The Heart of the Matter

For weeks, my seven year old daughter cracked jokes that were neither funny nor clever.

“Knock, knock,” she’d start, and I already knew the gist of the dark punchline that would follow.

“Who’s there?”

“Nobody, cause I’m dead.”

She danced around the subject of death; was probably inviting me to a conversation about it, and yet each time she did so I passed on the invite.

I was waiting for her to frame her punchline into a real question, just in case I was reading too much into the dark humor.

She finally came to me one night, the week before she was going to Children’s Memorial Hospital for her next open heart surgery.

“Daddy?” she asked.

I looked up from my laptop.

“Can kids die?” she contined.

I swallowed, shut my laptop, and invited her to sit with me.

This time, she was the one who passed on the invite.

She stood still before me, tears beginning to trickle from her watery blue eyes.

“Oh, Love,” I swallowed. This was no joke. “Why do you ask?”

The words stuck in her throat.  “Because I don’t want to.”

My heart broke as I scooped her into my lap and nudged strands of her long brown hair from her cheek. I took a moment to weigh my answer.

Should I give her the truth, or something more appropriate for a seven year old facing heart surgery?

“Yes,” I finally admitted. “Kids can die.”

But I promised her that Children’s was one of the best hospitals with some of the best doctors and nurses—whose sole job was to get her better, and to get her home.

I knew I was being selfish, but I made her promise me that she would do whatever it took to get home again.

Conversations such as these have been wonderful and awful at the same time, just as being her dad has been awful and awfully wonderful.

You cannot imagine how often I have shared her very real fear of death over her few short years; how many times I had buried her in my mind.

I try not to dwell on the fear, but sometimes it just consumes. I’ll be sitting at a stop light, for example, waiting, maybe listening to the radio or working on a work-related problem in my head, and by the time the light turns green I find myself sobbing.

Out of the clear blue. I shake the thoughts, tell myself I’m being ridiculous, but by the next green light, this crazy nightmare-fantasy of her funeral plays out before me a second time.

Lifeline Church's Pastor Dave, without knowing any of the details behind my asking , gave a cautious answer about not being sure he could accept the premise of the question.

“Did God behave in some errant way that would require forgiveness?” It was a fair response, and certainly a position I waffled with.

Did God behave in some errant way?

If God exists, he could have prevented my daughter’s struggles, but chose not to. If God exists, he could completely cure her, but chooses not to.

If God exists, maybe he was responsible for her condition, or maybe he just merely let it happen. God not existing had become the only option that brought me comfort, because if God did exist, then yes, he behaved in an errant way. At least as far as my daughter was concerned.

It didn’t matter if my logic was spot-on or was flawed; I needed to get past this waffling if I was ever going to move forward in my search for God.

So, I forgave God. For all that was wrong with my daughter’s health. For all that had gone wrong in my life. For all the struggles I had yet to overcome. I forgave God.

That certainly didn’t change my reality any. My daughter still struggles health-wise.

I can still get sucked into that crazy nightmare-fantasy of her death. All that had gone wrong in my life wasn’t magically fixed. And the struggles I had yet to overcome still lay before me.

Yet, what I feel about all those things began to change. I no longer felt wronged. I no longer felt angry and bitter.

Forgiveness is such a weird thing when you think of it. It’s not something you can simply take from someone, nor is it something you can reject once it’s given.

It’s not yours to take, nor is it yours to reject. And, once given, forgiveness sort of hovers on a life of its own.

And, for me, forgiving God was my first real step on my journey back to him.

If my forgiveness was misguided, I figure, well, God might have to do some forgiving, too.