Freedom Is Wild - Afterword
A Serialized Memoir of Life and Death
Remember, O Lord, your great mercy and love. - Psalm 25:6
12/31/2023 Context for the remarks that follow:
What follows is the final installment of writings I intend to publish from the book I wrote about our life with our late daughter, Mary. I include this as a kind of “afterword” to all the chapters in the book, some of which I have published here on Substack. I’m resolved not to write on this subject anymore.
I was motivated to publish this series by the lack of help we ourselves were able to find which offered any useful insights, or even just comprehended, what we were experiencing with our daughter. Perhaps some other parents of a similarly troubled child will find these scribblings and recognize enough of their own situation that they are helped by what we went through. Nevertheless, I don’t like doing this, and I have no interest in making it a recurring theme of my writing. I’m glad for this to be the last installment. Fittingly, this final installment contains the remarks that were made at Mary’s funeral.
Holding a funeral for someone like Mary, whose life was so fraught with contrasts and struggle, left us with the need to choose between whether we would confine ourselves to perfunctory remarks, or take the opportunity to honestly reflect on her, what we had learned from our life with her, and how we intended to proceed going forward.
We chose honest reflection.
The chapel where Mary’s funeral was held was completely full. A large gathering of people who had known and loved her throughout her life showed up to say goodbye. Some had traveled significant distances to be there and, like many funerals, the crushing grief was leavened and lightened by the joy of reunion with old friends.
Both of Mary’s brothers, Josh and Ben, spoke during her funeral, with their remarks preceding my own.
What follows are the remarks made by each of us, with only minor editing for grammar and privacy.
Josh’s Remarks
Before I get to the thrust of my remarks, I’d like to make an apology and a clarification regarding one aspect of Mary’s obituary, which, during our family’s first funeral planning session, it fell to me to write. I had never written one before, and being for my own sister, I couldn’t abide some of the formal templates I was finding on the internet. And since it was I writing it and not anyone else, I had to insert a Mary anecdote that was precious to me: her head-scratching determination to deny Burl Ives his rightful name.
I trust at least half of you gathered here today know who Burl Ives was. A celebrated film actor of his time, he also recorded some children’s folk music. One morning in the car on the way to church, Mary asked Mom to put in the “Harry Lewis” music. Mom obliged, or so I thought, putting a cassette tape into the dash and turning on the stereo. But it was Burl Ives. As humans do when confronted by things that don’t add up, we enlist our subconscious to make them add up. “Burl must do his kids music under a moniker,” 14-year-old me decided, and just went along with it. It may have been a week or two later when I saw that Burl Ives cassette for myself, which contained no references whatsoever to this figment named Harry Lewis, that I realized the truth: Mary had invented him. Mom knew what was up and made no ceremony when Mary would request, again and again, to listen to one more Harry Lewis tune. And without any protest, we all eventually joined in the fiction, forever blurring in our minds the true identity of the man in our car speakers and on our TV screen.
Mary was a treasure. Alas.
On Tuesday, January 7th, I was engaged in a conversation with a coworker about the trials and travails of his ex-wife. He relayed to me a tapestry of histrionic behaviors she had exhibited over the years that had become more and more inexplicable and self-destructive. I expressed solidarity with my friend because, albeit through a different sort of relationship, I understood all too well what he was dealing with.
Our conversation turned to what our prognoses were for our respective loved ones. “I just need my ex to hit rock bottom soon or she’ll never get serious,” my friend said. I told him I empathized with that sentiment, but that I was worried in my sister’s case that she had no rock bottom, that her rock bottom might just be her end. How could I have imagined that Mary’s end was only three days away?
My dad and brother and I have been shuffling rough drafts of our remarks around to each other in email the last few days, and you can all thank that editorial process for preventing me from plunging our proceedings into a flavor of grief even a funeral for Mary doesn’t deserve. The thing is, I have been uniquely unsuccessful among my family members at recalling with clarity any complete memories from Mary’s innocent years. There are only fragments. Just images. When my wife and I relocated from Dallas to Knoxville, TN in 2004, my sister was as I’ve ever known her: joyful, hilarious, smart, silly, and perhaps a little too reckless when it came to friendships. But I thought little of it. I could not have known in 2004 that I would never encounter that Mary again.
Over the ensuing 15 years, much of them spent thousands of miles away from her, the brokenness of this world would overtake Mary. But it overtook me as well. Mary had succumbed to a lie that she shouldn’t rise above her own impulses, and I eventually succumbed to the lie that she couldn’t. At the heart of both was the fundamental untruth that as persons, we are only the sum of our appetites.
My sister may have lived an ignoble life, but she was divine in the ultimate sense of the word. That is truth. The truth that we all, despite our appetites, have the image of divinity inscribed on our souls. Everything that was good about Mary—her joy, her contagious laughter, even her happy eyes—was the good of Jesus Himself. I came to forget that about my sister. I lost hope, and in so doing, I withheld love. I fell short of Paul’s exhortation in his first letter to the Corinthian church, that if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and possess all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind.
Love is not jealous, nor proud, nor rude.
Love does not insist on its own way; it is not resentful.
Love finds no joy in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
I’ve come to believe, and I’m afraid I’m not persuadable on this matter, that when Jesus commended “doing to the least of these” as effectively “doing unto Him”, He wasn’t talking about an eschatological scoring system. He was telling us how we can meet Him. In October of 1988, Keith and Becca Lowery took in a little girl who was born into poverty and brokenness, and for the next 31 years gave her every glimmer of hope, every tear of sorrow, and every pulsation of love they could give. And when you talk to them about the experience, the impression is inescapable: they have drawn painfully near to the crucified Lord.
Whatever the temptation might be, when that person in your life who has lost their way has taken what you think is your last measure of hope, remember that to continue stretching out your hope even to the ripping point, and to hold forth for just a little longer, is to participate in the life of Christ who submitted to the Cross, even while we were yet sinners. We are only Christians, though, “little Christs” as the word implies. We will fail, and we will break. But if anyone knows what it’s like to be broken for others, it must surely be Him who came down from Heaven and entered into our brokenness, and Who heals by His own wounds.
There’s so much I wish I could hope for Mary’s life that I no longer can. But I’m not hopeless. I can prevail on the mercies of Christ for her sake, the Christ who knew her heart as only her Creator could, and hope that she may yet be restored when all is restored. I can honor her memory by pouring myself out for those God has given me to love.
I love you, Mary, and I miss you so much.
Ben’s Remarks
One of the very first assignments God gave Adam in the Garden was to go about naming things. Well, today, my task is simple – to name the poison that took the life of my sister.
When Mary entered my world, barely months old, she came as the answer to many nights of childhood prayers for me. As the youngest of two boys, I began to pray nightly for little sisters. I can't say why or what put the notion in my head. But, for whatever reason, I got it in my head that I wanted little sisters and that God was the one to see about that. The evening I first met her, at once, my little sister, Mary, set about gurgling and grinning her way into my heart forever. You should have seen those eyes! Of course, some of you did see them, and remember them still. Big, brown gems, bright and so full of life and joy. She wore them particularly well through her early years. Those were her good years, and I'm overjoyed to see so many here who remember those years and who shared in that history with us.
Throughout our shared childhoods, Mary was everything a sister should be. She was equal parts friend and “frenemy”. She loved to laugh, and we laughed hard together. Of course, she annoyed me in all the ways that little sisters are obligated to annoy their big brothers. I can remember, on more than one occasion, sitting down in a living room chair to watch a movie and having my little sister walk in circles around the room barking loud, obnoxious noises in my face as she made her rounds, for no other reason than to delight in my frustration. To think I'd prayed for these! I remember being drawn into Christmas pageants of Mary's making. I remember Mary's impromptu public performances of "You Are My Sunshine," and she was certainly that to us. I remember her baptism and profession of faith in Jesus. I remember Christmas Eve nights as kids, clustered together in the oversized, single upstairs bedroom in our family home on Drake, staying up late, speculating on what we might discover in the morning. I remember Mary's unceasing interest in making the family's plans and running the family calendar. She schemed to bring us all together and to bring joy into our lives. Those were very good years. I treasure the memory of them.
But now, Mary has died, and those words have been running through my mind again and again, uninvited, for the past week and a day. Mary is dead, and that's the terrible, uncompromising truth. She was just 31 years old.
Now, this is the hard part. Because as most of you know, my sister, Mary, lived the bulk of her short life untethered to the truth. And so, in order to honor her memory, in order to do justice to her life, and because the worst mistake we could make today would be to waste her life and the lessons it wrought, we need to talk openly about what’s true, what’s true for each of us, not just for Mary, but for me and for you also. And I’m afraid this could be hard to hear. I can tell you it’s been hard to write. I think it may prove hardest still to read. But I have to read this, and, with all my heart, I hope you’ll listen.
Since I learned of Mary's untimely death, I've been struggling to make sense of my own thoughts about my sister’s life and death. Several times this past week I sat down to hammer out my thoughts, but I couldn't force myself think or write past the cold, hard facts: on January 10, 2020, my sister, Mary, died. I would write that down, read it over, rearrange the words, read it again, delete it, and walk away. Her life and death beg a number of questions, cosmic questions of biblical proportions on the meaning of life and death, the nature of sin and of free-will, the breadth of mercy, the extent of salvation, final judgement, and "what do we do with our hope now?" These kinds of questions, difficult to answer under optimal circumstances, become impossible within the context of immediate personal grief and tragic loss. But grief and loss insist the questions be asked, even if they go unsatisfactorily answered or unanswered altogether. Gradually, though, as the days pass, I'm finding more clarity. I'm better able to process the tragedy of January 10th and the now closed book of my sister's brief life in general, at least those chapters for which I was present or have been made privy.
Huge swaths of Mary's life remain a mystery to me. In many ways, in the end, I'm left with the realization that my little sister had become something of a stranger. After all, she went places I could not go. She chose for herself and lived her life walking paths I would not wish upon an enemy, let alone my dear sister. I don't know exactly all that she did or suffered, but I know enough. I know that she suffered untold horrors in the shadow world of her life apart from Christ and apart from her family, a life that I cannot begin to comprehend. So, for me, trying to make sense of my little sister's abbreviated life is an impossible exercise in connecting missing dots from the smiling, exuberant, brilliantly bright-eyed little girl of her youth, to the lonely, darkened, drug-addled shell of my sister that took her last breath isolated in a hospital room in Houston. One thing led to another, as they say. Well, then I'm asking - what on earth could possibly have led to this miserable conclusion to my sister’s life, who once upon a blessed time was our family's sunshine, as she so famously sang as a girl? What could possibly possess a transformative power so devastating as that?
I’m scanning the patchwork of my own memories in search of the unifying thread of her unraveling, the beginning of her end, so to speak. And what have I found there? What is it, in the final analysis of her tragic life and death, that could lay utter ruin to a soul so promising of joy and light as the soul of my now lost sister, Mary?
A lie. Pernicious. Poisonous. Ancient.
I remember when the fatal spell was cast. It was 2005, and Mary had been in and out of trouble at school and at home. Over time, her standard teenage rebellion fare tended toward increasingly dangerous paths. It broke my heart to see my sister strike out with such long, determined strides toward sin and self-destruction. Then it happened. On a bright, sunny morning in 2005, a well-meaning woman told my sister and my parents and me, that we were unable to understand Mary's actions and her passions -- her "needs" as she put it -- because we were a different color than Mary. We were told to believe that Mary's actions were owed not to her character but to her color, and that her actions were, under the pall of that woman's own benighted perspective, not only acceptable but justified. “Mary needs to satisfy her needs because of what she is.” The racial hint to that lie is but one available flavor. It comes in many. The meta-lie, in its essence, is simply this: you are what you want, that what you want and do is justified already by what you are, and that you will, therefore, only be happy if and when you take what you want for yourself. It's a lie that disguises sinful, destructive desires as "needs" stemming from the essence of our fundamental, individual identity. You are defined by your desires. That fateful morning none other than the nature of truth, an ethic of personal accountability and responsibility for one's actions, and the defining principles of my sister's own identity were all under direct assault. The lie cast a spell that would not be broken.
Of course, the truth is, long before that sunny morning in 2005, Mary was already lying to herself. For Mary, this was no light-bulb moment; it was a galvanizing one. The woman merely did my sister the disservice of lending a philosophical infrastructure to her unbridled passions. More than that, now Mary's self-destructive trajectory was armed with the affirmation and validation of an otherwise responsible adult woman, who claimed to understand her “needs” in ways that her family of 17 years was incurably incapable.
That our appetites lead safely and surely to our ultimate fulfillment is a lie written deep within the marrow of our bones. It’s a lie that has festered in our hearts since Satan first whispered it into the ears of our first-parents in the Garden and whispered again into the ears of my sister’s heart and mind on a sunny morning in 2005. It also happens to be the orthodoxy of our day. You've heard it yourself. It goes like this: "Don't question your desires. Don't challenge their origin. Don't resist them. And, whatever you do, don’t repress your desires. Obey them. Because your desires are needs, and, as such, are a roadmap to your unique, individual happiness! You're on the right track, baby, you were born this way!" This conflation of one's identity with one's desires is a cancer of the soul, and I believe it's culpable for the deaths of untold billions of human beings from the beginning of time to now, with my sister, Mary, being its most recent conquest and exhibit. Once Mary fully imbibed those cancerous platitudes, the clock began to tick down to the grave.
Please don’t mishear me, though. We’ve got to be very careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. Mary could have repented. The lie gave permission to her passions; it did not irresistibly compel her to persist in them. She could have cast it off, called the lie a lie, and turned from her darkness back to the light. But that’s not how it happened. Instead, my little sister died. And I, for one, am left grieved and haunted by the specter of what might have been.
We don't yet know the precise medical cause of my sister's death, but we do know enough of the details surrounding her death to safely conclude that she died of an accidental drug overdose. However the official documents read, though, my family and I know more than that. On January 10, 2020, my sister Mary Lowery died from the poison of an ancient fruit, the fruit of a timeless, pernicious, damnable lie.
There’s a better way – the Gospel of Grace, the power of God to break the bonds of our slavery to sin and self-worship. This is enough. This loss and this grief is too much already. Surrender to the truth. Mary's life and death at last are telling us the truth: "the wages of sin really is death, and the free gift of God is eternal life. And blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." If we define ourselves according to our desires and order our lives around them, our appetites will bind us to their tyranny and lead you to a grave. Break free from the lies of sin, self-determination, and self-worship and choose the Love of God. Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, died for your sin, to atone for your sin, to deliver you from the power of sin and from death and judgement. Today, right now, you are invited into the joy of repentance, into the freedom of forgiveness, and into the light of God's good design for your life. Joy, freedom, and light are yours, if you will believe and abide in Christ.
Will you redeem the life of my sister within the circumstances of your own, by casting off the lie and the sin that so easily entangles and by living in the Truth? Let your repentance and mine be the legacy of Mary’s redemption -- a visible, living redemption of which those of us, who loved her best, have now been tragically deprived. For your own sake and for Mary's, do this. Because this is too much already.
Mary has passed beyond our reach, and that is perhaps the saddest thought of all. I find odd comfort, though, in the thought that Mary has also finally passed beyond the reach of all lies and beyond the reach of her passions and addictions. She’s passed beyond the veil. And where she is, truth alone reigns. Where has she gone? I can’t say. But I also don't have to say. Her Judge -- and yours and mine -- is perfect. It's for Him to say. His judgement will be as it must be. All things will be considered then and there -- the vast expanse of His mercy, the oceans of His grace, the manner of her life, the status of her faith, all the secret things brought into the light. There will be no oversight, no mistakes, no injustice. Perfect and true are His judgements. Where is our hope now? Tethered, with absolute trust and unwavering devotion, to Jesus.
Mary was and remains forever a source of great joy in our memories and, tragically, the source of great sorrow as well.
Keith’s Remarks
I’m grateful to Josh and Ben for sharing these things with you this morning. These were hard things to share and they didn’t do it because they were anxious to, but because their mother and I asked them to. So if you think such genuine, honest reflection is in any way inappropriate for such a time as this, you can attach the blame to me. I take Mr. Darcy’s view, from Pride and Prejudice: “Disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.”
With gratitude in our grieving hearts today, we give thanks to the Lord God Almighty for having been given the honor and life-changing opportunity of loving Mary Lowery throughout her too short life. And Becca and I say together, with full and unquestioning voice and no reservations, “blessed be the name of the Lord”.
One of my favorite people in the world is here today. I only remember the story I’m about to tell because it happened on the very day one of my favorite people, my grandson Abram, went home with his mommy and daddy for the very first time. At that exact moment, far across the sea, where they first became a family, I was standing with a group of high school students in McKinney TX talking about the power that these students had. And I told them this, that they possessed enormous power which could be wielded in one of two ways: they could either bring unbounded joy to their families, or they could bring unspeakable pain. I told them, that day, that at their age they were on the precipice of making important decisions that would have lasting effects on their lives and would result in either delight or desolation in the hearts of those who loved them. As you may have discerned by now, Mary exercised both options to the full.
Mary loved horses. So much so, and with such giftedness, that she eventually became a nationally ranked equestrian, qualifying for the national championship in Eventing at her competitive tier. She was ranked 5th in the nation in her class. She eventually earned a second level certification of the British Horse Society in the care and training of horses.
Here and there, in this world, little girls are sometimes born with a strange, innate love for horses and Mary was one of the those. If you have ever known a “horsey girl” then you know what I’m talking about. Mary loved every single thing about horses. She loved the very smell of them. She loved the smell of the barn where horses lived. She would inhale deeply as she walked into the barn, first thing in the morning. She loved the feel of horses. She loved all of the paraphernalia that went along with them. At this very moment, in my attic, is a trunk full of horse paraphernalia from Mary’s horsey pursuits. (A brief word of advice for any fathers of horsey girls who happen to be present today: abandon all hope for your wallet.)
Mary loved all horses but she especially loved her own horses. She owned two horses in her life, a quarter horse mare she called “Little Red” and a Dutch warmblood mare she called “Bunny”. Once, when Mary was around 12 years old, she was riding Little Red in an outdoor arena that sat adjacent to a busy road. As Mary and Red cantered around the arena, a car driving by on the road backfired. Absurdly, it’s not uncommon for horses to interpret these mild, unexpected events as the start of the apocalypse. And this moment was no exception. Apparently under the impression that the world was about to end, Red reared up and fell over backwards with all 1300 of her pounds landing on Mary who, with her typically stubborn refusal to fall off a horse, was still in the saddle. Mary was taken away to the hospital in an ambulance, yet the very next day she limped on her bruised hip out into the arena, climbed up on Red’s back, and picked up where she left off.
Mary had tenacity. Mary had grit. These attributes turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.
Ben talked about Mary’s annoying little sister ways. Let me tell you a story about Josh and Ben’s annoying big brother ways. Anna may remember these stories. One Christmas, Mary’s brothers got it into their heads on Christmas Eve to make Mary’s Christmas experience more real. So, after Mary went to bed, and boys being boys, they climbed up onto the roof above Mary’s bedroom and proceeded to stomp around up there, shaking sleigh bells like mad. The goal, of course, was to convince Mary that Santa had arrived. The problem though, was that Mary was not one to let events take place without her full participation. And no sooner had the sleigh bells started than I heard her bedroom door bang against the wall as she threw it open, racing down the hall and out the front door before I could stop her. She had every intention of seeing Santa in all his glory. Well, when the boys on the roof heard the front door open, and realizing Mary was “loose”, they madly clambered back over the ridge top of the roof to hide on the other side. By the time Mary got far enough out into the yard to see the roof, there was no Santa or sleigh. Mary immediately burst into tears and her Christmas Eve was ruined.
Another Christmas her brothers ruined was the year Mary received a horse bridle as a gift. Mary didn’t have a horse at this point, mind you, but all she wanted for Christmas was something – anything – having to do with real horses. So she opened one of her gifts and found a “horsey thing” in it and was immediately filled with her characteristic joyous delight. But it was at this point that things started to go south, so to speak. Her big brother Josh, for some reason, decided this would be the perfect moment to throw a monkey wrench into our Christmas morning. He spoke to Mary in a conspiratorial, secretive kind of way and said, “Mary, go look in the backyard.” He was implying, of course, without quite saying it, that maybe something that went with the bridle was waiting for her back there. Now, Mary was always a little woman of action, and she immediately bolted through the backdoor only to discover, to her extreme disappointment, that there was no horse there. So the tears flowed freely on yet another Lowery Christmas.
But Mary eventually got her horses and had the opportunity to immerse herself in that happy world. In fact, of all the things we ever tried in order to help her, her love of all things horsey may have come closer than any other thing to pulling her back from the cliff’s edge.
But now she’s gone. And the unspeakable tragedy of both the manner, and needlessness, of her death leaves many of us who loved her full of questions.
A theme which Josh alluded to, and which Ben unpacked in more detail, is that one of the most seductive lies of our time is that our appetites and desires are indistinguishable from our identities. Mary’s decision to follow her appetites, wherever they led her, proved ultimately fatal.
But we had desires too. Let me tell you about our desires. Well, my own desire was to be free of pain. My desire was for relief from the desperation a father feels when his child’s life is slipping away, like water through his fingers. My desire was for the hellish, sleepless nights of worry to just go away. Like my Lord, I wanted to, and did, cry out, “let this cup pass from me”.
But does it follow that just because I desired those things I should have celebrated them and declared “living without concerns for the well-being of my children” to be my new identity? Should we have made our own comfort the measure of our lives? Should anyone make their desires the measure of their lives? Or should we have done what we did, and given ourselves over to the pain that accompanies self-denial – giving ourselves over to the exact opposite of our appetites and desires - to try to rescue someone who bore the very image of God and mattered so terribly much?
Don’t hear me to be saying that we did this perfectly. We most certainly did not. Sometimes due to fear or exhaustion or confusion we recoiled. We sometimes felt like we were living in a house of mirrors filled with fog. We often didn’t know what we were doing, and we felt alone in our search for answers. Not least because there has been so much that we had to unlearn from our prior understanding of the way the world works.
The inescapable paradox of reality is this: Love takes form, not in the celebration of ourselves, but in the denial of ourselves. That’s the wonder of it. And the more we celebrate ourselves, the more elusive love becomes. The pernicious and ancient lie that Ben spoke of will, like sea water to a man dying of thirst, drain our lives of the very thing we most want and need.
I want to avoid doing what C.S. Lewis described in his book, A Grief Observed. That book was a journal of Lewis’ grief during the weeks and months immediately following his wife Joy’s death. A couple of chapters into his book you will find this: “For the first time, I have looked back and read these notes. They appall me. From the way I’ve been talking, anyone would think that Joy’s death matters chiefly for its effect on myself.”. And the same is true in our case here today. Whatever our pain and whatever our loss, I remind myself that the cost to Mary has been infinitely more.
Well, I need to close, so let me share with you how we’ve answered some of the awful questions raised by these events, and how we find the strength to move forward.
One of the great insights of our experience has been that, to use Becca’s words, we have learned to have joy in the midst of suffering. We have learned that joy is something that can be chosen, and that the choosing of it is inseparably bound up with gratitude. The challenge in doing this is that, while our sufferings shout at us, our blessings often only whisper. And it is an act of the will, in the midst of suffering, to recall how much we have to be thankful for. “Count your many blessings, name them one by one,” the song says. Truer words were never spoken as an antidote to despair. Joy is not only found in the absence of great suffering but in the intentionality of being thankful for, and remembering, God’s care and provision.
Another thing that we’ve learned is how crucial it is to avoid being selective in our embrace of what God has said. We want to believe ALL of it. The apostle John said “light came into the world, but men loved darkness”. We believe that the challenges we all face are challenges in regard to what we’re going to love and why. Mary’s suffering was not a matter of what she knew or believed so much as a matter of what she loved.
We have learned that God is patient but that his patience is not unbounded. His word alludes to this in so many stories, but we often prefer not to see it. It is possible to run out of runway and sooner than we think.
We have learned that faith in God is not a kumbaya, Pollyanna approach to life. We western evangelicals sometimes prefer to envision faith as hands raised in ecstasy but, as I said in a note to a friend this week, in our life it has often looked more like white knuckles and gritted teeth. In the roll call of faith from Hebrews 11, the faithful are commended, saved from death, given children beyond all hope, and rescued. They conquered kingdoms, shut the mouths of lions, and received their children back from the dead. So far so good. Things are great so far. But then come other, more jarring manifestations of faith. It turns out that some of those in the roll call of faith were jeered at, flogged, destitute, and mistreated. They went about wearing animal skins and living in holes in the ground. We have learned that the life of faith is not a matter of guaranteed happy outcomes but a matter of holding fast, in good times and bad, regardless of the consequences or the outcome.
Lastly, and this is particularly apt, it is impossible to be like Christ unless we are willing to love someone who may reject the truth along with the dearest hopes we have for them. Love is not love where freedom is not real. Jesus’ entry into the world is framed within scripture as an effort “to seek and save the lost”, but not everyone he sought responded the way he had hoped. The apostle John says it this way: “he came to that which was his own, but his own people did not receive him.” We must follow him in this hard thing that he does.
At the end of the day we don’t have all the answers, but we put our trust in the One who does. We’re going to grow in our dependence on Jesus. We’re going to put more faith in him. We’re going to put greater hope in him. We’re going to love him more, and love our family and friends that much more. And, when love demands it, we’re going to enter into suffering. We’re going to believe ALL of what God says. We’re going to remember that if Jesus came to “seek and save the lost”, it would be hard in any meaningful sense, to say we’re following him if we don’t do the same, even with the possibility of suffering which such seeking implies.
We’ve talked a lot today, truthfully if painfully, about lies. But lies don’t just appear on their own. If there are lies on the scene, it’s because somewhere nearby there is a liar. And in our life, this is no exception. He has been around since the beginning. John, in the book of Revelation refers to him as “the deceiver of the whole world”. Jesus said this about him:
“He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44
So what was once said of author Lillian Hellman could be said about Satan – “every word he says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
The lie that prepared the way for Mary’s death, and the one being whispered to us still, did not appear out of nowhere. We have an enemy. Make no mistake.
So if I’m honest, in choosing to respond to Mary’s death the way we have, I know that the enemy of my Lord, and the accuser of my brothers, and the deceiver of the whole world, will hate it. The ravages he visited on Mary will not be forgotten. We know who shares the blame. And I want, in my small way, to dash his hopes and dreams. I look forward to the day when the enemy will be thrown into the lake of fire where, in frustration and rage, he will be prevented from ever again doing to another precious soul what he has done to Mary. Let him grit his own teeth, for a change, and know the frustration of his own impotence.
May God have mercy on someone we loved. Someone we still love, our precious daughter Mary.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.