I can’t say why it is that we place extra emphasis on anniversaries that are multiples of five. Why does five years seem more significant than six or 20 than 21? It’s a strange custom, yet one we all acknowledge and accept. And on that note, today marks the fifth anniversary of the day my son died. It has been five years since Nick very suddenly and unexpectedly went to be with Jesus.
This anniversary has been weighing heavily on my heart for the past few weeks, and has forced me to consider questions like these: When does an event change in such a way that it no longer feels like it happened recently, but instead happened long ago? When do we stop marveling at how little time has passed and begin to marvel instead at how much? When does the recent past become the distant past, and when does a wound become a scar?
I think a component of this five-year grief is the distance I am beginning to feel from Nick. Sometimes his death still doesn’t feel real, but like it happened to someone else’s child rather than mine, and like another father has been bereaved rather than me. There are moments when it feels like he is still here, still close enough to touch, to hug, to speak to. But mostly now it feels like he is very distant. Harder still, it sometimes feels like his life was only ever a dream, and like maybe I never had a son at all. Time heals some wounds, I suppose, but causes others.
Yet if he never existed, then why this ache, and if he wasn’t real, then why this scar? Many years after the war is over, the marks on the veteran’s body testify to the war that raged and the battles he fought. Five years after Nick’s death, the ache in my heart and the scars on my soul assure me that he lived and died, that he was given and then taken. The tears that still so often flow from my eyes assure me that I loved him then and love him still. He was such a gift.
There is so much I have had to consider over the past five years, so many truths that were once mostly abstract but are now etched deeply onto my heart. And perhaps the foremost is this: There is no better response to grief than to bow the knee in submission to God and to say, “You do all things well.”
Since that hardest of days, I have been assured time and again that we all live within a kind of preparatory school, a place of training, a world in which we are made ready for the world to come. In this school, we are trained in godliness and taught to put on Christ-like character. We soon learn that such virtue does not come to us apart from pain, but through it. We soon learn as well that when the Teacher speaks, whether through his word or through his providence, there is nothing better than for us to listen and obey. When his instructions lead us into sorrow or his providence directs us into grief, we are to trust in the superiority of his desires, of his mind, and of his will.
I know it would be senseless and sinful to contend against his will or to charge him with wrong.
And, by God’s grace, I can testify that I have and that I do. I know it would be senseless and sinful to contend against his will or to charge him with wrong. I know it would add sin to sorrow if I were to resent his providence. I know he is a good and loving Father who has displayed through the cross that his will is best, even when it doesn’t look that way to human eyes. I know that if I can trust him with my soul, I can trust him with my son. And so even when my mind doesn’t understand, my soul still submits.
My soul submits as I wait for the day he has promised—the day when darkness will give way to light, when faith will become sight, and when God will make all things plain. I wait for the day when I will stand before Jesus, when I will stand beside Nick, and when together we will testify: “You did all things well.”
