As Jen and I sat in church this Sunday she started to cry. It is fairly normal for either or both of us to do that - last week it was me - so we just sat there in the back against the wall and she laid her head on my shoulder.
It wasn't too long before a friend saw her and came to sit with us. She just sat on the floor with us, held Jen's hand, and cried too.
The night carter passed we had the entire pastoral team with their wives at our house. We had elders and their wives providing support in numerous ways. We had friends cleaning our house. We had friends adjusting our front door so it would close easy.
In the days following we had countless people come over to sit with us, bring food, take care of final preparations and expenses, and to bear the weight of our pain.
We had family fly in from the west coast. We had family drive up from long distances. We had my office provide meals and support. We had my employer freely offer me a week of bereavement.
We have truly had such an outpouring of love and support.
We are so blessed to count you all as friends.
I am so blessed to know you.
You are loved and appreciated like you will never know.
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2 comments:
I second all that, Love.
We have been held like we've never been held before by friends and family... church and neighborhood... It is so overwhelming to think of the love we have felt during this hard hard time... I, too, am deeply grateful... More grateful than words could ever in a million years express... I love Jesus for loving us through people... I love all those people.
God's Sovereignty
I just finished reading When God Doesn't Make Sense by James Dobson. It is by far the best book I have read going through all of this... I wish I could encaptulate my thoughts but the only thing I can paraphrase right now is ... God's Sovereignty... I choose to believe that God brought my baby home... NOT that Satan took him or he died because doctors couldn't figure it out... but God took him home... Perhaps I will detail some excerpts of the book...
... there is nothing the Lord wants more of us than the exercise of our faith... faith is believing that which has no absolute proof... it is hanging tough when the evidence would have us bail out. It is determining to trust Him when He has not answered all the question or even assured a pain-free passage...The Lord obviously permitted your difficulties to occur. Why didn't He prevent them-and why has He not attempted to explain or apologize for them? The inability to answer those fundamental questions has become a spiritual barrier a mile high, and you can't seem to find a way around or over it.... God usually does not choose to answer those questions in this life! That's what I've been trying to say. He will not parade His plans and purposes for our approval. We must never forget that He is God. As such He wants us to believe and trust in him despite the things we don't understand. It's that straightforward...My strongest advice is that each of us acknowledge before the crisis occurs, if possible, that our trust in Him must be independent of our understanding... "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than you ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Is 55:9) And our reply should be, "Not my will, but yours be done" (Lu 22:42)...
It is so important to understand that God's value system is entirely different from our own-and His is correct. In human eyes, death is viewed as the ultimate defeat-the final tragedy....But we need to understand that God views death very differently than we do. It is not disaster to him. Is. 57:1 "The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understand that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil." Ps 116:15 "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints"... I hope you will see that the discomfort is intensified by a misunderstanding of time. Our journey here has the illusion of permanence about it...Though the pain is indescribable now, we must never forget that our separation is temporary. We will be reunited forever on that glad resurrection. As the Scripture promises, our tears will be banished forever!...
Expect periods of hardship to occur and don't be dismayed when they arrive. "Lean into the pain" when your time to suffer comes around, knowing that God will use the difficulty for His purposes-and, indeed, for our own good. The Lord is very near, and He has promised that your temptation will not be greater than you can bear...
Ps 34:17-19 The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. A righteous man may have many troubles but the Lord delivers him from them all.
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