Nancy and I often go for walks in our neighborhood. My goal is to walk every day, but some days are ministry rich and leave me with little time to walk. My oncologist, Dr. Heather Cheng, told me on my first or second visit that the one thing that has been proven in multiple studies to fight the kind of cancer I have is rigorous exercise. So, Nancy and I walk. Our new route takes us down through the Olympic College campus, now empty because of the pandemic, then snaking back up through the college, with the last leg down around the Bremerton High School. We catch glimpses of the yet snow-clad Olympics and the quiet waters of the Port Washington Narrows. Today, while walking past some of our favorite flower adorned yards, an old, bedtime prayer from my childhood loosed itself from the basement of my mind and made an appearance on the main floor of my thoughts:

From before my memories began to stick, my mother or father would tuck me into bed at night and pray together with me this familiar prayer. I have joked in the past that, throughout my childhood, my last thought before going to bed each night was that I might die that very night. “No wonder why I have been so messed up,” I would quip, chuckling as I said it. In looking back, it does seem strange from my current vantage point that parents would remind their children each night of the possibility of their impending death. Yet, when seen from history, when it was nearly a miracle to survive childhood, the prayer must have brought much comfort to many a child.

I, too, found comfort in that prayer as a small child. After lights were turned off and doors shut, I would clutch my lamb that, when wound, played, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” resting in the comfort that Jesus would someday—my soul to take.

For now, I am on the winning side of fighting this cancer, and my prayer is to be healed, as the Lord has significantly done twice in my past. Yet, today I am grateful for the thousand or so times Mamma and Daddy prayed that prayer with me. I rest on their voices joining mine, their prayers long since answered, and mine yet to come. Now when I lay me down to sleep, having long ago lost the comfort of a little lamb playing “Twinkle, twinkle little star,” I have the inexpressibly more comforting presence of my wife always by my side. I rest in the Lamb of God, who has taken away all my sin, who keeps my soul. And if I die before I wake, borne on just one of those times asked, I know the Lord my soul to take. Lying in the stillness and loneliness of a boarding school bed late one night so very many years ago, I believed Jesus’ words. He has so lovingly said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” On this night, I lay me down to sleep in perfect peace..