Last Sunday afternoon a dear colleague of mine in the Bible school went home to the with the Lord. By the grace of God, he lived with Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer for six years and up till days before he passed, he was still teaching! God kept him alive and productive as long as He did, but for reasons unknown to us, God did not keep our loved ones alive for just a few more years. In his book Enjoying Intimacy with God, J. Oswald Sanders shares this poignant insight, “We are trusted with the unexplained.” Frances Ridley Havergal, the 19th century English song writer known for her hymn, Take My Life and Let It Be, sums it well in her poem, “The ills we see—The mysteries of sorrow deep and long/The dark enigmas of permitted wrong—Have all one key/The strange, sad world is but our Father’s School.” We are in the school of God with life as our classrooms.
Santy and I were privileged to be able to speak with him over the phone about a couple of days before he passed. Before we ended our conversation, we said goodbye and promised to meet again in Our Eternal Home one day. To the others who visited or called him, Heman Elia, this colleague of mine, also ended his conversation with the same goodbye, that he would see them again in Heavens. It was sad, but at the same time, it was peaceful. We shall meet again!
One of our reactions when something unexpected and bad happens is to seek as much information as we can—to know everything—as if by knowing everything we could have averted the mishap. Well, we must get as much information as possible but at some point, we ought to say, “It’s enough.” We still can’t explain it, but we know that God is in full control over the unexplained part. Our part is to trust Him and learn about a new material in God’s curriculum that He’s teaching us. Through my colleague’s way of facing death, God taught me to see Heavens as the house next door. So close, so safe.
Pastor Paul