God's Power Lives in Us

  

I would like to share an experience that my sister’s friend shared with us after the accident.  I don’t personally know her but am so encouraged that she was willing to take the time to listen to God and pray until God sent her an answer.  She wrote this to my sister.

   I felt like I needed to tell you what I have been experiencing since Monday early morning.  I was really encouraged that you said your sister wondered why she didn’t just wake her son from the dead, (I referred to this in my post called ‘Heaven’) it encouraged me that there are Christians out there that believe we have that power within us thru Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

   Monday morning I woke up with a dream.  I dreamed that someone in your family had died.  We were together with the youth and everyone was shocked. I started singing:  “The same Power that rose Jesus from the grave, the same power that commands the dead to wake, lives in us.  And so we agreed that we were going to pray for that person to come back to life.   After a few hours Lucy came and said he was back to life.  Now I don’t think that every dream has a meaning but I have had a few dreams in my life where I knew God had revealed something to me.  When you told us that your nephew has committed suicide, this dream came to mind and I didn’t know if your nephew had Jesus or not, so I started praying earnestly that God would bring him back to his family, I commanded death to leave him and life to be breathed into him again in the name of Jesus.  I kept singing the song that I sang in my dream over and over all day.  Every message I got and every time my phone rang I was sure that the news would come that God brought him back to this life.  When you said that the cops figured it might have been an accident but they would do further investigation, I calmed down somewhat but I still kept speaking life over him. 

   By Tuesday my prayer had still not been answered and I said to God:  “if he is with You in heaven then I’m ok if you don’t bring him back, because he wouldn’t want to.  But if he is not with you then I ask you one more time to bring him back”.  (Remember I didn’t know if he had Jesus or not because I don’t know him and I hadn’t asked you about that)

    “God; I don’t understand, You say in your Word that we as believers have the same power that rose Jesus from the grave, why is this not happening?  Talk to me God, I’m listening”, I said.

   And then He answered ever so clearly.  He said to me:  Roderick is with me, and his family will be ok, they have Me, I am their comforter, I am their helper.  More people will be drawn to Me by the way they handle this loss then if I would bring Roderick back to life.  -Teresa

   Thanks Teresa for allowing God to use you and taking the risk to share your experience.  Thanks for not being to busy and for searching and praying until God gave you the answer.  Because those underlined words are what go through my mind daily.  God has used you in our lives in a big way. 

Lessons Learned

  

 We have learned a lot of lessons in the last eight months.  The biggest obviously how compassionate and kind our community is and the other big one how excruciatingly painful it is to loose a child.  I had this idea that when parents loose a child they went through a couple of years of grieving and then it slowly faded away and everything was normal again.  Yes I know a lot of you think, that’s just ridiculous, you don’t have to loose a child to know that’s not the case but honestly I had never had someone close enough loose a child that I actually knew any better.  We have so many friends who’ve never lost a child, yet they are so compassionate and understanding and they love and honour Roderick in so many different ways. 

   Some other less important lessons are how expensive a cemetery plot is, how stressful to make all the decisions and how long you have to sit in that office to get it all finalized.  Then you’ve got to decide on a gravestone and you find out it takes half a year for it to actually get installed which seems ridiculous because it’s during that first half year where the most people come to visit the gravesite or so it seems to me but I might be wrong.  

   Another lesson is how precious life is.  Just this week I was in the grocery store and I saw a mother with her two young daughters shopping.  What a brave mother, anyway I hear her patiently talking to her children and I’m thinking just never forget how precious they are, you realize that very quickly when you loose one.  Or I hear parents talking about how overwhelmingly busy it is taking their kids to all their doings and I’m thinking just enjoy it because you never want that to be taken away from you.  Now that doesn’t mean I never get frustrated or overwhelmed, in fact I have to remind myself more often then others.

   A huge lesson is not to worry about what other people think and to freely grieve and be our selves.  It doesn’t matter if some people think we should do it differently.  It has also freed me to worry less what people think in other areas of life.  I mean, I have to work at it but I just feel heaven is my true home and I’m just doing my job here until I go home so whether people like me or not is not that important as long as I’m doing the job I’m destined to do.  By this I do not mean that I cannot find joy in doing my job and enjoy life.  I can and we will again.  It’s all right if people see my short comings and mistakes too, because we all have those and God is so gracious so why be worried if others see that we’re imperfect.  In fact I find most people are also very gracious and are quite willing to forgive us our mistakes, I’m usually the one that is hardest on myself anyway.

   So to wrap it all up, yes we’ve learned these lessons and they are important to us but more and more as time goes by we tend to again slip into our old ways and we have to keep reminding our selves to keep working at and living the lessons we have learned.