A FATHER'S PROFOUND LESSON: THE WAY OF KINDNESS CALLS US TO BE RECEIVABLE

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Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. — MATTHEW 10:40, ESV

For my father's final days, we checked him into a Boston hospice center, referring to it as "palliative care" to mask the gravity of his last home. It was a welcoming room housing a welcoming man, and visitors sensed in this antiseptic environment the purity of my father's affections. As long as he was cogent, he was also kind.

Loving-kindness was my father's greatest way to help others see their greatest yearning: knowing the grace of God the Father. For him, it always began by making himself what he called "receivable." When he went into the receivable mode, he would reach out to others with love that could only be described as divine. That life of being receivable is the starting point for the life of kindness. And as his life flashed before my eyes on that last night, I recalled one of the most profound lessons he ever taught me.

My father lived the receivable life, but he talked to me about it only once. One somewhat ordinary conversation on an early morning walk with him in Bangladesh stands out as that transformative moment when I began to grasp how his acts of being receivable were the first steps toward kindness.

I was researching in Bangladesh for several months when my father visited for a few days, traveling with my mother between missionary stops in Madras and Singapore. I was in my late twenties, ponytailed and single. Each morning before breakfast, he and I descended the staircase from the small flat I leased and stepped onto the streets of Dhaka, one of the world's poorest and most densely populated cities. On our walk we passed half-constructed homes framed by bamboo scaffolding. Dumpsters were permanent, not portable, made of brick and rummaged through simultaneously by dogs and children and widows. Open drains on each side of the street reeked of human waste, and rickshaw peddlers dodged us as we walked our morning route.

For the three or four days we were together, we spent much of our time catching up on all that was happening in each other's lives. He was particularly interested in what I was seeing and observing. This was nothing new.

But one morning our walk seemed different — quieter and more contemplative. As we turned the first corner, he shared with me that five decades after he began his pilgrimage of faith, there was so much about God's wisdom and ways that he still did not know. He held no seminary degree. He never completed college. But as we walked, Hugh Corey — the follower of God — began to share with me what his life in Christ had taught him.

"And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me," he spoke in his native King James language, recounting the words of Christ near the end of Matthew 10, "is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Finally, he camped on the next sentence, the point of his recitation: "He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me."

Then he stopped talking for a few minutes, and I considered the last part of Christ's words my father had just recited: "Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me."

I'm not sure my father grasped the full context of what Jesus was saying in that verse, but I'm certain he did understand what Jesus modeled in the Gospels: a receivable life. Love your enemies. Receive a child in Jesus' name. Pray for those who persecute you. When you're slapped on the cheek, turn the other. Listen to the shunned harlot. Talk to the scorned tax collector. When someone takes your coat, give him your shirt. When someone tells you she wants you to walk a mile with her, walk two.

Whoever receives you receives me. These are the instructions Jesus gave one day to his disciples, prescribing for them what it means to be a faithful follower.

Knowing I was the student that moment as we turned onto the next street, I waited for my father to continue. He told me that in everything he did, he would choose to make himself receivable to the people God placed in his life.

He actually used the word receivable. This was the word that made him tick. I don't know if I've heard other followers of Jesus refer to themselves that way, but the word works for me. My father gave me the vocabulary to articulate his way of life and to help me understand it in mine.

He stopped walking and turned to me. "Barry," he said, "if the lives God intersects with mine don't have the opportunity to receive me, how will they ever know the love God has for them?" I nodded.

What he was saying made sense in light of everything I'd seen him say and do in all our years together. He started walking again, and I fell in beside him.

"I've got to live my life so strangers, friends, aching, lonely, family — they receive me," he said. "And through me they see God's inexhaustible love."

We finished our walk in silence. I knew that although he wanted to share with me his musings as he had so many times before and would do so many times after, this moral was different. It was as if he had traveled halfway around the world just to find me and bequeath a truth. Maybe it was different because I had not heard his voice for many months. Maybe it was different because I was trying to make sense of my life in Christ while I lived among crowds of the world's poorest. Maybe it was different because I was ready to hear what he had to say. Maybe the Holy Spirit was speaking to me through a holy mouthpiece. I don't know.

This I do know: I have gone back to that walk many times. And as I have, I know that God ordained that moment when I would receive a cherished gift. On the fetid streets of Bangladesh — as from the local mosque the muezzin was calling Muslims to prayer — the bedrock of Hugh Corey's Christian faith was...