I Still Believe Page 11

  Heaven is a wonderful place,

  Filled with glory and grace.

  I want to see my Savior’s face.

  Suddenly, Melissa sat straight up in her bed and put her hands on their mouths, as if she was saying, “No, I’m not going yet!” She became restless, fidgeting in the bed. We all began praying. Melissa tugged at her legs and told us to lower the bed rails because she wanted to get up.

  We told her that we couldn’t, but then we all seemed to realize that God might be healing her, and we quickly let the rails down.

  Melissa swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, and looked me directly in the eyes.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “It’s gone!”

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Jeremy, you have to believe me. It’s all gone!”

  Confused, I asked what she meant. “Are you healed?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “It’s all gone.”

  The room instantly broke out in rejoicing. I hugged Melissa. My brother Jared embraced both of us. Our mothers started jumping up and down and hugging each other too. We all continued to rejoice and thank God for her healing.

  Melissa lunged, trying to walk, and would have fallen if a friend hadn’t caught her. She said she needed to go into the restroom. We told her that she couldn’t yet because of all the tubes hooked up to her, so she would have to wait. We helped her back into bed, and she lay back with the most peaceful look on her face.

  I went outside the room and started calling friends to tell them what had just happened. “I think maybe God healed her.”

  Melissa slept off and on that day, sitting up and talking at times. There was a glazed look in her eyes that we assumed was caused by all the medication. We hoped she would be back to her old self again as soon as the medication wore off. A renewed level of energy filled the room.

  When she was awake and speaking, we’d talk to her for as long as we could before she drifted back to sleep. When she was asleep, I’d go out into the hallway or take a walk and marvel at the possibility that my Melissa had been healed.

  But over the span of a few hours she became less responsive again. Her vital signs became poor, and she appeared even weaker than before.

  I was confused. Was she healed or not? I returned to the waiting room next door, drained. Lying facedown on the floor, I cried aloud, “Lord, what is happening?”

  I stayed on the floor, weeping and crying out to God for answers.

  Then, sensing someone else’s presence, I looked up to see a friend standing in the doorway.

  “Jeremy,” he said in a somber tone, “it’s time.”

  I got off the floor and started what seemed like a long walk to her room. My brother and parents walked with me.

  Jared, with a hurt look in his eyes, stopped and hugged me. He cried as we embraced. “It’s not over,” Jared said. “She’s not gone yet.”

  We took a couple of steps toward Melissa’s room when, for some reason, it struck me: Jared, barely a teenager, was maturing spiritually, and this could be a hinge moment for his faith in God. I wanted to give him reassurance for his walk with Christ.

  I grabbed Jared and looked him in the face.

  “Whatever you do,” I told him, “don’t you ever stop serving Jesus. Just because we live in a sick, sin-filled world doesn’t mean He’s not in control.”

  Jared nodded.

  I could feel my legs buckling as I walked into Melissa’s room. Other than worship music playing from a CD, the room was quiet. I approached Melissa and lay beside her on the bed. I hugged her. “I love you,” I said.

  At 12:05 a.m. on Monday, February 5, 2001, Heather whispered, “She’s with Jesus now.”

  I rolled out of the bed and onto the floor, where I curled into a ball. Melissa’s family began worshiping the Lord, raising their hands and singing along with the CD. Then my mom started singing, followed by my dad and other members of our families.

  I had no desire to sing. I just wanted to stay in my spot on the floor and cry.

  But then God spoke to my heart: I want you to stand up and worship Me.

  Oh, God, no! I don’t want to stand up and worship right now. There’s nothing in me that can do that!

  My mom, in a mother’s tender but firm voice, told me, “Honey, you have to lift your hands—you have to worship the Lord.”

  I knew that I had to trust God, that even in the most painful and crushing times, He is still worthy to be praised. I slowly rose to my knees, and then my parents helped me to my feet. I began singing and lifted my hands alongside the others around Melissa’s bed.

  I had never felt God’s presence as powerfully as I felt it then. Melissa’s body lay lifeless in front of us, but I knew that her soul was worshiping her Lord and Savior. She was in the presence of her King—pain-free and no longer suffering.

  The journey had been long for all of us. It had drained us physically and emotionally. I didn’t think I had the strength to walk on my own, so I put my arms around my dad and a close friend, and they helped me leave Melissa’s room.

  TIME TO TRUST

  When I woke up in our apartment later that morning, my first thought was, I’m going to get a phone call telling me she’s been healed—that she’s alive. I told my mom, and she said she’d had a similar thought.

  We’d had so much faith that Melissa would be healed, latching on to Scriptures filled with promises that we believed meant healing would come to her.

  Shortly after Melissa had stood beside her hospital bed and declared, “It’s gone! It’s gone!” her brother, Ryan, had asked me whether I believed God had healed her. I don’t remember the exact words of his next question, but I do clearly remember its essence: God wouldn’t be so cruel to give us false hope that she had been healed, would He?

  “No way, man,” I had answered Ryan.

  But then Melissa lay back in the bed and never got up again.

  Why would You do that? I asked God. Why would You give us that hope? Why did You let us have that hope about having kids? We started talking about having kids, and obviously we were supposed to have kids because she didn’t have to have the hysterectomy.

  I sensed God telling me, I gave you that hope because I didn’t want you going into your marriage thinking that you weren’t going to have kids.

  I kind of understood that.

  But then I asked, Why would she say she had been healed? Why would You let that happen?

  The realization began to set in that perhaps she was indeed being healed at that moment—a different type of healing than I had been praying, believing, and hoping for, but healed the way God wanted. I believed that God had been revealing to Melissa that the cancer and all the pain and suffering were being removed from her as she entered His presence for eternity.

  But still, I struggled with the fact that I had believed that Melissa would be healed here on this earth.

  There’s a simple word for what I had to do at that time: trust.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHY?

  What do you do when your best option is to trust someone, but at that point in your life you don’t fully have the ability to trust? And what if you’ve learned that just because you trust God, it doesn’t mean everything is safe or that nothing bad will happen?

  That confusing place is where I was with God after Melissa went to heaven. After the memorial service, I returned to Indiana to spend time with my family. I just needed to get away from our apartment and the West Coast and all the daily reminders of Melissa.

  Melissa and I hadn’t really even had the chance to establish a new normal after the wedding—it was barely more than a hundred days since we had said “until death do us part.” I wasn’t prepared to start my new, new normal apart from her. I was a twenty-three-year-old widower. That last word was difficult to come to grips with.

  Numb is the closest word to describing how I felt. Getting out of bed in the mornings seemed to require full effort. If I could have stayed in bed and pulled the cove
rs over my head to avoid confronting my confusion, I would have. But the confusion would have crept under the covers too. It was everywhere I turned.

  It wasn’t like I suddenly stopped knowing all the good things about God that I have mentioned up to this point in the book. I was thankful God had brought Melissa into my life. I was grateful for the strength He had given me, which was the only reason I had been able to make it through the difficult circumstances. I wanted to trust God—I knew I needed to trust Him—but because I had believed He would heal Melissa and He didn’t do so the way I believed He would, my trust in Him stalled.

  I was taking my questions directly to God, but there didn’t seem to be a solid connection between us. It was like when you are talking with someone on a cell phone and you enter a bad coverage area, the conversation starts breaking up. You know the other person is on the line with you and talking to you, but you’re not able to receive the message. Except that I had been in that bad area for two weeks and was beginning to wonder if God and I would ever communicate like we had before.

  So that’s why I was a little surprised to sense God telling me, Pick up your guitar on the day I was sitting alone on my parents’ couch. First, I was surprised because I sensed those words clearly. Second, I didn’t feel I had anything to offer God, or anyone else for that matter, physically or emotionally. Imagine a tire that has no air in it. It’s still a tire, but without air, it’s useless. I felt like that tire.

  After resisting God’s urging for perhaps half an hour, I picked up my guitar. Ten minutes later, “I Still Believe” was completed.

  There was no thought that this was going to be a big hit song. The purpose of that song was to minister to me, and all I’ve done in the years since is share it with others.

  I sat back on the couch and sighed. In the middle of all my confusion, I felt God’s presence. In the middle of my pain, I felt His grace and sensed His mercy.

  That song made some big statements for me. The Bible is where I had seen what I believed to be promises that Melissa would be healed, but in the song I said that I still believed in God’s holy Word. That I believed in His truth. That I believed in His faithfulness.

  Through those words, written from my soul, I was saying, “You are faithful. You are faithful. You are faithful.” Even in all the hardships, I still believed. I did fully trust Him!

  That moment is what I look back to now as the beginning of my heart’s healing.

  Obedience to God can result in dramatic change, even though in my case it wasn’t the most tenderhearted obedience. Obedience opens our heart’s door to allow God to do the work He desires.

  “DO YOU BELIEVE THIS?”

  Being in Indiana was good for me because it placed me in the same house as my parents’ wisdom. While grieving, they still spoke words of comfort and healing to me.

  As always, my mom seemed to know the exact words from the Bible that I needed to hear. Each day—sometimes multiple times per day—she would share a verse with me that she felt the Lord had placed on her heart to speak to my situation.

  My mom found comfort herself in Hebrews 11. The first verse gives us the definition of faith many of us memorized as youngsters: “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” The chapter also includes the members of the “Hall of Faith”—heroes and heroines of the Old Testament who serve as examples to us because they remained strong in their faith although they did not see certain promises from God fulfilled in their lifetimes.

  My mom pointed me to the final two verses of that chapter, verses 39 and 40: “These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.”

  “I don’t understand why God gave us those promises,” she told me, “but I feel like He’s telling us that even though we were given the promises and didn’t receive what had been promised, we are to walk by faith. And this will be a deeper kind of faith.”

  There were several occasions in my parents’ house when my dad would walk up to me and just hug me and hold me tight while I cried. There was a time when we were singing worship songs together and I had to stop. “She was such a worshiper,” I told my dad and started crying. My dad reached over and embraced me without saying a word. My dad was great about letting me cry when I wanted to. I am blessed to have a father who loves God and loves me with such tenderness.

  Early in the spring of 2001, I returned to California. I wasn’t convinced I was ready to live there without Melissa, but I felt that was where God wanted me to be. It wasn’t easy being there because there were visual reminders of Melissa everywhere—the restaurants where we ate, the places where we hung out, the church we attended. My friends weren’t only my friends, they were our friends.

  I didn’t want to live in our apartment alone, so Melissa’s brother, Ryan, and another friend stayed with me for a while at different points.

  Being in our apartment was especially emotional. Melissa loved Thomas Kinkade paintings, and two of his prints that we had picked out together hung on our walls—one a gift from Kinkade himself, another that I bought for her. I would be in the kitchen dicing carrots and start crying at the memory of juicing carrots to help her beat the cancer. I would sit in bed and watch TV and think of how she used to be there right next to me. But then I would remember that stinking monitor with the bag and the tube and the beeping noise that would wake me up in the middle of the night to keep the fluids flowing through her.

  There was just a crazy amount and mix of emotions.

  The numbness I felt immediately after Melissa’s death turned to sadness. After a while, the sadness gave way to anger. I was angry over her life ending far too soon. She was only twenty-one, with so much to offer! I was angry that so many hopes and dreams were snatched from us so suddenly.

  One day I was reading the Bible in my bedroom when I came across a passage in which Jesus miraculously healed someone. I couldn’t even finish the passage because it felt like a volcano had been awakened inside me. I stood, picked up my Bible, and flung it across the room. It slammed against the wall and fell to the floor.

  “Why, Lord? Why didn’t You heal my wife? I had faith! I believed! Why?”

  I’m not prone to angry eruptions like that, and the anger I felt wasn’t constant. I just had moments when I would think about everything that had happened and become upset. But I tried to hold back my feelings of anger toward God because I had told myself that He was God, and I couldn’t be angry at God. I asked Him a lot of questions, but I hadn’t wanted to actually question Him. That seemed like a line I couldn’t—and shouldn’t—cross. Yet there was such a wide-ranging mix of emotions pent up within me that it had become more than I could hold back.

  My pulse quickened. My lungs were working overtime. I could feel how tense my muscles were, and I wanted to punch a hole in the nearest wall. I was a little freaked out by how I had responded—You threw your Bible! I reminded myself—and took a few deep breaths to settle my body down.

  Again, I sensed the Lord placing words in my heart: You’re not supposed to know why. That is not My purpose for you. I want you to have a testimony of walking by faith.

  That was not what I wanted to hear, but I calmed down even though I still didn’t fully understand.

  Another day when I was reading the Bible, God directed me to spend time studying the story of Lazarus in John 11. Lazarus was sick and dying in Bethany. Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters and Jesus’ friends, called for Jesus because they knew He could heal Lazarus. You’d expect Jesus to go to their house right away when he received Mary and Martha’s request. Yet instead of dropping everything and rushing off to Bethany, Jesus stayed where he was.

  By the time Jesus did arrive in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been in the tomb for four days. Mary and Martha had been dealing with mourners and well-wishers all that time before Jesus showed up. Martha heard Jesus was coming and
went out to meet Him. As I read through the story, I didn’t have to imagine Martha’s hurt, confusion, and anger.

  She says to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”7

  Jesus reminds her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” Then He asks Martha a direct question: “Do you believe this?”8

  Do you believe this?

  Martha’s question to answer was mine, too. Did I believe that the Lord was willing to heal? I had been wrestling with that question every hour of every day. Would I continue to believe that Jesus was the Resurrection and the Life? And that Melissa was more alive now than she had ever been on earth?

  Later in the story of Lazarus, it is revealed that it wasn’t because of callousness or indifference that Jesus hadn’t come sooner. As “God-made-man,” Jesus felt every emotion we can feel. He loved, He rejoiced, He felt anger (just ask the money changers in the temple9), and of course, He suffered.

  John 11:35 is another Scripture many of us memorized at an early age, because as the shortest verse in the Bible, it was the easiest to learn: “Jesus wept.” It’s also one of the most profound verses in God’s Word because it demonstrates the true empathy of our Savior.

  Jesus didn’t merely cry; the original word translated “wept” basically means convulsing out of a depth of sorrow that shakes one to the core of his or her being. A person probably could not be more overcome with mourning than Jesus was.

  Fully God and fully man, Jesus had to know the end result in Lazarus’s death—that he would walk out of the tomb a risen man. Why did Jesus weep, then? I think one big reason is that Jesus loved Lazarus, and He loved Mary and Martha, so He knew how much they were hurting. I believe He empathized with the sisters’ pain as they grieved the death of their brother.

  After all, Jesus had done the same with me. I could feel Him weeping with me at times. Whether I was hurting, confused, angry, or questioning Him, the Lord never withdrew from me. When I had expressed my anger by throwing my Bible, God already knew how I felt. He already knew my thoughts. My actions were merely me being myself.