CHAPTER 22: FLASHBACKS FROM HOSPICE
TWENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, I was sitting by Ma’s hospice bed at Lutheran Hospital. Each night, when I was not on the road as an evangelist to teenagers, I slept on the unfold-into-a-bed hospital chair next to her. Day after day, I held her work-roughened hand and watched her slowly pass into the presence of the Lord. Slowly is the operative word. My family dies hard. It had been almost forty days since she first arrived, but she was still hanging on. But now she had the death rattle, the same one my grandpa had on his death bed so many years ago.
It would be soon.
I heard them coming down the hallway —the family, that is, and I mean all of them. My brother Doug, uncles, aunts, and cousins filled the waiting room, a few at a time cycling into my ma’s hospice room on a steady rotation. They had just gotten back from lunch in the hospital cafeteria.
Once they had adjusted to the reality that my ma was going to die, they started recounting stories, telling jokes, and having a grand old time.
Death was nothing for us, or for my now unconscious ma, to fear. For the Mathias clan, it meant the last stop before heaven on the highway of life. Death was a mere bump in the road. The highway stretched into eternity beyond the bump.
Just a few days earlier, when my ma was still coherent and not in a stupor from the higher and higher levels of pain medications, she had me read her some of the passages from Revelation 21 and 22 over and over again:
I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
These passages had brought her immense comfort.
For five weeks, whenever a new nurse came into our room, Ma would say in her raspy smoker’s voice, “My son’s got something to tell you.” Then Ma would get a great big smile on her face as she listened to me share the gospel with them.
She wanted every one of her nurses to have the same hope that she had. Ma knew that her son was just the one to tell them about Jesus.
But now her smile was gone, and she was about to be gone too.
The nurse on watch was frazzled because my family, although saved, was really, really loud. Not only was their noise level disturbing the other patients, but my uncles had also been going into different rooms sharing the gospel with the other hospice patients.
My uncle Jack sneaked into an elderly Jewish woman’s room and said, “What do you have?”
She answered weakly, “Stage 4 cancer.”
He said, “That’s what my sister’s got two rooms down. She’s goin’ to heaven when she dies, because she’s put her faith in Jesus. Have you?”
This lovely lady said, “I’m Jewish, son.”
Jack just smiled and said, “Jesus was Jewish too. You’re halfway there! Just trust in him now!”
This was normally a place for quiet recollection and grieving, but my large family had turned this hospice into a loud family reunion. When I approached the viscerally frazzled but too-afraid-to-say-anything nurse on duty, I jokingly told her, “Ma’am, I need to warn you.”
“About what?” she said, looking up from her computer, startled.
“The crazy half of my family is about to arrive,” I said. I thought she was going to pass out on the spot. Of course, I was joking. The whole crazy family was there already.
Walking down to the waiting room, I could hear my family telling stories and cracking jokes. Even though the waiting room was another fifty feet down the hall, I could clearly make out every word because of their North Denver volume.
Taking my seat in the Mathias circle, I listened to my uncles tell story after story. Memory lane for my family was full of blood, bruises, and Bibles. And anything but boring.
As I silently listened to them recounting stories, there was one theme underneath them all, one scarlet thread that bound them all together: the blood of Jesus Christ. He was the final story, the ultimate hero, the one “tough enough” to redeem the “crazy brothers.”
Every single one of them.
Inviting me into the storytelling, Bob looked at me and said, “Greg, tell the story about Uncle Richard, that time he came to Grace Church with all of us.”
“Yeah, tell that one!” the other uncles affirmed.
I knew they weren’t asking me to tell the story just for them. This story was really for the cousins who had married into the family and the kids who had been born since, who were gathered in the waiting room.
“Well,” I said, “Uncle Richard had flown into town to see the whole family.”
“Yeah, after he’d gotten the cancer,” Jack interjected.
Before I could commandeer the story back, Bob jumped in. “It broke my heart to see him so frail. He had lost so much weight from the chemo and the cancer that I could pick him up in my arms like he was a little kid.”
“We’d tried to share the gospel with him again and again over the years, and he’d just kept shutting us down,” Jack explained.
“Yeah, that was until we finally got him to agree to go to Greg’s church,” Bob said, smiling at the memory.
It actually wasn’t Greg’s church. It was Grace Church.
Right out of college, my buddy Rick and I had planted a church and called it Grace Church. This was the same Rick who was my friend at Arvada Christian School. The same Rick who attended the Bill Gothard seminar with me.
We called it Grace Church because we’d finally broken free of a lot of the legalism we’d encountered growing up. Both of us had realized that God’s grace isn’t just good for the sinner who believes; it’s good for the believer, too. We were thankful for the passion for evangelism we had encountered in our King James–only, by-the-book, hair-off-the-ears fundamentalist upbringing. But the accompanying lists of dos and don’ts and wills and won’ts had failed. After all, it wasn’t evangelism we were in love with; it was Jesus. He was the reason we shared the gospel. He was the hero of our stories too.
“I thought I was telling this story, not you meatheads,” I interjected. After an awkward pause, there was a collective roar of laughter.
“Go ahead and tell the story then!” Jack said, still laughing.
“So,” I continued, “you guys finally convinced Richard to come to Grace Church so he could hear your little nephew, yours truly, preach.”
“We knew you’d give the gospel,” Uncle Bob interrupted.
“And we had tried again and again to tell Richard ourselves, but he shut us down every time,” Uncle Tommy explained.
“It looked like our church was getting invaded by some biker gang,” I said, jumping back in before they hijacked the story again. “Between the uncles, aunts, and cousins, the Mathiases filled the back two rows of the church. And, as before, Uncle Richard was sitting at the end of the pew, just as he did at Grandpa’s funeral —”
“ —Ready for a quick escape,” Uncle Dave said, interrupting despite my best efforts.
“So, I preached the sermon and got to the gospel and the invitation as quick as I could,” I continued. “All I was thinking about was giving Uncle Richard one last opportunity to believe. I asked everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes. And everyone did.”
“Everyone except us,” Jack interrupted again. “We were peeking through our fingers down the aisle, looking to see if Richard would raise his hand.”
I picked it up from there. “Then I said, ‘If that makes sense and you’re trusting in Jesus and receiving the gift of eternal life through faith for the first time, then raise your hand right now.’ And boom! Uncle Richard raised his hand, and bam! all you guys started bawling.”
“That was one of the best moments of my life,” Jack said. “My brother was saved!” The other uncles nodded their agreement.
“At the airport later that day,” Bob said, “Richard pulled me aside and said, ‘Brother, before I get on this plane to go home, I want you to know something. You’re gonna see me in heaven someday. Today, I trusted in Jesus.’ Although I already knew because I was peeking too when he raised his hand, I just started cryin’ like a baby, and we just hugged each other and cried our eyes out ’cause we knew this would be the last time we’d see each other this side of eternity.”
As I looked around the hospice room at my aunts and uncles, I could see their eyes full of joyful tears. That was the day the last Mathias had fallen. All of us had been transformed by the gospel of grace.
“And in the next three months before he died,” Jack added, “Richard led more people to Jesus than most Christians do in their entire lives.”
“Makin’ up for lost time,” Dave added.
“And soon,” my brother Doug said, breaking his long silence, “Ma’s gonna see him again in heaven.” His cheeks glistened with tears.
“Yup,” I said, unable to hold back my own tears as my sweet wife, Debbie, squeezed my hand comfortingly.
“She’s gonna see Mom and Dad, too!” Uncle Dave said.
Everyone nodded. We all missed Grandma and Grandpa so much. I didn’t know until years later how much of a prayer warrior Grandma had been. Long before Yankee entered our lives, Grandma was desperately pleading with God for the salvation of each of my family members.
“This life we’ve lived,” I said, rising to my feet to go check on Ma, “it’s been a wild ride!”
“D — straight!” Jack said on behalf of the entire family.
As I walked back down the hallway to Ma’s hospice room, my mind scrolled through the wild ride of my life. Those growing-up years were so far in the distant past but so present on my mind. From my long string of near-death experiences, to my soul-rattling personal challenges, to my family’s radical transformation, to my own discovery of my calling and purpose, I was overwhelmed by God’s providence.
With each step down that long hallway, I silently thanked God for the change he’d wrought in me and in my family. He had transformed them all from warriors into, well, warriors for Christ.
Warriors for Christ was the original name of the evangelism training ministry for teenagers I started soon after planting Grace Church with Rick in 1989. My uncles were all, in a very real sense, warriors for Christ. So was Ma. So was Doug. So was I.
Maybe naming the ministry Warriors for Christ was a subconscious shout-out to how the power of the gospel had transformed all of us. Maybe it was a reminder to myself that my enemy, the devil, who came to steal, kill, and destroy, was an enemy I had been, in a sense, flipping off since the third grade. It captured the intensity I felt in my heart about reaching the lost for Christ.
Thankfully, I met Debbie while attending Colorado Christian University. She was just as passionate about Jesus as I was but was polite, proper, kind, and compassionate. She helped me realize that effective evangelism is equal parts relational and relentless. I had the relentless side, and thankfully, she had the relational side. Eventually, we married. Eventually, I changed the name of our ministry from Warriors for Christ to Dare 2 Share. For me, “dare” caught the relentless side of evangelism, and “share” caught the relational side.
As I walked closer to my ma’s room and approached the nurse’s station, I couldn’t help but notice the stressed look on the hospice nurse’s face. It triggered the memories of my own stress years earlier. After planting Grace Church and launching Dare 2 Share, I was stressed too. Over a ten-year stretch, Grace had grown to over a thousand people, and Dare 2 Share weekend conferences had been picking up steam, moving from large churches to small arenas. With increased budgets came increased stress. But I was doing what God had called me to do . . . or so I thought.
Then on April 20, 1999, at 11:21 a.m., two fully armed teenagers walked into Columbine High School and viciously murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
That day shook Denver. That day shook America. That day shook me down to my calling.
There were school shootings before Columbine and after, but somehow this massacre became the terrible yardstick by which every school shooting would be measured.
“Bound for Hell” was all I could think about when I heard what happened at Columbine High School. The news coverage that night showed hundreds upon hundreds of teenagers, after hours of hiding in their classrooms, running out of the school single file in long lines, trying to escape the madness. They had no idea whether the shooters were alive or dead.
As I watched the news footage, I couldn’t help but imagine that dreaded sign on each of their foreheads. I couldn’t help but think of how desperately the next generation needed Jesus to rescue them from sin’s grip and Satan’s clutches.
It was right after the Columbine High School shooting that I began to realize that I was no longer called to be a pastor to adults but a full-time evangelist to teenagers. I knew I wasn’t an apostle, but I also knew that I had an apostolic calling to reach and mobilize the next generation. My calling was to raise up a generation to reach their generation with the power of the gospel, the same gospel that had transformed so many people back at Youth Ranch, the same gospel that had transformed me and my entire family.
Within a few months, I resigned from being a pastor and went full-time into leading Dare 2 Share. Thankfully, Rick became the preaching pastor and continued advancing the gospel at Grace Church. Thankfully, God raised up an amazing woman of God, Debbie Bresina, to lead the team at Dare 2 Share while I led the movement from the road.
As I turned into my ma’s room and took my seat by her side, my eyes filled with thankful tears for all that God had done. Since the decision to resign from Grace Church and focus on Dare 2 Share full-time, hundreds of thousands of teenagers had been equipped to share their faith. A movement was growing. An army of unlikely warriors was rising up to fight for the hearts of their friends against the enemy of their souls.
Just months earlier, while Ma still had enough strength, she came to a Dare 2 Share conference in Denver. She stood in the back of the Pepsi Center and watched in pride as I shook the pulpit once again. God was using her son to rescue teenagers from the sin and shame that she had struggled with for much of her life.
Ma was proud of me, and that was enough.
As I looked at her lying there, struggling to breathe because of her advanced lung cancer, my heart was full of a strange combination of grief and gratitude.
I was grieving because I knew her time was short. I was grateful that she never knew that I knew that she’d almost aborted me. She never knew that Grandma had told me all about it at her kitchen table so many years ago. I never brought it up, because I didn’t want her to know that I knew. It would only have triggered pain and shame in her already sin-scarred soul.
She also never knew that just two years earlier I had received an email from someone who asked, “Is your dad’s name Toney Woods? If so, I think I’m your sister.” This sister I had never met had been tipped off by Tess, Toney’s sister-in-law. Tess was the only one in the whole family who not only knew about Toney’s short-term tryst with my ma but also knew about my existence. Tess was the one who had told me the basic facts about my biological father when my ma took me to meet her so many years ago, a night that spun my world like the other kid had been spinning those weighted socks.
I “happened” to get that email three days before I was flying to preach in Sacramento for the first time in my life. This “happened” to be where my family, the family I never knew existed, lived.
Over email we set plans to meet for dinner. Meeting my “other family” was surreal for me and for them. Attending the dinner that night were Marilyn, my sister; Toney Jr., my brother; a niece named Krysta; and, most awkward of all, Barbara —Marilyn’s mother. Toney Jr, like me, had a different mother as well. My other sister, Melody, lived in Seattle at the time and was unable to attend.
Marilyn was ten years older than me, Melody was eight years older than me, and Toney Jr. was five years younger than me. While everyone knew about Toney Jr.’s mom (she and Toney had been married), nobody in the family except Tess knew about me. Ma was “the other woman,” the one in between Toney’s two marriages. But thankfully, after decades of hiding Toney’s secret, Aunt Tess accidentally spilled the beans about me and Ma at a family reunion.
It was at that dinner that not only did I get to know my other family, but I learned all sorts of new insights about my father, Toney. I discovered how much of a war hero he really had been. I discovered that, before he was in the army, he, too, was a preacher. That’s right. Preaching was in my blood. I discovered how he lived and how he died (heart complications).
At first, when we all met in Sacramento for dinner, Toney’s wife, Barbara, didn’t believe I was Toney’s son. She sat in silence as everyone else talked.
That night was full of laughter and tears, stories and recollections, memories and magic. But all through dinner, Barbara sat staring at me in silence.
When we all stood up to say goodbye, Barbara walked around the table and came right up to me. She put her hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes, and said, “I didn’t think you were Toney’s son at first. I didn’t think Toney would do this to me or to us. But now, after seeing you and hearing you, I know you’re Toney’s son. I can see him in you. Toney was a hero on the battlefield in North Korea, but he had his struggles back home. I can see glimpses of heroism in you, but in a different way. My prayer is that you are not only a hero on the battlefield of your ministry, but also a hero to your wife and kids.” With that we collapsed into each other’s arms in the restaurant and wept.
What a crazy, eye-opening, and emotional night that was.
Ma didn’t know about that dinner meeting because I didn’t want her to know. Her knowing that I had met my “other family” and was secretly keeping in contact with them would only hurt her feelings. I kept it from her because I loved her.
Taking my ma’s strong hand into my own in that hospice room, my tears began to overflow their banks. My ma was about to fully realize the love that the Father had for her. Ma was about to have every last vestige of shame she ever felt stripped away in exchange for a robe of righteousness.
There, sitting next to my ma, tears streaming down my face, I was reminded that the gospel changes everything. It changed my uncles, aunts, and cousins. It changed my brother. It changed my ma.
And it changed me.
My identity was not as a fatherless kid in an earthly family; it was as an adopted child in God’s. My purpose was not to fight or flex or prove my manhood; it was to mobilize a generation for Jesus. My hope was not in earning anyone’s approval, even my ma’s, but in basking in the love of Jesus, who gave his life for me.
In that moment, holding my ma’s hands for one of the last times, I recommitted myself to the mission to mobilize a generation with that same message of redemption, hope, and love that had transformed our tribe. I wouldn’t stop until every teen everywhere had every last chance to believe in Jesus. By God’s grace, I wouldn’t stop until I collapsed into the arms of Jesus on the other side of eternity, until I heard “well done” from the one dad who would never leave me or forsake me.
Little did I know that the wild ride was just getting started.