Finding Joy again and again. Coming out of the darkness.

It is difficult to talk about the emotional and spiritual toll Joshua’s death has had on our family. The day he died I looked at the place he always sat while reading and spoke out loud, “My life is ruined.”   The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines ruin as “to damage something so badly that it is no longer useful, valuable, enjoyable… to spoil or destroy something.” It was the perfect description of my world.

Hope was gone and my will to live was gone.  I laid in my bed for days calling it my mourning bed and I never wanted to leave.  The hymn “Blessed Assurance” started playing over and over in my head from the moment I heard of his death.  Out of nowhere I could hear the words and the melody.

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

O what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God

Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood

This is my story, this is my song

Praising my Savior all the day long

This is my story, this is my song

At the time I did not know the significance of that song or the impact the words would have on me in the months ahead. 

As word spread my home began to fill with friends and family. I laid in bed and received visitors in my room, not needing or desiring to be surrounded. My friends trickled in to share comforting words. They laid beside me, opening the Bible to read scripture, singing songs and crying with me. I was their patient, my body wracked with grief and my mind tortured with my loss.

I suffered greatly those first few weeks, wracked with guilt that I was not able to get him help.  Angry with our poor health care system, doctors, and hospitals.  The hardest part was the loss of hope. How could I have trust and hope in God who had been with me since the beginning? God had betrayed me and betrayed my son. Where did all my prayers go? Was He even listening? I did not stop believing he was real because I know that he is real. I stopped believing I was loved. Why would God have allowed this to happen?  Why did He despise me?

Prayer was impossible in those early days.  I had become totally dependent on my friends to pray and send scripture.  I did not want to pray or open a Bible. My lifeline became those texts from my friends.  The beauty in those days were the friends who cried with me and shared in my suffering. 

My biggest concern was that I needed to know that Joshua was in heaven.  I cried out to God asking Him to show me that he was safe with Him.  It took weeks for me to step back into a Church.  Finally, one Sunday I managed to get up and go to Church.  As I walked in that very first time our worship was under way and as I walked down the aisle the words “Blessed Assurance” rang through the Church. Now I understood why that song rang through my head that awful day. God in his all-knowing knew that I was going to need an assurance. Assurance that my son was with Him. A simple hymn that I had heard in my childhood was planted as a seed long ago.  A seed that would eventually grow into a new kind of faith and trust. I would walk through many painful months and begin to know God in a brand new more intimate way.