“Did God Fix Him?”
Redemption is a vast idea — one that sometimes feels as though it may take a lifetime to fully begin to grasp. A few weeks ago (during Epiphanytide no less!), my four-year-old daughter shed new light on just how vast our redemption through God is.
In the pressure cooker of the evening commute, all she wanted to talk about was her new-found dislike of her name. As the youngest child, she apparently wants her older sister’s name. What ensued were my attempts to change her mind. I reassured her how special it was that her middle name was her great-grandfather’s name. This, as things tend to do with children, veered quickly into a conversation about this person she never met. Our chat sounded something like this:
Her: “Where is my great-grandfather?”
Me: “Well, he died before you were born.”
Her: “Where is he?”
Me: “Well, darling, he died so he’s with God now.”
Her: “Why did he die?”
Me: “You see, he was old and got sick.”
Her: “Where is he?”
Me: “Well, like I said, he’s dead and we buried him, so his body is in the ground, but his spirit is with God and one day God will remake his body in a new way.”
Her: “Is he with Jesus now?”
Me: “Yes, exactly! He gets to be with God and Jesus now.”
And then, a long pause. Every parent knows this pause well. This is the pregnant silence after you (the grownup) think you have successfully navigated a tough conversation and can (thankfully) move on. Then, the pause ends, and you are given a follow-up question that leaves you gobsmacked by the grace of the Holy Spirit’s movement in the mind of a child.
Her: “But did God fix him?”
In an epiphany that I have trouble putting into words, God’s love for us was made manifest in a fresh and powerfully new way. My response? “Why yes — you couldn’t be more right. God did fix him.”
For her, “fix” meant no more sickness that ultimately took his life. For me, “fix” meant redeem.
Someday I’ll share the more complete story of her great-grandfather — the story of a man who, for much of his life, lived with chronic pain on account of a horrific car accident and who, like so many of us, struggled with how to cope with life’s many pains.
God’s redemptive plan for us isn’t made complete when we die. It was completed when God sent His only Son to open His arms of love upon the hard wood of the cross to redeem each and every one of us. Mysteriously and thankfully, it will reach its glorious completion when my youngest daughter, her great-grandfather she never met and I are somehow re-created in the New Heaven and New Earth and abide in the unmediated presence of Almighty God for all time.
Fix us, Lord.
Amen.
