And Jesus said: “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.” (John 14: 18 KJV)
I am now what other friends (who are in my stage of life) have referred to as an adult “orphan”: grownup children whose parents have passed away, and they suddenly feel like pre-schoolers again, waiting for their mom and dad to walk through the front door of their home (after work or an errand), just to realize that they never will. I admit there is a slight feeling of abandonment at having been left behind—my parents now gone on one of their only “road trips” without me. And boy, what a fabulous final destination in now they reside.
I miss them like crazy.
As of Valentine’s Day, both my parents are now in heaven. Mom had been gone over two years, and dad missed her so. After a sudden and intense battle with cancer, he went to be with Jesus (and his beloved Valentine bride). Now, I have to learn how —for the first time in my life—to exist in a world without the two people who raised me, supported me, and loved me, and who I looked up to, like no other. The ones that I’ve known the longest and who have known me the best.
Of course God’s love is still in the picture, my Heavenly Father, having knitted me together in my mom’s womb, created me with attributes of my dad (his brown eyes and creativity), and my mom’s smile and skill for teaching—our collective love of family, friends and our faith. And I am so grateful that God’s love has been holding me up in my time of grief—along with those around me (angels on earth), giving me so much strength and encouragement. But if I am to be real about it all, there is still a massive hole in the center of my heart that is causing me a great deal of pain.
The NIV Bible’s version of the above passage reads as Jesus saying to the disciples: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you”.
This passage is especially important to me now, because the use of the words “orphans” and “comfortless” interchangeably highlights the meaning for me of my experience, and the term my friends and I have been using to describe ourselves without earthly parent still here. Because if I were truly an orphan and comfortless, then God would not be with me. And I know this to not be the case.
God promised in Jesus that we would not be forsaken, we might suffer in sadness— maybe feel “pits” in our stomachs and holes in our heart—but not be forsaken or left alone. And, I remember learning as a young girl about the fact that (in Ephesians 1:5) “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.” So, at my shared baptism (with my baby sister), through Jesus we were both adopted into God’s family, yet residing with our earthly parents. And now that our parents are with God, God is still looking out over us. Our brother and sisters in Christ are still our family on earth, all around us.
After my dad died, I told my husband that I didn’t have any more extended family here in Minnesota and when the time came that our son moved on—I might want to leave, too. The rest of my relatives had moved out of town or passed on to greener pastures. Of course, this was said out of a swell of grief and the new loss of my last parent, but part of me was just forgetting, in that moment, my baptism, my extended family in Jesus, that goes far beyond the blood relatives that now live across the country, this world, and the next. The DNA connections of our humanness go far beyond the mere understanding of what our blood contains, and who we share family “traits” with. God created our genetic make up, every chromosome and cell in our body, fashioning us both uniquely and similar; and then came (deciding in advance) to fully claim us through Christ.
So, the next time a friend brings up the reality that we are now feeling like “orphans” without our parents, I will remind them (or teach them) of our adoption into God’s family through Christ Jesus. And that even if our earthly parents aren’t with us in a physical, tangible way, we will never ever be orphans, comfortless, abandoned, or alone. Alleluia!
