Five years
ago, My wife and I both felt that we have a picture-perfect life for our
family. Career-wise, I was then employed in a China-based foreign company whose
owner is kind enough to be a second father to me. I have good working
relationship with everyone in the office. I was actively participating in the
small virtual group of Kerygmafamily expressing and exchanging faith ideas and
experiences with other fellow-believers. I was also contributing articles to
the e-ministry of Bro. Jun Asis’ Mabuting Balita. And above all, my family of
four was always together, a special situation that a lot of OFWs around the
world continue to wish and hope for. At the end of each day, my wife, as a
full-time homemaker, never ran out of stories about the fun stuffs to tell of
how her day went with our two active and bubbly kids. Each moment was pleasant,
memorable and fulfilling to us being young parents.
Little did
we know that we were actually threading through the eye of the storm and the
whiplash of wind gusts would hit us when we least expected it.
A few weeks
after moving to our new flat, the very intense heart-piercing tragedy struck us
– within few overnight-hours of contracting fever, our 22-month old daughter passed away in our arms at the break of dawn. It happened so fast that
by the time I brought her to the hospital, the expressions on the faces of the
doctor and nurse confirmed that it was already too late to save her.
We were
devastated to our very inner core and were totally lost in pain.
We
desperately searched for answer and despaired when no answer seemed to come
from anywhere.
When a child
loses a parent, he/she becomes an orphan. When a spouse loses his/her partner, he
becomes a widower or she becomes a widow. But when a mother loses her child,
there is no known societal status for her to be known or called. It is as if
she died also with her child. As a husband, my greatest fear then was if and
how my wife would be able to recover considering that she already went through
a lot of tough times during her growing years.
In Rick Warren’s recent e-article “You
Need God’s Presence, not His Explanation” he wrote, “When God is silent in your life, you’re going through a test. When you
don’t hear God and he feels like a million miles away, that is a test! The
teacher is always silent when the students take a test. When God is silent in
your life, your faith is being tested. Will you let go of control, or will you
grab on more tightly? Will you learn to be content?
Slowly, it
dawned on us that God was actually talking to us through the support and
comforting words of family members, relatives and friends. He was not only
talking to us, but He was embracing us to make sure our faith that He put to the
test would not falter. We were not able to and most probably will never
understand in our lifetime why it really had to happen to us but by His
constant presence and grace, we learned to accept His will. We let go and let
God.
When
you’re going through pain this next week or next month or this year, you don’t
really need God’s explanation. You need God’s presence” - RW
We love and
miss you a lot, Maia.
We will see
you again in God’s appointed time so for now we will let bittersweet memories
remain to remember you by. And we will keep refuge with the knowledge that you
are now an angel in heaven and that God is always in loving control of our
lives.
