-Samuel Johnson, Selected Letters

Grief is for those left behind, doubt is for those who have not yet seen, pain is for us who still fight on upon this mortal coil.  The truth of the matter is that death takes us all in our time and the hard truth is that the path through the valley of the shadow is what God has ordained for us.  Faith through the time of grieving is perhaps the most difficult and the most blessed of faith.  My family and I have recently experienced just such a season of faith.  We have lost one of our number at an age that seems to us to be too young.  We have lost my brother Jonathan in one of the most hideous ways you can lose someone.  We didn’t lose him to a disease after a long struggle, we didn’t lose him to a war where he died a heroic death, we didn’t lose him to a freak accident.  We lost him to drugs, to an overdose, to “the adverse effects of drug use,” to quote the death certificate.  We lost him to a disease, if you could call it that, which eats, rots and consumes the soul.

            Evil crept in and latched on to the sensitive soul of a “Silent Prophet.”  A young man who, despite the hold that drugs had on him, still thought and prayed that God would see him through.  There are some battles that God cannot wage fiercely enough while we are stuck in these sickly bags of flesh.  There are some battles that God must wage on the plane of eternity.  There is some evil that can and must be exposed to the light of Heaven before it can be destroyed; such was the addiction that took my brother from us.  The man who preached Jon’s funeral, a friend of my Dad’s from his Seminary days, had been counseling Jon for about a year and he knew, he saw in Jon what was really there the soul of a prophet, a soul that was sensitive to the suffering of  “his people,” a soul that could not tolerate injustice, a soul that, quite simply was too sensitive for the slings and arrows of this world.  The prophet’s voice was silenced, before it ever uttered a word, only through faith and the mission of the Gospel will the “silent prophet” be heard.

            The theme that has emerged from the spiritual journey of grief has been articulated by my Aunt Fran in her prayer journal and corroborated by unsolicited testimony from many miles away.  “Some people just can’t grow here.”  So it was with Jonathan, he needed to be in God’s arms.  As the Lord spoke to Aunt Fran, “He’s here with me.  He’s sorry.  Here he can grow faster.”  Samuel Johnson wrote the above lines to a mother grieving her son, “He is gone, we are going.”  All these things speak to the mercy of God on those who prove too fragile for this world.  All these things speak to the immense grace of God’s plan.  All these things encourage faith in the face of death and suffering.  All these things inspire peace in the midst of grief.  Far from being sentimental placebos for grief, these beacons of Christian faith allow us to take a clear, steely-eyed look in the face of our own mortality and the mortality of those we love.

“He is gone, we are going.”  It is the truth of our existence, we are not meant for this world but for the kingdom of Heaven, some of us just show it sooner than others.  They will grow much faster with God. 

These thoughts are not as organized or coherent as normal, even for this rambling weblog.  The veil of tears is thick right now.

In memory of Jonathan Mayne Gaskill, my little brother, Gone too soon and sorely missed.  April 10, 1981 - July 23, 2005