A recent photo of my mom and dad taken by Tanya
“Therefore then, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [who have borne testimony to the Truth]…let us run with patient endurance and steady and active persistence the appointed course of the race that is set before us”. (Hebrews 12:1 – Amplified Bible)
At shortly after midnight this morning, April 18, 2013, my father, Alvin Frey graduated from this life to the next. As someone has put it : “He is now among the living. We who remain are among the dying.”
On Sunday morning dad had stood up at the end of the church service in Landmark Christian Fellowship where they attend, and had begun to give a prophetic exhortation as he often did to the Church. At this point he apparently went into ventricular fibrillation and collapsed. There was a police officer in attendance who immediately began administering CPR until the emergency response team arrived. Dad was rushed into the hospital and did have an apparent recovery on Monday. An echo showed that his heart had not deteriorated too much since last year – now being somewhere between 10% to 15% of normal output, approximately where it had been last year. But by Tuesday he was doing progressively worse. His decline continued, and he passed away last night due to associated complications.
Theresa and I are currently in Nebraska after having driven straight through from the Mexico border – a 23 hour drive. We arrived at Theresa’s mom’s place at around 5:00 am this morning and grabbed about four hours of sleep. We still have another twelve hour drive ahead of us. Theresa will visit with her mother today, I will sleep, and then we hope to leave tonight and drive through to Manitoba in order to arrive in the morning to be there with family.
Hopefully the weather will cooperate a little better than yesterday when we drove through a narrow corridor of hurricane alley in Oklahoma where tornados and extreme storms were tearing up carnage all around us to the north, south, east, and west as we drove through heavy rains up the middle. Reports were coming in of baseball and tennis ball sized hail falling in some of the area along with funnel clouds touching here and there around the state. Then, somewhere around midnight we hit heavy blizzard and blowing white-out conditions in central Nebraska.
Today the bulk of the storms seem to be heading north east and it is warming up and drying off here. The Lord willing we will be able to safely leave tonight for the last leg of the journey.
A giant has gone home. As Paul said in Hebrews 12: “We are surrounded by [a] great cloud of witnesses [who have borne testimony to the Truth]”. My father is now among them.
Please remember those of us who are left behind; especially my mother. We do not grieve as those who have no hope – far to the contrary – we know that he is truly among the living now. Nonetheless, we do grieve.
My dad was a great man who has touched many lives. His wisdom, gentleness, and humble godliness has spoken volumes to many.
“My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel! (2 Kings 2:12 – NIV)
