Words from Priya's service...

Below we have posted the words that I shared at the memorial service for Priya:

We would first like to thank all of you who have been such a help and comfort to us in these past few weeks. Your letters, words, and most of all prayers have been a constant source of solace and healing for us. We are awed by the outpouring of love we have received through this.

Now that you have seen and heard about Priya’s short life, we wanted to take a little time to talk about what her life and death have meant to us, in the hopes that we can offer some comfort to you who have mourned with us and to testify to the goodness of God.

When something painful and tragic like this happens it’s always confusing—Why did this happen? Why does God allow this kind of thing? Why didn’t God stop it? We wanted to share where the answer to these questions is found, and why we’re at peace with that answer. We are hurt, and grieving, and facing the most painful thing we’ve ever faced, but we have a peace that passes understanding.

From the beginning, we’ve seen our Priya as an undeserved gift to us out of the abundance of God’s grace. She was not some kind of reward for our faithfulness to God, or payment for services rendered. She was, like all things good in our lives, an unmerited gift. Every moment of her life was a bit of God’s grace to us, and we’re grateful for all of it. For whatever reason, God chose to take her to Himself. Should we begrudge Him the daughter that we didn’t deserve in the first place? In Job’s words, should we accept good from the Lord, and not disaster? Is it right for us to praise Him only when He does good things for us?

Because, truth be told, all the good we have in our lives is an undeserved measure of His grace. It is nowhere guaranteed to us that we will have healthy lives and healthy children. But we so easily fall into a sense of entitlement. Health, children, and the good life are gifts that we rightly enjoy when we have and rightly grieve at their loss. But to treasure these gifts truly and to avoid utter despair when we lose them, we have to understand something about them. They are gifts to us. And there is a Giver. Our hearts are not meant to rest in the gifts themselves but in the Giver. And ultimately, our hope, joy, and peace is not found in the gifts themselves, but in the Giver.

This is the great secret of Job. He was a man of flesh and blood, just like us, who in the space of a day was plunged into an unimaginable abyss of grief and pain. And yet he could say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.” He understood that God had freely given and then He had taken, and in either circumstance was still worthy of praise. That’s because, I think, He knew Who God is. It’s clear from Job’s words that he was rightly focused on God. It is this focus on God, on Who He is, that leads us out of the muddle of questions and frustrations about why bad things happen.

If you think about it, almost all those questions assume that He is somehow indifferent to our pain…that He doesn’t understand. Surely the almighty God can’t understand what we’re going through. But what we know from the life of Jesus Christ turns all that on its head. What is there about suffering that our God doesn’t know from personal experience? If we take the crucifixion of Christ seriously, then we are left with the stark fact that Christians worship a God who suffered and died. Moreover, Christians worship a God who was bereaved at the loss of His Son, His beloved. That is an absolutely unique claim in the world.
Indeed, there are many for whom the crucifixion of Jesus is simply proof that Jesus was not God Almighty—for what kind of God can die? But for us, particularly at times like this, that very fact is the bedrock of our hope.

I’m reminded of some friends of ours who work in India. One of their Indian sisters in Christ got radically saved and began preaching the Gospel to Hindus. Once a Hindu woman asked her, “Why should I follow your God? I only see pictures of Him naked and dying.” And this Indian sister replied, “That’s right. All of your gods are dressed in gold and fine clothes, because they take and take from you. But my God gave everything He had for me.”

The God of the Cross, Jesus Christ, is the only one who makes sense out of a world of pain. He is not indifferent to it. He knows what it is like to suffer. And God the Father knows what it’s like to grieve.

And perhaps what is most surprising about the God who suffered, died, and grieved is that He wasn’t taken by surprise in any of it. In Acts 4:28 and other places, it’s clear that the crucifixion of Jesus was carried out according to whatever God’s hand and God’s plan had predestined to take place. In the mystery of God’s will, He ordained that His Son suffer the most horrendous death in all of history. Of course we know the reason why He ordained that—so that people could find redemption and ultimately new life. But we don’t know the reasons for all the things that happen in God’s plan. We may never know the reason behind the choice to take Priya. But we know the God who made that choice. And that’s enough for us. We can never fathom all of His will, but we can know who He is, and that He is ultimately working for our good, if we are His children. It’s that trust in who God is that sustains us. It was that trust that allowed Jesus, standing on the brink of unimaginable darkness, to say, “Not My will, but Your’s be done.” If He could say that then, then we, by His grace, can say it now.

And we don’t simply say it out of obligation or against our conscience. We say it because out across the great sea of life, fraught as it is with painful storms and waves of despair that threaten to overthrow us and carry us under, there is the far shore of promised glory. The Bible says that Jesus endured the cross, despising its shame, for the sake of the joy that was before Him. We do not grieve as those who have no hope. Because our God is not only the God who suffered and died but the God who rose and conquered.

We hope and rejoice in the knowledge that Priya is with Christ. He has prevailed over death in her life and will one day do the same in us. That is our great hope. And it is not a baseless hope. It is founded on the teaching of Scripture that infants are taken to be with the Lord. From the same Scriptures comes the teaching that, in order to secure that hope in our own lives, we have to repent of our sin and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have lots of cultural myths surrounding death in America. One seems to be that, immediately after death, almost everyone becomes a saint. Just about every death is blanketed in assurances that so-and-so has gone to be with Jesus. But Jesus Himself said that there will be many, on that last day, to whom He will say, “Depart from me, you workers of iniquity, for I never knew you.” When it comes to death, it is unwise, indeed eternally fatal, to bank on a fuzzy sense of entitlement that you should get to go to heaven. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me.” As long as we persist in our sin, in insisting on our own way, we will be cut off from the Father. As long as we insist on our own righteousness, on our own merit, we will never find the way, the truth, and the life. Indeed, the Bible says that those who have not given their lives to God in Christ are enemies to God. They cherish their sin over God, and have made themselves Lord of their lives. What you need to ask yourself today is whether truly, by your life, by who you are, you are a friend of God or an enemy. If you have made yourself His enemy by your sin and have cut yourself off from Him, you need to know today that there is grace without measure available for you. All that you need to be redeemed, everything needed to atone for who you are and what you’ve done, everything needed to reconcile you to God, has been provided in Jesus Christ. Repent of your sin, lay down your arms, and entrust your life into His hands. Find the hope that will carry you up, and crown you with glory, when all your earthly treasures are gone.

If you are God’s friend; if you have been reconciled to Him by the blood of His Son Jesus, then you need to decide today what you will do when the trials of life come upon you. You need to decide whether you will join Job in saying, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” He will be no less worthy of your praise on that day than He is today.

Today all of us need to as ourselves, “Is my hope and trust firmly planted in Jesus Christ?” He alone is the answer to the world’s cries for comfort, peace, and redemption. All mouths are stopped at the foot of the Cross. He is the God who suffered and died, who rose and conquered, and who now intercedes for us with the Father. He is the great Giver. And as we remember today the great gift that Priya was to us, we are compelled to look to the Giver, the Author of all good things, and thank Him, and praise Him.