Till We Are Home

Deep in the throes of sorrow, questions inevitably come. Losing loved ones, suffering through sickness, facing losses will challenge everything you learned about the goodness and kindness of the Lord. Does God really care? How is this for our good? When we walk through seasons of suffering, our faith in God is tested. 

Four weeks after losing Isabel, we found ourselves in one of these faith-testing periods. Overwhelmed by grief and just missing our girl, we were having a very hard day. We asked all the questions I mentioned and more. We wondered how to keep moving forward. We just couldn’t make sense of it all. As Mark Talbot puts it in his book, When the Stars Disappear, we felt like a ship lost at sea while the clouds covered our navigating stars. 

Untethered. Directionless. Hopeless.

It had only been a short time since losing her – those early days are marked with so much crying, so much pain, so much questioning, so much…sorrow. That day we were in the thick of it, too. 

Some people comb through a loved one’s things, photos, videos, or anything that will remind them of the one they lost. That day, my wife found herself going through some things in the school room. We homeschooled our children, and my wife was sorting through some of Isabel’s recent work. One particular assignment, Isabel read Elie Wiesel’s Night then had to write a letter to Mr. Wiesel in response to his book.

This assignment…this letter my wife found that day when she looked through Isabel’s schoolwork. 

In the letter, Isabel wrote of her sadness at what Mr. Wiesel endured in those concentration camps. She expressed her sorrow to him but also wanted to encourage him as well. The encouragement she wrote to him prompted my wife to cry out, asking me to come in the room with her. I came into the room and she handed me the letter, tears running down her face. 

“Read this,” she said to me. 

As I read the letter, my wife sitting right next to me wiping her tears from her face, watching and waiting for me to get to the same part she found. Isabel encouraged Mr. Wiesel that though he may have felt that God didn’t care about him anymore because of his suffering, she told him that indeed He does. 

That God cares for him so much. 

And that He is doing all of this, even the suffering Elie was enduring, for Elie’s good and God’s glory. 

Therefore, Mr. Wiesel was encouraged by my sweet girl that he ‘must trust’ God because He knows what He’s doing.

My little girl wrote that letter just a few months before her death.

We were stunned. Utterly stunned at what Isabel wrote. But I couldn’t ignore the connection…through she wrote this as an assignment for school…though she wrote this to Mr. Elie Wiesel…I told my wife that Isabel wrote that not for Mr. Wiesel, but for her. 

That the Lord, 

in His kindness, 

in His goodness,

in His absolute sovereignty knew what she needed to hear that day, those few weeks after losing her precious youngest daughter.

We needed to hear that we ‘must trust’ God. 

All of those things that my sweet girl was saying to Elie Wiesel were things we were wrestling with that day and in those weeks after her death. They were the exact things we felt, and Isabel’s pencil etched out the words her mama and daddy needed to hear.

I am blown away by the kindness and goodness of the Lord to minister to our hearts through the penciled etching of our lost little girl’s heart. 

‘Must trust’ has become an anthem in our home. It’s a battle cry we Christians must shout not only on the fields of horror in suffering but through all our days. For us, these words were the precise anthem we needed that day and the anthem we still need – for our God is so good and worthy of our trust. 

In those last few months leading up to her death, Isabel dove into God’s Word and found great comfort in several passages including Proverbs 3:5-6, which says, 

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

and he will make straight your paths.

This must have been the melody of her heart in those days, finding that her greatest hope was in trusting in the Lord. These words of finding trust in the Lord echoed throughout her last few months, finding its way even into her schoolwork. 

We still find ourselves in seasons of sadness. The waves of sorrow can still wash in and feel overwhelming. But we ‘must trust’ that the Lord is doing all things for our good and His glory. We can trust Him with all our hearts, turn from our own understanding (because, quite frankly, we can’t possibly understand it all), and find the path for our feet ordered by the Lord even in these days when our path seems so obscure. 

That day just a few weeks after losing her when our sorrow ran deep, the bright light of the Lord shown so majestically and so sweetly through the penciled words of our little girl. Our God was so tender and kind, we couldn’t help but praise Him and thank Him for this gift – the gift of words from our little girl and the gift of a new banner to raise in the seasons of grief to come. 

I agree with my little one…we ‘must trust’ our God in the highs and lows for He surely knows what He is doing. So we will ‘must trust’ Him through our days…

Till we are home…