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The following is an excerpt from Dr. Luis Palau’s book "Where Is God When Bad Things Happen?" (used with permission). He thoughtfully and compassionately answers common questions about God and the loss of a baby.
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Chapter 2
But She’s Too Young to Die!
What do you tell a devastated young couple who awakens one morning to find their infant daughter lying cold and still beside them—a victim of sudden infant death syndrome? That was my challenge one night in Kansas City.
Greg and his wife, Linda, had waited for two days to get on Night Talk with Luis Palau, and his trembling voice told me his heart was breaking.
“I lost my daughter Gabriella a week ago,” he said. “She was ten weeks old; I lost her to SIDS. And I’m just wondering—why?”
On its own that’s a difficult question to answer. But Greg wasn’t finished yet.
“You know, as a father you’re supposed to protect and provide for your children, and I feel as if I’ve failed. Luis, she lay right in between us in our bed, and that’s where she died! I mean, she was not but six inches away from us. There must have been something I could have done. I just wanted to end my life and go see her, because I loved her very much!
“I’m thirty-two years old, I’ve waited and waited to have a child of my own, and I’ve always wanted a little girl. God gave me what I wanted—and then He took it away just as quickly as He gave it.”
My heart ached for this man as I pondered what could be said. How could I bring some hope and comfort to his shattered soul? I’ll tell you what I said to Greg and Linda that night, but before I do, permit me to take you thousands of miles from their deep sorrow and introduce you to man who also bitterly grieved the loss of his own sweetheart daughter.
Picture this scene: an English graveyard in Bristol, deserted except for a solitary, despairing man. It is Saturday, and the man has come to this lonely place—as he has for six months of Saturdays—to speak his anguish to a mute headstone.
“Alice,” he says softly, “we miss you terribly. We love you so very much. We had such dreams for you, such hopes. And now they are all gone. Oh, how we miss you!”
Alice, the man’s delicate ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter, had died in November after a short illness. The following June this distraught man attended a business luncheon at which I was the speaker. He happened to sit across the table from a friend of mine and heard a message typical of those I offer to an audience of professionals. During part of the talk the man began to sob.
After the luncheon my friend said to him, “You look really distressed. Is there something I can do?”
“I have gone through an unspeakable tragedy,” he replied.
“So have I,” our friend said. “My husband left me abruptly; I had no notion it was about to happen.”
“Mine was my little daughter, Alice, a beautiful girl,” he said. “She contracted an incurable disease and the doctors could do nothing. We buried her last November, and I can’t get over it. I am devastated. My wife is still in a state of shock. We just don’t know how God relates to all this. Our little girl loved the Lord with all her heart. Now she’s gone.” The man seemed totally helpless and miserable—no church, no personal knowledge of God, a practical agnostic.
Our friend consoled the man and then invited him to one of our stadium meetings. His deep distress prevented him from catching much of what I had said at the luncheon, but he agreed to return that night. After the evening meeting we held a little reception, to which our friend brought this man and his wife. I met them and listened to their gut-wrenching story. Then I told them I planned to preach on heaven the following night.
“Why don’t you come and hear the message on heaven?” I asked. “Maybe that will clarify things for you.”
The next morning he brought his surviving child, a nine-year-old boy, to our children’s rally. He and his wife returned that night for the message on heaven, and at another reception one night later, a Saturday evening, he bore a message of his own.
“When we buried Alice, I wrote her a letter expressing how I felt about her and her life, about how much I was going to miss her and how bad we feel,” he began. “I was in utter despair. I simply placed the letter on her chest when we closed the casket.
“Every Saturday morning since then, before heading to the golf course, I have visited the cemetery to stand in front of Alice’s grave and to talk to my daughter about how deeply we all miss her.”
His face betrayed terrible pain, but it betrayed something else, too—a deep peace seemed etched on his weary features.
“Last night when you were preaching on heaven, I gave my heart to Christ,” he said. “And, you know, already I can see a change taking place in my life. This morning, when I got to the cemetery and stood by Alice’s grave, it suddenly dawned on me: Wait! Alice isn’t here. She’s in heaven. And now I’m going to go to heaven, too. I don’t need to have an imaginary conversation with her!
“I finally decided, right then and there, that I wasn’t going to visit the grave every Saturday. Maybe I would come from time to time out of memory and respect, but I no longer have a compulsion as I did for all these months since she died. You see, it finally registered: She isn’t here.”
So that morning he said, “Good-bye, Alice.” And he left.
His story explained a parcel I received that night just before the service began. This dear father had sent to the platform a photograph of Alice with a little note attached: “Luis, please keep this picture of Alice with you so you can think of her.”
At the reception I referred to his note and said to him, “Not only am I going to think about her, I’m going to talk about her all over the world. And I’m going to carry this picture with me.”
To this day Alice’s smiling face accompanies me on all of my travels.
What Does the Bible Say?
Both of these stories prompt the question “Where was God when my child died?” What can we say to those who have suddenly lost their dear little ones? Their deaths seem so wrong, so unfair. As one man, Nicholas Woltersdorff, wrote after losing his son in a climbing accident: “It’s so wrong, so profoundly wrong, for a child to die before his parents. It’s hard to bury our parents, but that we expect. Our parents belong to our past; our children belong to our future. We do not visualize our future without them. How can I bury my son, my future, my next in line? He was meant to bury me!”
I think there are at least seven things to say to someone in this kind of pain.
1. God sees our heartache and takes seriously our loss.
Our heavenly Father is not unmoved by our agony. He is not callused or distant. For good reason the Bible calls Him “the God of all comfort” (1 Corinthians 1:3).
It was Jesus who wept loudly when His friend Lazarus died—so loudly that witnesses said, “See how he loved him!” (John 11:36). When He saw a great calamity descending on Jerusalem, it was also Jesus who cried out, “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her children under her wings!” (Matthew 23:37). Centuries before this, it was God the Father who proclaimed through the prophet Isaiah, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem” (Isaiah 40:1).
If you have suffered the loss of a little one, know that God longs to comfort your broken heart. He is very near to you right now, and He wants to restore your wounded soul.
2. Every life is a complete life, even though it may not look that way to us.
The Bible says, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:16). That means God knows exactly how long each of us will live. Some miscarry; some live more than a century. But every life is a complete life. We may not understand this completely, and accepting it will never take all the sting out of our loss, but embracing this as truth can help to soften the blow. Whether a life spans decades or blooms and fades in minutes, it is a complete life. God makes no mistakes.
3. God loves little children and will welcome them all into heaven.
I believe that children like Alice and Gabriella are in heaven with Jesus right now. Jesus loved little children and even used them as examples of how we adults might come into a right relationship with God. “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14), Jesus declared to His astonished disciples.
Hints of this special concern for infants and young children are given even in the Old Testament. For example, when King David lost his baby boy to an illness, he said to the members of his court, “I will go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). I don’t think he was merely saying he would one day die, as his son had. I believe he was proclaiming his firm belief that he would see his son in heaven.
It is inconceivable to me that a gracious, loving God would ever condemn a child to hell. I believe that the work of Jesus Christ covers such children and that they all will greet us in heaven.
That is why I could say to Greg, who desperately wanted to hold his daughter again, “I believe the Bible teaches that your little girl is in heaven in the presence of the Lord, and that you will see her one day if you have Jesus Christ in your life as your Savior and Master. I believe that she is saved through the work of Jesus Christ, that she is redeemed and rescued by the grace and goodness of God. Greg, you will see your girl in heaven. She is enjoying life, she’s rejoicing. And I’ll tell you, Greg—she is contented there in the presence of God. Your little Gabriella is in the arms of the Lord—thoroughly conscious, perfect, and forever in the presence of Jesus Christ.”
4. God has purposes that we cannot understand.
We can never understand all the ways of God. We who have a difficult time programming our VCRs and figuring out how to put together certain children’s toys should not be surprised that the One who created the universe and keeps it running also thinks and acts in ways we can’t begin to fathom.
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways,” the Lord reminds us. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). We are not always kept in the dark, yet some things are beyond our understanding: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29).
As I told Greg, “God has a purpose for each one of us, even for little Gabriella’s ten weeks. Of course, we don’t always understand the ways of God; He has mysteries we can’t comprehend. Why would He take a little girl? I don’t know—but God makes no mistakes. Sometimes we foolishly think He does, but He doesn’t. He had a plan for your little girl, and it was somehow fulfilled.”
I admit it’s terribly hard to understand why God would take a little one whom we love so much and for whom we held such big dreams. Right now, at this moment, none of us can fully understand why. But I’m convinced that in heaven we will understand. When the apostle Paul writes, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12-13), I think he was telling us that all these earthly mysteries that so puzzle and hurt us will one day be solved. The darkness surrounding our tragedies will be dispelled by blazing, divine light. And then we will see and appreciate the stunning grandeur and majesty of God’s total plan. But that day is not yet.
5. God may be protecting them from something far worse later in life.
I know not everyone believes this, but I do. God sees the end from the beginning and it may be that He takes home certain loved ones now because He knows that later on a tragedy of much grimmer proportions would overtake them. No doubt someone will say to me, “But if God is almighty, couldn’t He prevent either tragedy from happening in the first place?” Yes, He could, but that’s not the way this world works. Which brings us to the next point.
6. We are part of a fallen human race.
This world is not as it should be. God created it perfect in the beginning, but something happened to shatter its original harmony and beauty and peace. The Bible says that when our first forebears, Adam and Eve, chose to disobey God and rebel against His rule, a curse settled on the human race and on the world and universe we inhabit. Their sin brought to the human race all the ugliness and corruption and hatred and depravity and brutality and illness and death that we see everywhere around us today.
This means that death is an unwanted part of this current world order. As the great Oxford writer C.S. Lewis once said, “Wars don’t cause death. Wars simply hurry the process for some people.” All of us will die; it’s just a question of when.
The sad fact is that until God remakes this world and lifts the curse (and He will do so one glorious day!), horrible things will continue to happen on this planet “that just isn’t right.” In this world gone awry, the good do not always receive their just due, nor do the evil. Jesus said that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45) and sometimes that sun causes firestorms that incinerate both the evil and the good, and those rains create floods that drown both the righteous and the unrighteous.
7. The people closest to God have never been immune to painful circumstances.
It certainly does not seem fair to most of us that innocent children in the bloom of life can die from awful diseases or accidents, while many evil adults live for eight or nine decades in the lap of luxury. It just doesn’t seem right.
But I can never forget that the most unfair death of all was that of Jesus Christ. Although God repeatedly called Jesus His “beloved Son” (Mathew 3:17; 12:18; 17:5), His life was taken that we might gain eternal life. The apostle Peter put it like this: “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (1 Peter 3:18).
Paul the apostle said the same thing in these words: “God made him who had no sin [Jesus] to be sin for us, so that in him [Jesus] we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Jesus’s death was not “fair” in any usual sense of the term, yet He freely gave His life for us so that we might become sons and daughters of God. It is His most “unfair” death that gives us the firm hope that we will one day see again all our precious loved ones who left this earth at such a tender age. “Let the little children come to me,” Jesus said, and then He died on a cross to make it possible.
What to Do Now
I hope the answers I’ve just suggested give some clarity and bring some hope to those of you who have suffered the devastating loss of a child. I don’t want to leave you with answers only, however. Allow me briefly to sketch out a few practical steps you might consider taking to help yourself recover from such a stunning blow.
First, there are a number of things you can do on your own to find healing from your wounds.
* Spend time with God.
Say to Him, “Lord, what lessons am I to learn from this traumatic experience? What do You want me to do now? How can we redeem any part of this experience?”
Books like this one can be helpful up to a point, but the real answers to the difficult questions of life are best found right at the source: God Himself. Middlemen have their place, but that’s all they are—individuals in the middle. Some of their advice is useful, some isn’t. What you need most is to talk to the One who can really give you insight into your sorrow and medicine for your soul.
In the nicest way possible, I have to say, “Don’t ask me, go ask God yourself.” That is where the answers can be found.
* Think a lot about heaven.
I heard recently that young people are more interested in death than in almost any other subject. That can be frightening, but it can also be used for good. Thinking and studying about heaven are not an exercise in wishful thinking, but a fruitful and encouraging endeavor that enables us to live well now.
But you have to go to the right source for your information about heaven. Boatloads of nonsense are circulating these days on the subject. The only trustworthy information we have about the hereafter is found in God’s Word, the Bible, not in bestselling books by people who claim to have visited there or channeled there or flown there first class on a flying saucer.
And what we find in the Bible is that heaven is a real place. Even children understand that (sometimes better than we adults). A friend of mine told me of an incident involving a seven-year-old boy named Peter. The boy heard his parents talking at the breakfast table one morning about a family friend, Mr. Whittle. Word had come that Mr. Whittle was close to death and about to go to heaven. When Peter heard this, he got up and ran to his bedroom. My friend thought the boy was shaken up and so left him alone. When Peter returned to the table, he said, “Dad, would you send this to Mr. Whittle?” The note said, “Dear Mr. Whittle, I hear that you’re going to heaven. Isn’t that great? Love, Peter.” Even though death is an enemy, going to heaven truly is great.
When thinking of heaven, many people ask, “Do our loved ones go directly to heaven, or do they go to some in-between place?” According to the Bible, on their death believers go directly to be with Jesus. As the apostle Paul put it, “to be away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Knowing this certainty can do much to ease the transition from earth to heaven when that day finally comes.
Many years ago the founder of a well-respected Christian college on the West Coast, Dr. Willard Aldrich, was sitting with his mother. She was in her nineties and could hardly eat anymore. Every noon he visited her house to feed her a cup of soup or to give her a little rice. Mrs. Aldrich had been a fine believer and follower of Jesus Christ all her life, and she knew the end was coming. One day Dr. Aldrich walked into her room bringing soup and a few little biscuits. He sat by his mother and noticed her all dressed up with her hair fixed nicely, and he asked, “Mother, why are you all dressed up today?” She replied, “Willard, I’m going home today, that’s why.” He thought she was disoriented, so he said to her, “Mother, you are home. What do you mean, you’re going home?”
“Willard, I’m going to heaven today,” she responded.
“Okay, Mother, that’s wonderful,” Dr. Aldrich said, “but why don’t you have a little soup?”
“No, Willard, I’ll have some when I get there.”
“Okay,” her son replied, “why don’t you have some for the road, then?”
That night Mrs. Aldrich went to be with the Lord. And in heaven one day her son will see her again.
* Prepare your other children to understand death.
If you have other children in the family, learn to speak about heaven in proper terms. Describe heaven in the vivid language of the Bible.
Jesus promised us, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2).
The apostle Paul tells us, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
During one of our live “Night Talk” programs, I received a call from Laurie. Her ten-year-old son, Joshua, had contracted leukemia; just prior to her call the disease had relapsed after a bone-marrow transplant. “It doesn’t look good,” she told me through tears, adding that Joshua had just lost a friend who suffered from the same disease. “I’m having a hard time dealing with children getting this, and I’m trying to understand why God allows this to happen to children. Why does He put them through all this?” she asked.
After bringing what comfort I could, I told Laurie some of the things I’ve outlined in this chapter. During our conversation I learned that she already was teaching Joshua about the Bible’s picture of heaven.
“I think you’re doing the right thing in training your boy for heaven,” I told this frightened thirty-one-year-old mother of two. “Help him to understand that heaven is his home, that he will see the Lord Jesus, that he will see thousands of believers. The Bible says that in heaven there will be no more crying, no more pain, no more tears. That world is not like this one. The Bible says there will be rejoicing and singing.
“And let this be a beautiful lesson for your younger son. Let people see that your trust in the Lord is not shaken and that you will not deny Him. Don’t follow the path of millions of people who, when something goes wrong, immediately start blaspheming God and denying Him. The Lord must have a purpose in your experience, perhaps to share with others. So don’t despair and don’t let this divert you from trusting Him and continuing to rely on Him. The Lord could heal Joshua, but if He chooses not to do so, remember that He has a better purpose than you and I can see.”
Beyond the things you can do on your own, there are other things you can do with people outside your own family. I urge you not to remove yourself from people or to hide inside your house. Don’t become a hermit. As painful as your loss is, it won’t help to disappear inside the four walls of your castle. Let me suggest some possible ways to reach out:
* For the rest of your life, you will be uniquely qualified to show love and compassion to hurting, lonely children.
Since you’ve suffered so much over the loss of your child, how about dedicating a good percentage of your time to helping children who are suffering and alone? After you have spent enough time recovering from your loss—and I realize this may take a while—why not consider a Big Brother or Big Sister program or something similar that reaches out to boys and girls who lack a set of parents? Of course, this child can never “substitute” for your own child, but he or she has real needs you can meet.
* You will be especially equipped to comfort those who have lost children.
Redeem your sorrow and give redemptive meaning to the pain of losing your child. God wants to use you to comfort other people who are going through their own shattering pain. The Bible says God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Corinthians 1:4). No one knows what it is like to lose a child except someone else who also has lost a child. Why not use your own painful experience to help another to walk a similar path? I think you will find that in giving, you will receive far more in return.
How Do You Know?
The same night that I took the call from Greg and Linda, I received another from Karen, a thirty-six-year-old in a high-risk pregnancy confined to partial bed rest. Ten months prior to her call, she and her husband had suffered their own tragedy. After struggling with infertility for several years, they finally had a set of triplets. But all three children died.
“After that happened,” Karen said, “I went through some real depression and hard times. I had a lot of people who gave me a lot of clichés about ‘This was God’s will’ and ‘It happened for a reason.’ But I just lost a lot of faith. I said, ‘Don’t even talk to me about God.’
“But eventually I started going to a Bible-study group because I was trying to figure it out, trying to find some answers. A lot of people have asked me, ‘Have you been saved? Have you given your life to Christ?’ To be honest, I don’t even know what that means. I’m Methodist, my husband is Catholic. When people ask me that, I don’t really know how to answer them.
“If I died tomorrow, what would happen to me? I don’t know. I never have gone down to an altar and thrown myself down and cried. So what does that mean? Does it mean that I’ve just gone through the motions my whole life? Aren’t we all going to heaven? I just don’t understand. It’s like I’m stuck somewhere.”
I was glad to explain to Karen the difference between being religious and having a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. I told her about a woman in Chicago who opened her heart to Christ after attending church for forty-two years. This woman told me, “You know, after forty-two years, finally, it happened! I opened my heart to Christ, and now I know that I have eternal life!”
“But how do you know?” Karen asked urgently. I then quoted a few of my favorite Bible verses, the first one from the Gospel of John: “To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). I gave her Jesus’ personal promise: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). And I also quoted a famous verse from the New Testament book of Romans: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13). I then described how the Holy Spirit comes into a believer’s life and confirms in his or her soul the reality of Jesus’ presence.
Karen “got it,” and I hope you do, too! You know, the assurance of eternal life is one of the great gifts of God. If you don’t have that assurance, at this very moment Jesus Christ says to you, “I have made you and I know you. I have loved you and I gave my life for you. I am alive and I am calling you. If you give me your heart right now, I will forgive all your sins. I’ll give you the Holy Spirit. And I’ll give you eternal life and heaven as an ultimate blessing.”
To meet Jesus Christ and to know him is better than falling in love, better than anything in the world. He is the Creator and he loves you. He wants to come into your life and to take despair and turn it into hope.
The old song is still right. “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.” We don’t know why he sometimes chooses to bring them home to heaven before we’re ready to see them go, but we can know that he loves them with a passion we simply can’t explain. And when we put our trust in him as our Savior, we can also know that we will see those precious children again. And what a day that will be!
“But, Luis, how can I have that assurance?” you may be thinking.
Let me share the same Scripture verses that someone once shared with me. And allow me to personalize these verses, as my friend did for me: “If you, ______ [insert your name], confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you, _______, will be saved. For it is with your heart that you, _______, believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you, ________, confess and are saved” (Romans 10:9-10).
Have you asked the Lord Jesus to save you—to forgive your sins, cleanse your heart, adopt you into God’s family, and give you the sure hope of heaven? If not, why not stop right now, where you are, and in the quietness of your heart talk to God. You can place your trust in him this very minute. The choice is yours.
You can talk to God using any words you wish, of course. I suggest that you pray the following prayer of commitment:
“Lord, I come before you humbly, in the midst of my heartache and sorrow. Yes, please forgive my sins. Thank you that Jesus died on the cross to cleanse my heart and rose again to give me new eternal life. Thank you that now I can enjoy the sure hope of heaven. Please keep my precious little one in your dear care. I love you and will live for you all the days of my life. Amen.”
If that’s your prayer, congratulations!
Welcome to the family of God!
[If you’ve just committed your life to Jesus Christ, please write to me. I’ll be glad to correspond with you and send you a free copy of my book, Your New Life with Christ. It’s yours free for the asking. Or maybe you would like to request prayer. Again, please feel free to write. My address is Luis Palau, P.O. Box 1173, Portland, Oregon 97207, U.S.A. E-mail: palau@palau.org.]
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