Why my child? Why did they have such a short life? For those of us who have said goodbye to our children, we are often vexed by the sheer limited amount of time we had with them. One thing that has encouraged me lately is something hidden away in Isaiah 57:1-2. The prophet explains, “Good people pass away; the godly often die before their time. But no one seems to care or wonder why. No one seems to understand that God is protecting them from the evil to come. For those who follow godly paths will rest in peace when they die. (NLT)” The prophet says in passing that sometimes good and righteous people pass away before their perceived time as a form of mercy. A protective mercy. A relieving mercy. A stinging mercy. They are spared evil by being brought immediately into God’s presence.
There’s something oddly encouraging to think that perhaps one reason why our kids were brought safely into the harbor of God’s rest is He was watching over them. He wanted them to be with Him. He wanted them to skip the school of suffering and graduate early into His care. Dr. Ralph Wardlaw reminds us, “How delightfully tranquillizing, when the first burst of nature’s agony has a little subsided, the reflection that your child has been taken away from the evil to come, — taken, to spend those years in heaven, which he must otherwise have spent amidst sin, and temptation, and sorrow, in the valley of tears: that he has been spared all the perils, and fatigues, and fightings of the wilderness, and has been received at the better country, even the heavenly; that the tender and lovely plant which you had begun to cherish with so much care has been happily removed from all the chilling frosts and withering blasts of this inferior clime, and has found its place in the garden of God above, there to drink the dews of paradise, and to flourish in unfading beauty!”
The only suffering my baby boy experienced in this mean old world was the storm that wafted him safely into God’s presence. He was spared. He was exempted. He was strangely protected from a heavenly perspective while not from an earthly one. He was gently guided into a safer, more sublime experience above while I’m left here below in the thick of it. Knowing he is experiencing bliss somehow helps me with this ongoing weight of grief. Reverend George Gilfillan writes, “Could we but see the future in this world from which a premature departure saves, and the future in another to which it conveys, it would help to reconcile us to the frost which withers many an opening blossom.” I need to remind myself often as the reverend points out—God delivers some by grace in this world and others by an early call from it. What a strange and severe mercy indeed!
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