Remembering Kent

Even though it's been two years since Kent went to his eternal home in Heaven, my heart is still grieving. In remembering him, this partial entry by Lettie Cowman, a widow herself, in her classic devotional Consolation speaks to my heart:

[H]eart stricken mourner, He knows the grief and anguish you feel; He knows the desolations of your spirit and its yearnings after a solace the world cannot give!

Go the grave of your beloved one; but as you go let not your tears so blind you, neither so hang down your head that you may not see that Jesus has come to sustain you. Hear His gracious voice from beside the tomb, "I am the resurrection and the life."

Your husband is not dead. His believing soul lived with Christ here, now lives with Christ in Heaven and his Christian dust is sleeping sweetly until He shall rise, immortal, glorious and incorruptible at the resurrection of the last day. All your love, watching and anxious nursing could not save him from [sickness, suffering] and the tomb; but the love of Jesus has delivered him from all and taken him up to that sinless home where there "shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things have passed away".

Here you were united in a better than an earthly love, the love of Christ, and in that love you are and shall be united forever. Look, then, beyond the scene of your mortal grief to the home of your perpetual bliss. Christ has lain in the tomb and sweetened it for the sleep of His beloved and yours; but as you stoop to see within the sepulchre see not that it is broken and that the uprising Master has opened a way through it, up through the rent veil, up through the everlasting doors to the paradise of God! There seek to follow and when you draw near the celestial band you will find waiting to welcome you one more radiant than an angel in whose transfigured countenance you will recognize him you have not lost but who has gone before you to our Father's house.

I miss my husband and my sons miss their father, but it's an incredible comfort to know we'll be reunited with him in Heaven. In the meantime, though, God is continuing to sustain and bless us as we continue to heal from our loss.