Believing for more

            It had to happen eventually – my first Scripture memorisation card from The Passion Bible. Actually, it is not meant to be a memorization card, but rather a meditation card, but by simply chewing over it again and again, well, pretty soon I will know it off by heart. Allow me to share it with you: Jn.10:9,10 “I am the Gateway. To enter through me is to experience life, freedom, and satisfaction. A thief has only one thing in mind – he wants to steal, slaughter, and destroy. But I have come to give you everything in abundance, more than you expect – life in its fullness until you overflow!”

            The Holy Spirit highlighted this Scripture for me recently as I was reading through John’s gospel. Before having my prayer time, I had been quickly looking at Facebook, and I noticed a post about a new movie I want to see. It is a movie about a young boy who is trapped under water for about fifteen minutes. His parents are Christians, and they are praying for him, and miraculously he lives. In this post on Facebook another mother was lamenting that her son had been trapped under water for just six minutes, and his family was praying desperately for him too, but he did not survive. It was not that she was unhappy about the boy who did survive, but she wondered why God had not answered her prayers. My son drowned too. I had always believed that the Holy Spirit was going to tell me if I needed to pray for Nathan, but that did not happen. Nathan was dead several hours before I knew anything was even wrong.

            What do you do with that? I was asking the Lord how I should respond in my prayer time, and I came upon this Scripture. When someone close to you dies, a part of you dies with them. When I lost Nathan, death became more real to me, and for a long time God felt incredibly distant. That is no longer the case, and now nearly twenty years later I am experiencing Gods presence more and more. Yet it is true, God did not answer my prayers for my son the way I wanted him to. There was no life, freedom, or satisfaction in what I went through when Nathan died. But now I have a choice. I can choose to stay in grief, I can choose to continue to be angry at God, to continue to embrace bitterness and darkness. Or I can choose life. Life, freedom, and satisfaction. Because that is what Jesus has opened the door, the gate, for me to experience.

            I do not have the answers as to why my son drowned, or why this mother whose son was trapped under the water for six minutes also lost her son. Somehow, I do not believe that those deaths were what God wanted. I believe that my Heavenly Daddy wants so much more for his children, for all of his children. He wants us to experience life, life in its fullness until we overflow!