These are the words that Elder Peggy Cox shared at the memorial service for my dad July 3, 2011. Our thanks to Peggy for her openness and love.
"Robin had a gift of speaking with everyone around him and a gift of listening close enough to hear their need. As he was undergoing cancer treatment at St. Mary’s Medical Center he spoke with many of the other patients there and became aware that many of the people who drove to Walla Walla each day to have treatment chose to drive home in the afternoons only to return the following day because they could not afford the cost of staying in Walla Walla on top of the other costs of the treatment.
He came to the session meeting in November 2009 with a vision for a house that the church owned. He wanted to renovate it and allow patients of the cancer center to stay in it free of charge while they were here for treatments. He knew it would be a huge financial burden lifted from the patients who were generally exhausted and sometimes nauseated after the treatments.
I also knew how important the house would be to other cancer patients and their families, since my sister Pam had spent months in a Ronald McDonald house in Denver in 2008 while her 7 year old daughter Erin underwent cancer treatment for a brain tumor. So I volunteered to help with the renovation.
Judy Holloway and I became the coordinators of the transformation. We were given a budget of $5000 to begin the project. We walked through the house taking notes of the major things that needed accomplished… all the plumbing needs to be replaced, no furnace-existing heaters had mouse nests in them, bathroom walls were rotten, windows need replaced, needs new carpet and linoleum throughout house, needs new kitchen including cabinets and appliances, spiral staircase to attic removed, interior and exterior painted, new back porch including roof, new fence. As we walked back out of the house we did not have a warm fuzzy feeling about making it into a home. It was overwhelming at first for both of us.
But as we began making the calls to have professionals come and look at plumbing, and heating, we were amazed at the excitement and generosity of people to be a part of the project. Robin’s enthusiasm soon spread throughout the congregation. Every time someone else would call us with a donation of another item we needed we just shook our heads in amazement of God’s provision and watched the house being changed before our eyes.
During the time that I was helping with the house, my niece passed away. After a couple months, when I returned to working on the house, I had one of the volunteers tell me that it was good therapy for me to work on the house to help me through the hard time of grieving for Erin. They were right. We knew that the people using the house after completion would be blessed, but little did we realize that each of the volunteers would be blessed as they came to help with the project. The friends we made, the skills we learned, the laughs we shared filled the house with memories.
Robin left for Seattle in August of 2010 to begin his treatment there. Our group continued rain or shine to work diligently on the house. Focused work days brought in more volunteers to help! The volunteers ranged from 9-75 years old. Our goal was to have the house done when he got home in November.
Robin’s treatment plan was changed so he came home in September. He would stop by the house every day for a progress report usually after his treatment at St. Mary’s. There were days that he said he was not feeling very well at all, but he was so excited to see the house taking shape. I looked forward to his daily visits so I could see that he was okay enduring his treatments. If he stopped by and I had already left for the day he would call me at home to check in with me. He enjoyed knowing that yet again he had used his gift of seeing potential in people to grow another Christian leader in our church by watching me work outside my comfort zone on leading this project. He started every conversation with "General Cox", and he left messages on my answering machine addressing me as General Cox. I would only chuckle at his comment.
On October 24, 2010 he dedicated the house now known as the Wasser House and its ministry.
He used the verse from Haggai 2:9 in his sermon in November 7, 2010 -- “The GLORY of this present House will be Greater than the GLORY of the former House, and in this Place I will grant PEACE,” Declares the LORD Almighty."
The next day he came to the Wasser house and said he thought that verse spoke about the house and he wanted it displayed. We printed the verse and had it framed and placed it on the living room wall where it still hangs today.
On November 15, 2010 one year after he came before the session with his vision for the house, we handed over keys to St. Mary’s for the first family to use the house.
Pastor Robin’s prayer for the house was that God would use the beauty, charm and love that transformed the house to encourage and bless the families that will occupy it for years to come and that the guests will feel God’s nearness and find both physical and spiritual healing as they share in life together with us, their neighbors, at College Place Presbyterian Church.
Robin knew he could not take away the pain and heartache of the journey these people were on, but he did know that he could give them a little hope when they needed it by having a place to call their home away from home.
After the house was structurally ready for guests, we began getting furniture donated to fill each room. The end result for the decorating theme was jokingly described as: Egyptian Renaissance. Which is fitting since it truly will be a place and time for renaissance; for revival!
Volunteers from our church came forward who wanted to clean the house on a weekly basis, to meet with the new guests as they came to town for treatment and to make meals or baked goods for the people as they underwent their treatment. Robin’s dream was realized. Robin definitely treated the people as neighbors, checking in with them during treatment or in the evenings. I agree with what the first family said “This house is a blessing. And Robin… he is heaven sent. I think he is an angel in disguise.”
The house has been used on a regular basis since the day we turned over the keys to St. Mary’s in November 2010. The guests have stayed an average of 8 weeks at a time in the house. The third family just finished their treatment and left their “home away from home”.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson describes Robin’s rule for his life:
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Leaving a Legacy
July 3, 2011
College Place, WA
This is the sermon I delivered at my Father's Memorial Service on July 3rd. It was a wonderful day and a beautiful celebration of his life and ministry at the College Place Presbyterian Church for over 30 years. Thank you to all 500+ who attended and for those of you unable to attend, here is a brief sample of some of the wonderful, inspiring words shared in the service.
"Leaving a Legacy"
How can you measure a man’s life? Do you look at his accomplishments? Do you look at his family? What is the legacy he has left behind? My father was a worker. The Peterson family value is hard work. Many families have different ways of enjoying each other’s company… we worked. Hard. Dad even made up a song for us, “Mad dogs and Petersons go out in the midday sun.” Our family bonding took place over sprinkler pipes and broken-down tractors, onion bins and animals. I’m not surprised that God took him home before he was 60. In those few years he did the work of 3 men. One of his favorite sayings was, “A lot of men could, but not many would,” after having accomplished some incredible feat of strength and hard work. He also loved the adage, “Work smarter, not harder”, although he just worked harder anyway. He didn’t look like he could out work everyone in the field, but he did. He was so incredibly strong that we called him the “Incredible Bulk”. He never turned green.
He was always approachable. People were drawn to him. His smile and his manner were welcoming. My Aunt Pat told me a story that people have always treated him this way. Even as a baby, people loved him. Being the youngest of 13 children in North Dakota, there was not a lotof money to go around. So there weren’t many pictures of him, but there were a few. They sent a couple of photos to Aunt Pat who was working in New York as a nurse. She was dating a doctor who didn’t have any siblings and when he saw the picture of dad in a little sideways baseball cap, he asked her if he could have it. He told her he never had a little brother and that was the cutest kid he had ever seen. Aunt Pat said, “Well, I have 9 little brothers, so you can share one of them!” Years later, when she met him again, he still had that picture of dad in his wallet, his little brother. “People always loved him, for his whole life.” Aunt Pat said.
As the youngest, he wanted to be like his older brothers and sisters. They would play school with him and on the first day of first grade he already knew how to read and write, add and subtract and his multiplication tables. He was so bored that while the poor teacher of the one-room schoolhouse was busy teaching the older kids, little Robin was wandering around the classroom visiting his brothers and sisters. She got so frustrated with him that she tied his shoelaces to the chair to keep him in place and instead of staying put; he just took off his shoes. He was sent home with a note and that meant a severe punishment. The solution to the problem was that Grandma took a teaching job in another school and took dad and Aunt Kathy with her. She could teach him whatever he was ready to learn and he would mind her because it was his mother. He was a little spoiled that way. He got his own children’s books. He didn’t have his own new pair of shoes until he was 6 years old, but he had books to read. Grandma always wanted to go to Bible college and was thrilled that finally the last of her children was going to study the Bible.
He loved us. He was our softball coach, our soccer coach, our personal trainer, our mentor. He wanted us to achieve great things. He believed the best in others. He loved sports. He loved music. He loved teams and working together. He loved to tell stories and be the focus of attention. Maybe because he was the youngest of 13 kids, he had to get attention somehow. He loved sports and he supported and encouraged athletes of all ages to do their best and accomplish all they could. He was the self-appointed “chaplain” to the Wa-Hi wrestling team. It was his desire to help young men and women become the strong disciples of Jesus Christ that God desired them to be. He came to faith as a teenager at a Billy Graham crusade in Yakima and it transformed his life. He knew first-hand how important those teenage years can be to spiritual formation. He wasn’t one of those pastors who stayed inside the walls of the church expecting people to come to him. Whether it was at Camp Ghormley as the speaker or at a Blue Devil sporting event, at the hospital or the parts store, he went to where the people were and met them on their terms in their comfort zone and brought Jesus to them.
He lived his life to the fullest. He worked hard, he played hard, and if he ever sat down long enough, he slept hard, too. We have pictures of him holding each one of us kids and the grandkids and while the baby slept, so did he.
He loved the Blues Brothers and would often say, “We’re on a mission from God.” Even when he was in Seattle at the Cancer Care Alliance, he was ministering to the other patients and nurses and doctors there. He gave them bottles of wine and prayed for them. He brought Jesus to the cancer center, too. He had a passion for life and an unyielding faith in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He had a wonderful picture in his bedroom of a young man at the helm of a ship and Jesus Christ looking over his shoulder pointing the way to safety through the storm. This was the model of his life. I brought the picture to his hospital room and hung it on the wall so he would have that constant reminder and comfort that Christ was still guiding and directing and leading him every minute. Even when he suffered, he still reached people in ministry. He wrote his blogs to touch the lives of thousands of people with the saving message of Jesus Christ. He wanted to care for his congregation even in the midst of being absent physically; he was always the spiritual guide of this church. Christ is the head of the church and my father worked as His loving servant to shepherd this flock in their walk with Christ.
When my uncle suffered multiple strokes in January and February, dad wrote these words in his blog:
"Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me; and the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."
"That Jesus willingly went to the cross to conquer death is the rock that anchors my soul.
"Death in Christ is a miraculous and wonderful gift. To claim all the promises of the One who promises to be the Resurrection and the Life gives us a boldness and confidence to "surthrive" even human mortality. But the process of dying still sucks. It often hangs on to the vestiges of when it was the ultimate destiny of humanity and makes the process bitter and trying. Maybe that is part of what being crucified with Christ is all about: to share in physical pain, the loss of control and the releasing of our souls into the Hands of God may have some redemptive value we just can't see. At the end of that journey, however, I do know what awaits those who die in Christ. Twice in my baseball career I have been up to bat in the bottom of the last inning with the game on the line. If I struck out or made an out, we would lose. If I got a hit, particularly a home run, we would win. Miraculously, both times I hit a home run. Each time as I was rounding 2nd base I was suddenly grabbed by the entire team and hoisted on their shoulders and carried to third base and finally home. That is what dying in Christ is like. God's angels come swooping down and carry you home because you have fought the good fight, you have finished the race, you are lifted up on eagle's wings and you go home."
These are my Father’s words of hope and assurance of faith. He wrote these words in the midst of grieving his brother, Tom. I can’t tell you why my dad died. I can’t tell you what went wrong. He had cancer. And cancer sucks. Cancer kills people. Even good people die of cancer. Sometimes God's healing takes the cancer away from the body and other times God heals by taking the body away from the cancer. I can tell you with confidence that God was glorified, even in his death. My father sacrificed his life to love and serve Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. And his last words to us were, “Tell the kids I love them. Tell the church I love them. All to the glory of God.” Even in his dying breath, he glorified God.
He didn’t want to die. He wanted to be here with all of us today. He wanted to blow out 60 candles on his German Chocolate birthday cake.
Even though we don’t understand, even though we shake our fists at heaven and ask, “Why God? Don’t you care that we lost this man that we love? Didn’t you hear our prayers? Don’t you care about us?” God says to us, “My grace is sufficient for you. For my power is made perfect in weakness.” Those words were so important to my dad. He memorized them in Greek for crying out loud! We worship a God who loves us even more than my father did. We worship and serve a God who is holy and perfect. His timing is perfect. His will is made manifest in our lives. God is able to transform what cancer did for evil, God transforms for good.
As most of you know, dad loved the Celtic Women concerts on PBS. His favorite song was “You Raise Me Up”. The day he died, I brought DVDs of the concerts to play in his room and we played them over and over all day long. When he died, the song “You Raise Me Up” came on. It was as though God blessed us with the assurance that He had raised dad up to heaven in that moment. God gave us that blessing and comfort that dad didn’t have to suffer and fight with cancer anymore. He was raised up to a new life in a new resurrection body where there is no pain, or crying or hurt or cancer; where God wipes away every tear.
We miss you, daddy. We love you. But we know that you don’t have to fight any more. And for that, we are grateful. This world is not all there is, and my father has gone home on the shoulders of angels to hear those words we all long for, “well done, good and faithful servant.”
I remember dad saying, “When I die, I want a Dixieland band to play, “When the Saints Go Marching In”, because that day is going to be a celebration. I will be in heaven with Jesus.
College Place, WA
This is the sermon I delivered at my Father's Memorial Service on July 3rd. It was a wonderful day and a beautiful celebration of his life and ministry at the College Place Presbyterian Church for over 30 years. Thank you to all 500+ who attended and for those of you unable to attend, here is a brief sample of some of the wonderful, inspiring words shared in the service.
"Leaving a Legacy"
How can you measure a man’s life? Do you look at his accomplishments? Do you look at his family? What is the legacy he has left behind? My father was a worker. The Peterson family value is hard work. Many families have different ways of enjoying each other’s company… we worked. Hard. Dad even made up a song for us, “Mad dogs and Petersons go out in the midday sun.” Our family bonding took place over sprinkler pipes and broken-down tractors, onion bins and animals. I’m not surprised that God took him home before he was 60. In those few years he did the work of 3 men. One of his favorite sayings was, “A lot of men could, but not many would,” after having accomplished some incredible feat of strength and hard work. He also loved the adage, “Work smarter, not harder”, although he just worked harder anyway. He didn’t look like he could out work everyone in the field, but he did. He was so incredibly strong that we called him the “Incredible Bulk”. He never turned green.
He was always approachable. People were drawn to him. His smile and his manner were welcoming. My Aunt Pat told me a story that people have always treated him this way. Even as a baby, people loved him. Being the youngest of 13 children in North Dakota, there was not a lotof money to go around. So there weren’t many pictures of him, but there were a few. They sent a couple of photos to Aunt Pat who was working in New York as a nurse. She was dating a doctor who didn’t have any siblings and when he saw the picture of dad in a little sideways baseball cap, he asked her if he could have it. He told her he never had a little brother and that was the cutest kid he had ever seen. Aunt Pat said, “Well, I have 9 little brothers, so you can share one of them!” Years later, when she met him again, he still had that picture of dad in his wallet, his little brother. “People always loved him, for his whole life.” Aunt Pat said.
As the youngest, he wanted to be like his older brothers and sisters. They would play school with him and on the first day of first grade he already knew how to read and write, add and subtract and his multiplication tables. He was so bored that while the poor teacher of the one-room schoolhouse was busy teaching the older kids, little Robin was wandering around the classroom visiting his brothers and sisters. She got so frustrated with him that she tied his shoelaces to the chair to keep him in place and instead of staying put; he just took off his shoes. He was sent home with a note and that meant a severe punishment. The solution to the problem was that Grandma took a teaching job in another school and took dad and Aunt Kathy with her. She could teach him whatever he was ready to learn and he would mind her because it was his mother. He was a little spoiled that way. He got his own children’s books. He didn’t have his own new pair of shoes until he was 6 years old, but he had books to read. Grandma always wanted to go to Bible college and was thrilled that finally the last of her children was going to study the Bible.
He loved us. He was our softball coach, our soccer coach, our personal trainer, our mentor. He wanted us to achieve great things. He believed the best in others. He loved sports. He loved music. He loved teams and working together. He loved to tell stories and be the focus of attention. Maybe because he was the youngest of 13 kids, he had to get attention somehow. He loved sports and he supported and encouraged athletes of all ages to do their best and accomplish all they could. He was the self-appointed “chaplain” to the Wa-Hi wrestling team. It was his desire to help young men and women become the strong disciples of Jesus Christ that God desired them to be. He came to faith as a teenager at a Billy Graham crusade in Yakima and it transformed his life. He knew first-hand how important those teenage years can be to spiritual formation. He wasn’t one of those pastors who stayed inside the walls of the church expecting people to come to him. Whether it was at Camp Ghormley as the speaker or at a Blue Devil sporting event, at the hospital or the parts store, he went to where the people were and met them on their terms in their comfort zone and brought Jesus to them.
He lived his life to the fullest. He worked hard, he played hard, and if he ever sat down long enough, he slept hard, too. We have pictures of him holding each one of us kids and the grandkids and while the baby slept, so did he.
He loved the Blues Brothers and would often say, “We’re on a mission from God.” Even when he was in Seattle at the Cancer Care Alliance, he was ministering to the other patients and nurses and doctors there. He gave them bottles of wine and prayed for them. He brought Jesus to the cancer center, too. He had a passion for life and an unyielding faith in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He had a wonderful picture in his bedroom of a young man at the helm of a ship and Jesus Christ looking over his shoulder pointing the way to safety through the storm. This was the model of his life. I brought the picture to his hospital room and hung it on the wall so he would have that constant reminder and comfort that Christ was still guiding and directing and leading him every minute. Even when he suffered, he still reached people in ministry. He wrote his blogs to touch the lives of thousands of people with the saving message of Jesus Christ. He wanted to care for his congregation even in the midst of being absent physically; he was always the spiritual guide of this church. Christ is the head of the church and my father worked as His loving servant to shepherd this flock in their walk with Christ.
When my uncle suffered multiple strokes in January and February, dad wrote these words in his blog:
"Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me; and the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."
"That Jesus willingly went to the cross to conquer death is the rock that anchors my soul.
"Death in Christ is a miraculous and wonderful gift. To claim all the promises of the One who promises to be the Resurrection and the Life gives us a boldness and confidence to "surthrive" even human mortality. But the process of dying still sucks. It often hangs on to the vestiges of when it was the ultimate destiny of humanity and makes the process bitter and trying. Maybe that is part of what being crucified with Christ is all about: to share in physical pain, the loss of control and the releasing of our souls into the Hands of God may have some redemptive value we just can't see. At the end of that journey, however, I do know what awaits those who die in Christ. Twice in my baseball career I have been up to bat in the bottom of the last inning with the game on the line. If I struck out or made an out, we would lose. If I got a hit, particularly a home run, we would win. Miraculously, both times I hit a home run. Each time as I was rounding 2nd base I was suddenly grabbed by the entire team and hoisted on their shoulders and carried to third base and finally home. That is what dying in Christ is like. God's angels come swooping down and carry you home because you have fought the good fight, you have finished the race, you are lifted up on eagle's wings and you go home."
These are my Father’s words of hope and assurance of faith. He wrote these words in the midst of grieving his brother, Tom. I can’t tell you why my dad died. I can’t tell you what went wrong. He had cancer. And cancer sucks. Cancer kills people. Even good people die of cancer. Sometimes God's healing takes the cancer away from the body and other times God heals by taking the body away from the cancer. I can tell you with confidence that God was glorified, even in his death. My father sacrificed his life to love and serve Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. And his last words to us were, “Tell the kids I love them. Tell the church I love them. All to the glory of God.” Even in his dying breath, he glorified God.
He didn’t want to die. He wanted to be here with all of us today. He wanted to blow out 60 candles on his German Chocolate birthday cake.
Even though we don’t understand, even though we shake our fists at heaven and ask, “Why God? Don’t you care that we lost this man that we love? Didn’t you hear our prayers? Don’t you care about us?” God says to us, “My grace is sufficient for you. For my power is made perfect in weakness.” Those words were so important to my dad. He memorized them in Greek for crying out loud! We worship a God who loves us even more than my father did. We worship and serve a God who is holy and perfect. His timing is perfect. His will is made manifest in our lives. God is able to transform what cancer did for evil, God transforms for good.
As most of you know, dad loved the Celtic Women concerts on PBS. His favorite song was “You Raise Me Up”. The day he died, I brought DVDs of the concerts to play in his room and we played them over and over all day long. When he died, the song “You Raise Me Up” came on. It was as though God blessed us with the assurance that He had raised dad up to heaven in that moment. God gave us that blessing and comfort that dad didn’t have to suffer and fight with cancer anymore. He was raised up to a new life in a new resurrection body where there is no pain, or crying or hurt or cancer; where God wipes away every tear.
We miss you, daddy. We love you. But we know that you don’t have to fight any more. And for that, we are grateful. This world is not all there is, and my father has gone home on the shoulders of angels to hear those words we all long for, “well done, good and faithful servant.”
I remember dad saying, “When I die, I want a Dixieland band to play, “When the Saints Go Marching In”, because that day is going to be a celebration. I will be in heaven with Jesus.
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