Death has the remarkable quality of putting
life into perspective.
I lost a friend that I worked with this week. It’s been harder to process than I ever would have anticipated and I haven’t been able to stop thinking since. So, I thought I’d write some of my thoughts down.
I have two distinct memories of cussing God out after a death. The first was after my three-month-old nephew died. The second was after my cousin died. In both cases, God was gracious enough to give me answers to “why?” They may not be the whole reason why, but they stopped me from asking more.
My nephew was born with only a brain stem. He would never recognize his family, never speak, never eat on his own, and never even smile of his own volition. The morning he died, I remember going to my brother’s house. After holding my nephew for one last time, I took him to pick up his family from church.
In the car, he told me that he knew that that little boy, his son, would never be able to love him back, give anything back, or even fully appreciate the warmth of his care. Even so, he didn’t realize it was possible to love someone so much and it was because his son could never give anything back, that he did love him more than he knew he could love.
My nephew was adopted with the knowledge of his condition. That was the first glimpse I ever had into God’s love for me and it changed my life.
The day my cousin died, I prayed over him in his hospital bed. I prayed for healing and for peace. I was resentful of God afterwards for not answering my prayer, but at his funeral, I was able to see what He had done. Broken relationships in our family were healed. The Great Physician took his broken body into rest. He was thankful to have the hope of a Savior that he had previously resented. More healing and more peace came to pass than I would have ever thought possible.
In the end, we can never hope to understand the reasons. G.K. Chesterton once said, "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
It is not for us to understand “why?” We may only marvel at “how?” and rest in the knowledge that, while we never were in control, God always is.
I was crying in my parents’ dining room earlier this evening and my mom told me, “You know, I think it’s good that this made you feel this way.” I looked at her, a little irked by that statement and asked why. She said, “If you didn’t, would you ever know that you could?”
Our capacity to grieve is as much a mark of our capacity to love as either one is a mark of our willingness to allow another human being to impact us.
One of the hardest things about someone dying is the guilt of surviving, of not being able to save them. The truth is that it’s pretty arrogant of any of us to say that we could have prevented a death. We were friends. Any of us would have been there if we could have. We may never know why they died and why we couldn’t save them, but we can know that there was a purpose for it, even if we don’t know what. The important thing is that we were friends. It’s also just as important that it’s ok that it hurts that they’re gone.
We should never resent pain. C.S. Lewis said, “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” It’s good that we hurt, because that is how we know how much they really mean to us.
We need to feel every bit of that pain- experience it, recognize it, and live in it- if we ever hope to understand the full impact and meaning their life had. That doesn’t make it easy. It is pain, after all. But we don’t need to be afraid of it either. We were never designed to withstand pain on our own.
The most clarifying moment I have ever had as a Christian was when, in the midst of despair, I cried out, “Where are you? What are you doing?” And he quietly whispered back, “I’m right here. I’m holding you. I’m weeping with you.”
The shortest verse in the Bible is, “Jesus wept.” Those two words hold more power, more meaning, more love, and more pain in them than all the songs that have ever been written. The creator was grieved to be separated from his beloved. Love himself was pained at death.
To paraphrase my dad: We’re allowed snapshots of happiness. We may live in joy, but rarely do we laugh full-forced guffaws with uninhibited hearts. In the same way, we’re allowed tastes of sorrow. We may live in a somber state, but rarely does our heart break to the point that we become lost in the agony. I think, in both cases, it is because, were we to be exposed to them for too long, our hearts would burst. The agony, like the joy, is not a bad thing. They are ways of feeling love for a moment, and, while the weight of real love may break us, it will never rest on us long enough to crush us until the day we die ourselves and become immersed in that love in God’s presence. There, in heaven, we can finally experience it in full, glorious force, without fear of our souls tearing from our bodies.
We can’t change the past, but we shouldn’t want to. I will be forever grateful that he was in our lives, even if it was for a short time. The emptiness we feel at his loss means that he filled our lives more than we ever would have realized. I do wish he was still here. I miss him. But it would be so much worse if I didn’t miss him, because that would mean that he didn’t mean as much to me.
Grieving takes time and it’s hard. In the end, though, grieving is a happy thing because it is the process by which we recognize the meaning a person had and will continue to have in our lives, and through that process they are able to speak to our hearts forever.
In a sermon I recently wrote I said this:
“We’ll hear God’s voice when we surrender completely into Him. We’ll hear it in the laughter, in a tear, in the quite moments. We’ll know his gentle whisper even after the winds and earthquakes and fires, and we may even hear it loud as thunder if we dare enter the cloud of his presence. For now, though, we surrender everything to him. We let go, we collapse, we fall…we truly fall in love: we fall into Him.
And here is the simplest and most difficult instruction that I will ever give: let go, be weak, and give up. You are lost. Let God take over.”
I lost a friend that I worked with this week. It’s been harder to process than I ever would have anticipated and I haven’t been able to stop thinking since. So, I thought I’d write some of my thoughts down.
I have two distinct memories of cussing God out after a death. The first was after my three-month-old nephew died. The second was after my cousin died. In both cases, God was gracious enough to give me answers to “why?” They may not be the whole reason why, but they stopped me from asking more.
My nephew was born with only a brain stem. He would never recognize his family, never speak, never eat on his own, and never even smile of his own volition. The morning he died, I remember going to my brother’s house. After holding my nephew for one last time, I took him to pick up his family from church.
In the car, he told me that he knew that that little boy, his son, would never be able to love him back, give anything back, or even fully appreciate the warmth of his care. Even so, he didn’t realize it was possible to love someone so much and it was because his son could never give anything back, that he did love him more than he knew he could love.
My nephew was adopted with the knowledge of his condition. That was the first glimpse I ever had into God’s love for me and it changed my life.
The day my cousin died, I prayed over him in his hospital bed. I prayed for healing and for peace. I was resentful of God afterwards for not answering my prayer, but at his funeral, I was able to see what He had done. Broken relationships in our family were healed. The Great Physician took his broken body into rest. He was thankful to have the hope of a Savior that he had previously resented. More healing and more peace came to pass than I would have ever thought possible.
In the end, we can never hope to understand the reasons. G.K. Chesterton once said, "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
It is not for us to understand “why?” We may only marvel at “how?” and rest in the knowledge that, while we never were in control, God always is.
I was crying in my parents’ dining room earlier this evening and my mom told me, “You know, I think it’s good that this made you feel this way.” I looked at her, a little irked by that statement and asked why. She said, “If you didn’t, would you ever know that you could?”
Our capacity to grieve is as much a mark of our capacity to love as either one is a mark of our willingness to allow another human being to impact us.
One of the hardest things about someone dying is the guilt of surviving, of not being able to save them. The truth is that it’s pretty arrogant of any of us to say that we could have prevented a death. We were friends. Any of us would have been there if we could have. We may never know why they died and why we couldn’t save them, but we can know that there was a purpose for it, even if we don’t know what. The important thing is that we were friends. It’s also just as important that it’s ok that it hurts that they’re gone.
We should never resent pain. C.S. Lewis said, “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” It’s good that we hurt, because that is how we know how much they really mean to us.
We need to feel every bit of that pain- experience it, recognize it, and live in it- if we ever hope to understand the full impact and meaning their life had. That doesn’t make it easy. It is pain, after all. But we don’t need to be afraid of it either. We were never designed to withstand pain on our own.
The most clarifying moment I have ever had as a Christian was when, in the midst of despair, I cried out, “Where are you? What are you doing?” And he quietly whispered back, “I’m right here. I’m holding you. I’m weeping with you.”
The shortest verse in the Bible is, “Jesus wept.” Those two words hold more power, more meaning, more love, and more pain in them than all the songs that have ever been written. The creator was grieved to be separated from his beloved. Love himself was pained at death.
To paraphrase my dad: We’re allowed snapshots of happiness. We may live in joy, but rarely do we laugh full-forced guffaws with uninhibited hearts. In the same way, we’re allowed tastes of sorrow. We may live in a somber state, but rarely does our heart break to the point that we become lost in the agony. I think, in both cases, it is because, were we to be exposed to them for too long, our hearts would burst. The agony, like the joy, is not a bad thing. They are ways of feeling love for a moment, and, while the weight of real love may break us, it will never rest on us long enough to crush us until the day we die ourselves and become immersed in that love in God’s presence. There, in heaven, we can finally experience it in full, glorious force, without fear of our souls tearing from our bodies.
We can’t change the past, but we shouldn’t want to. I will be forever grateful that he was in our lives, even if it was for a short time. The emptiness we feel at his loss means that he filled our lives more than we ever would have realized. I do wish he was still here. I miss him. But it would be so much worse if I didn’t miss him, because that would mean that he didn’t mean as much to me.
Grieving takes time and it’s hard. In the end, though, grieving is a happy thing because it is the process by which we recognize the meaning a person had and will continue to have in our lives, and through that process they are able to speak to our hearts forever.
In a sermon I recently wrote I said this:
“We’ll hear God’s voice when we surrender completely into Him. We’ll hear it in the laughter, in a tear, in the quite moments. We’ll know his gentle whisper even after the winds and earthquakes and fires, and we may even hear it loud as thunder if we dare enter the cloud of his presence. For now, though, we surrender everything to him. We let go, we collapse, we fall…we truly fall in love: we fall into Him.
And here is the simplest and most difficult instruction that I will ever give: let go, be weak, and give up. You are lost. Let God take over.”
