Three years ago, our daughter Megan died in our living room while we lay next to her. She was 24 years old. When she was a baby, she suffered catastrophic brain damage from a heart surgery that fixed her heart but destroyed her life. She was severely disabled as a result; but it was pneumonia that finally took her from us. We are still numb and exhausted. I don’t see that going away soon.
What follows is a letter that I wrote about three weeks after Megan died. It was written to some friends that I had been meeting with throughout the previous year. A small men’s study group. I felt hat I owed them some perspective. It has been modified only slightly for this format. It is the raw thoughts of a father dealing with the death of his child, so I will understand if you do not wish to read it. For believers, my hope is that you will find strength in my weakness. For all my unbelieving friends; (whom I love dearly), if you have ever wondered if Christians struggle with doubt and fear; the answer, of course, is yes, and this is what it looks like. And I would remind us all; that to risk love, is to risk pain. But it is always worth the risk to love…
“I have been wanting to write to you men for several weeks, but I have not been able to hold a thought in my head and I did not know what to say. If I did what I wanted to do I would sit and drink and watch TV till the end of days. But God will not let me.
I suppose, being a pastor, what I am supposed to do is tell you everything is ok now; that God has sustained us with some psalm or something. That this has all been worth it because of all the things that God has been teaching us in our agony. I cannot say any of that because I have never been able to speak Christian gobbledy-gook, and I love you too much to be anything but honest. My prayer is that you will at least find some encouragement in that.
The truth is this:
This has been horrible, and it will continue to be horrible for a long time. I would not wish such pain on my worst enemy. No man should have to watch his child die. No man should have to watch his wife dress his baby girls’ corpse so some stranger can come pick her up, knowing you will never see her again. I often feel like I am suffocating with grief. I have no breath. I have spent 24 years bitching about the burden that God has made me carry. The only thing harder than carrying that burden was laying it down. I would give away everything I own just to pick her up and carry her for another week.
I wish that I could tell you that I have felt the nearness of God as never before. But the truth is, for the most part, He has been a stranger to me. As if He were standing on Neptune with His back to me. Never trust your feelings. I wish that I could describe how my prayer life has deepened, but again, for the most part, I have been praying the same prayer over again for weeks. Usually choked with tears; “God! Help us! Please!” I have been unable to get much else out. I wish that I could quote for you some verse or passage that has strengthened me through this. But the only verse that came to mind in the thick of it was “Father, let this cup pass from me.” Not very inspiring, I know. I told Him repeatedly, “I don’t want to do this”, but, alas, He was on Neptune.
God will not protect you from life gentlemen.
God will protect you from the enemy. God will protect you from God. But He will not protect you from life. He wants you to feel every hammer-blow. To know every loss. To feel real pain, and to know what it is like to beg for mercy. I just finished reading the book of Genesis again. In almost every other chapter, it seemed, one of the old saints is weeping and burying a loved one. How else could we minister to a lost and dying world, unless we know its’ pain? If pain were water, the world would drown.
So, is that it? Despair? No, of course not. I have no revelation for you, or even any deep insights. But while He is not teaching me anything new in this agony, God seems content to remind me of a few things that we already know.
The first is this:
“The just shall live by faith.” What do you really believe? Do you really believe what you preach? Is your faith real? Have you really learned to trust someone if can’t trust them in the dark? I confess, my faith is weak. Shaky. Timorous. Desperate. Like a lost sailor clinging to a board and staring into the night for a lighthouse that he cannot see but he knows is there. “I believe, help my unbelief.” My faith may be smaller than a mustard seed, but it is real, and it is enough. Your feelings, your prayers, your bible reading, your church, and everything around you may all collapse. In the end, you are left standing by faith. Whatever else you do brothers, believe. Because our faith is not based on our experience, or even on a book. It is based on an event; something that happened, in history. It is based on a person.
The second thing is this:
There is no life without hope. Humans can survive a long time without a lot of things. But we would not last a day without hope. God knows this; that is why He has provided it in a very real and overwhelming way. I do not mean the vague, strange hope that well-meaning people toss at me from their Hallmark spiritual Pez-dispenser. Things like, “she has gone to a better place now”, or “she is dancing with Jesus now”. That is not my hope. Megan’s ashes are in a box in my living room; she is not dancing with Jesus, or anyone else. As far as I can tell she is not doing anything, except resting in the Presence of God. As her father, I must be content with that.
My hope is in the resurrection. The resurrection of the Son of God is everything. We have no hope without it. He is the beginning of the new creation; He is proof that her ashes will be re-animated and rejoined with her spirit someday. Then she will, for the first time, truly dance. I will sit one day, under a new sunrise, on a new shore, and finally have what I have never had; a conversation with Megan. Not because of me, or Megan. But because of Jesus; because He killed death and makes all things new.
The last is this:
The love of God is devastating. It is painful. We speak of it all the time. We preach it; we sing of it, but do we really know it? The other week I walked to a park not far from the hospital. I was walking and sitting and weeping and begging, even though I knew how this was going to end. I have never felt such crippling love for anything than what I felt for Megan; such pity; such longing; such loss. I was telling God that it is not fair to have to experience such heart-breaking love; the love of a father for a broken child. Then words came into my mind; unbidden; uncalled for. It is the only time in my life that I believe Heaven spoke something directly to me. I am not prone to such things. I tend not to trust my own thoughts. But these words were so jarring, and unexpected: “That’s how I feel about you.” that’s it. I gasped. I sat up, listening, straining to grab the words again. But they had drifted away on the breeze. It was just a whisper. From Neptune.
I just paced and pondered. Really? This is how you feel about me? The thought that anyone, let alone the Living God, could feel this way about me was too much. I felt embarrassed. I had to avert my eyes; I couldn’t look at it. His love for you is astonishing. If I could keep this one thought; this one whisper, ever before my eyes, I would never sin again. I would always be patient. I would always be kind. I would never consider a wrong suffered. What God has done for us in Christ is unspeakable, yet we must never stop speaking of it.
I thought of the words of Jesus, “The Father loves the Son…” and I knew, that the love I have for Megan has been dwarfed for eternity by another Father. Comparing the two loves would be like lighting a candle on the surface of the sun. Like me, He knows what it is like to watch His beloved child die gasping for breath. God did not cheat somehow in letting Jesus die for our sins. The Son suffered the dying; but the Father suffered the death. The greater the heart, the greater the love. The greater the love, the greater the pain.
Whatever else you may get from this; get this one thing. God loves you with a painful love. It cost Him everything He holds dear to get you.
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Those are my thoughts for now. I miss you. Please pray for my wife. Do not take the people around you for granted, you do not know how long you may have them. Hold your loved ones close. Forgive quickly and easily.
Love God. Even when He’s on Neptune.