Reflection / John Shaughnessy

Embrace the gift of life

I once entered a funeral home to pay my respects to a mother and father whose infant son had died. The child had been born with severe respiratory and neurological problems. He also had other birth defects, all of which led to him spending a significant part of his less-than-one-year life in a children’s hospital.

Some people said it was better for the infant and his parents that he died. Surely now, the thought was, the infant will have the peaceful, beautiful life that all children deserve. But when the infant was alive, the parents never gave any indication that it was better for their son to die. Instead, they loved and cared for him. And they swear that he returned their love and taught them through his pain and suffering.

Standing with the infant’s father at the funeral home, I noticed a stuffed animal had been placed in the coffin. I asked the father if it was a favorite toy of his son. He answered, “No, that’s a new one that we got for him. We were kind of selfish about his toys. We wanted to keep them for ourselves, to have something of his.”

In those words, it was evident that his son had touched his life with love.

That moment also revealed a glimpse of the depth of God’s love for us. God knows what it means to have a child die. God knows the pain, the heartbreak, the devastation. Yet he endured it all to offer us the gift of eternal life.

The bond between the father and the infant son mirrors the bond between God the Father and God the Son. Through the pain, the suffering and the death, there are lessons about the power, the purpose and the promise of our lives.

Our power is in the love we share in whatever time we have together.

Our purpose is to live in such a way that the people whose lives we touch will be blessed by our hope, our joy and our love.

Our promise is to be reunited with God, the Father who longs to be with his children.

They’re all part of the gift of life we’ve been given.

Embrace the gift of life.
 

(This reflection is an excerpt from John Shaughnessy’s new book, Then Something Wondrous Happened: Unlikely encounters and unexpected graces in search of a friendship with God. It is available on www.amazon.com.) †