Author: Jon

A Jon Post

Javan came in last night. What a joy and a privilege to have our good friend and brother join us here, be a part of our ministry, see our lives and share our Thanksgiving day this week. I went to the airport last night to pick him up. I was pretty giddy with anticipation. He is our first visitor and has been my best friend for many years. I really cannot express how much joy I had in my heart last night as I anticipated Javan joining me in my life, even for just the few days he’s here.

We took him to the Oncology ward with us today. Smiles, hugs, children and friends running around, eager to meet our good friend and try out any English phrase they may know.

And then it all changed.

Marcelino… dear, precious, 13-year-old Marcelino… is dying.

Last Friday, he was walking around, laughing, enjoying a new ultrasound image of Anaya, and all around getting better. Today was much different. Today he lay in a dirty hospital bed, deliriously moaning and holding the side of his head in tremendous pain. Today he could not muster the strength to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. Today… Marcelino’s weary body teeters upon the cusp of eternity. The pain in his body is the last thread that holds him to it.

This morning, I laughed, I praised God, I thanked Him for His blessings in my life.

This afternoon, I cried, I praised God, I thanked Him for Marcelino… and asked Him to take my friend quickly.

How fast it changes here. How quickly the joy of life is tempered by the sting and victory of the grave.

How fast it changes.

A Jon Post

There’s a moment. I don’t really know how to describe it. It comes after a prayer, a Bible study, a tear, or a simple breaking of the soul.
It’s the silence of God.
I’ve prayed and cried with a man who holds his dying son in his arms and looks at me and asks me what he should do. He has just heard from his wife that another of his children in his distant home is in the hospital. “What should I do Jon? I can’t go home and leave my son here at the hospital, and my wife cannot watch over my other children while one is in the hospital. What should I do?”
So we pray and cry and wait.
And we’re answered by the silence of God.
See it’s easy to walk into a place of suffering with stories of overcoming obstacles, deliverance, and God’s goodness in times of trouble. But how am I supposed to look into the one good eye of a boy who is about to return home with a tumor hanging over his other eye because the one hospital in the country with chemotherapy is out of its chemotherapy treatment. What do I say to this boy of hope?
And the silence of God hangs thick and it nearly freezes the tears to our cheeks.
Andrew Peterson, a singer/songwriter said this:

There's a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll
In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold
And He's kneeling in the garden, as silent as a Stone
All His friends are sleeping and He's weeping all alone
And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not

I think Jesus knows what the Silence of God feels like. I think He’s intimately acquainted with the torture of the soul that comes with a desperate prayer and the inky blackness that drapes over the heart in response.
I think Jesus hasn’t forgotten the sorrow that Albano, Marçelino and Rosina carry.
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.(Isaiah 53:3)
Wow… a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
See, I may not understand what my friends in oncology go through. I may not be able to wrap my mind around the intensity of the pain that they experience every day, hour, and ticking second in their beds.
But the man of sorrows does. He does. He’s familiar with their suffering.
What other God could I turn to than this? What other God answers sorrow and suffering, not by waving a magic wand and making us all smile and making it all go away… but by joining us in it.
Christ Jesus… the man of sorrows. He knows deeply the silence of God.