I am about to publish a letter I sent to the family of a friend who died of cancer in this past December. The reason I am doing it is because what God has told me is for everyone. Please read and receive…
“My heart has been heavy since the parting of your beloved. I cannot even imagine what you are going through. The reason I am writing you this letter is because I have had similar loses in my life; especially my mother when I as only 8 years old.
I am not going to compare your loss to mine. I am not going to tell you that I understand what you are going through either. What I am going to attempt to do is tell you what God has said to me as I struggled to understand why he let it happen, even do it has no explanation that takes away the pain. Still his answers have given me peace, hope and resignation.
As I stated at the beginning of this letter, my mother died when I was only 8 years old. I am the oldest of 7 children. My youngest brother was only 10 months old at the time our mother died. My father had taken her away to my grandmother’s home, and we did not get to see her again, alive or dead. My grandmother lived about 500 miles away. My father left one day and came back and told us she had died. They had already buried her. When our father told us, my world ended. I was holding my baby brother in my arms, and from that day on I was never the same. As the years went by, I became used to being an orphan, but I hated it. I hated myself, and I hated God for having taken away my mother and my world. What did he need her for? He is surrounded with legions of angels! He has everything! I decided that God is a selfish, egotistical, uncaring, unloving God.
I grew up, continued in the church and with my life, but this was always in the bottom of my soul. I could not let it go. No matter how happy I seemed to be in the surface, this bitterness remained and it poisoned my soul.
When after many years, at the age of 52, I took my own life, God miraculously brought me back to life. The first thing he had to convince me of, was that he loved me. Because if you believe that God took your mother from you unfairly, you will never believe he loves you. Never!
I asked God why he brought me back! I did not want to be here in this world even back then at age 8! Couldn’t he find something for me to help him with in heaven too?…
In a period of 2 years he spoke to my heart softly, patiently, tenderly. Seven months out of those 2 years I actually spent in my bedroom, in the dark, alone with God. During all this time he talked to me in many ways and of many things. I compare it now to how he spoke to Job. But that was only part of it. Because God deals with each of his children according to the way we are. I needed love. I needed him to prove to me he loved me. And he did! Not the way another person would understand it, but the way I only would understand it. He convinced my heart so I had absolutely no doubt it all! I was so convinced that I became unafraid of everything that had tied me before.
From that day on, God started to deal with each and every one of the things in me that got in the way of his love manifested in my life. And here is where it came time for the death of my mother to be dealt with.
I always asked WHY! God has never answered that question. But the answers he has given me are enough. Not easy, because they demand my trust and my faith in Him more than ever, but they have given me hope, and more than anything more trust in my God and Father, that he knows best.
Let me try to explain: When God allowed all those awful loses and sickness to happen to Job, he also questioned WHY. The question was and still is: Why if I serve you so well, why if I am obedient to you, why if you love me, why if I am your child. Why!
The story of Job was left to us in the Bible, the word of God to help us deal with our own suffering and inexplicable loses in this earth until we go home to be eternally free from this world. Please bear with me as I tell you what God told me through the book of Job about my mother’s death, and about every person he allows to go through suffering and death, including yours.
In the first chapter of Job, we see how rich, healthy, and blessed Job’s life was. God holds a meeting in heaven with “the sons of God” The Scripture states that also Satan came to see God. And it was God himself that started the conversation about Job! Not Satan! Please notice that! God himself told Satan: HAVE YOU CONSIDERED MY SERVANT JOB…. God started it! We tend to blame Satan for many of our troubles. It would not be right to think that God would PLAN our suffering! But he does! This fact used to scare me, make me distrust God more than ever. Especially when I thought I was being obedient, and was working so hard to please him!
Then we see the deal God makes with the devil about Job. I remember how reading this before, made me feel that it was like a game between them. God actually played games with my life! The powerful using the weak to play their games of good versus evil.
After Satan leaves God’s presence, things start to go wrong, very wrong for Job. He starts losing his properties, his businesses, his children, everything! Finally one day he loses the last thing he has, his health. His wife, tells him to curse God and die. An understandable suggestion if you are thinking humanly right? But Job does not do it. He remains faithful to God but also has many questions! His “friends” come to “console” him in his distress; like many of us, they make terrible mistakes in what they say, telling Job must have sinned in some terrible way to deserve all that has befallen him. Then they leave, and Job finally has a chance to sit there in the soot and scratch his sores and ask God all his questions that are killing his soul more than the sickness of his body. Take the time to read the entire book, keeping all of this in mind. God will illuminate your spirit to understand and receive his truth.
When Job is done complaining, asking, even saying that it would have been better if he had never been born, he finishes and it is then that God comes to him and talks to him for a long time. Do you know what it is that God tells him? I could not, by the life of me understand it until now. God starts to ask Job questions! “Were you there when I created this; were you there when I made that? Where were you Job when the heavens were created? Please read it yourself Job 38 and on to see what God asked Job.
I always wondered how this answered Job’s questions! But now I know! After I spent time with Rosalba in the hospital and saw her family suffer her loss, my own pain came rushing back to me. But God had planned to answer MY questions that had been burning in the depths of my soul for so long.
One the night after Rosalba left this world, I went for an evening walk with Chacha. I started telling God how I felt about the whole situation. I have learned to be honest when I talk to him, because he really already knows how I feel. This is how my talk went: “Father, I do not understand what you are doing and I don’t like it! In what did all of this glorify you?” I continued like this for a few minutes, but it was the culmination of days, really, years and years of the same feelings. And God saw fit to finally open my eyes and answered me like he answered Job. This was what he said:
“Do you see the skies? Do you see everything I have made? Can you do that? (At that moment I remembered Job! God had asked him the same things!) Then God told me: I am God! You are only flesh! Yes you are my child, but you are not me. I see everything at the same time, the past, the present and the future are all the same in my sight! Time itself does not exist in my presence! You had a pick at that in your experience with me some time ago. (My mind flew back to 2008 when I killed myself and God took me in his arms for 10 hours and then sent me back for a very special purpose. I still remember the total lack of time in his presence, the calm, the peace…). He continued: I know your understanding of my mind is short; but I also know your heart toward me, your trust that is growing with each experience I present to you. So trust me in this also! I am God! I know everything! Your eyesight is so short. I asked him: Please let me see! And he opened my eyes and said:
“HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT I PREVENTED SOMETHING WORSE FROM HAPPENING?”
Something worse!? Something Worse! My head started turning with all the other possibilities of each situation I had gone through that had cause me immeasurable pain. Worse than that? God intervened in my mind immediately and stopped me. Trust me! Just trust me! And his peace came over me and flooded my soul, heart, my entire being.
At that moment I dropped my burden of fifty years of pain for the loss of my mother, the cancer that killed both my grandmothers, the loss of my baby, the many other things that have gone ”wrong” in my life, and I left it there in the road of my walk, at the foot of the cross.
I have a choice; do I decide to believe God? Do I decide to trust him? Or NOT.
I have been in the other side before, and it took me to the path of death. I never want to be there again. I was alive but dead inside because I had chosen not to believe and trust God. I had a religion, but it helped me for nothing! The burdens of being religious are unbearable! Knowing this, I know what my choice will be! Believe my God! Believe my Father! Trust him!
I am not saying here, that there won’t be pain and difficulties in my life again, my sweet mother in law thought me this when her husband died of leukemia. As we were going into the funeral home for the viewing she broke down and told me: “As children of God we cannot expect to be exempt from the pain of this world” Those words resounded in my ears, and still do to this day because we as children of God do expect to be exempt from the pain of this world! We think that we should get a better deal that everyone else! God has never promised that! On the contrary! He clearly said that we would suffer! But he also promised that he would not leave us alone in our suffering. There are many passages of Scripture that state that.
To me the choice is clear: Suffer with God by my side and fighting for me, planning always my best, or suffer by myself, totally alone, no one looking out for me.
I hope this helps you in your own suffering and losses, all of us will suffer. I encourage you to let God speak to your heart and let him set you free of your pain. Without him it is impossible to get through it. I tried to understand it, to figure it out in my own understanding and it is impossible. Let God serve you! He offers you peace, joy, real joy and hope. May this revelation be what you have been looking for”
God’s grace is enough! God’s grace is sufficient!
December 12, 2014 Estrella Montealegre de Albarrán
