Another friend has lost a beloved child. Tears seem inadequate. Sorrow seems too pale a word to describe what her family must surely be feeling right now...what we are all feeling. No parent should ever, ever have to bury their child. I've gone to bed praying and awakened in the morning praying for this family and other dear families who have lost loved ones in recent months. In light of this, I hope you'll forgive me for sharing some recent thoughts on the subject of facing life's storms. Sorry it's a bit long:
I love this definition of peace: “Peace is the calm assurance that whatever God is doing is best.” In other words, supernatural peace is knowing that the Lord is not only in complete control but that whatever He is doing is the ultimate best, even if at that moment we cannot possibly see how.
And so we pray and pray for our heart’s desire, but then we have to be willing to trust God with the results, because sometimes the miraculous healing or intervention comes. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes God’s perfect plan is to allow someone we love to go on home to heaven. Sometimes His plan is to allow what from our perspective seems like a crushing disappointment or an utterly unfair outcome or even a tragedy. At those hard, perplexing places in our lives, we want to cry out, “Why, God? Don’t you care? Don’t you love me? Don’t you hear our prayers?”
But He does. He always does. The difference is we don’t have all the facts...God does. We can’t peer into eternity and see how whatever we are enduring will ultimately be used for far greater good and in far greater ways than we, with our limited vision, can ever begin to imagine.
I’ll never forget hearing someone who had lost a baby say: “God’s will is what we would always choose if we knew what God knows.” Peace is knowing and trusting that God’s will is what we’d choose if we knew all the facts. When we’re chafing against God’s plans and ways, it really means we think we know better than Almighty God what’s best for us or for those we love. And that’s when we forfeit our peace.
I clearly remember one particular drive back from the Greenville hospital with the Andrews. I had one of those moments where I sort of hit a wall. Janie was still unconscious and her prognosis looked grim at best. Yet we were talking about the extraordinary ways God was using this accident in the lives of so many high schoolers and other folks. We had heard stories of people giving their lives to Christ as their Savior. Stories of people recommitting their lives to Christ. All kinds of remarkable stories.
We were incredibly thankful that God was using this to affect so many for eternity. But suddenly this mama’s heart broke, and I couldn’t help but cry out, “Yes, yes, I am so grateful God is using this so mightily. But did it have to be our daughter? Did God have to use our child as the sacrificial lamb? Why does it have to be Janie who sacrifices her life, her future for all these other people?”
I’m just being honest here. I didn’t feel this way often. Much of the time, we trusted in God’s plans and ways--even in this hard place. We felt a supernatural peace that God was in control and would use this for our ultimate good and His greater glory--even if we couldn’t imagine how. But every now and then, the emotions of sorrow and fear just bubbled up and overwhelmed our hearts.
Later that night, however, as I lay in bed, God gently spoke to my heart. My daughter wasn’t the sacrificial lamb. God’s Son was. He was the sacrifice. He died, that she might live. Truly live. For God so loved you, God so loved me, God so loved all of us that He gave His only begotten, beloved, sinless Son that any and all who choose to believe in Him by faith might pass from death to life and have eternal, abundant life forever. Jesus cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me” so that we need never feel forsaken.
As I contemplated what God had sacrificed for me, for us, it didn’t necessarily make the pain go away, but it put everything back into perspective. My Heavenly Father reminded me that He knew exactly what it felt like to see a beloved child suffer, and He fully understood our pain. We have a loving Father who enters with us into our pain, weeping with us, holding us, comforting us, and encouraging us.
The Lord reassured my anxious heart that everything, absolutely everything, that happens to us in this life first passes through His powerful, sovereign hands. If our God of perfect love and goodness allowed it, then we can know His purposes spring out of His infinite love for us and His desire to use it for our ultimate blessing.
We have the unbreakable promise that no matter what we will ever go through, our Savior will never leave us nor forsake us. Even at the darkest, scariest moments in that ICU room--even when one doctor told us that Janie, if she survived, would likely be either in a vegetative state or in a wheelchair and on a feeding tube for the rest of her life--God was clearly there. We could feel His presence. We had some very low moments, but our feet were always on solid ground, never on sinking sand.
We experienced firsthand the great truth that Corrie ten Boom’s sister, Betsie, declared as she lay dying in a Nazi concentration camp: “We must tell them what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.”
We’ve recently had several wonderful friends who have lost precious children. I cannot comprehend such losses. Such pain. But God can.
We don’t have all the answers on this side of heaven. God saved Daniel from the lion’s den but he allowed Stephen to be stoned to death. There are countless miraculous stories of God supernaturally delivering His children...but then permitting someone like the great German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to be hanged just weeks before the end of WW II.
I’ve long since given up trying to understand the why’s. God doesn’t have to tell us why. It’s enough to know that He is sovereign and that He is both perfectly good and completely powerful. In those gaps where we don’t understand, He simply calls us to trust Him who loves us infinitely, and in doing so, we experience His perfect peace.
I loved these words by Melody Green from her book, No Compromise, about the life and death of her husband, Keith Green. Keith was an amazingly gifted Christian singer who, at the age of 28, was killed in a small plane crash, along with two of his young children. His wife, Melody, who was pregnant at the time, was left behind along with their youngest one-year old child.
This is what Melody Green wrote: "With God's help, we can eventually come out on the other side of the storm. Then we can become vessels of grace and understanding to others who are in their season of crisis and pain. Some cuts are deep enough to mark us forever. But after seasons and times of healing and restoration by God, we don't have to be controlled by our wounds. Even with healing, we may always be marked by them to the greater good of our souls. Our injuries can be our biggest windows into aspects of God's character we might not have known any other way. I know my losses deposited something deep into my spirit. Yes, I would have rather read a book to receive what God gave to me in those darkest of times--but some pearls are only discovered when the field looks like an impossible wasteland. He is the God of the impossible. The God who tells us where to dig for the treasure. The God of great and tender mercies. And I love Him with all my heart."
If anyone is reading this who has suffered such an unspeakable loss, please know you are loved, not just by us, your dear friends and family, but by the One who made you and loves you more than you can ever begin to imagine. I recently read this from Ann Voskamp: “Faith is this unwavering trust in the heart of God in the hurt of here. Unwavering trust all the time though I don’t understand all the time.” Amen.
We cannot understand the tragic loss of an innocent child. We never will this side of heaven. But in those mystifying gaps, might we choose, by faith, to trust the heart of God even when we question what His hand might be doing. It is enough that He knows. He is still and forever in control. And He is somehow, someway bringing resurrection life and light even out of the blackest, bleakest darkness in our lives.
Until then, we weep with those who weep. So many tears, so much pain, so much sorrow. O help them, Lord Jesus, as only You can. Might You, the God of all comfort, wrap them in Your tender, strong embrace so that they feel and know Your loving, gracious, healing presence as never before.
And help us, Father, even in the darkness and pain, to choose to rejoice that those whom we love and miss so desperately are at this moment--at this very moment--with You and enjoying wonders and glories and infinite joy that we cannot begin to fathom. And one day--one glorious day--we will see them again, and we will rejoice together. In perfection. In our true home.
Until that day, we simply say thank You, Father, for the certain hope and joyous promise of heaven. To God be the glory.
