Today I went to the funeral of a two year old. I watched her father, a 24-year old Marine, talk about his daughter with such grace. I so love “my” military families and although it makes me sound old, I am so proud of them as I watch them journey through life. No parent should ever experience the loss of a child. It is not how it should be. We should come into this life, live 95.3 years and die quietly in our sleep. But that is not always how it goes. It is actually rarely how it goes. One day you are playing in the park with your child, or snuggling on the couch or watching a movie together and the next day, they are gone. I can’t imagine the hole left behind.
After my father’s death, my mom always said it is not something you ever get over, it is something you learn to live with. Those words have always stuck with me. After my mother’s death, they rang even truer. The pain of loss remains, the hole remains. We build lives around it, we go on, we thrive, we live, we have joy again … but the hole is there. The hole that only that person, that friend, that parent, that child can fill. Over time I think the hole fills with memories and stories making it less painful but none the less it is still a hole.
Today was one of those days that I feel so blessed to be part of North Coast Church. I stood and listened to our Pastor talk about the loss and gently move the family thru the service, thru the reception, thru the burial. His words were powerful. His message was of hope. He spoke about how temporary our life is here…how this is just a blip in eternity. In the bible Peter writes about living in the tent of this body. Our body is just a tent…temporary. Chris said how much stock do you put in a tent? Do you build a driveway to it, put patios around it, install a Jacuzzi…no it’s temporary. You never plan to stay in the tent, you always plan to move on to a “real” place to live…that’s eternity. Everything here is temporary…a blip.
I felt blessed today. I have attended funerals my whole life, a lot of them in fact. Standing out by the graveside, kind of watching from the side, I experienced one of those moments that will have lasting impact. Hard to put into words but something along the lines of out of all the deaths I’ve seen and all the funerals I’ve attended, today I felt such peace in knowing, truly knowing, that eternity is there for us. In a way I always think we are waiting for God, but God is also waiting for us, we just leave our tent behind and go. Something profound in that.
So today I grieve with this couple and I share in the joy that their little girl is with our God, dancing with Jesus.
