Five Years

12/13/2006

Five years ago…today. (This was written on November 14, 2006)

Our son, Phil, is five years old in Heaven today--if the years are counted there. Are they throwing a party for him? Is that done there? Are they celebrating the date of his arrival, the one written in Book of Life next to Phil’s name? The date that told when he’d be going Home? We can’t know from here what they do there, but one can wonder…and I do.

To tell you the truth, I don’t really want to write about this day, because I think many might be tired of hearing about our son, about his illness, about his Homegoing…enough, some might be saying…enough. We’ve heard about this long enough…

So, what’s a mom to do when she wakes on the fifth anniversary of her son being gone? Especially a mom who writes about everything that God brings across her path each day? I resist writing this, and yet it seems God is calling me to do it. I procrastinate, and instead look back over the last five years to see if I have written about this day in each of those years…I have…so I guess I should write today…so I will, but I don’t feel any great need to, except 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 the need to write is not so great today, 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…

Do you know what I thought when I got pregnant back in 1985 with our third son? First of all, I was shocked, as was Jim. We hadn’t planned on a having a third child. We had two boys who totally filled our days, and we figured that was enough. We were done. Thank you God for these little blessings, but we’re tired, so we’ll just stop here.

God had other plans. As I practiced softball one Saturday morning, talking with a friend, she asked if we were going to have any more children? I said, “I hope not.” The next Saturday morning I called her to tell here that I wouldn’t be at practice…I was pregnant.

Now, this pregnancy came at a time in our lives that was not exactly “perfect.” Jim was only working part-time at a new job with Digital Equipment Corporation, making less than $10 an hour, and we were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Alameda, which was costing us $650 a month, twice as much as the home we had lived in in Fresno. We had no medical benefits at the time, and each paycheck was practically counted out to the penny to just survive. We were 28 years old and struggling…and then God said, “Here, I’d like to bless you with a third child!”

It rocked our world. We were very planned people up to that point, and this was very unplanned. What were we going to do? I remember the phone call telling my parents that we were expecting number three. I felt like I was 16 years old, and unwed, because of the irresponsibility involved with this pregnancy. We had no money to pay for this child…in fact we were so broke that when the information for the school lunch program came home with our oldest son, Jimm, one day, and we qualified, I joked that I’d like to go to the school for lunch! It would have been a treat just to go somewhere!

Our plan was always that I would be a stay-at-home mom, like my mom was, and like Jim’s mom was. We liked that idea, so whatever Jim made, that’s what we lived on. We made it work, but it called for some very slim years. I remember Christmas shopping that first year we lived in Alameda. I bought most of the boys’ gifts off the front rack at the grocery store…you know, where the little toys and treats hang up so you’ll pick them up while you’re standing in line after you’ve already chosen all the big items in the other part of the store. There were no other “big items,” in my basket then. The boys were young, four and seven, so they didn’t notice. They were thrilled with whatever they received.

And now, we were having another child…God had plans we weren’t very thrilled with at the time…not in our “all about me,” twenty-eight year old thinking in the mid 1980’s. I remember clearly thinking how I’d just been set back five years…FIVE YEARS! Chris would be going off to kindergarten, and I’d be home with another baby…man! That just wasn’t in MY plans at all…

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.

My daughter-in-law Holly said a cool thing the other day. She said this about most people having a baby… “It’s not like most people say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a bunch of extra money! Let’s have a baby!’”

Isn’t that the truth! But with me, it really wasn’t even all about the money, it really wasn’t even all about not having the medical benefits, it was more about what I WANTED in life, what MY PLANS were…and how this totally messed things up!

Lord, forgive me…

And so, we had a baby. Son number three!! By the time Phil was born, we were excited for his arrival, and we loved him with all our hearts. Please don’t think that we brought him into this world full of anger and resentment, because we certainly did not. He was a precious child that we loved from day one. He came out at 8 pounds, 7 ounces, and in God’s perfect plan, he was the most inexpensive child we had. During my pregnancy, Jim was hired on full time at Digital, acquired a company car and medical benefits, which covered a pre-existing condition. We walked out of Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California without paying them a dime for our third son! With our first two, we had to write a large check to cover what insurance did not, just so we could take our baby home!

Phil was a good baby, and what this young mother discovered was, when the older two did go off to school, he was like an only child. Yes, I still had some selfish thoughts of how he had set me back five years, but I also was able to fully enjoy him because of the time we had, just the two of us together. He was a little blonde haired, blued eyed gift to our family, and his brothers adored him. Somewhere along the way, he acquired the nickname, “Moo,” from our son Jimm. I called him “punkin,” or “punk” for short, until his dying day.

Phil slept in his crib, in the same room with his brothers. They were old enough to know to be quiet when the baby was sleeping, they did great with him--and it wasn’t long and we were moving from Alameda to the town of Fremont where we rented a three-bedroom house. Oh the plans of God…what He can see that we cannot!

But then I recall all you have done,
O Lord; I remember your wonderful deeds of long ago.
Psalm 77:11 (NLT)

Back in the 80’s, Jim and I were believers. We took the boys to church, we prayed before our meals, we knew there was a God in Heaven, but He wasn’t our everything. As I said, we were very planned people. We were making our plans, doing our thing, and just trying to carve out a good life for our family.

After a few years in Fremont, we were given the opportunity to move overseas with the company Jim worked for, and we took it. We packed up and moved to England for a couple of years, eventually ending up in Germany for six years, and life was adventurous. The slim-pickens days were behind us, and life was fun! We traveled, we skied, we made wonderful new friends…life was good, very good…and God was there, but mostly in the background of our lives. We attended church on Easter and Christmas. I signed up for a woman’s Bible study now and then, but that was about it. We were busy…

I believe God brought Phil into our lives, to not only rock our world a bit in 1985 when he was born, but also to rock our world a bit more in 1996 when he was diagnosed with Leukemia at the age of ten and a half. 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? If we thought having an unexpected child was not in our plans, having one of our children get cancer was far beyond anything we could have ever imagined back in our “planned” days of doing life. I tell people Phil was one of the first unplanned things Jim and I experienced in life, and since that day, we have discovered that God’s plans are very different and so much better than ours…

How can I say that?
Because now I live that, and God is an amazing God of wonder!

We will not hide these truths from our children; we will tell
the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord,
about his power and his mighty wonders.
Psalm 78:4 (NLT)

Phil didn’t know he was an “unexpected” baby, until Jim gave his testimony at church one Sunday. Phil was standing in the wings, listening to his dad tell the story of how God was working in some of the most difficult things of his life, and then Phil was to walk out onto the stage with our Pastor John when Jim was done, and be there while we all prayed. When that day was over, Phil had discovered that little “secret” of his birth, which to us, by then, was simply part of Who God was and how wonderfully He works in our lives. We were no longer the 28-year-old, all-about-me, what-are-MY-plans, people…we were God’s possession and we were depending on Him in ways we never could have imagined 16 years earlier. Things in our lives had changed drastically, because God loves us enough to rock our world, to shake things up that are “good” and make them great!

How can I say that?
Because I now live that, and God is an amazing God of wonder!

But as for me, how good it is to be near God!
I have made the Sovereign Lord my shelter,
and I will tell everyone about the wonderful things you do.
Psalm 73:28 (NLT)

It wasn’t long after Phil left for Heaven that my friend was here from Florida. She had come out for Phil’s memorial service and she wanted to see the tape of Jim giving his testimony at church, so we popped it in. I will never forget that day, because I had given no thought to the fact that Phil was also on that tape. As the tape played and Jim finished speaking, Phil and our Pastor walked onto stage, and I LOST IT! I sobbed great cries of anguish for the son that was no longer with us on this earth. I immediately fell to pieces watching that video--the loss was so great, the pain was so deep--it washed over me like a tidal wave, and the tears still fall as I type this to you on this day--thinking back to the devastation that I felt at that time.

Our son, our gift from God that we hadn’t planned, was gone from us, and the five years that I “thought” I had been set back were no longer there…those five years that I anguished over in my younger days…were no longer a “problem.” Oh, how God had rocked our world, had shaken up our self-absorbed lives…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.

“No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone.” (Hannah Whitall Smith “The God of All Comfort”)

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 the way He could when I had dropped to the floor in tears of utter despair. Nothing else calmed me like He did when I could barely breathe through moments of missing that gripped my heart like a vice. There was nowhere I could turn but to Him when I wanted to see my son so much I couldn’t stand one more minute without him, and the promises of God told me, “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.

Recently, I said, “Good-bye” to a good friend, If you have been reading my writings, you know that story. (If you missed it, you can read it on dcshore.com) In that loss, I learned some things that I never would have known… We miss our friends when they go Home, we long to talk with them and be with them, but there is a difference there. The difference I found is that our friends are not a part of our thinking 24-7. They are that time of the day when we would pick up the phone and call them, or they are that time of the day when we would go and visit them for a couple of hours. They are that time of the day when the mail would come and there might be a letter from them. They are a part of our day, but they are not our whole day. Our children are our whole day. As I’ve heard it said, “Our children are like a piece of our heart that is walking around outside of our bodies.”

In thinking about this, I think of it as a Corelle plate as compared to a breakable china plate. Maybe you’ve seen the recent commercials with the models, walking down the runway, their outfits matching the designs of the Corelle plate they are carrying. Then the plate drops…but it doesn’t break. Do you know why? Because Corelle plates are not supposed to break! But they do!! If you’ve ever owned Corelle plates, you may have experienced one breaking, as I have. The difference is, that when these plates, that are not supposed to break, do, they shatter into a million pieces…sometimes into just tiny slivers that are hard to even sweep up. There is no way in this world that we’d even attempt to glue them back together. They are gone, shattered and are to be thrown away, unlike a piece of precious china, where the pieces are larger and maybe, just maybe, we could get the glue out and fix it…

A child is not supposed to die. They are supposed to outlive their parents, but they do die sometimes, and what is left is like that Corelle plate…what’s left is a heart so completely shattered that without the miracle of God, it will never be put back together again. No amount of glue will do the job, because we can’t even find all the pieces in the beginning. Sometimes weeks later, when sweeping, a piece will be discovered… Sometimes with the loss of a child, lives are thrown away; hearts are never healed because there isn’t the willingness to hand the brokenness over to our healing God. We try to make the repairs ourselves, and it’s just not possible. The pieces just won’t fit…

In being with my friend, Sara, as she went through spinals and bone marrow tests, and in seeing all those familiar sights again, some slivers were discovered that still needed to be mended in my own heart, almost five years later. God knew that, He was still working on the healing process. There still may be some slivers out there, some experiences that will bring further healing, but for the most part, my heart has been put back together by our Mighty God!

I think that’s why I didn’t want to even “go there” with you today, one more time, bringing up what is now five years in the past…but God wanted me to, because all the glory belongs to Him and it certainly is a day to let Him shine! To hold the Corelle plate of my heart up to His light and see the brokenness that has been repaired. To give the Lord all the praises that He is so deserving of! To thank Him for all that He does in our lives to bless us, even when, and especially when, it doesn’t look like a blessing in the “plans we have for us.”

When Phil first got sick, I wondered what God was doing. I remember thinking, “God, why Phil? He was the child You gave to us, when we did not ask for him. I could understand if Jimm or Chris got sick, if we were to lose one of them. That would make sense. You knew it was coming and you gave us Phil to help out in that, but this doesn’t make sense to me.” But God had other plans…go figure! It was like He said, “Look, you planned your first two. Here they are, enjoy them. But Phil is My plan. I’m bringing him into your life for 16 years to rock your boat, to help you to know Me more, to help You to live the life I’ve designed for each of my children to live. I want you to truly live each day with Me in focus, and to take what I have taught you and to share it with others who are weary and need the Hope that I am offering to them.”

Now, I don’t know for sure that this is what God is saying in all of this. I mean, I’m just a mom who loves her kids, who is living without one now, and trying to make some sense of all of it. I’m just living one day at a time now…me, the most planned person you could have met, just living one day at a time…asking God what His plans are for each day. Today, it was to write to you about all that He has done in the last five plus years, and all that He will do in each of our lives, if we will trust in Him.

All heaven will praise your great wonders, Lord;
myriads of angels will praise you for your faithfulness.
Psalm 89:5 (NLT)

God has been faithful and continues to be faithful through all of this. My sister was funny the other day. She said she told her Bible study group, “I want to be where my sister is at…I just don’t want to go through everything she has gone through.”

I don’t want her to either… I told her, “Read the book, ‘The God of All Comfort.’ It’s all there. Just do what it says, then you won’t have to go through this.” She said, “Yeah, that’s the hard part, applying it…”

Isn’t that the truth!! Applying God’s Truth to our lives, believing His promises, understanding that He only wants the best for His children--to give us rest, to provide for us, to help us to know Him more…and sometimes the learning process can hurt beyond what we think we can endure.

Did I lose five years of my life when our second son went off to kindergarten and I was at home with a brand new baby? In my selfishness, I thought so at the time…my thinking was so wrong! The fact is it was only the beginning of a life that I never would have planned, but a life that God knew I would need. A life that is fully blessed by our Mighty God!

O Lord, I will honor and praise your name,
for you are my God. You do such wonderful things!
You planned them long ago, and now you have accomplished them.
Isaiah 25:1 (NLT)

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!

In re-reading this, it comes to mind that some may say, this is all fine and good, but what about Phil? He died. He’s not here to give all the glory to God for the great healing that has happened. It makes me think about the commercials that are on right now with Lance Armstrong. He’s talking about his cancer, his healing… And that is awesome! He was also diagnosed in 1996, and he’s still here, healthy and living a full life. I just pray he knows the Great Healer. If Lance doesn’t know God, he’s missing the best part of his story!

And where does this leave Phil? It leaves him in the best place ever because he believed in the eternal life offered through Jesus Christ! I mean really, life is hard, Heaven is easy! Phil’s struggles are over; he’s at perfect peace now. He knows joy and love beyond what we can ever experience here. He didn’t “lose,” because death is swallowed up in victory when we know Who our Savior is! That’s where it leaves Phil. He’s gone on to enjoy the fruits of his labor. While I’m left here to tell the story, he has already heard the words, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

There are worship songs that talk about the God of Heaven and Earth…I love that! The God I talk with each day, is the same God Phil sees each day now. Our Father God is as much on the Throne of Heaven, as I write this, as He is with me each day. The Son of God, Jesus Christ, is as much seated at the right hand of His Father in Heaven, as His Spirit is living inside of me on this day. 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…

Has my life changed in these past five years?
More than you could ever know!
Has it been set back?
Absolutely not!
Instead, it has propelled me forward into a future that rests securely in God alone!

I’m no longer 28 years old…do I wish I were? No, I don’t. I may not be able to open tightened jars like I once could, and I may no longer have the eyesight that I once had, and I know I no longer have the memory I once did, but as I come up to my 50th birthday this next year, it is the year of Jubilee! It’s a year to celebrate what God has done!

How can I say that?
I think you know now, from what I have written here today.
Perhaps, that’s why God said, “write” when I felt no need to.

He said, “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!”

It’s not finished, that I know. I truly feel like this is just the beginning of really knowing God and serving God, as He calls all of us to. I’m more excited than ever for each unplanned day now!

Chris called me just a little while ago. He said, “I just called to say ‘Hi’ and see how you’re doing Mom.” I thanked him for that. We talked of the Raiders losing again, and a few other things, and I told him this is a mementos day. He was sort of silent, and I asked him if he knew what today was? He said, “Yes, I do.” I said, “It’s a good day.” That was all I could say… He agreed.

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)

So today, I write this to let you know how mighty God is!

Praising Him!

Diane