Because She Believed - A Story of Faith and Hope
The intimacy I described in the previous chapter pales in comparison to the intimacy God expresses to us through His Spirit. He is the ultimate loving father. During my two months of struggle with God over my daughter, I often wondered how our lives appear through our Father’s eyes… through God’s perspective.
The morning of Kristen’s celebration service, I woke to a stirring in my spirit. Julie was still asleep, and I wanted her to rest as much as she could before the service that afternoon. So I quietly picked up my phone and began to write as God’s Spirit poured into me. It was the final piece of the story He wanted me to share at the celebration service.
In my times of struggle with Him during the two months leading up to Kristen’s accident, He had told me that He wanted to use our upcoming trial with Kristen to be a testimony of His grace and a spark to help light a fire in the church. He whispered to my heart, “My church has grown cold and left its first love.” These are the words He gave me that morning:
Through Our Father’s Eyes
Persecution is coming,
My church must wake up,
I need Kristen to help me,
So I gave you this cup.Death is defeated,
It lost all its power,
I’ve loved her and held her,
From her very first hour.I know it is hard,
It was for me too,
But to fulfill my plans,
This is what we must do.Don’t resist me too hard,
You will need all your might,
To honor her gift
And join in the fight.You said you’d give everything,
You had to my care,
Please release her to me,
So in my work, she can share.I need the spark I planted,
Deep down in her soul,
To help me light the fire,
So my church can grow.As I look down in sorrow,
With tears from above.
It has become cold,
And left its first love.I asked for your daughter,
And you gave a hard fight,
But you yielded her spirit,
To help me shine light.I am always with you,
I will never leave,
To love and to hold you,
To your heart, I will cleave.
I was genuinely amazed as I saw the three poems come together. They formed a complete picture of His grace and faith. In them, I could see the trial through Kristen’s eyes, through my eyes as her father, and through God’s eyes as our heavenly Father. It was the answer to my Easter prayer!
Someone may discount one or even two accounts of God’s grace. But the three accounts of grace, from our various perspectives, are not easily dismissed.
“A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12b).
I had asked God to let me see His heart regarding sin and His Son, and He had shown me His perspective in the middle of our trial. As I reflect on these poems, I am even more amazed now than when I first received the words from Him. Although they were intimate and beautiful in their rawness, they were also partially obscured by the emotions of our loss. Julie and I know, without any doubt, that Kristen’s spirit is hidden in Jesus. But our flesh still misses the sound of her voice and the feel of her touch… we miss her physical presence with us.
Again, I want to be absolutely clear. My prayer did not cause Kristen’s accident. And God did not need my permission to move forward with His purpose. I believe God knew my heart earnestly desired to see and understand His heart regarding our sin and His sacrifice. I wanted to see it from His perspective, the perspective of a father. That Easter evening, as Julie, Kristen, Grace, and I gathered to watch the recording of The Passion musical, my heart ached to see beyond the surface and into the depths of God’s grace. I can’t explain it other than this, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” And my spirit longed to know Him more intimately!
“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him” (John 4:23).
Please understand that I am not saying I am better or more spiritual than anyone else. What I am saying is that I seek Him without boundaries and without borders. I have no box of religious rules or traditions in which I am trapped. Jesus brought us freedom, and I am indeed free in Him. We must live outside the box of religious expectations if we are to live fully in fellowship with Him. I approach God as a weak and broken vessel, longing to be filled by the glory of His presence. I can ask Him for nothing of greater value than that which He has already given… Himself, through His Son and His Spirit!
I was blessed to be able to get to know Him without the religious trappings. I met Him as a child while walking in the woods. Through His beautiful creation, I was drawn to Him. His creation cried out the glory of the Creator. His very presence inspired me to be better. The contrast between His light and the darkness around me convicted me to draw nearer to Him. Each time I stumbled, He was there to show me the wrong and encourage me to walk more closely with Him. He had no need to condemn me in my weakness because we already stand condemned when we walk in our own will and strength.
It is His grace, through faith in His Son, that redeems us out of our sin and out of this fallen world.
After I had shared with some friends about my prayer and the two months of struggle with God that followed, a couple of them commented that they couldn’t imagine asking God to let them see His heart. They said they would be afraid that such a vision would consume them. I understand the sentiment, but after the many times God’s Spirit has inspired me, I couldn’t imagine not asking for more. He has always given me the perfect amount of grace for each trial and each triumph. He has never left me lacking that which was needed for each circumstance.
He showed me His heart concerning Jesus dying for our sin, and I experienced the perfect balance between His foreknowledge and grace. I wrestled with Him most of the time between Easter and Kristen’s accident on May 27. I struggled against the inevitable cost of sin and the cost of living in a fallen world, but I was never overwhelmed or consumed by our impending loss. His grace was sufficient for the trial that He knew was coming, the trial He gently guided me through so I could see His heart as a father.
After God had finished pouring out the words for the third and final poem for Kristen’s celebration service, I decided to get up quietly, take my shower, and let Julie rest a bit longer. It was difficult to wait to tell her about the final piece of the story. After the first two poems had come, I still felt there was more to tell regarding my time with God. Julie and I had prayed that He would provide what was needed or give us peace that the first two were enough. In the end, the three poems were a more complete reflection of the many conversations I had with God concerning Kristen. They testified of the grace and intimacy He shared with me as He led me through this trial. The story is not mine; it is a gift from God!
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights…” (James 1:17).
The beautiful thing about walking with God is that we never have to worry about where we are going. We draw close to Him and listen as His Spirit guides us. Turn by turn, He leads us. God’s Spirit is our GPS, but our flesh demands a complete map to our next destination. We continue to strive to find God’s will for our life as if there is a master map for each of us to follow. If we can just find it, then we will finally be at peace. The truth is, His will is revealed as we listen to His Spirit, turn by turn, minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day. We can’t fast forward “our” movie to find God’s will, and we can’t watch the “trailer” of our life to get a preview. We find God’s will as each scene of our life is lived out in faith and dependence on Him. There is no shortcut to knowing the will of the Father.
That is how He revealed His will to me regarding Kristen’s celebration service. He said I needed to speak, but I had no words. He said He would give them to me, but He didn’t say when. That is what it means to walk by faith and not by sight. God’s grace is sufficient for the moment. We must trust Him moment by moment. We can’t rely on our past experiences of grace, and we can’t expect our spiritual momentum to carry us forward if we disengage from His Spirit. I trusted He would give me the next step on my journey and the next and the next. And that is what He did as He gave me one poem, then another, and on the morning of her celebration… the final piece of the story.
He has never let me down, but there is still a little quickening of my spirit when I know I can’t do what He has asked me to do in my own strength. It isn’t fear. It is more like butterflies in my belly. It is the excitement of being at the end of myself but trusting He will be there when I take the next step.
That is how I felt in October 1990 when I finally gave up the last bit of myself to Him—the day He introduced me to His Word. He had walked with me through many years of trials and triumphs, but I didn’t know the fullness of His identity until then. That afternoon in my cousin’s backyard, He led my spirit to the edge of the cliff of my self-sufficiency and asked me to trust Him. Everything around me faded away, except Him and me. I was standing at the edge of the cliff, looking out over the mist. I could not see beyond the edge when He said, “Come! Trust me!”
I stood there struggling against my self-reliance and the fear of the unknown. He had never let me down in the past… not as a child in an abusive home or as a teen living on the street or as a young man burning on that high voltage tower or during the years of recovery that followed. I looked at the mist and then looked at Him with His hand outstretched. I could see His form, but He was partially obscured by the mist.
As my heart pounded in my chest, my spirit leaped forward to grasp His hand. The next instant, I was back in my cousin’s backyard. I knew something was different because now I had a hunger to know what was in the book that my grandfather had given me when I was a young man. I longed to know what that New King James Version had to say about my God.
When I first opened the Scriptures and understood who God was from His own words, it was like coming home to a place I’d never been before. I saw the God I had known since I was a kid walking in the woods. He was alive in His Word. It truly was like coming home, like a reunion of my spirit with His. Now I knew the name of that Friend and Guide who had never left me. I had no doubt that He was the one in those pages. He appeared there exactly as He had been with me all those years. He had honored my faith as a child and preserved me until I could know Him through His Word. Years later I would hear the song “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver and wonder if he had been writing about a similar experience.
That is the intimacy I wanted to share at Kristen’s celebration. That is the intimacy God had expressed to me as we struggled over Kristen. That is the intimacy He wanted me to show through the three poems.
After Julie woke, we finalized our plans for the celebration. God had already given us three songs that were to be part of the service. The first was “My Story” by Big Daddy Weave. The second was “Who Am I” by Casting Crowns. And the third was “God Is on the Move” by 7eventh Time Down. We didn’t know it at the time, but these songs spoke to each of the three perspectives expressed in the poems: “My Story” complemented Kristen’s poem, “Who Am I” spoke to my perspective in the second poem, and “God Is on the Move” echoed God’s perspective in the final poem.
Julie had asked me to include that final song on the jump drive we gave to the funeral home the evening of the visitation. At that time, I didn’t know where we would use it since God had not yet given me the third poem. When we arrived at the funeral home before the celebration service, I asked their production assistant to play “God Is on the Move” after the last poem.
God honored my Easter prayer, giving me a glimpse of His heart and a taste of His foreknowledge. As I trusted Him, I found His will for my life and more specifically for Kristen’s celebration service one step at a time, minute by minute, and turn by turn. I don’t worry about tomorrow or what the future holds. I hold tightly to Him through His Spirit, and His will finds me. He is my GPS!
