Five Years

12/13/2006

In that wonderful day you will sing: “Thank the Lord! Praise his name!
Tell the nations what he has done. Let them know how mighty he is!”
Isaiah 12:4 (NLT)

Our son, Phil, was five years old in Heaven recently--if the years are counted there. Did they throw a party for him? Is that done there? We can’t know from here what they do there, but one can wonder…and I do. I write this in obedience to the God of Heaven and Earth. I will answer His call…and in doing so, I hope to give Him all the glory and praise He is so deserving of.

I guess my personal need to write this is not so great, because the healing has been…great that is. Most times, the best writing comes out of pain. It’s usually the most honest, the most gripping, the most relatable… But, there is no pain in my heart today. Only thanks for all that God has done. It’s not that I don’t miss, that’s not it at all, it’s that I see things in a different light five years later, ten years later, 21 years later…

Lord, forgive me for my “all about me” attitude then…forgive me for not seeing You in those years…forgive me for not understanding that You have a perfect plan for our lives even when it most certainly doesn’t seem that it is perfect.

You see, it’s easy to ignore God when life is good, but when things don’t quite go the way we have them planned, we start to question God…we wonder what He’s doing, and why? It takes time to discover that God’s plans are very different, and so much better than ours… Our son was a gift from God that we hadn’t planned. Oh, how God had rocked our world, had shaken up our self-absorbed life…because He loves us that much. He knew the self-absorption had to go if we were ever to live the life that He had planned…a life filled with blessings beyond measure.

My soul is at rest today, more than it has ever been in the past. And why is that? How can that be on the fifth anniversary of Phil’s Homegoing? Because, I have been forced to depend on the Lord alone. Nothing else in this world satisfies me like He does. Nothing else could take the pain from my heart like the words, “Be patient. You WILL see him again one day. He has not died, he is living…with Me…and you will be here one day too.” God is our eternal Hope, and there is nothing that matches that! There is nothing in this world that can fix what once was so broken, nothing but our Mighty God.

God will not quit, even when we want to. He will keep working in our lives, even when we want to lie down and die. He has a plan, and He will see it accomplished! Phil may be gone from us on this earth, but we are not far from one another when we are both in the presence of our God. It keeps my heart set on prayer…

God says, “Praise Me in your weakness, praise Me in your sorrow, and most of all praise Me for the things I planned long ago and have now accomplished!” AMEN!