Update at Micah's Fourth Birthday Celebration

Last Saturday, Heather and I hosted our annual chili lunch in honor of Micah's birthday.  (Micah will turn 4 years tomorrow, on the 30th). In each of the past 4 years, we have hosted an informal chili lunch with friends and family at Nokomis Community Center in Minneapolis.  As I have done in each of the past four years, I provided everyone with a brief update on what the Lord has been doing in our lives and through the ministry to which he has called us.

MICAH WESSMAN FOUNDATION & HOPE FOR THE MOURNING

In December of 2009, Heather and I started a nonprofit called “the Micah Wessman Foundation.” The purpose of the foundation is to provide Christ-centered resources and practical assistance to parents who are grieving the death of an infant or young child. In October of last year, we launched a website called “Hope for the Mourning,” which provides Biblical teaching about suffering, infant salvation as well as how friends and family members can support parents grieving the death of a young child or infant. www.hopeforthemourning.com Among other resources, the webpage has a place for visitors to provide us with the contact information for parents who are grieving the death of a young child.

CARE PACKAGES

Since January 1 of this year, we have sent out a total of 47 care packages to 47 grieving families. These care packages typically include three books written from a Christian perspective, some additional resources, and in some cases, restaurant gift cards. While we learned of many of these grieving parents through word of mouth or obituary notices, many of these came to us through the website. In fact, we have sent care packages to India, England, and Trinidad. We have been able to correspond and interact with many of these grieving parents, especially those who live in the Twin Cities.  Several of the families who received care packages were at our chili lunch. 

FUNDRAISING

Earlier this month, a group of 8 friends and family members agreed to become part of the “Hope for the Mourning” running team.  The 8 of us competed in the Twin Cities 10 Mile race.  Each of the 8 runners agreed to find sponsors from friends, family and coworkers to raise at least $500 for Hope for the Mourning. I’m pleased to report that we collectively did more than twice that; to date, we have received more than $8,500 in pledges. Many of you pledged amounts for Hope for the Mourning. We are so grateful for how you have allowed us to minister to other grieving parents. The average cost per care package is more than $100, and so we appreciate how you have helped us offset the significant costs associated with this care package ministry. 

 

PURPOSE OF THE LUNCH

Ultimately, however, the purpose of our getting together last Saturday is not about fundraising; it was not even about Hope for the Mourning or the Micah Wessman Foundation. It was about our son's birthday, and about celebrating the blessing of his short life, about sharing in the unbelievable grief and shock of his sudden death, and fellowshipping with our friends and family members who have provided us with so much support through these past 3-plus years. While we are so grateful and thankful for your support, we get together with our friends and family because we can't be physically present with our own son on his birthday.  How we wish things were different-- how we wish we could celebrate Micah's birthday with him, in person, in a more conventional fashion. Perhaps at a greasy pizza restaurant with cake, ice cream and birthday hats? How we miss our Micah.

 

Bonhoeffer & The "Sweetness" of Death

Death seems everywhere these days.  A neighbor of ours, a mother with young children, is entering her last days in her battle with cancer.  Two sets of families from church lost adult children this week; two more families from church have sick infants on the brink of eternity.  So how should we view this event that, unless the Lord returns soon, is certain to occur to each and of us?  

 

 About death, Germon theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.

Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up--that is for young and old alike alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death?...Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God's Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that is is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.

 

How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that it can transform death." Eric Metaxas, Bonhoffer, page 531.

 

It was faith that allowed Bonhoeffer to go calmly to Hitler's gallows in 1945.  Bonhoeffer was certain of what was to meet him on the "other side."  I pray that each of us would similarly strive to hold fast to the promises found in God's word so that, whether our illnesses are brief or extended, and whether we must endure our death or the deaths of loved ones, we would view the death of a Christian as "the mild, sweet & gentle" transition to eternity, where the currently unimaginable pleasures of God await those of us who are in Christ Jesus.   

 

 

Bonhoeffer, Metaxes, Page 531 

Too Much Grief?

Do we grieving parents make too big of a deal out of the deaths of our own children? Does God think that we grieve too much? Does our grief suggest that we have made idols out of our children?

God has created us so that, rather than being satisfied with lesser pleasures, our hearts will not experience real satisfaction until we experience God Himself. The Psalmist proclaims, "My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you." Psalm 63:5. But while we treasure God as our ultimate prize, we can enjoy the gifts that he gives, so long as that they are enjoyed as gifts from God, and not in competiton with Him. In a recent sermon, Bethlehem Seminary Professor Joe Rigney pointed out that we need not experience any "false guilt" for enjoying the gifts that God gives. Rigney cited Genesis 2:18, where God told Adam that he was going to make a helpmate for him, "because it is not good that the man should be alone." Even though God is Himself our ultimate satisfaction, God has deemed it good and right for us to enjoy the gifts he gives us here on earth, including marriage, children, family, friends, food, drink, sports, and other earthly endeavors. In enjoying any gift as a gift from God, we do not take away from our enjoyment and worship of God as our perfectly benevelent and omnipotent gift-giver; rather, such an attitude adds to our praise of God to the extent we recognize God's goodness in giving and our unworthiness in receiving.

C.S. Lewis once said, "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak." As grieving parents, if we try to minimize the paid of our own grief, we would have to ignore the very God-ordained affections built into our emotional and spiritual beings for our own children. More than that, we would cut off opportunities for the grace of God to fill the wounds of our life is we attempted to artificially limit the flow of grief coming from our own hearts. If we hold on to Christ, and to his promises, we need try to apologize or minimize our pain. There is no level of depth in grief that God's grace cannot rescue us from. The deeper the grief, the further down, and deeper in, God's love goes to reach us.

It has now been 3 years and 2 months since we lost Micah, and our grief extends to so many areas of our life. But God, who ordained for Micah's little life in the first place, doesn't want us to apologize or feel bad about our grief. Rather, he wants to salve the pain of grief in and through the various forms of grace he provides, so that we can stand amazed at the working of God, both in how He gave us our beautiful, precious oldest son, and in how He has comforted us since taking him away.

Birthday Gift

Heather and I are excited to let you know that we are expecting our fourth child who will, Lord willing, be born to us sometime in April of 2013.  Today, on my 36th birthday, Heather and I were able to see the heartbeat of our 4th child.  What a wonderful birthday gift! Following Micah's death, a friend prayed that we would see "the goodness of the Lord in the land of the Living.  (Psalm 27:13).  His prayer has been answered. With two living boys already in our home, we cannot express how very grateful we are for the Lord's provision for our (growing) family.  Please join us in thanking the good Lord for how He has blessed us. 

Gratefulness for the Past and Joy for the Future

"With all that has happened to me in my life, I feel very grateful."  These were the words of a recently-widowed client of mine as we discussed her own grief following the death of her husband.  She shared how she viewed the universe as just a random set of forces wrecking havoc in a haphazard manner.  Given all that could have happened in her life, given all the pain and suffering that exists in the universe, she lives life now with gratefulness because of how "lucky" she and her husband were, in the past, to have had the life they did together.  In other words, her future joy is based upon the gratefulness for past circumstances that, according to my client, were purely the result of fortuitous luck. 

Gratefulness is not a bad thing.  Of course, in my client's case, there is no one to be grateful to, given her view of the universe.  For those of us who out to follow Christ, we ought to be grateful for every blessing we have received from the creator and sustainer of the universe, the God from whom we receive all good things.

But unlike my grieving client who has only the past from which to derive joy, parents who are grieving in Christ need not be "stuck" only in the past. We can, and ought to, look to the future with joyful anticipation. Paul tells us in Philippians 3 that he was "...forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead... [to] press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."  We grieve not as those who have no hope, but with the sure expectation that we will see our children again, in Heaven.  (1 Thess 4:13).  In Christ Jesus, we can focus our mind not on the past, but on the prize of Heaven, where Christ will have made all things new, even our precious little children.   

All of us will inevitably grieve the death of a loved one.  The question is, will we focus only on the past with them, or do we expect to have the future, too? In Christ, we can have both.  

A President's Loss: 47 Years Later

During World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower served as Allied Supreme Commander, in charge of the North African campaigns and the D-Day invasion.   After the war, Eisenhower went on to become the 34th President of the United States. Throughout his military and political career, Eisenhower commanded millions of lives and billions of dollars.  And yet nothing during any of those years compared to the grief he and his wife experienced with the death of his first son, "Icky." 

In a 1967 autobiography, Eisenhower recounts what he considers, "the greatest disaster and disappointment" of his life. It was not any military loss or political mistake; it was the unexpected and untimely death of his oldest son. In 1920, Eisenhower's three-year old son, "Icky," contracted scarlet fever and died suddenly.  Forty-seven years later, Eisenhower writes, "Today when I think of it, even now as I write it, the keenness of our loss comes back to me as fresh and as terrible as it was in that long dark day soon after Christmas, 1920....no matter what activities and preoccupations there were, we could never forget the death of the boy." At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, p.181-182.

 

The more fellow grieving parents I meet, the more I come to believe the basic truth that the grief felt by parents at the death of their children will never go away.  No matter who we are now, or what our lives will become in the future, grieving parents are never the same.  Even if we wanted to "go back to normal" (an altogether different question), there is no way that, in burying your son or daughter, our lives could ever be the same.  As many fellow grieving parents have told us, the death of our child is, in some way, the death of our "old life," and we must begin another. 

 

 

Are we scary?

Especially the first few years after our son died, we got the sense that people were so afraid to say the wrong thing to us that they didn't say anything at all.  Rather than welcome us in, emotionally, people shut us out.  If you know a bereaved parent, please don't be afraid to reach out to them, even if you make mistakes. A fellow grieving parent, Jill Sullivan, has provided some excellent thoughts on how fellow church members can help bereaved parents:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2012/07/24/how-to-help-bereaved-parents-in-your-church/