John Mark Hicks

Text: 1 Corinthians 15:19-28 Death is an enemy. On occasion death can be a relative good. When the quality of life, for example, is significantly diminished and there is unbearable pain, we might think dying is better than living—but only in a relative sense. Life is better than death since God created life but not […]

When the Byzantine Emperor Leo V (866-911) wanted to dedicate a church to his recently deceased and godly wife, the Patriarch denied this requested.  Consequently, he dedicated it to “all saints” which, he assumed, would include his wife. Thus was born the Eastern festival celebration of “all saints” on the first Sunday after Pentecost. In […]

Morris Pettit, Sheila’s father (my first wife who died in 1980), passed from this life into the next this past Tuesday, July 14. I am sad today. Morris, even 29 years after Sheila’s death, called me “son.” I have experienced the joy of family, the model of a good father, and the grace of sonship […]

May 21, 2001 and May 21, 2008 have something in common, and I remember that today, May 21, 2016. Those are the days on which our children died–my son Joshua and John & Maggy Dobbs’ son John Robert. The memories are painful and today we will each remember, commemorate, and reflect. I pray for peace […]

[Note: I am attempting to keep these SBD installments under 2000 words each, but that is–of course–quite inadequate for the topics covered. Consequently, these contributions are more programmatic than they are explanatory or defenses of the positions stated. You may access the whole series at my Serial page.] Jesus accomplishes the divine mission to make […]

Yesterday I drove to Ellijay, Georgia–the city of my wife’s birth, upbringing, marriage, death and burial. She died around 2:00am on April 30, 1980 while convalescing in her parent’s home from back surgery twenty days before. Yesterday I drove to her graveside alone. I had not been there alone in some years, perhaps decades. It was […]

Yesterday I posted two articles by my hand from the 1981 Gospel Advocate. These were my first atttempts, at the age of twenty-three, to write (even publicly speak of) the loss of my wife in 1980. Reading them again after so long–I don’t think I have read them or perhaps even thought of them in […]

On April 30, 1980, Sheila Pettit Hicks, my wife of two years, eleven months, and eight days, died twenty days after recovering from back surgery. A blood clot stopped her heart while she slept at her parent’s home in Ellijay, GA.  This week is the 29th anniversary of that horrendous moment in my life. It shifted […]

Good Friday and then Easter! But a day is missing in that story. To move from Friday to Sunday one must walk through Saturday. Saturday, however, is a lonely day. Death has won. Hope is lost. Jesus of Nazareth lies in a tomb. His disciples are afraid, hiding and deeply depressed. Everything they had invested […]

When Sheila died in 1980, I discovered that I was one who neither enjoyed nor desired to visit graves. For me visiting the grave was not very comforting. In fact, it was the opposite. The graveyard seemed too permanent. It contained too many granite stones which testified to both the pervasiveness and intransience of death. I didn’t […]