135- The Missing Father

Young Teresa asked her mother, “Where did my father go?”

The mother answered, “He’s with Father Jesus.”

“Is he coming back?”

“No, but we will go to him when our Lord Jesus asks for us.”

Two days later, the mother was speaking to a friend and saying, “I’m very sad because I lost my husband.”

The little girl heard her mother and as she remembered what her mother told her about her late father, the girl asked her mother, “If something was lost and then you found where it was; do you still consider it lost?”

The mother responded, “No Teresa!”

The child then said, “You told me that my father went to be with Father Jesus, why do you now say that he was missing as if he was lost?”

This story reminds me of what St. John Chrysostom said when he went to church for a funeral prayer. As he saw that many were weeping, he said to the congregation,

“I am astonished from what I see. Is our faith just a talk?

We desire heaven, but when someone near to our heart goes to heaven, we cry and mourn!”

→ English translation of the story here at St-Takla.org: الأب المفقود.

Grant me O Lord to recognize Your existence.

See Your hand stretched waiting for me,

Unto You I run joyful and with jubilation.

With every soul, which passes on to You, my heart burns with tenderness for You.

I say to the passing soul, “May God who helped You, help me also!”

Speaking to the congregation because of a fatal plague that befell them, saint Cyprian said,

“Thus the heavenly had been prepared to take the place of the earthly!

The great matters in place of nonsense! The eternal instead of the temporal! Therefore what is the reason for worry and fear?

If you are righteous by faith, you live. You rejoice once you get rid of Satan and come close to be with Jesus Christ in paradise!

Through death we reach the harbor, our heavenly home, eternal rest and everlasting life.”

Empty handed

Short Stories (Stories for the Youth) Books by Father Tadros Yacoub Malaty

Because God took him