other team in a flag football game. The coach followed me home that afternoon to talk with my parents and asked permission for me to join the 7th & 8th grade football team. I did and for the next several years our teams in Middle School and High School either went undefeated or lost only one game per year.

As a 10th grader at the newly-formed Andrews High School in High Point I was not only selected to the varsity football squad, but started both offensively at tight end and defensively at outside linebacker for the entire season. A measure of success and the attention that accompanied it went right to my head. By the time I was 15 years old I was convinced that I was physically ‘invincible’ and could accomplish anything I put my mind to. I wrote several lofty goals and placed them on the board above the desk in my room.

  • Win a North Carolina state football championship
  • Get a scholarship to play NCAA division I football
  • Become an all-american in collegiate football
  • Play professional football in the NFL
  • Be part of a Super Bowl winning team and be named MVP for the game

These were lofty ambitions for a teenage boy that was hardly shaving yet, but I believed with all my heart that I could accomplish every single goal. I was soon to learn one of life’s most profound lessons - that loss and abandonment are very real companions throughout the years.

  • There was the accident as a teen that sent me to a hospital for three months with a broken neck, a severely damaged throat, and ultimately the end of a football career and the dashing of youthful ambitions.
  • There was the death of my father at age 71 from congestive heart failure.
  • There was the sudden, tragic death of my younger sister, Patty, who at age 33 died in childbirth resulting from a condition called “disseminated intravascular coagulation” (‘DIC’) that occurred while Patty was in labor and delivery.
  • There was the early conclusion of our 9-year career as missionaries in Thailand following the diagnosis and treatment of my wife, Cathy, for breast cancer and recurrence of metastatic disease throughout her body.
  • There was Cathy’s death at age 39 from metastatic breast cancer.
  • There was a failed 7-year marriage to Donna ending in divorce.
  • There is my mother’s diagnosis earlier this year with terminal lung cancer.
  • Finally, there is my own sudden, unexpected illness just 4 months ago, first with pneumonia and blood clots in both lungs and right leg, followed by the shocking diagnosis of a rare form of aggressive cancer that is fatal within 12 months for 4 out of 5 patients.

One thing seems sure in life – we keep losing things & people – parents, spouses, siblings, friends, dreams, health, the security of the past. Nothing stays the way it was.

Tomorrow afternoon I will undergo an MRI of my brain. Monday morning I will have a CT scan of my chest, abdomen and urinary tract. Mid-day Monday I will sit before my doctor to learn if there are any new cancerous tumors developing in my body. Monday afternoon I will have 5 hours of chemotherapy – toxins - pumped into my body that will cause me to experience nausea and fatigue. I would be lying to you if I said I don’t have fears or anxiety about these next 2 days - what one simple pronouncement could mean - what it’s like to awaken alone in my bed early in the quiet morning darkness and not be able to get back to sleep. Knowing and walking with God does not exempt any man or woman from normal human responses. I am very human. You are, too.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian in Nazi Germany during WW II. He was imprisoned and ultimately executed at age 39 in a concentration camp just days before the allies defeated the Germans. He wrote a book entitled “The Cost Of Discipleship.” In this book Bonhoeffer wrote the two following sentences. He said,

  • “The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” And then,
  • “The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.”

It is true. When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die, to relinquish all self-sufficiency. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. 25 What good is it for you to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit your very self?”

Before you return to your lives and families let me challenge you first as clearly as I can. In a few minutes some of you will go back to a life where you must deal with the realities of loss and abandonment. Don’t continue to trust your own resources and your own abilities to get you through. You need a Savior; you need Jesus. He died on the cross to procure salvation for you. He rose again from the dead and lives today as the creative, loving Savior who is your hope – your only hope. Jesus stands with you today with loving arms wide open, waiting to embrace you, embrace your hurts, embrace your pain, embrace your failures. He wants to help you build a new life as you surrender to Him and trust Him for any and all needs and challenges facing you just now.

Trust Him today.

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The Road Not Taken (Part I) - December 2008 PDF print email

 

I have shared in past devotionals how God has brought many blessings into my life during our time of trial. I have been particularly blessed by some very special people God has brought into my life during this season. One of those people is J.P. Mellis, a faithful and gentle man of God who has been one of our greatest sources of encouragement and wisdom since meeting him two years ago. J.P. has experienced great loss in his own life, yet he has never faltered in his faith or his consistent devotion to pray for and encourage others. My heart swells with gratitude and thankfulness for this man, and I am thrilled that you too will now have the opportunity during this month’s and next month’s devotional to hear a little of his story and the secret of his enduring strength and joy.

My life has been structured by a series of losses or abandoned dreams. As a boy I was intrigued by Tarzan. He lived in beautiful exotic jungles, played with wild animals and swam all day. Later I wanted to be ‘Superman.’ Loved the cape and the fact that he could fly faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound. I wanted to do that, but no cloth or ‘cape’ I swung around my shoulders or neck ever quite did the trick. Then I was engrossed with ‘Batman,’ the caped-crusader. He had the coolest car I’d ever seen. Dad’s station wagon just didn’t fill the bill. Besides, I couldn’t find a belt that had all the gadgets that his did. One by one, of course, those dreams faded away as I grew older.

How many of you are truly living the life you dreamed of as a youth? All too often we find ourselves abandoned by someone or something we needed or wanted. Relationships sour. Friendships whither. Companies downsize. Accidents and illness happen. We counted on a spouse, a career, or at least our health. Then one day real life happens, things or people are gone, and life will never be the same again.

Our experiences with abandonment and unwanted or unexpected change are crisis moments, moments when you and I must decide whether or not to leave behind the life that is gone forever. We can do that, but only if we believe and embrace the reality and creativity of a personal God, a God who promises to bring both light and beauty to the dark chaos of life’s losses and to the shattered dreams of an aching heart.
I’ve always enjoyed the poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost.

 

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

 

Many know this prose as “the road less traveled,” but as you now know it’s really “the road not taken.” The beginning of the final section – and perhaps the key to the poem – is the first line of the last train that reads, “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.” The poem is infused with an anticipation of regret or remorse. Even as the traveler makes selection of a path to take, he understands that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the road of life, or at least wonder at what is irrevocably lost – that unknowable ‘other path.’ The nature of the decision is such that there is the chosen path and there is the other path. What is sighed for “ages and ages hence” may be wrong decisions, choices along the way that define life’s journey, or, perhaps, the never-ending curiosity about the what the other path would have been like.
I, too, have experienced watershed moments where I pondered such things. Ultimately I found myself face-to-face with crisis – a crisis of faith – and the choice whether or not to believe God, whether or not God is truly trustworthy. Sometimes I struggled with the choice to accept loss and abandonment as an opportunity to trust God with my life. This is the central dynamic of the Christian life. We all struggle at times like this.
Jesus said these words (Luke 9:24-25) “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. 25 What good is it for you to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit your very self?”
There is an interesting, but vital paradox found in these words of Jesus. To save your life, you must first lose it. Face it, we all like to think we’re problem solvers. We can fix anything, take care of any issue, make anything right. We cannot. There are some things in life – especially tough issues involving loss and abandonment – that no matter how capable and talented we may think we are – there are finite limits to our personal resources and abilities. Inevitably, we all come to realize that I can’t do everything. I can’t solve every wrong or injustice. I don’t have all the answers. I need help! I need an answer greater than myself. I need a force more powerful than I am. The truth is, we all need a Savior.
The good news for all of us is that Jesus Christ is the answer, the hope, which we seek. In fact, He is the only hope we have. We must abandon all hopes that we hang on any dream or ambition, any relationship, any job, any vocation. Be sure, it is impossible to follow Jesus and not be led away from something . . . or someone. “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:24)

 

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Helping children who are living with a terminally ill parent - November 2008 PDF print email

Meg Hill has been a bright light in my life since our first days together at Davidson College, more than 15 years ago. I have been enormously blessed to have this beautiful woman as one of my dearest friends … I adore her! But this is not why we asked her to share with you in this month’s devotional. As a gifted and devoted children’s counselor, Meg has graciously agreed to share some thoughts on how to deal with children experiencing hardship or trauma … specifically children living with a terminally ill parent. For me, Meg has been the answer to my most heartfelt prayers, those for my children. She has aided me countless times as I try to navigate both the struggles every parent faces raising children and the additional challenges of doing so with the uncertainties and fears that accompany a parent with a terminal illness. Thank you Meg.


Kids—and sometimes adults—need concrete ideas to help them grasp what is not concrete. For instance, as an Elementary school counselor, when I teach kids about anger, I use the idea of a volcano to describe how angry feelings can build and erupt if people don’t “let off steam.” At the IOH retreat last summer, we used yarn and string to show how webs of worries sometimes get tangled up inside us.


Right now I am leading a group of 6 students who have each experienced a parent’s death within the past year. This week we built a “swamp” to describe how it feels when you are grieving for someone you love. This is a swamp you can’t fly over, you can’t go around; you just have to wade through it. The students marked on butcher paper and used materials such as sand, leaves, sticks, glue, and glitter to demonstrate what grief looks like.

The kids immediately understood what I meant when I said that grief is like a swamp (after I defined the word grief…none of them knew what that word meant). We talked about how some people suddenly find themselves in the swamp and others have some preparation before they get there.

We decided that even though being in the swamp was not fun, that there can be things in the swamp that help you on your journey. The kids built things in the swamp that symbolize their parent who died, like tombstones, urns, and crosses. But they also built beautiful things in the swamp, like islands with buried treasures, flowers, benches to sit on, trees, places to play, and shiny, star-like pools. They put people in the swamp with them, like parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, and friends. We all agreed that it helps to have other people in the swamp with you as long as you have to be there.

When I asked the students if they thought they would ever get out of the swamp, they all said, "Yes." They said that a part of them would always be sad because of their parent had died, but that they would not feel like they were in the swamp forever. They also agreed that their deceased parents were definitely not in the swamp. They were glad to inform me that their parents who had died were in heaven and at peace.


When a parent lives with terminal illness, a family might wade through two swamps. Before the grief swamp, they are in a life swamp, living with illness and hoping for healing…that God will show doctors, family, and friends that He alone gives and takes away life, and that He can heal even when doctors predict He can’t. It’s also preparing for what might happen, talking together about what the doctors have said, crying, making memories, and being thankful for small victories. It’s battling all the inconveniences, sorrows, and fatigue in that swamp with prayers for strength from God.


People who love God have often found themselves in swamps. God does not promise to let us skim over the swamp, remaining dry and clean. God promises he will be with us as we wade. And He promises that we will wade out of the swamp…whether dry land is on earth or in heaven. The following verses give us hope:


“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! O people of Zion, who live in Jerusalem, you will weep no more. How gracious will he be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, you teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. Whether you turn to the right or the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’” -- Isaiah 30:18-21


I pray that we, and our children, will feel God’s presence as we wade through swamps. I pray that we would be encouraged by the friends and family who are wading with us. I pray that we would see Him answering our prayers and hear His voice telling us which way to go. And I pray, Lord, that you would have mercy on us and lead us to dry land. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.
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A Husband's Courage and Grace - October 2008 PDF print email
Deric and I (Kristen) have been greatly touched and blessed by the friendships we gained through the inaugural Inheritance of Hope Family Retreat this past August. Seven families who were strangers before came together to support and love one another, and my heart has been forever changed by each of these precious families. Just as my heart swells with love for these families, my heart now breaks at the loss of Shannon, my beautiful and dear friend whom I met for the first time at that retreat. She and her husband, Tom, have ministered to my soul, and stories of their two precious little boys have made me laugh, even now through my tears. The day of Shannon’s death, on September 30, Tom wrote this letter to the multitudes who serve Shannon and Tom through love and steadfast prayer. Tom graciously gave me permission to share his message with all of you … it shows the beautiful heart of a heartbroken man who continues to praise an almighty God through his words, his courage, and his grace. 

It is with great confidence and strength in our Lord Jesus Christ that I can tell you Shannon has gone home to be with Him. In this time of sorrow we have an even greater hope that we will see Shannon again in a day of joy when she shall have a body that decay cannot touch.

Thank you all for the overwhelming support and prayer through this trying time. There is so much to say that words fail me. And so though we grieve, we do so with great hope. "For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep" (1 Thessalonians 4:14).

I have drawn hope and encouragement from King David's example. In 2 Samuel 12, we read of David praying and fasting as he cried out to God for the life of his sick child. He did this for seven days. And then his child died. Once David realized the child was dead, he stopped praying and fasting and ate a meal. His servants were surprised at his actions. While his child was sick, David fasted, prayed, and wept. Once his child died, David stopped praying and weeping, changed clothes, worshiped God, and ate some food. His sudden change of actions didn't make sense to the servants.

David explained himself: "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, 'Who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that my child may live?' But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Sam. 12:22-23).

David was diligent in his prayers for healing. He wept. He grieved. Once he heard his child was dead, instead of being overcome with grief, he worshiped. He got up and continued life. Though (I am sure) his sorrow was great, he took comfort in the fact that one day he would see his child again.

Shannon has gone to be with Jesus. Though we grieve, for her, death was gain (Phil. 1:21). And so, though we grieve, we like David did for his son, can also worship God in the midst of our grief, looking forward to the day when we are reunited once again.

Tom, for the family

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