Love, Lament and Longing

Love and Lament

I never really knew how deeply I could love my children until I lost my firstborn.

Losing a child automatically throws you into deep, deep grief that somehow seems to correlate to the depth of your love for that child. Losing Daniel seven weeks ago has been unspeakably sad and hard; loving him for 18 years, 8 months, and 25 days before he died seemed amazingly easy, at least most of the time.

But, God has blessed me with three children. At breakfast this morning I told my two kids that I hoped to love them even more deeply now that there are only two of them left. Since I can no longer offer Daniel my love on this earth, I hope I can channel that extra love into Hannah and Ben, thereby increasing the love and affirmation they experience from me as their father. I hope that a good result of our grieving Daniel’s untimely death is a renewed, deepened, and impassioned love among us as a family as we move on and continue in our earthly journey.

By moving on, I do not mean “getting over Daniel’s death.” I don’t plan to ever do that.

Moving on means moving more deeply into life and never reverting to some of my bad habits, such as focusing on the unimportant, or imposing conditions on my love for my wife or children, or valuing things of this world (power, prestige, money, stuff, or career) over the people that God gives me to love and nurture.

Moving on means continuing to love and miss my child who is gone, but loving my other children, my wife, and all the other people in my life with more complete abandonment, tenderness, and mercy.

This Father’s Day I lament the loss of Daniel and celebrate the privilege of being a father to three incredible kids.

Thanks be to God for these unspeakable gifts!

Longing for my son

As I passed a creek and the surrounding cottonwoods along a highway around sunrise this morning, I thought about the deer which might be living in that brush and drinking from that creek.

In the book of Psalms, verse 42:1 says, “as the deer pants (or longs) for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God.”

Likewise, I find myself longing for my son Daniel.

I long to grab his head, tilt it toward me, rub my fingers through his thick motley hair, and kiss his soft warm forehead right on the scar he received when he was a toddler and fell off his tricycle, (that he was standing up on because I was not watching him closely enough!).

I long to be with him in this amazing Colorado wilderness this summer, fly fishing together so that we can sit by the stream, have lunch, laugh at our lack of fish-catching abilities and spend time talking about life.

I long to listen to Daniel talk – about everything, but especially the Fab and his freshman year at Whitworth – the amazing friendships he is forming there, the girl(s) he has his eye on, the young men with whom he is forming a new brotherhood, the kids he is meeting through Young Life, and the professors who are challenging him to think more deeply about life and the world.

I long to listen to Daniel think.

I long to watch Hannah and Ben follow Daniel around the house with the look of adoring sibling love on their faces, laugh at his silliness, and mutually engage in his quirky zest for life. I even long to hear the three of them engage in sibling arguments, knowing that struggling together is part of life “in the fam” as Daniel would say.

I long to hear Daniel plod down our stairs, look for Mom, and wonder aloud “what is there to eat?” in his most helpless little voice. I even long to realize how helpless he wanted to remain, at least for a few more years, or for as long as he could get away with it.

I long to tell Daniel again how proud I am of the fine young man he was growing into, how much I love him, and now, how deeply I miss him..

I simply long to be with my son.