A Cry for Help
Sent After Three Days (2/13/07)
As soon as I could manage it (later in the day), I sent out a brief desperate email asking for prayer. This is a follow-up (three days later) to let our friends and family know all that had transpired.
I sent out a very brief email as a cry for help and prayer within a very short time after learning of June's death. Many of you received that email and I want you to know that the prayers are working! within an hour I actually felt the strength of the Lord's Spirit begin undergirding my spirit in a most remarkable way and I have seen God moving in our children in ways for which I will be forever grateful to you for your prayers and to our beautiful Lord for His gifts of life in the midst of death.
I have never, ever known such a grief as this. It is a torrent moving by its own divinely sanctioned path through my heart in swelling waves of grief. Oh, but what a grief even such as I have long taught: uncontaminated by fear or despair, false guilt, or self-pity. It is wild, free, clear, and bright with hope. It lifts me out of myself and raises me up to heights of love-connection to June, often beyond anything I had previously known for her. I give myself to it with relieved and renewed abandonment each time I sense its beckoning call or feel its sudden unlooked-for embrace.
I love the days when I have so many friends to see and to embrace in person or by phone, but secretly I yearn for the nights when I can set her pictures before me and play the songs that remind me of her and give myself completely over to this God-sent way of mending so horrific a loss. By day or night, my heart plummets into depths of devastation, but never of desolation (for she and He are with me in most precious and almost tangible ways). I am rent, but never destroyed and in the rending a strange mending is sensibly at work as Jesus pours out the promised blessing He gave in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Stefan (our valiant son) said, I want to feel the pain (this was when the five of us Stefan and his wife Jennifer, Alisha, our daughter, and her husband Dave and I were at the funeral home with her body on Sunday for over five hours of precious tears and prayers). And that is exactly the way I feel. We don't want this problem, but since it is here, we want to feel the pain of it and grieve the pain as honestly and faithfully as we can, God helping us.
A loving Savior (whose own rent heart of love) has placed this cup of grief before us as His means of curing our aching wound shall we not drink of it deeply? Indeed, the tears and the pain have become our daily bread in feeding upon them we gain renewed strength to face the future where she and He have gone before us. Even now I am discovering fresh encounters with the Man of Sorrows, finding entry into His wounds and receiving there, knowledge of Him and knowledge of Him in such a way that I am beginning to understand something of what Paul meant when he wrote that he was willing to count it all loss for the sake of knowing Him in the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings.
But if I go on much longer like this some of you will be tempted to say, I am losing my mind. No, my friends, I am gaining my heart! Who can speak things equal to such a beautiful God? His ways are ways of matchless perfection I feel so foolish that I have ever questioned or doubted the kindness of His sovereign wisdom. His love knows no bounds. We sacrifice for one another in hopes of building a better future with them (and then, if we dare to be honest, only for a few and feebly at that) whereas He gives Himself with unstinting abandonment to loving even the ones He cannot gain and those who will be ripped from His dreams for them by their own wrong-headedness or that of others. What a dangerous and deadly thing our free will is! And how it grieves Him that we do not yield it to the only One who can ensure that our longed-for destiny in God is reached.
I had no idea I would write so much upon that theme. I set out to tell you the rest of the story as Paul Harvey used to say. I wrote to you that June took her life because that was all that I knew at the time. Now, that we have learned more, a much fuller picture of redemption has come one that has been bringing unspeakable comfort to our aching hearts. We all knew this was a fluke, some horrible mistake, an accident that did't have to happen this was not who June had become.
June had been walking free of deep despair and suicidal thoughts for so much of the past four years that she truly had received her life back and was willing to fight the good fight of believing truth to keep walking above the still un-mended depths. This is not to say that she was untouched by agony or fears, but that she knew what to do and had learned to live by those same God-spoken Words of Life that enabled Peter to step out of his own storm-tossed boat and walk upon the waves in his life at the calling of His Lover and Lord (a favorite metaphor of June's for what we have been doing in the past year with the new ministry).
Times of emotion still came, but always she would reach out to someone and the steadying Hand would reach through one of us and keep her walking at a level she had never known before in her adult life un-medicated, alive to hope and willing to keep fighting the demons that remained which ever sought to wreak her newfound peace. And through this, she was working to bring hope and release to other hopelessly wounded captives. And this she realized with such incredible, childlike wonder and incredulity. After ministry times, she would often exclaim: Steve, two (or whatever number of) people were set free in ministry today! If I have done nothing else with my life, at least I now have that to take with me to heaven! Do you think this will count? And I would say, Darling, of course, it does, but you have always given life in ways you've never seen. She had such a hard time seeing herself as God and others saw her
On Saturday morning, in a time alone at her sister's house, she fell past all the nets into just such a tormented hole. None of us saw it coming. It would have been so simple to turn this tragedy aside had any of us been there in the Providence of God. The panicked, good-bye email she sent me (and happened upon on my computer three hours too late!) told enough of the story to see the outlines of an un-mended place I knew from past encounters one she rarely visited anymore, but one from which (to my knowledge and experience) she had never successfully exited by herself alone.
How I wish I had had even an inkling of the danger that faced her that day! It was so easy to draw her from that spot! But for her, it was abject hopelessness and fear. She panicked and pulled her car into the garage, asking forgiveness in advance from a merciful God and sought to go to sleep in the back seat with the motor running. At this point it was a suicide in the making. But that is not the whole story.
Somehow the Spirit of the Lord got to her, somehow she came back to her right mind, somehow she realized she wanted life with us and with her God in time and space in spite of the pain of what had driven her to sudden despair. How do I know this? Because she had gotten out of the car and made it to the exit door before the heavier fumes in the garage itself overcame her and there she collapsed right at the very door that led to her freedom. We were literally only inches away from never having to go through any of this she had re-chosen life!
And yet in the mystery of Providence, the all-loving Father, who according to scripture gives escapes from death, chose in the hidden wisdom of God, to open instead that door that leads to LIFE, not the one that would have led to our lives in this life. We could hardly bear the staggering loss of what that last missed step to freedom costs us, were it not that we KNOW that she is beyond the reach of any pain ever wounding her dear, tender heart again and that she is now in the blessed joy she longed for with her whole being.
This, dear friends, is the heavy cross that is now lying unalterably across our path. Will we choose life, the life of trust and hope, or will we choose bitterness and despair? Only the embrace of this cross can save us now and we know that we are pledged to choose life. Is it not true that Jesus said we too (as He did) must learn to accept the cross of pain and bear it in hope of a better resurrection, trusting to the Father's perfect love?
How hard that simple sentence of scripture is to believe at first and yet how liberating it is discovered to be by those who place their hope in His Word to be true! We are living in that hope dedicated to seeing this pass from death into perfected redemption. Many lives will reap the benefit of what is already being birthed in our spirits. June's legacy will be greater lives impacted than if she had lived! Don't ask me how I know I KNOW! And that knowing is already bringing the tantalizing hope of new life for us.
Pray for us that we will not dishonor her suffering or her renewed choice of life by rejecting what is set before our lives now. Your prayers have been working so far so keep them up!
In His love and ours,
