In Memoriam: Lin Holmes Johnson

Lin Holmes Johnson My grandfather passed away this morning. It wasn’t a sad passing because he’d been living with pain and suffering for months. However, it is a time for reflection when someone whose thread of life has been interwoven with ours slips into the afterlife.

In fact, his death reminded me of a instructional graphic I saw called Breathing Earth. On the screen, each second passes by in real-time showing CO2 emissions, births, and deaths for each country in the world. Around 6:00am mountain time on October 16, 2006 one little black dot flickered onto the screen and was gone. That seemingly insignificant speck was my grandpa’s life coming to a close. In the U.S. alone someone dies every 12.8 seconds. How many lives are affected by the little black dots? How many understand God’s plan for them and their loved ones?

I grew up knowing my Grandpa Lin fairly well. He and my dad farmed together so when I went out with Dad, I usually went with Grandpa too. He wasn’t an especially warm man; he wasn’t one to express affection. However, he was a hard worker and served the Lord in the way he understood to be the right way.

As I’ve pondered life and death I’ve been thinking about the duality of things, the opposing nature of existence. It brought to mind the concept of a chiasmus. It’s a literary device used for millenia to emphasize a point greater than the individual parts of the text. From start to midpoint it presents a concept (or concepts). Then, it retreats back through that concept repeating the ideas (not the words, necessarily) in a reverse order. The central theme of the idea is presented at the core of the chiasmus. I’ve decided to share this chiasmus about Grandpa Lin.