Do I love my kids more than I love Jesus?
A tiny casket lowered into the sullen dirt and the sky was swollen with grief.
The parents stood to the side, watching their baby girl being buried in a box and my scarf was soaked with tears. I kept stealing glances at my friend, wondering how she was still standing. Wondering how to comfort her, because there is no comfort any human can give for the loss of a child.
I still have their daughter’s picture on my fridge and I tear up when I look at her delicate face, this baby born with a rare genetic disease to a couple that tried eight years for a child.
“If it has to be something, give me cancer or let me lose my house but please don’t take my kids,” I pray at night. “Please God, don’t make me go through that.”
Getting pregnant was hard for us too. We were told we would probably never have children because of my anorexia, and then a pastor prayed over us on national television for a son within the year — and we conceived a son within the year. And now we have two boys.
But I’ve also lost two babies, while they were in the womb, and it’s near-wrecked me. Those miscarriages bore stillborn faith and for awhile it was all I could do to just keep going.
I didn’t know, before having kids, the agony of giving birth to your heart and not being able to protect it.
A greater reality
It’s excruciatingly painful to send your vulnerable little heart (with his puppy-dog backpack) into a world full of sin, and I don’t know how to love Jesus more than I love my children.
I don’t know how to love him enough to say, “Anything Lord — whatever your plan is, whatever it is you want to use my children for, whatever your will is for this family — please do it.”
I’ve heard of parents giving God the glory when their children die and I want to be that person, yet I also believe in grief, because what is the resurrection without death? And what is praise without sorrow? Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.
Some things in life are really, really hard. And we’re not supposed to be able to comprehend the pain of losing our children. It’s supposed to be heart-wrenching, because otherwise God sacrificing his own son wouldn’t mean much.
This past winter I travelled to Uganda and Rwanda, where I met women who’d lost multiple children. I met children who’d lost their mothers and fathers; death was a reality for everyone there.
But God was a greater reality.
He rose off the face of every person I met; he rose triumphant and joyful; he rose with the promise of an eternity filled with life.
Jesus says to love him more than we love our sons and daughters.
Jesus says a lot of hard things. I’m a sinner saved by grace and it’s all I can do some days to repent. But I want to want to love him more than anything in this world. I want God to be a greater reality for me than death.
Surrender
And I know that I don’t serve a heartless Saviour. When I commit my children to him in prayer while seated at the scratched wooden kitchen table, my sons watching Thomas the Train in the background, I don’t commit them to just anyone. I commit them to their Maker.
And when I pray that Jesus would be glorified both in my family’s living and dying, I know God weeps — not only out of joy for the surrender of our hearts, but out of pain, knowing how hard it is to give up a child.
“I just wish I could be there to show her around heaven,” my friend said to me following the funeral of her baby girl, her eyes blurry with tears. “It’s such a big place. I just worry she’ll get lost.”
Oh friends, these mother hearts — they’re meant to ache with the thought of loss.
But this earth is but a glance, and then we have forever to spend with Christ and with our children. Hallelujah.
