My purpose in writing this is to emphasize two tremendous realities that Beverly and I experienced because of our son’ s death: the reality of death and the attendant grief it brought to us, and the reality of joy that eventually superseded the first.

Each person’s suffering is unique and has its own story. Each differs from the others, not principally in its intensity but in its quality. When we experience the reality of grieving we often say to another sufferer, “I know just how you are feeling,” but this is not entirely true. We cannot know precisely that it is true because sufferings cannot be compared. One must not assume that we believe that our suffering is any greater than that of others. We must not proudly assume that we have experienced the greatest of pain. Moreover, when we compare our suffering with that of our Lord on the cross, we find ours easier to bear. These words, therefore, are not just about Beverly and me. I want it to be seen that through it all—death, grief and eventually joy—God had His hand on our lives.

As someone once pointed out, grief is not an enemy or a sign of weakness. It is, rather, a sign of being human. It is the cost of loving and losing someone. By our experiencing grief we eventually made our way out of the immediacy of our terrible loss.

When we look back to that August morning in 1994 we remember vividly how the death of our firstborn caused both of us enormous suffering and long-term grief. We must testify, however, that through God’s grace He eventually brought joy back into our lives.

Still, as we look back at those first dark months we ask ourselves, How and why did this happen to us? Furthermore, we have often asked, How did God prepare us for this overwhelming tragedy? Believing in the God of providence, we came to believe that He had been preparing us for this event through the circumstances of many prior years.

We loved our children dearly and considered them as precious souls entrusted to our care. In our fragile way we tried very hard to make Christ real to them. We took every opportunity we had to follow the biblical command (Prov. 22:6): “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.” We strove to set an example before them: church attendance, family worship, prayer meetings, church camps, Christian schools and a Christian college. Because we knew that we were not perfect parents we always trusted God to help us and called upon Him daily. The years of rearing our children were wonderful ones. We had fun together as a family. There were many joys and few sorrows. Then, suddenly, everything fell apart.

We discovered in 1979 that our dear firstborn son was a homosexual and had been struggling with his desire since he was 12. He told us that he had prayed again and again to be delivered from his inmost feelings, but to no avail. We were totally devastated, for we had absolutely no suspicion that he had such an orientation. Beverly told me that upon hearing Mark’s admission she wanted to go straight to bed and never wake up. Her precious son who had been such an obedient child and who showed so much promise in his Christian walk had fallen into grievous sin. If only it had been a different sin. She felt it nearly impossible to tell her friends and our families.

Beverly confesses that she was angry with God for the first time in her life. She cried out to God again and again, “If you are a sovereign God, and we tried so hard to follow your commands, how could you let my son fall into this sin?” We both turned to the book of Job for comfort, and in my heart I cried out as did King David in Psalm 13: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?” We can now testify that eventually God took the anger from our hearts. Then began years of pleading with God to rescue our son and remove these feelings from him.

God’s answer came, as it always will, but not in the way that we requested, for eventually He took our son. All through that August night in 1994 we waited and prayed. Suddenly he was gone. With heart-wrenching difficulty we finally left him there. Death has its sting, and we knew it. When we finally pulled away from the bed and returned to his apartment, Beverly’s body just “fell apart.” By her own testimony she declares that she was never so sick nor so weak as she was that night. She cried out as King David did when his son died: “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you” (2 Sam. 18:33). We truly realized that night the terrible reality of death. Our hearts were broken. It seemed so unnatural for a parent to bury a child. We had experienced the deaths of our parents, and that was hard enough, but how to endure the death of a child? We realized that we had assumed that he was to be a large part of our future. In the days following, the sorrow kept returning in different ways. The son we loved so much was gone forever. We would never see his face again or hear his voice.

Never again would we stroll through a museum together or sit at the beach with him, reading our books. Why hadn’t we told him more often how much we loved him? If only we had been aware of his struggles, perhaps we could have helped. Never again would he join our family gatherings. Never would we see his extraordinary potential used in the world.

Those were some of the thoughts that crowded our minds during the working hours, but the nights were, if anything, harder. Beverly describes her experience: “At least through the day I could try to work; at night thoughts rushed at me and overwhelmed me. I couldn’t sleep; the tears wouldn’t stop. Then, when I did fall asleep I had dreadful nightmares about the last hours of his life.”

As the years passed we did not lose our belief in the eternal God of providence. Gradually we found that we were no longer angry with Him. We felt, however, the deep sorrow brought on by the void created through Mark’s absence, a gap never to be filled. We found that we didn’t want well-meaning people to tell us that “all things work together for good to those who love God.” What we needed was for people to recognize the brutal reality of our sorrow, to sit beside us, so to speak, on our mourning bench.

Lament became a part of our life. In a very real way the loss of our son came to determine our identity. We felt that, as parents who lost a child, our lament became a love song. We felt deeply that if he was so worth loving he was also worth grieving over, so we did not try to put it behind us or disavow it. We were counseled to take as long as we needed to grieve over our loss.

Our terrible wound eventually became less raw, and we entered a new phase in which we sought isolation and solitude. We wanted only to be together. We loved to walk, and we walked for miles on the back roads of our neighborhood in Western Pennsylvania. We walked through the woods and past the fields, asking questions, thinking about Mark’s life, and sharing the truths of God’s Word. We were truly seeking God’s healing.

As evangelical Christians we take the injunctions of Scripture seriously, and so we found ourselves, inevitably, bearing the shame of having a son who had chosen to practice homosexuality. More devastating, however, was the crushing question of his final destiny, for he had gone to the grave, as far as we knew, still rejecting the Christian faith. We never tired of sharing with each other our sorrow, comforting and encouraging one another and reminding ourselves of God’ s promises. We had to learn to live without our son and to overcome our guilt, for we thought that we had surely failed him. It was difficult to understand that God was working in and through us. We prayed for the balm of healing so that we could go on with our lives serving God in the kingdom.

We never turned our face away from God. We found promises in Scripture especially comforting. Isaiah, the prophet, speaking for God says, “I have put my words in your mouth and covered you with the shadow of my hand, I who set the heavens in place, who laid the foundations of the earth…Sorrow and sighing will flee away. I, even I, am he who comforts you” (Isa. 35:10; 51:12, 16). We asked the Lord if and when we would smile again or feel joy in our life. Meanwhile we were fulfilling all the responsibilities in our congregation, but life was weary and heavy. We knew that a thousand years are as a day with God. Still we wondered if we would ever know joy again. Would this grief ever leave us? We thought of the

Old Testament patriarch, Job, and asked ourselves, how did he hold on?’ One day we came across the English translation of the final counsel given to his congregation by Adolphe Monod, a 19th Century French Reformed pastor. Translated as Living in the Hope of Glory, these words are among the last he uttered to his flock as he lay dying of cancer. Monod has much to say about suffering. At one point he says,

What a consolation for those who suffer to be able to say to themselves, “Through my sufferings…I can give to God the glory that I would not otherwise have been able to give him.”…It is thus, above all, that suffering is a privilege. For a Christian, to suffer is a privilege; to suffer much is a special privilege. All those who suffer should enter into my thought and commit their souls to him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator.”2

C. S. Lewis expressed it thus: “Joy is a deep longing for God held in tension with the most intense suffering.” Job provides for us a great example of this when he speaks in the midst of his great suffering: “And after my skin has been destroyed yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!…Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (Job 19:26-27; 13:15).

The Apostle Paul knew how to keep both realities—joy and suffering—before him when he wrote of his contentment in God: “This all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:8-11).

As I write, 17 years have passed, and although death and the sorrow associated with death is still a reality for both of us; nevertheless, the joy set before us is also a reality. Though we must accept this sorrow, we also must embrace the joy. Dostoevsky, while writing Crime and Punishment, wrote in his notebook, “Every human being…is really living only when he suffers and consequently needs Christ and, consequently, there will be Christ.”

Our sovereign God brought these sorrows into our life, and through the years we have come to trust in Him to bring joy again. Today we testify that God has restored us in spite of ourselves and our frailties. We have come to experience that deep joy of Christ as we walk before Him.

Monod reminds us that when Paul writes that we should be conformed to the likeness of God’s Son, the “context shows us that we are dealing with a conformity of suffering. This…thought,” Monod adds, “is powerful enough to sustain us: pain is an essential part of the life of Jesus Christ, and it is thus a resemblance to him.” And he continues, “Let us rejoice in him, and let us affirm that through the power of faith and love there is no suffering that cannot be peacefully and happily endured and that cannot be related to the glory of God and the good of men.”3

Why, then, are we so overwhelmed in our suffering when He has promised us this comfort? It rises out of our fallen nature. Again, however, the Apostle Paul provides an answer when he writes,

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows (2 Cor. 1:3-5).

At one point Beverly told me about waking up that morning and looking out our bedroom window at a beautiful blue sky and saying to God at that very moment, I can go on, I can begin to enjoy life again and know the joy of Christ’s presence. His Spirit has restored me.

It is remarkable that because we have experienced such healing and such joy we feel called to help comfort others and share our healing with them. We can truly say that God has been good to us though we still live with earthly sorrows that we cannot understand.

For each of us the longing in our souls to know the joy of Christ has returned, and we praise Him and rejoice, for when we turn our face to God and keep our eyes fixed on Christ, we will know the power of the Holy Spirit who comforts us and brings us to the place of joy and gladness.…

Do we still miss Mark? Of course we do. Have we had regrets? Of course. Has the suffering been good for us? Our natural response is that, no, it has not, but Scripture tells us to “rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope; and hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us” (Rom. 5:3-5).

By participating in just a very small way in Christ’s suffering, we have come to share in His glory. We now know from experience how to trust the Lord. God has stripped us of our pride in our children. He has taught us not to judge other people’s children. We have, I believe, more compassion because of the comfort found in Christ. We have learned how to sit with others on their mourning bench. We have come to believe that the two realities—of grief and of joy—can be shared in our life.

Now a word to Christian parents. Remember this: No matter how hard you try to bring your children to God; no matter how faithful you may be in the nurture of your children, the choice ultimately must be your child’s. And remember this as well: Although we are not perfect, your Lord is. If we are obedient to His commands, faithfully teaching our children about Him, hope remains for us and for our children.

In God’s providence, our children can turn to Him, even on their deathbed, because we have not neglected to teach them the truth. We say with the Apostle Paul, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14). The joy of Christ has put a new song in our mouths and taught us both how to live with sorrow while celebrating life with joy.

1 Adolphe Monod, Living in the Hope of Glory. Trans. by Constance K. Walker. (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 2002), 76. 2 Monod, 109.

Norman Carson is professor emeritus of English at Geneva College. He and his wife, Beverly, are members of College Hill (Beaver Falls, Pa.) RPC. This article is excerpted by permission from his new book Precious Son, available from Crown & Covenant Publications.