On a lighter note, just a month after David passed away, my oldest son, who is 24 years old and got married about 2 ½ years ago to the most lovely girl from Michigan that we could possibly imagine, gave birth to their first baby, a baby girl. 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 two made me a grandfather for the first time and it’s been really exciting. Many of you who have grandchildren know it’s a wonderful thing. It’s hard to describe how much you love this young child that has 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 grandbaby in my 40s. Actually I just turned 50, but Merle, as they’re calling Mary Earl, 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 wiser.
It was a little bit intimidating, to be quite raw and honestly frank with you, having the baby come right as we were experiencing what was probably at that time the zenith of our grief. Enough time had passed that the shock, the denial, 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 was when the baby was born. That was just very intimidating, thinking that we were going to experience joy in the midst of a horrible tragic grief that we were still 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, 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 left hand doesn’t know what your right 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 or 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, having them both be true at the same time. And it’s exactly how I feel about the birth of Merle in the midst of our grief over the death of David. The joy that we have experienced in celebrating and welcoming Merle into this world has not in any way interfered with or dampened our grieving for David. And in turn our grieving for David has not in any way diminished the joy that we have been able to experience over Merle’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 Merle’s birth as being almost simultaneous with David’s passing. These two events were less than a month apart from each other.
So celebrate with us. The last time I was on one of these PassionLife videos I asked you to mourn and to 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 really still don’t know. I described it the other day to a friend as though you cut your arm really badly and deeply and you get a rag and hold it on that arm for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. 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 cut was fresh. I feel that way about David’s death. But we are learning to walk with a limp 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 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 PassionLife Fellowship. So I want to thank you for standing with us, for your notes and 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 small nonprofit. John and Kristen started it really as a living room nonprofit. But we’re a legitimate small nonprofit now, with a sizable budget, a big mission and a lot of staff now in various parts of the world. And you are walking with us and you have been a part of all of that. You have watched these videos, you’ve read what we’ve written, you’ve heard the stories and you’ve seen the pictures of babies and mothers from overseas. What that has done is it really has created a family. What we call the PassionLife 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.