Thursday, March 26, 2009

Flawless Perfection

I was cleaning up the house today (which is rare!), and I was praying while I was moving from room to room. For those of you who don't know, Jennifer's (my sister-in-law) really close friend passed away on Tuesday evening due to a terrible car accident. Christy was a beautiful, smart, friendly young woman who had just completed her master's degree. She was not in a relationship nor had any children, but was getting to know my cousin who lives in Las Vegas. She was very close to her family, especially her mother, and just an all around sweet person. She was the type of person that when they pass away, for a little while after, the world seems to be a little darker or colder. So as I was cleaning, my heart just seemed to break for this family and the people that knew her. I was asking the Lord to speak to me, because I so desperately need His help to make some sense of this situation. I did not feel my spirit move any real distance but deeper into the heart of God. It is times like these that we are inclined to be angry with God and to take away from the divinity of who He is. Why would a just God not have prevented the accident or keep her neck from snapping? The truth is that to save Christy from any real pain for the rest of her life, allowing her to complete her life earlier may have been justice. We will probably never know in this life time what the Lord accomplished for His sake, or how His heart was grieved at such an untimely death. For Christians, we have the hope of salvation and the knowledge that Christy is in a place of flawless perfection. It is so hard for us sometimes to see death as not the final end. So how do we find healing and peace for our aching hearts while here on Earth? We must dive into the Word and through prayer. It is in this time before the Lord that we realize that God is still in control and that only He can bring us to full restoration. Anger and bitterness, if allowed to fester in our hearts, will prevent the bridge to healing to take place. God is always there waiting for us, but because He gives us free will, we have to move towards Him. God full of perfect love and peace, who is light, can meet us in our darkness but we cannot remain dark. It is at a point of decision that we allow ourselves to have relationship with God. It is in times of people's deaths that our faith is made evident. Either we trust the goodness of God while knowing that the world we live in is broken, or we turn from the One who gives us the very breath that we take. The amazing thing about God is, He can handle our anger, and it is okay to hurt. However, we cannot allow that to push us from God and to keep from moving from glory to glory. We must pray as Paul did, that seeing only dimly through this world that the Lord would remove from his eyes the veils that keep Him from seeing as how God views the world. Christy's story wasn't over the second that she took her last breath. For she stood before the King of kings, and Jesus took her hand and said, "this one is with me." She is now in complete fullness, the way that we were intended to be. And now she only knows good and perfect peace, and is experiencing everlasting love. That is the story and legacy that she will carry, and for that I cannot be angry.

1 comment:

Grandma said...

Beautifully said and so true. Thank you for your insight and giving me a different way to think about death.