Child Apart

I listened to a podcast in which a man of faith describes the death of his only child. He said he didn’t have answers to what to do with that pain. It was an ever-present feeling, which unsettled me to hear. I’ve rejoiced in sufferings in my life and found great amounts of dignity and strength by doing so. It bothered me to think that there may be a type of pain that one simply cannot rejoice in – that there were exceptions to a vital principle that brought so much reliable comfort. The insanity of rejoicing in the pain of the death of one’s own child sounds like betrayal of the highest order.

Again, a man mentioned to me not long ago that the anniversary of the death of his daughter was coming up. He said he also wrestled with the Bible which talks about rejoicing in suffering. Verses like

 Romans 5:3-5 (ESV): “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Maybe only the greatly disturbed can rejoice in their own child’s death. I suppose a thought those who lose a child may have is: “God decided it was his/her time to go home to Jesus, and we don’t know what the consequences might have been if they had been allowed to grow into adulthood. Maybe they would have been worse off, with a degenerative disease or something if they had been left to live out their lives.”

The idea that God ordains the death of a loved one, let alone one’s own child, must bring with it some sort of divine agenda to all people involved in suffering that pain. The intimate God we serve also suffered the acute death of the child. It is also true that God suffers alongside those who have lost their child. God takes responsibility for decisions such as this, and it must also be so that there exists a plan for those still among the materially living.

There are other verses about rejoiced suffering. Here’s another one:

 James 1:2-4 (ESV): “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

Now we have a couple of promises: that hope is produced in us through rejoiced suffering (the first Bible passage mentioned), and here a form of completion of oneself due to rejoiced-in pain.

Whenever pain is rejoiced in, and one endures agony for the sake of God and character, one of the great emerging challenges is finding language to identify the internal working of oneself. Can it be described? Is it blind principle-following that leads to an abrupt end-of-tunnel-moment of enlightenment? Does the tunnel’s end have a label or a name? – Because the things we cannot give language to feel like primordial forces that cannot be well interacted with, communicated, quantified, manipulated, or multiplied.

Now how does one give language to the internal agonies of a bereaved parent? What verbalized positive change wouldn’t feel like a betrayal of one’s dead child? “My child died, so that I could get these internal characteristics”…

And it will always feel like a betrayal, until “death” is redefined by the believing parent. The child isn’t eternally gone but instead is eternally alive. It transitioned between two forms of life. God took the child, to live apart from the parent in the afterlife.

Why?

To render the heart of the parent into pieces. Two to be exact.

With one part of it beating in the realms of the material present – the other pounding in the life to come, in which they reunite with their kid. The parent is no longer a unified whole, and they shouldn’t be. Maybe they were designated to be something other than human – the child now gone for the sake of new creation (the parent); to pull the parent into unseen realms, in ways he or she never could before – a metamorphosis, or a half-breed, between two forms of existence. The one here, and now. The other there, and now, searching that unseen realm with their hearts. The never-abating pain keeps them split and firmly rooted in both worlds.

And just as they live with one leg in the realm of the currently unseen, and one in the material plane, they live out two priceless realities simultaneously. The first is an amplified gratefulness of the remaining people in their lives. People amplify in value to the wounded parent, if they manage to march forward despite the pain. It is hard to take people for granted after experiencing the sudden loss of someone.

The second priceless reality consists of uncertainties and agonies of this world. Not even the vitality of youth could stop death from knocking. Everyone is lose-able, everything is shake-able. Nothing is as firm as it once seemed to be, and this is invaluable to accept internally. No delusion of the prosperity of this world remains as it did. Everything goes the way of rust, mold, and, for living things, death. The pain ensures this truth is consistently carried.

These two realities create a context for faith in a believing parent that looks like this: that there must exist something that is unshakeable in a world that is now so less filled with certainty. There is Jesus that endured death (key word “endure”), and so did the child. There exists a heaven that is not invaded by the hells on Earth. It is a certainty more needed now in a parent than it ever was before in the face of the abyss of loss. The child’s passing has potential to powerfully focus the gaze of their mother/father, on an unseen realm of certainty and limitless potential, and if they are courageous, and intimate with God, bring it upon an Earth in which so many people suffer at the hands of the chaos of sin, or the workings of a devil. The pain is a guarantor that this focus ought never be forgotten. The pain becomes an instrument for glory in those that agree to their transformation.

And so the pain drags on, throughout the rest of their material existence, as a bridge that links the parent to the child, and the two halves of the parent to each other, and heaven to Earth. A new nature is born (if they persist in rejoicing). Many correct priorities and motivations are no longer consciously decided upon but are lived out by default – and because of this they must rejoice, for they are far greater than they once were, or could ever be, and no child on earth can appreciate that form of heroism in their parent than a child in heaven can.

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