Yesterday, Friday, we celebrated the homegoing of my 101-year-old mother, Sonia Delaina,

with the memorial service. It was just a small gathering that we came together, and it was a joy that even though I realized her life that we celebrated, that she lived a hundred and one year,

just a few months short of 102, it's amazing that grief still accompanies loss, even to have my mom

for many, sometimes really just for many more years that many people sitting here haven't had their parents.

And then it hit me. One of those things that hit me very deeply on Friday night was the thought of being an orphan.

Even at 60 years old, I realized I'm an orphan now. I have no more parents.

Three times in my life, I faced a difficult

moment. And I remember being on the phone with my father and my mother as I was expressing to them

what I was faced with. And I remember hearing these words from my parents. And it were these words,

just come home. Just come home.

And to not have those people on the other end to call me home has left a little bit of a blank

spot, left a little bit of a hollow place in my heart. It was the great classic Christian writer, C.S. Luce, you said this.

He says, the death of a beloved one is really like an amputation.

It's those amputees that talk about sometimes ghost limbs, that you feel like it's there.

And sometimes you do, you feel like I still have my mom and dad on my phone

to call them, but I know I can't call them. And it's like the loss of a limb to lose them.

Grief is such a strong word in one of the hardest battles anyone can ever face. And it's mostly

a word that is associated with loss and death.

After being in ministry for over four decades, I've seen grief and loss at so many levels.

I've done funerals for tragic gang shootings, drive-by shootings.

Sometimes the funeral at the church was full of teenage gang members, and you're speaking to young people that literally have just sold out their lives for wrong things.

I've done funerals in hospitals where a couple was expecting to celebrate a baby girl or a baby boy and it was born dead, it was born stillborn, and sitting in the chapel at a hospital with two hollow-looking

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