Advent Week Two: Peace

I have been reading Ann Voskamp's posts on Advent, and this week she shared a video on Peace.  You can watch it here....please take the time.  It is so powerful.  I have decided to share my thoughts on Advent also, so I am writing my reflections on peace that came to the surface today from a place deep inside.

Peace

This week holds powerful memories for us.  It was both a long and a short nine years ago that we received a phone call in the middle of the night telling us our son Kevin was in the ER and had "coded" and could we get to the hospital right away.  The problem was, we lived in Iowa an he lived in Colorado.  The nurse told me the medical team was "working on him", so I asked her to please call us back when she knew more information.  Joel and I lay in bed, stunned, and as we held each other we tearfully prayed for our son's life to be spared.  But I knew....a mother knows.   An hour later they had a social worker call and inform us he had passed.  He was 25 years old and died after a virus attacked his heart and he went into congestive heart failure. 

Why does this memory bring to mind peace during this second week of Advent?  That is a story that would take a long time to share,  so I will attempt to speak of it briefly. 

We adopted our son Kevin when he was three years old.  He was a beautiful boy with brown skin, black hair, and huge brown eyes.  He was our 5th child and we welcomed him with open arms, but being in a family was difficult for him.  We discovered over time that not only had Kevin been physically and sexually abused in his birth home, but also in his foster family.  He knew only pain and he did not trust love. 

Many of the years with our son were challenging for him and for the whole family, but we did what we could for him and to keep the family in tact.  So when he moved to Colorado to be near a friend he met at Job Corps we hoped for the best for him.  Soon after moving he met and married a young girl and they had a son. He and his wife soon separated  and he met another woman with whom he had a daughter.  He was not on a good path and we worried about him a great deal.  Sometimes when he would call and talk to us, we would converse about God.  He had been baptized at age three, and years later confirmed at his own request.  He understood God and what Jesus had done for him, but walked away from church as an adult.  He struggled with God letting bad things happen to him as he saw it ~ like the virus that damaged his heart beyond repair.  He had the faith....maybe the faith of only a mustard seed...but he did have faith.  When he died we held on to that tightly.  He had faith.

So, when we grieved and at times still grieve the early death of our son, we grieve with hope.  The hope of believing God prepared a place for Kevin and he is for the first time pain free....he now understands real love. Our oldest daughter said Kevin died from not only a damaged heart, but a broken heart.  In Heaven we know his heart is whole.  He gets it now.....the love of a Father .....the joy of being whole.  And that gives us peace.