This entire night, I have struggled trying to figure out what to write. My heart is still heavy with the loss of my friend, and there seems to be nothing pouring out of me verbally. In all honesty, I really don’t want to write. But maybe that in itself is the best reason to write.
This isn’t supposed to happen. Healthy thirty-one year old men with incredible families, loved jobs, and great passion don’t just collapse and die for no reason. They just don’t. This is not what the world is supposed to be.
And the truth is, this is NOT how the world was created to be. We were not meant to die all of a sudden. We weren’t meant to die, period. But when sin entered the world, what was to be was destroyed, and senselessness prevailed. Things like cancer, war, murder, and tragedies were not meant to be a part of our lives, but because we broke trust with what was intended, they are a byproduct of our punishment.
It is almost second-nature, in times like these, to look up at God and ask how He could let this happen. How could He just stand back and let this amazing young man die so suddenly, leaving his wife, young children, family, and friends to grieve so deeply. How could He? Didn’t He love Lynn? Doesn’t He care about how we feel? Doesn’t He know Lynn’s family and friends need him? How could God possibly take him away?? These are the questions we throw at God. We doubt His love and care. We wonder at His selfishness or callousness. And when all that is done, we fall in exhaustion feeling no better about what has happened.
But imagine. Imagine, as those words are flying out of our mouths and thoughts. Imagine God’s face. I don’t think the enormousness of the feelings of our loss are any comparison at all to the brokeness that must be upon God’s face when He hears these questions. The sadness in His eyes would be too great for our sight to behold. The intense pain in His heart would rent our hearts beyond repair. And these feelings of God’s would not be because we doubt His wisdom, but because we are suffering. His children are suffering, and He mourns with us.
God never intended this to happen. But He refused to create robots. In His love, He gave us free will. With our free will, we made a bad choice. In our bad choice, He lost His Son. And, though now through His Son our SOULS have life eternal, out bodies still suffer the consequences of our fall. Was Lynn’s death God’s intention? No. It was, like so many others, a result of the choices made thousands of years ago. Is God grieving? Yes, because His children are hurting. Is there a good reason this happened? Yes. Yes, there is.
Death has a way of opening eyes that never would have been opened. Death has a way of bringing our lives and choices into sharp relief. Death makes us contemplate our own, and whether there is an eternity, and what side of it will we be on.
I know this firsthand, for my salvation was the result of a death. A young man, 16, a little older than I was at the time, taken too suddenly in a tragic car accident. And though it seemed so senseless, and though so many questioned God, it saved me. And every person I reach in the name of Christ is a positive action of that death. And every person they reach, and so on. I stand here today, sixteen-and-a-half years later, one of many that found Christ through a tragic death.
Everything, EVERYTHING, works for the good of those who love God. Romans 8:28 gives no exceptions. And so may the Lord take what we see as tragic, senseless, and painful, and turn it into something beautiful beyond description. And if sphere of influence is any indication, there is going to be an unimaginable throng of people coming to know Christ’s love, all because Lynn made a decision to follow Him, even unto death. We will never know the total effect here on earth, but oh, what a sweet sweet meeting it will be when we all get to see!
I will miss you, my friend. Things will never be the same, but the new normal will come. And with it, an even greater anticipation for the home we on Earth have yet to see. Love always, my friend. ❤
LOBLA
Live Like That 