Famous author Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely attributed for having said that “Success is to be loved by children and respected by intelligent men and women.”
I don’t know about having the respect of intelligent men and women, but at least I qualify for success in the second half of the equation, because children love me as evidenced by my twin granddaughters. Especially when they were very young they followed me around, sat in my lap, sang and played the piano for me, came in my office and stood there staring at me working until I “had” to stop what I was doing and talk to them; they counted to ten in Spanish for me, and wrote love letters and left them for me to find on my desk, bed, and living room.
Five years old and is such a sweet age for kids. They remind me of my brother’s son, Bob, (yep, he was named after me, and everyone referred to him as “Little Bob”). Like our twins he was incredibly smart; (he was so smart in fact that we could engage in adult level – intelligent – conversations.) Little Bob loved me, and I loved him with all we had, and we saw each other and talked on the phone often.
Unfortunately, Little Bob developed brain cancer at five years old. We could not believe it; we prayed, and we prayed, and we prayed, but the poor little fellow died an extremely difficult and painful death in spite of our prayers. He suffered through months of all of mankind’s known treatments of the day including surgery, chemo, radiation, and experimental drugs. He endured horrible pain that doctors told us would probably kill an adult. He lost all his hair and so much weight that he barely weighed thirty pounds at the point that he died in my brother’s arms. On that final day he weakly looked up into Jim’s eyes with his forehead dripping with sweat from being racked with pain and said, “Daddy I want to go home”, and it was at that point that the illuminating sparkle departed from those beautiful blue eyes, and he was gone.
To this day I’m still haunted by that experience. I’ve been looking at my long prayer list this morning and preparing to ask that God’s will be done, but that He will intercede for my friends and acquaintances. I believe in miracles and in answered prayer, and in fact I’m alive today because of several miracles of God.
But sadly, I also understand that sometimes the answers that we seek in prayer are not realized. At times God’s answer is “no”. I cannot begin to know why Little Bob had to suffer as he did, or why he was struck down so early in his life. My brother never got over it, and there can be little doubt that Little Bob’s ordeal played a major role in Jim’s ongoing depression throughout his life and contributed heavily to his mind-numbing suicide several years later.
When trying to explain the unexplainable, (children suffering and dying), I’ve often heard people say, “Can you imagine a perfect heaven without children being there?”
I really cannot imagine heaven being heaven without them, but I’m not sure that’s God’s entire reasoning and purpose for allowing Satan to destroy such goodness.
The truth be told He has mysteriously and deliberately left out of the Bible His reasoning for allowing bad things to happen to good people. Aside from some seemingly obscure verses that tell us that we develop patience and perseverance through trials and tribulations, the Bible seems strangely silent to me on such a deep and mind-boggling topic. I would have liked to have seen entire books devoted to it and no doubt I would have studied them for years.
We are however, left to accept His decisions by faith. I do this by going back to His demonstration of His love for us through Jesus on the cross. God did not have to send His only Son to leave His throne in heaven and come to earth and die a horrific death where he was even cursed and spat upon, but He did so voluntarily because He loves us with an incomprehensible love and wants to spend time everlasting with us. I cannot imagine that our Father who loved us so much that He would do that magnanimous act, or would ever do anything, or allow anything to happen to us that was not in our best interest.
When CEO of my company, I often made decisions utilizing information that was completely unknown to the other employees at our business. If they were privy to that information, my decisions would make better sense to them, but often without knowing all that I knew about a certain situation they thought I’d gone off the deep end. There have been numerous occasions when they came back later, (after my plan had matured), and told me that at the time they thought I’d lost it on that idea, but now they understood.
It’s the same with God in our lives except on a huge scale. God knows things that we do not know. He has a plan for all our lives, and He has assured us that it is a good plan and things will work out for the good. He has already written the final chapter of the book of life and knows that things end well and one day we will understand the “whys?” of the world. Until then we are charged with having complete faith in Him that He will be true to His word, and we must leave it there.
Trials test our faith, especially when the answer is no. We are told to trust in God and very little else. Imagine old Abraham waiting his entire life for a son and finally getting one in old age and then being asked to sacrifice him. He did not understand, he did not want to comply, but Abraham was totally faithful. God spared his son in the final moment and a great nation was spawned by Abraham as a blessing for his faithfulness.
This beautiful picture represents Jesus Christ to me, (only Jesus was not spared the agony of dying). He was however resurrected and now the entire Christian nation has been spawned. For some reason, known only to God, His son Christ had to suffer as no one has ever had to suffer before in order that we might have the opportunity to be reconciled and live. It is impossible to understand.
I say all of that in order to make the simple point that we will never be able to explain away tragedy any more than we can explain away why Christ had to die such an excruciatingly painful and humiliating death.
So the next time you receive a “no” when you pray, you should just accept it; there will be a time to grieve, and a time to get over it and smile, and then simply tell yourself . . . ONWARD!
And move on . . .
Romans 8:28
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.