Aaron’s Birthday (Part II)

Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?
Hebrews 1:14

One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!”
Acts 10:3

Last night an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I serve stood beside me.
Acts 27:23

I shared a little about what my family was doing on Aaron’s Birthday a few days ago, but I didn’t share everything. Missy and I took the kids over to my parents’ house and we had lunch together. The kids played with Teagan, Aaron’s youngest, and I visited the columbarium at the cemetery that holds Aaron’s cremated remains. Later, Missy and I took the kids to Washington Monument State Park just northwest of Frederick, Maryland. One of my favorite overlooks is there. Then we finished the day with good food at Black Hog BBQ and ice cream at Baskin-Robins.

But that wasn’t the best part of the day. God gave our family a unique gift the morning of Aaron’s birthday this year.

When Emily woke up that morning, she came downstairs, and the first thing she said to Missy was, “I saw my first angel!” When Emily woke up the morning of Aaron’s birthday, she saw an angel circling above her bed. She described yellow, shimmering wings, a long robe that covered down to its feet, and no face. She told me it was about as big as me. She could immediately discern that it was an angel and was not afraid of it.

Then, she spoke to the angel and said, “Go tell Jesus to tell Uncle Aaron ‘Happy Birthday!'” And as soon as she said that, the angel left. I believe the angel went and did just that. I love that Emily’s first thought when seeing an angel wasn’t about herself but was about Uncle Aaron. What a precious gift on such a sad day!

God was so kind to send an angel just for us as a sign of His comfort and faithfulness. And how kind of God to allow the angel to be revealed in plain sight to Emily. I believe it was there specifically to allow Emily to tell Uncle Aaron “Happy Birthday!”

And we have seen this over and over again when it comes to Aaron’s death. God has continued to show up in supernatural ways and has continued to speak clearly into this situation. Back when my brother’s accident happened, I wrote a blog post about how talkative God was. God’s kindness continues to amaze me in the midst of grief.

So now all three of my kids have seen angels at different times. And I pray that this only continues for them. That they would continue to know the reality of the unseen world right at our fingertips–the spirit realm that is so actively participating in our lives. Thank you Jesus!

Aaron’s Birthday

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten…”
Joel 2:25

Today we, as a family, celebrate my brother’s birthday. Aaron died in a sudden and tragic car accident back in August. It was out of the blue. It was unexpected. He was only 47 years old. He left behind a wife and three kids that are in college. One of the dominant feelings about his death was not just grief but the pervasive sense of it being unfair.

Even as a little kid I had a sense that things needed to be fair. I was given a deep sense of justice by the Lord, which reflects His own desire to bring justice into the world. This deep sense of justice would eventually lead me to help start an anti-trafficking organization. But it also causes the lack of fairness in the world to sting a little more.

It’s not fair that Aaron’s kids don’t get to talk to him or see him anymore. It’s not fair that his wife has to wake up every day without him next to her. It’s not fair that his two girls won’t get to walk down the wedding aisle with him at their side. It’s not fair that my parents don’t get to have their oldest child swing by their house just to chat. It’s not fair that my sister and I don’t get to joke with him and laugh with him and ask for his help with stuff around the house. It’s not fair that my kids lost their fun-loving uncle and all the memories they would have made with him as they grew up. It’s not fair that my wife lost her favorite Stephenson. Aaron was everyone’s favorite. There is a sense of deep injustice about his death.

And the reality of this world is that injustice is rampant. It’s everywhere you turn. We cannot be surprised by it because it is everywhere. No one makes it through this life without a story of injustice and suffering. No one. Suffering and grief don’t make us special; they make us normal. Sin has broken this world, and the enemy as exacerbated injustice as much as he is able.

So what do we do? What do we do when a life has been stolen from us? What do we do when years of memories and moments have been taken away without any recourse? What do we do in the face of an injustice like this?

What we are choosing to do is celebrate Aaron’s life and believe in the God who brings redemption to all things. We trust in God who promises to repay us for the years the locusts have eaten. We lean into the God who brings beauty from ashes, who brings life out of death. In the face of this injustice, we remember that God said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay“(Romans 12:19; Deuteronomy 32:35). This is the nature and character of the God we serve. So we leave it to Him to do just that. And, in the meantime, we receive His comfort as we grieve:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4

We miss you brother!

Hearing God in a Crisis

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good…
1 Thessalonians 5:19-21

My family and I are in the midst of a tragedy. We are walking through grief and loss. My older brother has just died at 47. He was in a car accident. He left behind a wife and three kids. We feel like so much has been stolen from us. So much time and so many memories that were yet to happen were ripped away from us in an instant. My nieces and nephew lost their dad. I lost a brother. My parents lost a son. My sister-in-law lost her husband. My kids lost an uncle. The pain is real and intense.

During these kinds of seasons we need the presence of the Lord to be near to us and comfort us. We need Jesus to bring His peace that passes all understanding. And it is extremely helpful to hear from the Lord as He speaks to us about what is happening. Yet, many people report that during difficult times, they don’t hear from the Lord. It often feels like the Lord is silent.

I have some thoughts on this. I believe the Lord wants to speak into these situations in our lives. I don’t believe the Lord wants to be silent. But I believe we often experience a kind of silence for a couple reasons.

Have you ever been on a video conference call and someone started talking while they were still muted? You can see their mouth moving but you can’t hear anything. It’s not that they aren’t talking but the mute button is keeping you from hearing them. I believe we sometimes interact with God this way. God is speaking but we don’t hear him. We have a mute button on in our spirit.

The thing that opens communication with the Lord is trust. If we can trust him implicitly in good times or bad, no matter what happens, then the communication lines stay open. Lack of trust shuts down our ability to hear from the Lord. So if personal crisis causes us not to trust the Lord, then we are shutting down the very thing we need in that moment–the voice of the Lord.

Not only does mistrust shut down our ability to hear, but it will sometimes cause God to stop speaking. He stops speaking because He loves us. That may sound strange but just think about it for a second. Imagine you are grieving an incredible loss in your life. Now imagine someone you don’t trust starts talking to you. In that moment, do you want them to keep talking? No. It doesn’t matter what they are saying. It doesn’t matter if they are saying all the right things. If we don’t trust them, we don’t want them speaking to us while we are in the midst of deep grief. It would be better if they were just silent.

God knows this. If we don’t trust God, it doesn’t matter what He says to us in that moment of grief and pain. If we don’t trust Him, we will misconstrue whatever it is He wants to tell us. We will doubt it, question it, and misinterpret it. Our lack of trust toward God often means it is more loving for Him just to be present with us and not speak to us in that moment.

Yet, in the midst of grief and pain, we are willing to hear from people we trust. So if we trust the Lord no matter what, we are willing to hear from Him in the midst of our pain. God speaks and we listen. And when we hear the word of the Lord in the midst of our tragedy, it is so helpful, so comforting, and so clarifying.

This may sound strange to some, but here’s the truth: God has not been silent during this tragedy in my life. In fact, the only way to describe my interaction with God right now is that God has been downright talkative. In the midst of my grief, pain and loss, He has had so many things He’s wanted to say to me.

He has spoken to me directly through scripture, through prayer (His still small voice in my heart), through friends, and through prophetic words from others. When I didn’t know what to pray, the Lord gave me different themes and things to focus on that directed my prayers. When I was confused by what seemed to be missing pieces of the puzzle, God dropped a puzzle piece on me that brought understanding.

My wife had a prophetic dream in the middle of our crisis that brought tremendous clarity. My good friend had multiple prophetic visions that he shared with me that were hard to hear at first but brought a level of comfort and understanding. This is why the above verse of scripture says, “Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all.” If we can learn to receive and process prophetic words on our normal days, then they will become lifelines during a crisis.

Trust is what keeps those communication lines open. When God begins to speak, and He says something unexpected, trust is what allows us to receive His word without being confused or offended by it. Jesus is the most trustworthy person I’ve ever met. We owe Him our unconditional, implicit, unyielding trust.

We need to stop believing the lie that God is always silent during hard times. Not true. God loves to talk us through a crisis. He loves to speak. He loves to speak words that bring clarity, understanding, comfort, and peace. If God is quiet, it may be that He knows what we need in that moment is His tangible Presence and not His words. But it also might mean that our inability to trust Him has shut down communication. Let’s make sure our trust in Him keeps those lines of communication open. Even during a crisis, He is worthy of our trust.

Comfort and Mystery

“I, even I, am he who comforts you.
    Who are you that you fear mere mortals,
    human beings who are but grass,
that you forget the Lord your Maker,
    who stretches out the heavens
    and who lays the foundations of the earth…
Isaiah 51:12-13

So often we comfort ourselves by using the tool of “comparison.” We feel like we are struggling financially and so we compare ourselves to someone with less and say, “At least I’m not that poor.” We feel like our career has stalled and so we compare ourselves to someone who got fired and say, “At least I have a job.” This is often how we comfort ourselves when we are facing a hard time.

But using comparison to bring comfort has an ugly side to it. When you are the one completely broke, when you are the one who lost their job, when you are the one with a terminal illness, comparison only leads to more despair. Far from bringing comfort, comparison brings feelings of deep pain and hopelessness.

God makes it clear that He alone is our comforter. We need to take our pain to Him and let His presence exchange our sorrow with joy. Psalm 16:11 says, “…you will fill me with joy in your presence…” It’s in the presence of “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles“(2 Corinthians 1:3-4) where we find comfort and a lasting joy that can’t be taken from us by hard circumstances. Comparison can never do this!

The Lord recently revealed something to me in regard to mystery. We humans tend to be hypocrites when it comes to what mystery we’re comfortable accepting. We ask questions regarding the mysteries of pain and suffering but never ask the same questions about our blessing and provision. We don’t wrestle through why we were born into a country with freedoms, a strong economy, job opportunities, clean water and sanitation. We know it is a mystery as to why we were born here and others were born into countries with none of these things. Yet, we accept this mystery often without a second thought.

However, we love to ask “why me” when we get an illness, or have a financial crisis, or troubled relationships. We embrace the mystery of blessing just fine but can’t bear to embrace the mystery of suffering. If the answer to the question “why was I born into a middle-class family in the one of the greatest countries in the world” is above my pay grade, then certainly why my friend got cancer is above my pay grade. Both are mysteries and both are beyond my understanding. To accept one as mystery and demand answers for the other is hypocrisy.

The healthy response to suffering in our life is to take our grief and our pain to the Lord. We take it to Him and allow Him to comfort us. When we think we have to make sense of it and figure it all out, we step out of our role as trusting sons and daughters of the Father. Embracing mystery and trusting the Lord with things that are beyond our understanding is a part of living in a broken and fallen world.

What mystery in your own life is the Lord asking you to trust Him with?

What do you need to take to the Lord to receive His comfort?

The Heart of Jesus

When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.
Matthew 14:13-14

This gives us great insight into the heart of Jesus.

When Jesus heard what had happened, he tried to get alone. What happened? John the Baptist, Jesus’s cousin and the greatest of Old Testament prophets, was beheaded by Herod the tetrarch. And it wasn’t even a noble death.

John called Herod out for marrying his brother’s wife and got thrown into prison. Then Herod made a drunken oath to give his step-daughter half of his kingdom. At the prompting of her bitter mother, she asks for John’s head on a platter. It was an unceremonious and brutal death.

John the Baptist was a friend and a herald of Jesus. He was a fellow prophet calling people to repentance and declaring the Kingdom of God. Jesus knew all too well that if they were willing to so flippantly kill John, He would be next.

So Jesus withdrew to a solitary place to grieve. He was grieving the loss of a friend and fellow companion in ministry. He was grieving the death of the greatest of Old Testament prophets (Matthew 11:11). He was grieving the death of a family member. And He was grieving His own future, knowing it will look similar to John’s.

The crowds didn’t seem to honor Jesus’s need to be alone and process John’s death. As soon as Jesus came ashore He saw that the crowds followed Him around the Sea of Galilee on foot. They were all clamoring to have their needs met, not once thinking about what Jesus needed in that moment. The crowds weren’t there to comfort Jesus. They were there to be ministered to by Jesus.

What would your response be in this moment if you were Jesus?

It’s in this moment that we see the heart of Jesus, the heart of our Heavenly Father. When Jesus saw the large crowd, scripture says “he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” Jesus was still loving other people even as He grieved.

If we’re not careful, grief can pull us into a selfish spiral of self-pity. While grieving is healthy and necessary, there can be a great temptation in grief to become self-absorbed. But not for Jesus. He still was compassionate. He still chose to heal all who needed healing.

This is the Jesus we serve and love. This is the Jesus to whom we surrender all. Jesus wants to spend time with us. He wants to be near to us. He has limitless compassion for us and what we’re experiencing. He’s the perfect representation of God the Father’s heart toward us.

God is not put out by you. You don’t exhaust Him. He’s not irritated with you. You don’t bother Him. He loves you. And nothing you do will ever change that.