These first two weeks of February have been bleaker for me than any other time since Tyler’s death. The trauma of remembering what Tyler suffered these first fourteen days of February grips me not just emotionally, but also physically. I feel like I could shatter at any moment. Tears, the ugly kind, erupt without notice and catch me by surprise. The pain is often crippling, consuming.
I attempt to write now, because in recent weeks, as I’ve been at my own personal low in my grief-struggle, I’ve also faced the anger of others about what happened to Tyler.
I’ve heard passionate expressions along the lines of, “How can you say God is loving when He took your son from you?” I also read a recent post from a young man who cited Tyler’s death as a primary reason he now rejects the idea of having a personal relationship with God.
The thing is, I get this. These folks’ thinking is natural; my own lack of anger in the face of loss is what seems unnatural.
At times like these, I wish I had more than words. I wish I wasn’t limited to inadequate written or spoken communication to express why for me this heavy darkness is also pierced by light.
I am ever aware that my beliefs in the midst of loss and pain so deep sound irrational to many. It simply makes no kind of human sense. There’s a passage in Scripture which states that much of God’s plan seems like idiocy to those who don’t believe. The Message version beautifully captures the dissonance between human wisdom and God’s wisdom:
“We, of course, have plenty of wisdom to pass on to you once you get your feet on firm spiritual ground, but it’s not popular wisdom, the fashionable wisdom of high-priced experts that will be out-of-date in a year or so.
God’s wisdom is something mysterious that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don’t find it lying around on the surface. It’s not the latest message, but more like the oldest—what God determined as the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene.
The experts of our day haven’t a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they wouldn’t have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That’s why we have this Scripture text: ‘No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, never so much as imagined anything quite like it—what God has arranged for those who love him.’
But you’ve seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you. The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God planned all along.
Who ever knows what you’re thinking and planning except you yourself? The same with God—except that he not only knows what he’s thinking, but he lets us in on it. God offers a full report on the gifts of life and salvation that he is giving us.
We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions. We didn’t learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus, and we’re passing it on to you in the same firsthand, personal way.” (I Corinthians 2:6-13)
So as I write these words, I can only pray that the Spirit will make sense of them in the hearts of those who read them.
When Tyler was in the hospital, I read through the book of Job, looking for some material to help him understand being angry with God is OK. For those not familiar, Job is a character in the Bible who was blameless and righteous before God, but then experienced a series of tragedies.
His children died, he lost all his wealth, and then he faced a disease so miserable and disgusting that his own wife told him to curse God and die. On top of that, Job’s friends insisted he must have sinned in order to bring on such circumstances.
I ended up printing out for Tyler each conversation between Job and God. It made for very interesting reading. Job slammed God pretty hard throughout the book. And God took it pretty well. The very fact that Job ended up in the scriptures tells me that God must have thought the message of Job’s anger in the face of his tragedies was important for us to know about.
Despite Scripture giving me clear permission to be angry, I’m simply not. God could have healed Tyler. I know that. I was one hundred and ten percent counting on Him to heal Tyler, right up to the last beat of that boy’s heart (and even for a few moments beyond that).
This kid had an amazing life ahead of him. He had already influenced many people in his 15 years – his future accomplishments and impact as a man of God could have been staggering.
Even if I discounted my own desperate wishes as a mother, a complete healing was the only outcome that made sense to me: God, you’ve got the attention of thousands of people who have been captivated by Tyler’s story. If you heal Tyler, the news of such a miracle will spread even further and even more lives will be changed. Plus, you’ll be able to use this amazing young person to make an eternal impact for years and years to come.
This line of logic sounded so reasonable to me and to many others. Instead, God didn’t save Tyler from death, even though saving him from death was the prayer lifted by THOUSANDS.
But I’m not mad at God, because like Job finally did, I understand His character, at least to the extent that a human can understand.
I know that God heard every prayer uttered on Tyler’s behalf. I know that God deeply felt Tyler’s suffering, his strong desire to live, his fear of the unknown. I know that God’s own heart broke even as He wrapped His arms around Tyler’s mom and dad, his sister and brother-in-law, his grandparents, his aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, teachers, neighbors, nurses, doctors, and the many, many others who wanted Tyler to live.
I know that tears and misery caused by the illness and suffering of one of His own grieves God. God created us in His image. The deep love we humans experience for others and the deep loss we feel when death arrives stems from God. He Himself placed that in our hearts. Jesus, who was God in human form, wept when his friend Lazarus died and when Lazarus’ family and friends grieved deeply.
Jesus wept, despite knowing he was going to bring Lazarus back to life. Why? He wept from compassion, from deep love. One thing we NEVER have to question is whether God is turning a cold shoulder or a blind eye to our pleas and efforts to save a life we cherish. Even though God has already orchestrated redemption and eternal life, He still grieves with us over the pain and suffering that remain on this earth, just as Jesus did.
When we try to apply the world’s wisdom, we only succeed in making ourselves confused, a little insane, and yes, angry.
God’s wisdom and the world’s wisdom often collide, sometimes in ways that steer us far away from the very loving comfort and strength that is available to us from a God who understands grief and pain only too well.
Logic says that good people and innocent children don’t deserve to be touched by pain, misery and despair. Tyler did nothing to deserve contracting leukemia. Nor did God decide that Tyler’s loved-ones deserved to watch helplessly as neither medical care, nor love and support, nor the sheer power of prayer changed the outcome.
Our family heard many times over that we of all people didn’t deserve this. If that’s true, then wouldn’t logic also dictate that some DO deserve it? And if some do, who falls into that deserving category? If you ask me, NO child or parent deserves to face such an illness. And it’s not just illness that hits the undeserving. People are innocently born to poverty and deprivation. People are the victims of others’ choices. Murder, child abuse, adultery, drunk driving, drug dealing, pornography, bullying, rape, robbery? What does logic say about these?
These and more are chosen evil behaviors with innocent victims who didn’t deserve to be victims. And on top of that, sometimes the people who actively choose evil face no earthly consequences for their behavior, even as their victims do suffer the consequences. Neither Tyler, nor Ron and I, nor Michelle was chosen to suffer this way.
It happened because cancer happens, like poverty happens, like accidents happen, like crime happens, like natural disasters happen, like mental illness happens, and on and on and on.
I believe the Old and New Testaments’ accounts that God originally created a world that was perfect. He created humans who have the capacity to be perfect in relationship with Him but have the choice not to be. The earth and all in it are now far, far from perfect.
If you read both the Old and New Testaments, you’ll find outlined God’s plan to ultimately and eternally redeem both the physical earth and those of us who live in it. You’ll find how, despite our constant screw-ups, we can live our earthly lives in perfect relationship with a perfect God, even while we’re not perfect.
In the meantime, sometimes those striving to be Christ-like face terrible pain and suffering. It’s not a matter of deserving or undeserving, fair or unfair. Instead, as long as we are inhabitants of this earth, we’re all at equal risk to suffer.
God tells us in Scripture that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. He didn’t say that only the unjust deserve the rain or that fairness dictates that the just will never experience the rain. He tells us that we will be touched by this imperfect world. He also promises to give us the comfort, love and strength we need to press on when we face the rain, whether it’s a light drizzle or a full-on hurricane.
I also need to point out that just as neither Ron nor I did anything to deserve losing our son, we also didn’t do anything to deserve having him in our lives in the first place. In fact (and I may be slightly biased here) I don’t think that even Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., combined could pool together enough goodness to deserve a son like Tyler. I’ll never know why he was presented to us.
Tyler was a gift undeserved. Tyler was a blessing undeserved. To this day, Ron and I are amazed that God entrusted Tyler to us to be his earthly parents. Is it then unfair that we lost him at such a young age? Does the beauty of the initial gift of our son indicate God is good and loves us but the loss of Tyler’s life before we expected it mean God is bad and hates us? Did He give him to us in love and take him from us in hate?
I received a “Yes” to my life-long prayers to become a mother; I received a “No” to my desperate prayers to let Tyler be restored to health. Did God only love me and care about me when He said, “Yes?” When He answered, “No,” was He cruel? Should I praise him for the son He gave me and rail against Him for the son he took? All these questions result when we try to apply human logic to matters of faith.
It only brings us unnecessary grief, anger and despair.
But faith brings beauty to my grief.
I have grief. I have it in spades. I have it so deep that sometimes I feel it will prevent me from taking my next breath. I weep until my eyes and head hurt and my chest feels like it will explode. Sometimes I can’t get relief from the trauma of remembering my baby’s suffering.
But I don’t despair. And in my grief He promises to bless me with a special comfort reserved just for those who grieve. I am not alone in my suffering, nor will I be alone, because I am in relationship with my Creator, just as He intended me to be. While I live with the troubles of a suffering world, His promises are real and are mine.
As I said in the beginning of this post, I wish I had more than words to express all this. All I really have are my own story and experiences. That’s all I can speak of with absolute authority. And my experience is this: that as I live in personal relationship with God on an earth that is far from perfect, I “fix my eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
My own faith experience tells me God is good. He is love. He is hope. He knows each hair on my head and each time a sparrow falls (Matthew 10:29-30). And despite being holy and perfect, He made the way for you and for me to spend forever with Him because He loves us that much. He doesn’t have to, but He does. Never once, from the time I started to walk in relationship with Him as a teenager, to this very night, as I navigate the deepest pain I’ve ever felt, has God been untrue to any of His promises to me.
Putting my thoughts and beliefs out there like this is far outside my comfort zone. I’m more than satisfied to journey through this privately in my own little world surrounded by the people in my life. In all of my thirty-plus years of walking with the Lord, I had never before written or spoken this way publicly. Until Tyler became ill.
What compels me now to share my faith story is Tyler. He was outspoken in both his love for the Lord and his love for others. He cared deeply about helping people get through tough times, and his dad and I feel strongly about carrying on where Tyler cannot. We are simply astounded at God’s goodness to us and His goodness to our son.
For those of you who read this and still have doubts and questions and anger and fear, I can only point you to the One who can make sense of it all. He created you to be in an everlasting relationship with Him, one that nothing can break.
“So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?
Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.” (Romans 8:31-39, The Message)