"Trust in the Lord with all your heart;
do not depend on your own understanding."
do not depend on your own understanding."
Proverbs 3:5
Today my family and I celebrate the life of Connor Paul Walker- "Desired Little One". He was born ten years ago today; he went to be with Jesus ten years ago tomorrow. So many thoughts skitter through my head. What is it I want to convey? Do I want to share the circumstances that surrounded his birth and death? Part of me wants to. He was my firstborn son, and I want people to know about him, and because his time on earth was so very short, it would seem that there's really not much else to share other than those circumstances. I realize, though, what a short-sighted view that is. There's so much more to Connor's life than the time he spent with us. Were I to depend on my own understanding, I would pay this no heed. I would remain angry with God. Couldn't he have intervened when my husband and I, along with countless others, begged him to do so and healed his body? Surely he could have. And in my own understanding, I would still be questioning why a loving Father, if not for the sake of Cory and me, wouldn't at least come to the rescue of a helpless baby. Those were most certainly things I thought and felt and wrestled with a decade ago. But I've come to recognize that my own understanding is so little. In so many ways, it's so very childish and immature, and though I may grow in intellect and reasoning, in light of the omniscience of God, my understanding will remain small at best in so many ways. So I choose not to trust in what I can see or feel or touch or understand, and I choose to trust, as Abraham did when God asked him to sacrifice the son whom he had waited so long to hold in his arms and was to be his promised heir, in the goodness of God. His ways are higher than my ways, and his thoughts far above my own. In Abraham's case, he was provided a ram in the thicket to be the sacrifice instead of his son. I wanted a ram in the thicket. It didn't come in a physical sense; Connor still went on to heaven long before what seemed just to me. But that wasn't the sum total of his life. His legacy lives on. Because of Connor Paul, Cory and I aren't the same people we were ten years ago. Because of what we went through, our relationship with God has a richness to it born only in the soil of sorrow. It caused us to become completely real with God, and it allowed us, over time, to know the joy of being comforted by a God whose love for us can't be fathomed. Because of what we went through, our intentionality in parenting our other precious sons is far greater than it might have been otherwise. Do I desire to have my Connor with me today? Sure. But would I trade what I went through? Not if it meant not being who I am today and not having the relationship with God that I now have. So today we celebrate Connor Paul, and we're eternally grateful for the gift of his legacy.
