It has now been two months since I made one of these video recordings for PassionLife. A lot of you guys have been following along with us knowing that about two months ago now our youngest son passed away unexpectedly. He was 21 years old. When he passed away, John and I came on a few weeks after he died and just let you as the PassionLife community know that I was going to be stepping back from doing these recordings for several weeks. We record usually once a week and so I’ve taken the last four or five weeks off of that routine. A lot of you have been praying for us. A lot of you have been asking about how we’re doing and we’re so thankful for that. We appreciate your prayers and we appreciate you’re giving us the grace to kind of reexamine how we are going to live our lives now. We’re going to live our lives just fine. Anybody who lives long enough will probably have someone very, very close to them pass away and people learn to live with it. But there’s definitely some rearranging that takes place internally. On a lighter note, just a month after David passed away, my oldest son, who is 24 years old and got married about two and a half years ago to the most lovely girl that we could possibly imagine from Michigan, they gave birth to their first baby, a baby girl. You’re going to see a picture over here. Her name is Mary Earl Dressler Nicholson. Mary Earl comes from mothers on both sides and Dressler was the middle name of David, my younger son, who passed away. These guys made me a grandfather for the first time. It’s been really exciting. It’s been many of you who have grandchildren. It seems that you know it’s a wonderful thing and it’s hard to describe how much you love this young child that’s come into your own child’s life. It’s been a very beautiful adjustment getting used to having a baby in the house. I have a grand baby in my 40s. In fact, actually I just turned 50, but Merle, as they’re calling Mary Earl, Merle, the baby came just a few days before my 50th birthday. So my wife does not get to say, “Hey, I became a grandmother in my 40s and you became a grandfather in your 50s.” She doesn’t get to say that to me for the rest of her life. I was a grandfather in my 40s, but now I’m in my 50s and I’m older and I’m wiser. It was a little bit intimidating to be quite raw and honest and frank with you. It was a little bit intimidating having the baby come right as we were experiencing what was probably at that time the zenith of our grief. There was enough time past the shock and the denial and the whirlwind of getting David buried and having visitors come from out of town. All that had subsided and we were really beginning to understand how deep our wound is when the baby was born. And that was just very, very intimidating thinking that we were going to experience joy in the midst of a horrible tragic grief that we were also experiencing. I don’t even know how to describe the fear that I had wondering maybe if the joy of the baby would interrupt my grieving process. In God’s kindness and in His providence and in His sovereignty, He knew that joy and grief can exist simultaneously. In fact, in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus is talking about giving money to the needy and He says, “When you give to the needy, make sure that your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand is doing.” It’s a metaphor to describe the fact that we can maybe even hide from ourselves the good things that we’re doing so that we don’t brag about it. We don’t take credit for it. It’s a metaphor of holding one thing in one hand and holding something completely different and opposite in the other hand and having them both be true at the same time. And it’s actually exactly how I feel about the birth of Murrell in the midst of our grief over the death of David is that the joy that we have experienced in celebrating and welcoming Murrell into this world has not in any way interfered with or dampened our grief. And our grieving for David. And of course, our grieving for David has not in any way diminished the joy that we have been able to experience over Murrell’s birth. We are holding these things in two separate hands because obviously they really don’t have anything to do with each other. Other than in the future, we will look back on Murrell’s birth as being almost simultaneous with David’s passing. They were less than a month apart from each other, these two events. So celebrate with us. The last time I was on one of these passion like videos, I asked you to mourn with us and to grieve and lament with us. And we’ll ask you to go on doing that too. But now we’re asking you to celebrate with us as well. God has done a great thing in bringing us a great joy in the midst of a time of great sadness. It’s dissonant to say the least. And it just seems like a complete non sequitur. Nothing is linear about the roller coaster of emotions that we are experiencing right now. And for those of you who are continuing to wonder how Dana and I and our other children are processing the grief of losing David, I still don’t know. I really still don’t know. I described it the other day to a friend who was asking as as though maybe you cut your arm really badly and really deeply and you get a rag and you hold it on that arm for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And eventually you think surely it has clotted just a little bit and the bleeding has subsided and you take the rag off of your arm and it’s bleeding the same way it was bleeding when the coat was fresh. I feel this. I feel that way about David’s death. But we are learning to to to walk with a limp. We were learning to walk with a limp now and to understand that it’s okay to walk with a limp for the rest of our lives. To remember David and to grieve him. Some days are harder than others. And some days are just so hard. I really don’t know what to do. I figure there’s not enough oxygen in the world to help me catch my next breath. And to be honest with you, those days make sense to me. It’s all the other days that don’t make sense to me. I don’t know why it’s not it’s hard all the time. I think about him every hour of every day. But I don’t understand the days that aren’t so hard that I can’t function. God is good. And he has loved us well through his people. Many of those people are you the Passion Life Fellowship. And so I want to thank you. For standing with us for your notes of encouragement for your emails of encouragement for the cards that you’ve sent to our house. It reminds me that we are an organization that is based on relationship. We’re a we’re a small nonprofit. We we began. John and Kristen started it really as a living room nonprofit. But we’re a legitimate small nonprofit now. I mean, with a sizable budget and a big mission and a lot of staff now in various parts of the world. And you guys are walking with us and you have been a part of all of that and you have watched these videos and you’ve read what we’ve written and you’ve heard the stories and you’ve seen the pictures of babies and mothers from overseas. And what that has done is it really has created a family. What we call the Passion Life Fellowship really is a family type of environment. So thank you for being family to us. Thank you for being the hands and feet of Christ to us at this time. Continue please to pray for us. And now I invite you warmly to celebrate with us as well.