Revelation 13:10

Some Thoughts on the Call of God to Candy and Chet's Mom, Dorothy J. DuPont, 1937-2013

When Mom died last Tuesday it hit us all very hard. She had been sick so often over the last thirty years and had recovered every time. It was a surprise when her time actually came. Mom was called home.

During the last months of her life I was thinking about a verse from the last book of the Bible every time I prayed for her: "Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints." (Revelation 13:10)

When I think of the word call as we most commonly use it, I think of a telephone call. Candy talked to Mom once or twice a day. She is going to miss those calls very much.

Imagine a world before all our communication devices. If you wanted to hear a call you had to be near enough to a person to hear her voice with your ears.

During the last two days I have had this image in my mind of a couple of young kids playing in the woods. They both are headed to some higher point, but the way there is not all that clear.

One of them runs ahead and calls to the other, "This is the way! Come on up!" It still might be hard for the person who heard that call to discern the right path, but that voice would be a great encouragement that there was a way to go that would lead to higher ground.

When Mom talked about her faith over the years, that talk became increasingly earnest. Candy and Chet were talking with her last Monday when she woke up in the Emergency Room of Danbury Hospital. She was deeply disappointed to be in a hospital bed and not in heaven. She wanted to go. The very next day she reached the higher ground that she was longing for.

Mom learned her faith first from her own mother, Gram Hillard. I have no doubt that Gram learned her faith from her revered mother who was known as Mim. Along the way of life Mom learned more about Jesus Christ. She faced very difficult trials involving her health and life. When she stumbled, she somehow got up again, and through those struggles she saw the Lord more clearly, and she prayed.

The reason I prayed about Mom in connection with Revelation 13:10 was that I wanted her to be able to endure through this last part of her life as a woman of faith, like her mother and grandmother before her. The call of this verse is not a call to die, but a call to live, even through the most difficult times.

Endurance is admirable. This is what we need in this world that has so much sorrow. We need to stay in the faith and to keep on moving up to higher ground. What Mom increasingly saw was that the call that she heard from her mother and grandmother was the call of God in her life through Jesus Christ.

Dorothy DuPont was called to life by God. You could see it more and more clearly at the end of her life. She was stretching toward heaven in her spirit even though her body was failing. The journey of her soul was upward.

There was a second passage I wrote down and gave to Mom in addition to Revelation 13:10. This one came from Philippians 3:13-14. “... forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

May God use this wonderful woman's life and death as a testimony that calls us to a better world.