Just Had to Share

From an e-mail that was forwarded to me this morning:

Dear Friends,

When my dad died twenty years ago this month, I received a number of sympathy cards and notes. Among them was a particularly beautiful letter of consolation from Ann, a contemporary and long-time friend of my parents and a wonderful friend to me.

Six years later Ann herself died very unexpectedly. The loss was stunning and felt to me like the last straw in a series of losses. I couldn't quite believe God would allow it. Ann had been the one who stepped in with just the word I needed when my mother died, when my father died, when my brother Jess died. I couldn't forgive God for this one, and I kept my distance from Him for days. I avoided prayer and slammed through my daily tasks.

I remember the angry thoughts that eventually became angry prayers, "You could have saved her! You could have kept her alive. She died because it was Your timing. I can't believe You allowed this." But I see now that shooting off those angry words to God and even my initial avoidance of prayer were evidences, oddly enough, of my faith. Both were fueled by my recognition that this death could only have happened by His permissive will.

Taking our anger to God in prayer is just the thing to do. It is an acknowledgement of His Lordship over the circumstances, and every such acknowledgement honors Him. Going to prayer in our anger is evidence that spiritually we have our eyes in the right place, even if those eyes are glaring in protest. We take our angry selves to Him, to prayer, because He is the One to whom we must confess both the anger and the defiance behind it-that spirit which demands that things go our way. He is the only One who can forgive and relieve us of both, and He is waiting and most willing to do so. Because after the angry prayers the other prayers can come¯the deeper prayers of the heart, the hurting heart. Bringing all of it to Him perfectly positions us to receive His most personal comfort.

For me that comfort came in a most unlikely form. Soon after Ann's death I walked into my kitchen one day and nearly stepped on some folded papers in my path. I picked them up only to discover that this was the letter Ann had written to me when my father died. I had not seen it for six years. It must have been in a drawer, perhaps stuck to something I handled earlier that day. Here was my perfect consolation written years earlier for sorrowful me by Ann herself, and delivered to me a second time by the God who loves me.

I copied the letter and passed along this comfort to Ann's two sons, for God's comfort is given to us to be given away. In those days just after her death, imagine them receiving-in their mother's own words and handwriting-gentle instruction on how to bear the loss of a loved parent. Tender shepherd, indeed.