By George “Chip” Hammond
I am happy to be discovering the incredible impact my daughter Rebecca had on people in her short 19 years. The volume of cards that we have received is staggering. We have gotten letters from people we don’t know, or barely have known, telling us how much of a difference Rebecca made to their lives. Some of them are from people who have had distant connections with our church and wrote about the growth, depth of love, and the maturity of faith they’ve witnessed in Bethel Church as a result of the entire church raising and caring for Rebecca.
I learned a lot from being her dad. I learned a lot about my inherent selfishness and how to crucify it. I wish she didn’t have to go so soon, because that selfishness is not completely dead yet, and she was helping me. I feel like my lessons have been cut short, but it’s hard right now to be analytical, philosophical, or theological.
I could never have imagined that deep grief would be so much like physical injury. I can only compare it to having fallen from a 10-story building, miraculously surviving, but having every bone in my body broken. Not that it hurts all the time. It’s like a surgery in which having been locally anesthetized, you can feel what’s going on, you can feel that it hurts and is injurious to tissue, but the numbness takes away the sharpness of the pain.
There’s the guilt. That’s part of the pain. It’s my job to protect my family. Why wasn’t I home when it happened? What if I had been home and had gone to check on her an hour earlier? And now – now I can’t protect my wife or other children from the bouts of grief they suffer. I read that this too is “normal.” Guilt too often accompanies grief.
I also read that something akin to post traumatic stress disorder can accompany deep, sudden grief. I suppose that’s what causes the hyper-vigilance I’m experiencing: the constant inventorying in my mind of where my other children are, the constant suppression of feelings of panic and the need to act, the jumping up to check on Becca only to remember she is not there, the waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and starting to get out of bed to go help her, only to remember again. It leads to the persistent unfulfillable need to do something.
For the first two weeks I could barely sleep. Now I can do little more than sleep, or sit staring. Has more than an hour really passed since I’ve been sitting here? And the strangest things come out of my mouth, things that have nothing at all to do with anything.
An old friend who was instrumental in Donna’s coming to faith in Jesus sent us a book he wrote in the wake of his wife’s death, Hope When Your Heart is Breaking. It’s not difficult reading, grammatically speaking. The chapters are short, and the concepts are simple. Still, I can only read one little section at a time each day, and try to assimilate the comfort, perspective, and assurance of God’s presence that is contained in those few paragraphs.
Someone who knew Becca wrote to us, someone who is not from our church, and I don’t think she is the member of any church. She was at the service and she remarked in her letter, “your faith is strong.”
Are you kidding? There’s nothing strong about me right now.
I couldn’t help but think about her words. Such a statement about a person’s faith is not uncommon, but I realized for the first time how nonsensical it is to speak of “strong faith.”
“For by grace you have been saved through faith.”
Faith is not a force. Faith is a channel. The Potomac River basin itself is not a strong force. It would be nonsense to speak of it like that, but the water that flows through the basin can be a strong force. Similarly, my faith is not strong, but the grace that flows through it is. Grace brings God’s presence and love and carries me through the day when I can’t get dressed in the morning. God’s grace is so strong it will widen the channel by its sheer power if need be.
I know now what I’ve only read about in the past: that a soul-injury can be every bit as debilitating as a physical injury. They say time will heal, but this is not true. Time itself does not heal any more than time itself creates life. God heals through and in time.
I trust that healing will come, but I will bear the scars of being separated from Rebecca all the days of my life and until the resurrection comes. If I read my Bible rightly, on that day all my scars and Rebecca’s will be gone. In the New Heavens and the New Earth there will be only one who bears glorified scars, one who will forever look like “a Lamb who had been slain.” This is the forever testament to the cost of bringing Becca and me to the destination we were created for but had forfeit by the human race’s declaration of independence from him. But how long, O Lord?
No, my faith is not strong. Faith is only a channel. Through it, God gives me Christ and in Him, all things. He is strong.
