In John 12:24 Jesus says, “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”
I want us to see something more than an ending in the life of Elizabeth. I want us to recognize how she held on to life tenaciously and against all the odds – how she wrestled with the enemy time and again and won – hands down. How she grabbed the life she had and made it – and those around her – hers. Paul says to the Corinthians, “Stand firm and let nothing move you.” She stood firm – as a Diva should – and people moved around her. As her grandfather put it, “It was her world and we were just living in it.”
All of us have said one time or another that the purpose of our life is to point others to God. For Elizabeth everything she did pointed toward God because she could not do anything without Him. While we fight that sense of helplessness, it was not helplessness for Elizabeth. It was her very nature to depend on God’s love. And it was the nature of their relationship that made everyone who knew her look through her to a loving Father in heaven whose love was reckless, real and eternal. While anyone just watching from the outside would see a family with a child who needed nurturing and care, it is so obvious that Matt, Kathryn, Michael and Caroline realized Elizabeth nurtured them. She somehow over the course of those three and a half years made them more like what they had been created to be. Everyone around her became better than they were three year and a half years ago. They learned not only to bear each other’s burdens but to share each other’s happiness, sorrows, small successes and to find themselves pointing others to God through Elizabeth. When your response to people with the best of intentions saying, “I am so sorry” is “But we are not” you have accepted the gift you have been given. You have begun to understand that you were from before time chosen to receive this child into your lives. You were not chosen for who you were but for who you would become through the life of Elizabeth. You have grown into an extraordinary family because of her. Elizabeth had a purpose for her life – and part of that purpose was hand delivering in person a message of God’s love to you. Michael’s making her laugh was more than fun. It was all part of his young man’s vow to protect her. Caroline’s holding her during seizures and praying that God would be with her became part of their life together.
John Claypool and his wife lost their daughter, Laura, to leukemia when she was ten years old. In a series of sermons delivered during the struggle and immediately after her passing he described what he thought were their three choices for roads to travel down from the Mountain of Loss. The first two were what he soon found to be cul de sacs but the third road he calls the road of gratitude.
May I read from that?
“I do not mean to say that such a perspective makes things easy, for it does not. But at least it makes things bearable when I remember that she was gift, pure and simple, something I neither earned nor deserved nor had a right to. And when I remember that the appropriate response to a gift, even when it is taken away, is gratitude, then I am better able to try and thank God that I was ever given her in the first place.
I have two alternatives. I can dwell on the fact that she has been taken away, and dissolve in remorse that all of this is gone forever. Or, focusing on the wonder that she was ever given at all, I can resolve to be grateful that we shared life, even for an all-too-short ten years. There are only two choices here, but believe me, the best way for me is the way of gratitude.”
The author, Frederick Buechner has said, ““Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
He is right. The world is both beautiful and terrible but we are not to be afraid. It is not denial or being naïve. It is not pretending that the world is not a dangerous or very broken place. It is seeing the world for what it is but instead of despair or cynicism we choose what Elizabeth chose – hold on to life for what it can be and point people to God.
In 1 Corinthians 15:35 the Apostle Paul says, “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else.” Elizabeth was truly something else!
Elizabeth was planted in our lives as a seed and from this time forward for the rest of our lives her life and influence will grow inside us. It will not be just a memory but a living thing. She has left our lives physically but what she brought with her from the Father will keep growing. The fruit of her life will enrich yours and ours.
She left empty handed because she had given it all. Some would ask “What did she have to give?” and they would be wrong. Her last gift of many in this life was to give blood to help doctors understand and treat this rare disease.
The real question is why did we receive her in the first place? Why did she come to us at all? Her legacy is unpredictable and unimaginable and yet certain. The seed of her life has been planted in the soil of yours and it is there she will sprout and reproduce. You are her legacy and she has left you an inheritance that will enable you, like her, to point others to God.
The death of a child is an unexpected and unnatural sadness. An even greater sadness is to die never having really lived. In some ways, she lived more fully in her brief life with us than many live in 30 times as many years. Elizabeth has really and truly lived twice. Once when she was with us and now even more fully alive in the presence of Christ.
May I quote Frederick Buechner one more time? “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
In his blog, “Learning to Waltz” Matt in his beautiful words told us the story of Elizabeth’s third birthday party. In the midst of what he rightly called the “barely organized chaos” of sixty friends and the frenzy of kids breaking the big, pink cupcake piñata, “Elizabeth was fast asleep – completely at peace in the midst of the chaos. Elizabeth was most at peace – felt most safe and secure – when those around her who she loved were at their most active and vocal. She found peace in the chaos of life. She was content knowing that those she cared about were having fun. So, why is this little observation about Elizabeth in any way interesting? Well, I think it is instructive to each of us about how to properly look for peace in our lives. And, everyone is looking for peace. We all desperately search for that perfect Zen garden or bucolic field where we just know peace resides. We clamor and scratch to try to buy enough time to go searching for that place. We just know that this perfect, peaceful Eden is just around the next corner, or after the next million, or following the applause. We constantly push and pull and grab and claw our way in the valiant hope of forcing ourselves to a peaceful place. I really and truly think that we have been misinformed about what peace truly is. We think its a calm state where everyone is relaxed and wise, thinking deep thoughts and basking in camaraderie, enjoying everything and worrying about nothing. But, in fact, Elizabeth has shown me that peace–true lasting solid peace–is deeper than that. Instead of a place to go, a destination to find, it really is a foundation upon which you build your life–the prism through which you see your circumstances. It goes counter to our expectations, it flies in the face of all we think we know. Elizabeth has that peace. She basks in it. So, how can a child with myriad special needs, neurological hurdles, developmental delays and medical setbacks find that peace when so many of us have spent our lives actively searching in vain for it?
The answer is deceptively simple. Elizabeth has peace because she was given it–not because she found it. Her Creator, her Maker, her Protector gave E the “peace that passes understanding”. He gave her the ability to sleep amongst the chaos–to show that she is secure because she is loved. Wow. And, honestly, we all have the ability to have that peace, too. We just have to decide to quit searching aimlessly for it–and receive it. This peace won’t guarantee you a life without burden. (quite the opposite!) Elizabeth still has her significant issues and mountains to overcome. So will you. What the peace will do, though, is allow you the foundational ability to rest in Him while the world breaks apart the piñata you’ve built. All while you have a beautiful little smile on your face as you sleep…”
You know the story of Enoch who lived for 365 years and as Scripture puts it “walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.” Ray Stedman tells the story of a little girl not much older than Elizabeth who described it this way. “Enoch used to take long walks with God. One day, he walked so far God said, “It’s too far to go back; come on home with me.”
Enoch did and so did Elizabeth. They both went home with God. They both just flew away. And so those of us who are in Christ will rise one day and be truly at home. We will exchange the perishable for the imperishable. What is sown in weakness will be raised in power. What is only a seed will be, as Matt described Elizabeth, a beautiful and glorious life.