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On May 29^th, my darling little granddaughter, Sierra died. She fought a most heinous form of cancer for eighteen months. She died bravely, the way I want to when it’s my turn. I was with her at one o’clock in the morning when she breathed her last. Those eighteen months would take a volume to chronicle which I will never do. But, through all the hours of weeping and happiness, yes, happiness, there is something that I learned that is on my heart to share. Maybe it will help you, I hope so.

People usually deal with dying and death, particularly a tragic one, in pretty much the same way. They believe that no matter the severity of the illness, prayer will more than likely change the outcome. Their core belief is that God will interdict on behalf of the sick person and heal them. Modern medicine does what was impossible only a short time ago, people live who would have died then. These medical marvels are a gift from God.

But what about those who are not healed?  And no matter how many, how long or how fervent the prayers, they die.  When this happens some will blame God for “taking” their loved one. How could an all knowing, all powerful God let theirs die and let another live? It’s a puzzle that begins to eat at the very center of the believer’s heart. Well meaning friends might say, “If we had only had more faith”, or some other horrific statement, the sick one would have been made well. This is a satanic phrase and even though well intended strikes terror deep into the soul. How guilty would you be if your loved one died because you “didn’t have enough faith?”  Yes, we should have faith, enough to move a mountain, as Jesus said, but this faith is not for physical mountains, but spiritual ones.

If you have lost someone, perhaps the most important person in the world to you, you know what a mountain of grief there is to move. Let me tell you that at the lowest time in our journey with Sierra’s illness, satan came and whispered in my ear, “You’re not so sure now, are you?” Satan knew I was praying with everything I had and nothing was changing, just getting worse. Satan wanted me to give up. He knew I had prayed, cried, begged God not to let my baby die. After all that, she was still going to die. All the king’s men and all the king’s horses couldn’t put my baby together again. Satan wanted to kill me in the “coliseum”, so to speak, but God wouldn’t let him do it.

Job said he would trust God even though He slayed him. Worse than me dying, my baby did. And yet I trust Him more than ever. Let me tell you the Valley of the Shadow of Death is not where the dying travel, it’s where those that are left travel. When you must travel through that tunnel, you want God to take you through.

So what may we conclude? No doctor could ever explain why Sierra even got sick. Only two hundred kids a year in the United States get the kind of cancer she had. I have about the same probability of getting hit by a meteorite as she did to get the disease she had. We live in a natural, random world. It was not originally meant to be that way, but it is.

When satan convinced Eve to sin, he started the death process. Blame satan for death, not God. “‘You will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman.”(Genesis 3:4 NIV). Eden was perfect, post Eden is not. When sin entered the world, the world changed.  People would live and die differently after that happened. When a deadly, irreversible disease strikes a human, they are going to die, no matter who they are. We should pray that the medical marvels God has given us will be beneficial, but when they aren’t, we need to understand that death is a natural process, and God does not interfere with it anymore than He would interfere with any other natural process He has put in place.

Some say they can cure someone with a deadly disease. It they can do that, they can go out to the cemetery and raise dead people. They can’t do the former or the latter. When people are going to die, they are going to die.

Prayer? Yes, of course, for diminishing the pain of the sick and the pain of those who must watch their beloved die.  Prayer for miraculous cures and “turn arounds” leads one down the path of asking, “Why didn’t God heal my loved one?’’ The answer is this, we cannot expect God to heal someone who has a terminal illness, and reverse a natural process, but we can expect Him to be with us through the storm. Yes, the storm will rage, but “He is our Refuge and underneath are the Everlasting Arms.”  Please do not let Satan take the opportunity to sink your faith in God by shifting the blame of death from him to God.

Individuals have lost their faith in God because they misunderstood His promise. He promised to walk with us in good times and bad, on the tops of mountains and in the Valley of the Shadow of death. That is His promise, He did not promise to keep us here forever.

Lou David Allen graduated from Abilene Christian University with a BS in Physics in 1962 and a MBA in 1976. He worked for NASA on the Apollo Moon Project in Houston, TX. His area of expertise is heat transfer especially related to space simulation systems. He was a junior college administrator and teacher for 21 years and was the mayor of Merkel, TX for eight. He now works as a salesman for a company he and his wife Rhoda own. Rhoda and David have been married forty-seven years. They are happy.

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Heroes of Another Kind by David Allen

Snake photo by Felix Francis used under a Creative Commons license