Susan's Memorial Service
The memorial service for Susan McDowell was recorded on video and is now posted at vimeo. Phil Ryken also kindly sent me his message in manuscript.
The Steadfast Love of Jesus
Memorial Service for Susan McDowell—July 23, 2011
I want to begin by expressing my sympathies to you, Bruce, and to Brooke and Abby, and also to Susan’s brothers and the rest of the family gathered here to support you. Special greetings as well to Susan’s parents: Mr. and Mrs. David and Julie Benthal; we hold you in our thoughts and prayers today. Please know that we love you in the Lord. We grieve for your loss. Indeed, we share it as a loss of our own. We pray God’s comfort and peace upon you. And, Bruce, we admire you for the faithfulness, courage, and trust in God you and your family have showed in so many ways.
Then I want to say what an extraordinary privilege it is to speak at this memorial service, for someone I love and hope to see again soon. You will not be surprised, I think, to know that we began planning for this service several years ago. It is always wise to prepare for death, and therefore good to plan your funeral or memorial service as a way of clarifying what is most important to you in life and death. So I asked Susan (and Bruce, too, actually) to prepare a memorial service.
As we talked about her plans, Susan asked me to speak with you about the steadfast love of Jesus Christ. She had recently spent a day in prayer and Bible study with the pastor’s wives, where they had each chosen one of God’s attributes as something precious to them. Susan identified God’s steadfast love as the bedrock of her life, as the only thing that makes it possible for us to have hope in this world.
It would be enough simply to talk about God’s “love,” but Susan added the word “steadfast” because she knew that the Scriptures of the Old Testament often speak of God’s loving-kindness, or steadfast love, or covenant love—in other words, a love that is held secure by the unbreakable promises of God. Susan understood that the love of God is not a temporary affection, but the absolute disposition of his perfect character. The steadfast love of God is a love that stays with you and never lets you go: all through life, even unto death, and then on to all eternity.
Further, Susan asked me to speak on the love of God from Psalm 71—not so much because this psalm focuses on the biblical word for “steadfast love,” but because it shows what that love can do in the life of someone in desperate need.
Let me ask you, please, to turn to that psalm in your Bibles and to keep it open as I speak. Every week at Tenth Church we read through one of the psalms the way we have just read it: responsively. We start at Psalm 1, keep reading one psalm a week—week after week and year after year—until we get to Psalm 150, and then start again.
Not long after she received her diagnosis, and began to understand that she was in for the fight of her life, Susan heard Psalm 71 in a way that touched her soul. As I speak from this psalm, imagine what it is like to hear these words when somebody has told you that you may have a fatal disease, and so you’re afraid of losing your life and everything you love in the world. But also hear it for yourself, as someone who may have desperate problems of your own, and as someone who had better be prepared to die when the time comes.
DYING FROM A DEADLY ENEMY
The person who wrote this psalm—we don’t know who it was for sure, but it was probably King David—was brutally honest about the troubles of life. Given what is said in verse 9, it may have been someone old. Or maybe it was just somebody who was afraid of getting old, and of the weakness that would come with old age. But it is certainly someone who had a lot of problems in life.
The main problem here is the hostility of dangerous enemies. The psalmist looks to the Lord for refuge and asks for deliverance, not just once, but many times: Rescue me! Save me! Save me! Rescue me! And although the enemy is never mentioned by name, there are vivid descriptions: “the hand of the wicked,” “the unjust and cruel man.” These enemies whisper dark secrets. They are called “accusers.” With murderous eyes, they are looking for an opportunity to take the psalmist’s very life. Notice what is said in verses 10 and 11: “For my enemies speak concerning me; those who watch for my life consult together and say, ‘God has forsaken him; pursue and seize him, for there is none to deliver him’.”
As Susan McDowell read these verses, she was not thinking of any earthly enemies—as far as I could tell, all she had was friends—but of the mighty foe that the Bible calls “the last enemy,” namely, death (1 Cor. 15:26). And she was thinking of the cancer that had invaded her body, lurking beneath the surface of her skin, feeding on her life and looking for every chance to destroy her.
The Bible never regards death as anything except a cruel enemy. Death is the deadly foe that separates the body from the soul. It divides us from the people we love. When it comes in the form of disease, its animosity seems almost personal.
And as an enemy, death does everything that Psalm 71 talks about, and more. Its grasp is cruel. It preys upon physical weakness. It conspires to kill. Death did all of this to Susan, as someone we love. I say this not to be morbid, but to help you see what she saw in this psalm, to understand her deep need—and your deep need—for the love of Jesus, and most of all to know how she has been delivered.
If you were close to Susan at all—as so many people were, that is the way she made you feel—then you know what a burden it was for her to be under the assault of cancer, to feel her energy diminish, to worry about each new place where cancer appeared, to go through various physical changes, to fear what would happen next, and not to know from one day to the next what she would have the strength to do. I tell you, an enemy was watching to take her life.
But there is a greater danger, even, than the loss of life, and that is to lose hope in the love of God. That is what made the psalmist’s enemies especially pernicious. Their whispers had the power to become doubts: “God has forsaken him,” they said; “there is none to deliver him” (Ps. 71:11).
Susan faced this enemy, too. She had hoped that her faith would be an inspiration to us, as it so often was, that when we saw her trusting in God, it would give us the hope and the courage to trust in God, too. Yet she had not fully understood that she would not be called to display her faith only when she was feeling strong, but also when she was weak in every way: physically, emotionally, spiritually. It is then that the strongest doubts may come, when in our weakness in the face of death we are tempted to fear that God will not deliver us.
LIVING BY STEADFAST LOVE
What makes Psalm 71 so remarkable is that at the very time of weakness under the attack of a deadly enemy, the psalmist was still upheld by the steadfast love of a faithful God. We see this in so many ways. Let me mention some of them.
We see it in the way the psalmist prays. When he is afraid, he nevertheless believes that God is able to help him, and so he prays for salvation: “let me never be put to shame!” (v. 1); “deliver me and rescue me” (v. 2); “O my God, make haste to help me!” (v. 12). The psalmist had a friend who was greater than all his enemies. So he prayed for the help of God.
This is the way that Susan prayed—and that we prayed—in the face of her deadly enemy. We prayed that God would help her, and he gave her grace for each difficult day. We prayed that God would heal her, and he gave her respite from her disease. We prayed that God would be with her to the end, and at the end she was with the people she loved the most in the world, with the peace of God’s presence. We prayed that God would deliver her, and now she is released from all her earthly cares. Know this: that when you pray for the help of a loving God, he makes haste to help you.
We also see the psalmist upheld by God’s steadfast love in the way he worships. Psalm 71 is absolutely full of God’s praise. Never think for a moment that the only time we can praise God is when everything is fine and living is easy. This psalm refutes that. Here is someone under deadly attack, crying out for his very life. Yet at the same time he is able to confess his faith and give praise to God.
Notice all his words of praise: “In you, O LORD, do I take refuge” (v. 1). “You are my rock and my fortress” (v. 3). “My praise is continually of you” (v. 6). “My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all the day” (v. 8). “Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?” (v. 19).
Here is one of the great paradoxes of faith: that at times of greatest difficulty and distress, people who have genuine trust in the living God are more able to give him praise. You might think that the best way for God to prove his reality would be to answer all his people’s prayers for healing and deliverance. But that is not the way he chooses to work. Instead, he reveals the power of his presence by enabling his people to praise him and worship him even through the greatest suffering.
When you see that—when you see a woman dying little by little from cancer, and yet in spite of it all often joyful, singing God’s praises, ready to worship—then you see that the source of joy does not come from within her, but from somewhere outside—from God himself. We have joy today, even through sorrow, as Susan prayed we would. For when we first met to plan this service, she was absolutely clear that she wanted this to be a celebration of God’s love.
How else do we see the psalmist upheld by God’s steadfast love? We see it in his prayers and praises. We also see it in the way he shares his faith with the rising generation. The psalmist knows that he does not have long to live on this earth—in his case, because he is getting old. And one of the main things he wants to do before he dies is to share his faith with younger people so that they will know the same love of God that he knows. The man is an evangelist for the grace of God: “My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,” he says, “of your deeds of salvation all the day” (v. 15). “O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come” (v. 18). “My tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long” (v. 24).
Surely this is Susan’s most enduring legacy. Consider what she has done to proclaim the good news of Jesus and his love to another generation. She has done this by sharing the gospel with her own children, so that they may know and serve the Lord. She has done it with her nieces and nephews; she has prayed for them and encouraged them in spiritual things. She has done it through her ministry of hospitality to internationals—people who have gone back to their own countries knowing the love of Jesus. She has done it through her fundraising work and personal ministry at Spruce Hill Christian School and City Center Academy. For years to come, students in those schools will hear the gospel because of her work.
All of that is a testimony to God’s steadfast love, which is not the affection of a moment, but an enduring commitment that is passed from one person to the next, down through the generations. I wonder, has anyone ever shared God’s love with you? Has anyone told you that you have a Father in heaven who loves you with an everlasting love? Has anyone explained how Jesus the Son of God came to this earth to become a man and to show us the full extent of his love by dying for our sins—for all the wrong things that we have ever done? This is what Susan McDowell was trying to say with her life, however imperfectly: there is love and forgiveness and healing and hope for you in Jesus.
RISING UP TO ETERNAL LIFE
Then, finally, we see God’s steadfast love in the way the psalmist hopes in his resurrection. This is a very hopeful psalm. As much as anything, I think this is what attracted Susan to it. It is honest about the troubles of life, and so if you’re struggling with cancer, and worried that you may not have long to live, it meets you where you are. It doesn’t pretend that everything is right with the world; it faces up to a deadly enemy.
But the psalm doesn’t just leave you there, either. It gives you hope for the future in the love of God. Notice how many times the psalmist looks ahead and talks about things he hopes will happen—especially in the second half of the psalm. In verse 13 he talks about his accusers, but in verse 14 he says, “I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more.” Or in verses 22 to 24: “I will praise you. . . I will sing praises to you. . . my lips will shout for joy. . . my tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long.” As the psalmist looks to the future, he imagines that his life will be full of praise.
I believe that this psalm helped chart Susan’s spiritual course for her long struggle with a deadly disease. From the beginning, she looked ahead with hope and believed that she would be able to keep praising God, as in fact she did.
But the greatest hope of all comes in verse 20, which is the verse Susan wanted me to emphasize. Listen carefully: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.” This was the psalmist’s testimony of hope. Once again, we see how honest he is about his struggles, about how down he feels, but we also see how absolutely convinced he is that God will raise him up.
I read this verse and I can’t help but think of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. After he was crucified—after he suffered and died to pay the penalty for our sins—Jesus was laid down in the dust of death. But on the third day his physical body came miraculously back to life. God the Father did not abandon his Son to the grave, but brought him back to life with an immortal body that will never die again. This was the miracle of the first Easter that amazed the first Christians. They watched a man die, and then they saw him come back to life.
The Bible teaches that the same thing will happen to everyone who believes in Jesus. This is what Susan McDowell believed, and what she saw in this psalm. She read the words of the psalmist, and in heart she said that is my confession, too. God, you will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.
Now, maybe you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. I happen to think that everything in the human soul cries out for it to be true. Is it really the case that there is nothing more to life than this earthly existence? After all the pain and trouble and disease and death, is there nothing more to come? Or are we made to be immortal? In his love, does God not have a plan to raise us up again and bring us to a place of everlasting praise, and has he not proven this by raising his own Son from the grave?
Earlier my wife Lisa mentioned the hydrangea that Susan gave us—the one that came from Kirsten’s baby shower, that grew in Susan’s garden for fifteen years, under her loving care, until we carried a cutting to our new home across the country. Last fall we planted it near our front door, in the dry and dusty earth.
For months it was buried under ground. At times it was covered with more than two feet of snow. “I hope Susan’s hydrangea is going to make it,” Lisa would say. Then when spring came, we looked anxiously to see if it had survived. It didn’t come up, and Lisa said, “I’m worried that hydrangea isn’t going to make it.” But sure enough, the plant was alive. It came up late, but strong—no blooms, just big green leaves . . . until last week, when we came back from vacation to find a single flower—blue and purple and beautiful in the sunshine.
That flower is a living parable of what we read in Psalm 71: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again” (Ps. 71:20). Those words are true for Susan now, as they are for everyone who believes. Through faith in Jesus Christ, the body that is planted in the dust will rise up bright and beautiful. It will flower in the light of God’s steadfast love, and its joy and its beauty and its praise will never end.
The Steadfast Love of Jesus
Memorial Service for Susan McDowell—July 23, 2011
I want to begin by expressing my sympathies to you, Bruce, and to Brooke and Abby, and also to Susan’s brothers and the rest of the family gathered here to support you. Special greetings as well to Susan’s parents: Mr. and Mrs. David and Julie Benthal; we hold you in our thoughts and prayers today. Please know that we love you in the Lord. We grieve for your loss. Indeed, we share it as a loss of our own. We pray God’s comfort and peace upon you. And, Bruce, we admire you for the faithfulness, courage, and trust in God you and your family have showed in so many ways.
Then I want to say what an extraordinary privilege it is to speak at this memorial service, for someone I love and hope to see again soon. You will not be surprised, I think, to know that we began planning for this service several years ago. It is always wise to prepare for death, and therefore good to plan your funeral or memorial service as a way of clarifying what is most important to you in life and death. So I asked Susan (and Bruce, too, actually) to prepare a memorial service.
As we talked about her plans, Susan asked me to speak with you about the steadfast love of Jesus Christ. She had recently spent a day in prayer and Bible study with the pastor’s wives, where they had each chosen one of God’s attributes as something precious to them. Susan identified God’s steadfast love as the bedrock of her life, as the only thing that makes it possible for us to have hope in this world.
It would be enough simply to talk about God’s “love,” but Susan added the word “steadfast” because she knew that the Scriptures of the Old Testament often speak of God’s loving-kindness, or steadfast love, or covenant love—in other words, a love that is held secure by the unbreakable promises of God. Susan understood that the love of God is not a temporary affection, but the absolute disposition of his perfect character. The steadfast love of God is a love that stays with you and never lets you go: all through life, even unto death, and then on to all eternity.
Further, Susan asked me to speak on the love of God from Psalm 71—not so much because this psalm focuses on the biblical word for “steadfast love,” but because it shows what that love can do in the life of someone in desperate need.
Let me ask you, please, to turn to that psalm in your Bibles and to keep it open as I speak. Every week at Tenth Church we read through one of the psalms the way we have just read it: responsively. We start at Psalm 1, keep reading one psalm a week—week after week and year after year—until we get to Psalm 150, and then start again.
Not long after she received her diagnosis, and began to understand that she was in for the fight of her life, Susan heard Psalm 71 in a way that touched her soul. As I speak from this psalm, imagine what it is like to hear these words when somebody has told you that you may have a fatal disease, and so you’re afraid of losing your life and everything you love in the world. But also hear it for yourself, as someone who may have desperate problems of your own, and as someone who had better be prepared to die when the time comes.
DYING FROM A DEADLY ENEMY
The person who wrote this psalm—we don’t know who it was for sure, but it was probably King David—was brutally honest about the troubles of life. Given what is said in verse 9, it may have been someone old. Or maybe it was just somebody who was afraid of getting old, and of the weakness that would come with old age. But it is certainly someone who had a lot of problems in life.
The main problem here is the hostility of dangerous enemies. The psalmist looks to the Lord for refuge and asks for deliverance, not just once, but many times: Rescue me! Save me! Save me! Rescue me! And although the enemy is never mentioned by name, there are vivid descriptions: “the hand of the wicked,” “the unjust and cruel man.” These enemies whisper dark secrets. They are called “accusers.” With murderous eyes, they are looking for an opportunity to take the psalmist’s very life. Notice what is said in verses 10 and 11: “For my enemies speak concerning me; those who watch for my life consult together and say, ‘God has forsaken him; pursue and seize him, for there is none to deliver him’.”
As Susan McDowell read these verses, she was not thinking of any earthly enemies—as far as I could tell, all she had was friends—but of the mighty foe that the Bible calls “the last enemy,” namely, death (1 Cor. 15:26). And she was thinking of the cancer that had invaded her body, lurking beneath the surface of her skin, feeding on her life and looking for every chance to destroy her.
The Bible never regards death as anything except a cruel enemy. Death is the deadly foe that separates the body from the soul. It divides us from the people we love. When it comes in the form of disease, its animosity seems almost personal.
And as an enemy, death does everything that Psalm 71 talks about, and more. Its grasp is cruel. It preys upon physical weakness. It conspires to kill. Death did all of this to Susan, as someone we love. I say this not to be morbid, but to help you see what she saw in this psalm, to understand her deep need—and your deep need—for the love of Jesus, and most of all to know how she has been delivered.
If you were close to Susan at all—as so many people were, that is the way she made you feel—then you know what a burden it was for her to be under the assault of cancer, to feel her energy diminish, to worry about each new place where cancer appeared, to go through various physical changes, to fear what would happen next, and not to know from one day to the next what she would have the strength to do. I tell you, an enemy was watching to take her life.
But there is a greater danger, even, than the loss of life, and that is to lose hope in the love of God. That is what made the psalmist’s enemies especially pernicious. Their whispers had the power to become doubts: “God has forsaken him,” they said; “there is none to deliver him” (Ps. 71:11).
Susan faced this enemy, too. She had hoped that her faith would be an inspiration to us, as it so often was, that when we saw her trusting in God, it would give us the hope and the courage to trust in God, too. Yet she had not fully understood that she would not be called to display her faith only when she was feeling strong, but also when she was weak in every way: physically, emotionally, spiritually. It is then that the strongest doubts may come, when in our weakness in the face of death we are tempted to fear that God will not deliver us.
LIVING BY STEADFAST LOVE
What makes Psalm 71 so remarkable is that at the very time of weakness under the attack of a deadly enemy, the psalmist was still upheld by the steadfast love of a faithful God. We see this in so many ways. Let me mention some of them.
We see it in the way the psalmist prays. When he is afraid, he nevertheless believes that God is able to help him, and so he prays for salvation: “let me never be put to shame!” (v. 1); “deliver me and rescue me” (v. 2); “O my God, make haste to help me!” (v. 12). The psalmist had a friend who was greater than all his enemies. So he prayed for the help of God.
This is the way that Susan prayed—and that we prayed—in the face of her deadly enemy. We prayed that God would help her, and he gave her grace for each difficult day. We prayed that God would heal her, and he gave her respite from her disease. We prayed that God would be with her to the end, and at the end she was with the people she loved the most in the world, with the peace of God’s presence. We prayed that God would deliver her, and now she is released from all her earthly cares. Know this: that when you pray for the help of a loving God, he makes haste to help you.
We also see the psalmist upheld by God’s steadfast love in the way he worships. Psalm 71 is absolutely full of God’s praise. Never think for a moment that the only time we can praise God is when everything is fine and living is easy. This psalm refutes that. Here is someone under deadly attack, crying out for his very life. Yet at the same time he is able to confess his faith and give praise to God.
Notice all his words of praise: “In you, O LORD, do I take refuge” (v. 1). “You are my rock and my fortress” (v. 3). “My praise is continually of you” (v. 6). “My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all the day” (v. 8). “Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?” (v. 19).
Here is one of the great paradoxes of faith: that at times of greatest difficulty and distress, people who have genuine trust in the living God are more able to give him praise. You might think that the best way for God to prove his reality would be to answer all his people’s prayers for healing and deliverance. But that is not the way he chooses to work. Instead, he reveals the power of his presence by enabling his people to praise him and worship him even through the greatest suffering.
When you see that—when you see a woman dying little by little from cancer, and yet in spite of it all often joyful, singing God’s praises, ready to worship—then you see that the source of joy does not come from within her, but from somewhere outside—from God himself. We have joy today, even through sorrow, as Susan prayed we would. For when we first met to plan this service, she was absolutely clear that she wanted this to be a celebration of God’s love.
How else do we see the psalmist upheld by God’s steadfast love? We see it in his prayers and praises. We also see it in the way he shares his faith with the rising generation. The psalmist knows that he does not have long to live on this earth—in his case, because he is getting old. And one of the main things he wants to do before he dies is to share his faith with younger people so that they will know the same love of God that he knows. The man is an evangelist for the grace of God: “My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,” he says, “of your deeds of salvation all the day” (v. 15). “O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come” (v. 18). “My tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long” (v. 24).
Surely this is Susan’s most enduring legacy. Consider what she has done to proclaim the good news of Jesus and his love to another generation. She has done this by sharing the gospel with her own children, so that they may know and serve the Lord. She has done it with her nieces and nephews; she has prayed for them and encouraged them in spiritual things. She has done it through her ministry of hospitality to internationals—people who have gone back to their own countries knowing the love of Jesus. She has done it through her fundraising work and personal ministry at Spruce Hill Christian School and City Center Academy. For years to come, students in those schools will hear the gospel because of her work.
All of that is a testimony to God’s steadfast love, which is not the affection of a moment, but an enduring commitment that is passed from one person to the next, down through the generations. I wonder, has anyone ever shared God’s love with you? Has anyone told you that you have a Father in heaven who loves you with an everlasting love? Has anyone explained how Jesus the Son of God came to this earth to become a man and to show us the full extent of his love by dying for our sins—for all the wrong things that we have ever done? This is what Susan McDowell was trying to say with her life, however imperfectly: there is love and forgiveness and healing and hope for you in Jesus.
RISING UP TO ETERNAL LIFE
Then, finally, we see God’s steadfast love in the way the psalmist hopes in his resurrection. This is a very hopeful psalm. As much as anything, I think this is what attracted Susan to it. It is honest about the troubles of life, and so if you’re struggling with cancer, and worried that you may not have long to live, it meets you where you are. It doesn’t pretend that everything is right with the world; it faces up to a deadly enemy.
But the psalm doesn’t just leave you there, either. It gives you hope for the future in the love of God. Notice how many times the psalmist looks ahead and talks about things he hopes will happen—especially in the second half of the psalm. In verse 13 he talks about his accusers, but in verse 14 he says, “I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more.” Or in verses 22 to 24: “I will praise you. . . I will sing praises to you. . . my lips will shout for joy. . . my tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long.” As the psalmist looks to the future, he imagines that his life will be full of praise.
I believe that this psalm helped chart Susan’s spiritual course for her long struggle with a deadly disease. From the beginning, she looked ahead with hope and believed that she would be able to keep praising God, as in fact she did.
But the greatest hope of all comes in verse 20, which is the verse Susan wanted me to emphasize. Listen carefully: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.” This was the psalmist’s testimony of hope. Once again, we see how honest he is about his struggles, about how down he feels, but we also see how absolutely convinced he is that God will raise him up.
I read this verse and I can’t help but think of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. After he was crucified—after he suffered and died to pay the penalty for our sins—Jesus was laid down in the dust of death. But on the third day his physical body came miraculously back to life. God the Father did not abandon his Son to the grave, but brought him back to life with an immortal body that will never die again. This was the miracle of the first Easter that amazed the first Christians. They watched a man die, and then they saw him come back to life.
The Bible teaches that the same thing will happen to everyone who believes in Jesus. This is what Susan McDowell believed, and what she saw in this psalm. She read the words of the psalmist, and in heart she said that is my confession, too. God, you will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.
Now, maybe you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. I happen to think that everything in the human soul cries out for it to be true. Is it really the case that there is nothing more to life than this earthly existence? After all the pain and trouble and disease and death, is there nothing more to come? Or are we made to be immortal? In his love, does God not have a plan to raise us up again and bring us to a place of everlasting praise, and has he not proven this by raising his own Son from the grave?
Earlier my wife Lisa mentioned the hydrangea that Susan gave us—the one that came from Kirsten’s baby shower, that grew in Susan’s garden for fifteen years, under her loving care, until we carried a cutting to our new home across the country. Last fall we planted it near our front door, in the dry and dusty earth.
For months it was buried under ground. At times it was covered with more than two feet of snow. “I hope Susan’s hydrangea is going to make it,” Lisa would say. Then when spring came, we looked anxiously to see if it had survived. It didn’t come up, and Lisa said, “I’m worried that hydrangea isn’t going to make it.” But sure enough, the plant was alive. It came up late, but strong—no blooms, just big green leaves . . . until last week, when we came back from vacation to find a single flower—blue and purple and beautiful in the sunshine.
That flower is a living parable of what we read in Psalm 71: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again” (Ps. 71:20). Those words are true for Susan now, as they are for everyone who believes. Through faith in Jesus Christ, the body that is planted in the dust will rise up bright and beautiful. It will flower in the light of God’s steadfast love, and its joy and its beauty and its praise will never end.
posted by M Clark at 7/25/2011 01:31:00 PM
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