Prayers Mortz. For the family who's grieving right now and will be for a very long time.
As a pastor who supports families in their hour of grief, there are 3 themes we often share with families during times such as these.
Much was learned from grieving ancestors who lost large numbers of their children. The Puritans were such a people. Many lost most or all their children.
They knelt on the fact that;
1. Children are on loan from God and do not belong to us. We often think of children as belonging to their parents, but the Puritans believed children belong to God, who entrusts them to parents for gospel aims. Here's an example of one of the pastor's letters to a grieving mother;
"Remember of what age your daughter was, and that just so long was your lease of her. If she was eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, I know not; but her term was come, and your lease run out. Ye can no more justly quarrel your great Superior for taking His own at His just term day than a poor farmer can complain that his master taketh a portion of his own land to himself when his lease is expired."
When parents embrace this truth—that their kids belong to God and are on loan to them—rather than feeling cheated out of a lifetime with their children, they can find relief in knowing their child lived exactly the number of days God intended.
2. Your young child who has died will be reunited with you.
Separation creates a relentless ache in grieving parents’ hearts and minds but the Puritan Samuel Rutherford asked a grieving mother, “Do you think her lost when she is but sleeping in the bosom of the Almighty? Think her not absent who is in such a friend’s house. Is she lost to you who is found to Christ? . . . [And] ye shall, in the Resurrection, see her again.”
3. God intends your good.
The truth that God could have a good purpose in the death of a child is foreign to us most times. But there can be comfort too. Today, often parents are unwilling to accept that God has a good purpose in their child’s death unless they can identify and articulate what that purpose is and deem it good enough to be worth the death of their child.
Pastor Rutherford reminded one of his congregation that God’s purpose might be seen as an opportunity for her growth and grounding in God: “The Lord hath this way lopped your branch in taking from you many children to the end you should grow upward like one of the Lord’s cedars, setting your heart above, where Christ is, at the right hand of the Father.”
Death is not natural to us and now-a-days is pretty unusually for young people, but nothing could be more real.
Which is evidence we're not like the other animals who do not grieve as we do.
We don't have the answers.
So we trust in the One who does by assisting grieving parents.
It's not easy at all.
Blessings,
Mark
