Monday's Mourning Ministry - Feeling Forsaken / Believe ~Brooks & Dunn

Monday's Mourning Ministry

Feeling Forsaken

~

Believe ~Brooks & Dunn

Singing Your praise, betrayal surges up...

Tears start to pour before I know it.

Thanksgiving and sorrow merge in one cup;

Lord, Your thankful child is not stoic.

I don't like to feel conflicting thoughts of You;

I know You are Love, and gave all to save us.

But Your chid is human and feels betrayed by You~

You, who can save all, chose not to save her?

I know this thought is just part of the story,

And I know feelings and thoughts aren't always facts.

I know there's much I won't know before Glory;

I know Love is not unloving in His acts.

When did my life become so much about me?

Before her death, I was ever full of praise.

Now I am stumped ~ can't get over what I see,

Yet I know from her death, her life You'll surely raise.

God, how do You handle a child's dissonance?

It must clash in Your ears and make You sad,

And yet there's compassion and a Father's patience ~

Your own Son wept too when his friend, in death was clad;

And He too cried out when, by You, He felt forsaken,

Yet He knew Your heart, when by death He was taken.

Even tears cried out when we're feeling betrayed,

Love collects in a vile, vital to save.

Emotions come and go...they're just diamonds in Your quarry,

Love's elixir for us, You'll use to create

The Grand Finale...the Rest of Love's Story!

You allow evil, if just for a time;

When touched by Your Love, it produces the sublime.

When we stand before You, we'll see the bigger story;

All pain will fade away in the presence of Your Glory.

For now, we'll walk by faith, till You transform our story...

*****

Below is one of the songs Merry Katherine played for me from her new c.d., "Believe," that she played for me on our way to our last beach trip together the August before she died. When I heard it, it made me cry (and of course, I cried again today as I heard it). It expresses so well her sweet heart and the sweet words of comfort we have as we believe, by faith, what is ahead for all who love our Lord Jesus, so that "we know that we know that we know" we will see our loved ones again...

Believe

Brooks & Dunn

Old man Wrigley lived in that white house

Down the street where I grew up

Momma used to send me over with things

We struck a freindship up

I spent a few long summers out on his old porch swing

Says he was in the war when in the navy

Lost his wife, lost his baby

Broke down and asked him one time

How ya keep from going crazy?

He said I'll see my wife and son in just a little while

I asked him what he meant

He looked at me and smiled, said

(Chorus)

I raise my hands, bow my head

I'm finding more and more truth in the words written in red

They tell me that there's more to life than just what I can see

Oh I believe

Few years later I was off at college

Talkin' to mom on the phone one night

Getting all caught up on the gossip

The ins and outs of the small town life

She said, Oh by the way son, old man Wrigley's died.

Later on that night, I laid there thinkin' back

Thought 'bout a couple long-lost summers

I didn't know whether to cry or laugh

If there was ever anybody deserved a ticket to the other side

It'd be that sweet old man who looked me in the eye, said

(Chorus)

I raise my hands, bow my head

I'm finding more and more truth in the words written in red

They tell me that there's more to life than just what I can see

I can't quote the book

The chapter or the verse

You can't tell me it all ends

In a slow ride in a hearse

You know I'm more and more convinced

The longer that I live

Yeah, this can't be

No, this can't be

No, this can't be all there is

(Chorus)

When I raise my hands, bow my head

I'm finding more and more truth in the words written in red

They tell me that there's more to life than just what I can see

I believe

Oh, I

I believe

I believe

I believe

I believe

I believe

*****

Life is not a snap shot, It might take a little time, but you'll see the bigger picture.

There's good for those who love God.

Once you feel the weight of glory all your pain will fade to memory.

~found on Amy Richardson Peterson's Facebook page,

(Amy is a precious Sister-in Child-Loss Grief)

Poem - Feeling Forsaken - Angie Bennett Prince - 3/12/2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5z-jjWyAJQ&feature=related

Tuesday's Trust - How do I trust, left quaking in my boots?

Tuesday's Trust

How do I trust, left quaking in my boots?

This week, a precious grieving mother reached out to me on the internet, baring her broken heart and soul to cry out for help to a fellow-grieving-mother. I dare-say she shares much of our own dilemma in needing to cry out to God when our understanding of Him has been thrown to an all-time low... Here I share her cry anonymously and my letter back to her that God put on my heart.

Angie,

I found you last week when I was looking up the word Grieving on the Internet. (Your) story was very touching and I hurt for you too.

I recently was 5 months pregnant and lost my baby boy. I never knew we as mothers could experience so much pain. I struggle with constantly asking God why, why why. I am a believer as well and it just tears me apart wondering why God would hurt us this way.

Anyways I know that I have some kind of strength and peace because of the people praying for me. I have really (distanced) myself from God, even though I talk to Him just not as much anymore. I want to just pull my hair out at times.

Could you please give me some encouraging words. I don't know how you pulled through.

Thank you

Dearest (Grieving Mother),

I am so glad you found me through the internet!

My heart breaks for you in losing your baby boy.

My heart breaks for you in hearing your agonizing struggle with God.

My heart breaks for you in recognition of that vulnerable spiritual struggle.

Yes, Grief can throw us into what my husband and I call a

"Spiritual Train-Wreck": right when we most need God, all our basic foundation in Him is shaken, if not shattered.

The One who knows us to the core and loves us without fail, the death of our child leaves us questioning, confused, even recoiling from. His very love for us has seemingly been contradicted and disavowed when we needed it most.

His reputation as

that Rock of protection,

that Beacon of diligent watching out for us and our little ones,

that Fighter of our Enemy,

seems impugned if not completely shattered.

All of our "Assumptive Beliefs" in Him are challenged if not shot-through,

leaving us confused as to who He is now,

leaving us feeling betrayed,

leaving us feeling abandoned,

on-our-own against an Enemy

we had no strength to fight,

not enough foresight to circumvent,

not enough armor to destroy before he could destroy our own.

And then, we are expected to bow to our knees to call on this God at a time we feel the most abandoned, let down, and/or betrayed by Him?

So, we unwittingly find ourselves distancing from Him, knowing we are probably being deceived by the Enemy, yet unable to overcome our confusion to again trustingly bare our hearts and souls before Him who gave up all for us.

What a conundrum! What a dilemma! Needing the One who loves us the most, yet fearful of and feeling betrayed by Him in the loss of our most sacred treasure on this earth, our child who has fallen right in front of His very eyes...

We have spent our lives watching out for our little ones, throwing pillows down every time they are about to fall, or picking them up quickly after they do fall. And then, when they need a pillow much bigger than the one we could lift, we discover their Heavenly Father did NOT throw it down in time for them to be saved? When He could see what we could not see coming at them, HE did not intervene, HE did not SAVE? It does not compute with our finite minds. It does not register in our hearts as a God of Love, of Protection, of Saving-from-the-Enemy.

So we become estranged, confused; we pull away. We have no strength to do battle with Him with our questions, our confusions, our feelings of being betrayed. So we retreat. We shut down. We back away. At our weakest, we are seemingly left alone to walk through the "Valley of the Shadow of Death" that the psalmist declared he could walk through without fear "because Thou art with me."

And to whom do we turn?

The civilians who have never tangled with this War of the Soul in the Valley of the Shadow of Death have NO CLUE with what we are struggling; indeed, we had no clue when we were on the other side.

But now, here we are, under the rock and rubble of devastation of all that is most dear to us, with no fight in ourselves, and with no understanding of our Lord-our-Risen-One who could rescue us from Evil, who could restore our hearts and souls, who could pick us up and hold us close to His heart when we most need Him as our Heavenly Daddy, our Abba-Father.

So we turn to the literature of other Sojourners of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and we find very little there that truly addresses the spiritual disillusionment with which we struggle. It seems we find little more there than trite, superficial inquest of their Living Lord. It appears they are walking out of the Battle's Emergency Room settling for little more than mere superficial band-aids over their war-torn hearts that needed massive critical-care intervention to sustain Life.

So we turn away from pat answers of civilians and superficial answers of victims who have gone before us.

Yet we are left among the rubbles with no skin on, needing help but afraid to ask for it.

We find ourselves quaking before our Lord, much in need of His healing but afraid to bare our wounds to Him for treatment with His soothing ointment that could penetrate to the deepest core of our being with His healing Love because we don't "know" Him like we thought we did.

We not only feel blasted to smithereens by the Enemy, but when we look behind us to our Savior, we cannot find Him, and it feels as if some of the fiery blast was allowed to pass through Him straight to us, or even worse to our own vulnerable child.

Indeed some of us fear the fiery blast of death may have been of HIS own orchestration if we are to believe what is spoken to us: "God wanted your child to be His beautiful angel in Heaven."

So we recoil from Him, from His otherwise saving presence.

We are left in a sinking, war-torn ship without a Captain,

in a losing battle without a General,

in a Death-devastated Home with no Daddy to fight for us, to save us.

Disillusioned, beaten down, weak and powerless, we find ourselves like the disillusioned disciples who cry out,

"Whom have we in Heaven but Thee? And where else do we go? You alone hold out the words of Life."

My heart and prayers are with you, dear sister in grief.

Much love to you as you seek to find your way through the shattered remains of Death's battlefield,

Angie

Picture: Thank you to Eva Soulu for more of her amazing art... http://soulu.cgsociety.org/gallery/605247/

Friday's Faith - Where Was God...?

Friday's Faith

Where Was God...?

After we experience the death of a child, many of us have a crisis of faith of some sort or other. For me my very foundation was turned inside out. I never doubted God was with me and that God loved Merry Katherine, and I was incredibly grateful that He had rescued her off of that hard ground amidst Satan's evil work, and taken her to be with Him safely in Heaven. But many of my assumptive beliefs about God were challenged, turned upside down, and stripped bare. This reassembling of my very foundation has taken a lot of work, much angst and soul-searching before God.

Lewis Smedes, also a strong Christian when his son died, had a crisis of faith, asking,

"Where was God?"

and

"What was God doing when this evil happened in front of our eyes?"

Below is Smedes heart-breaking story:

A Father Grieves The Loss of a Child

by Lewis B. Smedes

Lewis B. Smedes, who died in 2002 after a fall at his home, was professor emeritus of theology and ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. This article is excerpted from his book, My God and I: A Memoir, © 2003 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Used by permission.

This article appeared in The Christian Century, May 3, 2003, pp. 38-39. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

About four years into my teaching profession, Doris gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who died before he had lived the whole of a day. God’s face has never looked the same to me since. Because of my Calvinism, God’s face had had the unmovable serenity of an absolute sovereign absolutely in control of absolutely everything. Every good thing, every bad thing, every triumph, every tragedy, from the fall of every sparrow to the ascent of every rocket, everything was under God’s silent, strange and secretive control. But I could not believe that God was in control of our child’s dying.

It was not as if I had found a forgotten Bible verse or saw a familiar one in a new light. It was more like something that happened to me when I was 15, hitchhiking through Georgia, waiting at the docks for a ride with a trucker. I heard a young white man curse an aging black man who had gotten in his way, cussed him out with God-rattling oaths; and what is more, he did it in front of the old man’s friends. I had never known a black person. I had never before seen racism in action. But when I heard its words and saw its face on that early morning in Atlanta, I knew for sure that racism was a terrible thing.

That’s how I knew for sure that God did not micromanage our baby’s death. I had been intellectually excited by John Calvin’s tough-minded belief that all things -- and he really meant all of them, including the ghastly and the horrible -- happen when and how and where they happen precisely as God decreed them to happen. A "horrific decree," Calvin conceded, but if it works out to God’s glory, who are we to complain? On the day that our baby boy died, I knew that I could never again believe that God had arranged for our tiny child to die before he had hardly begun to live, any more than I could believe that we would, one fine day when he would make it all plain, praise God that it had happened.

I learned that I do not have the right stuff for such hardboiled theology. I am no more able to believe that God micromanages the death of little children than I am able to believe that God was macromanaging Hitler’s Holocaust.

With one morning’s wrenching intuition, I knew that my portrait of God would have to be repainted.

I was well aware that every day other people are suffering tragedies infinitely worse than Doris’s and mine. And I remembered that I had consoled people whose loss was much greater than ours with the comforting assurance that God knew best. But grief can be a self-centered thing; I had no tears for the wretched and the poor of the earth that day. I had tears only for Doris and myself.

We had spent a decade making love according to a schedule set by four different fertility clinics in three different countries. And finally, after one summer night’s lark on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan with no thought but love, Doris became a medically certified pregnant woman.

Six months along and doing fine, we thought -- with God answering our prayers it could be no other way but fine -- she suddenly one night began losing amniotic fluid. I called her doctor. ‘She’s going into labor," he said. "Get her to the hospital as fast as you can." And then he said he was sorry, but our baby was going to be badly malformed.

"How badly?"

"Very."

We fumbled silent and bewildered into the car. I told her. We cried. And we promised God and each other that we would love the child no matter how damaged she or he was. After Doris had been tucked in, I went to the waiting room to worry for a few hours. Suddenly, Doris’s doctor broke in and exulted: "Congratulations, Lew, you are the father of a perfect man-child." I told Doris the news. She was skeptical, but I went home and danced like a delirious David before the Lord.

Next day, just before noon, our pediatrician called: I had better come right down to the hospital. When I met him he told me that our miracle child was dead. Two mornings later, with a couple of friends at my side and our minister reading the ceremony, we buried him "in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection." Doris never got to see her child.

A pious neighbor comforted me by reminding me that "God was in control." I wanted to say to her, "Not this time." It seems to me that the privilege of being the delicate organisms we are in the kind of world we live in comes at a price. The price is that things can go wrong, badly wrong sometimes, which should come as no surprise.

The blossoming of every flecklike zygote into a humanoid embryo and an embryo into the astounding creature we call a baby is beset with so many threats along the way that any baby who gets delivered into the world as the pride and joy of its mother is nature’s most marvelous success story. Every healthy newborn child is a biological miracle; if we did not know that it actually happens every day, we would say that the very notion was a wild man’s fantasy.

Doris and I cried a lot, and we knew in our tears that God was with us, paying attention to us, shedding ten thousand tears for every one of ours. Neither of us had a moment’s inclination to give up on God, to quit believing in God or to quit trusting God. In fact, God never seemed more real to either of us. Never closer. Never more important. I could stop believing that God had micron-managed our tiny boy’s dying. But I could not stop trusting that God was still with us.

Four decades later, on the morning of September 11, Doris and I, with people all over the country, were stunned into silence by the sight of two airliners crashing into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A gargantuan evil -- not a breakdown in physical nature this time, but an evil conceived and willed by human beings. Pure evil does not happen often. Most of the time, evil wears the mask of decency. But this time it wore no mask, and when we saw if, we spelled it with a capital E.

It is true that the purity of another’s evil does not make our own ways good. But this time, no matter how hard I tried to find one, I could locate no stain in our national behavior dark enough to temper the purity of this evil. What happened that terrible Tuesday was born in the evil intentions of evil men’s hearts. The evil of the thing only makes our question the more urgent:

Where was God and what was God doing when this evil happened in front of our eyes?

Calvinists seek their answer in the eternal past when God charted the course of every human event. There, in eternity, God wrote the entire script for the whole human drama yet to come. God, not Osama bin Laden, was really in charge when the terrorists murdered all those innocent people. And they have a splendid hymn to comfort them:

God moves in a mysterious way 


his wonders to perform.


He plants his footsteps in the sea


and rides upon the storm.


His purposes will ripen fast,


unfolding every hour. 


The bud may have a bitter taste, 


but sweet will be the flower. 


Blind unbelief is sure to err 


and scan his work in vain. 


God is his own interpreter 


and he will make it plain.

I do not want God to "make it plain." If God could show us that there was a good and necessary reason for such a bad thing to have happened, it must not have been a bad thing after all. And I cannot accommodate that thought. In fact, I have given up asking why such bad things happen. Instead, I look to the future and ask,

When is God going to come and purge evil from God’s world? When will God come to make God’s original dream for the world come true?

For me, there was no mystery about where God was and what God was up to on the morning of September 11, 2001. God was right there doing what God always does in the presence of evil that is willed by humans -- fighting it, resisting it, battling it, trying God’s best to keep it from happening. This time evil won. God, we hope, will one day emerge triumphant over evil -- though, on the way to that glad day, God sometimes takes a beating.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2716

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