A letter to Leslie

Last week, Leslie's 25 year old daughter was killed in a car accident on her way to work. I was just with Leslie a few weeks ago.

Dear Leslie

I opened the email in my hotel room in Beijing and recoiled in shock. Reading out loud of Aimee’s accident and the extent of her injuries, we looked at each other and shook our heads. Hope against hope, I was reading a death toll. Hours later, when I got the final news that she had not survived, I was not surprised, but the pain we felt for you was intense.

This was Aimee, of the bouncing hair tinged with honey, the bright eyes, and most of all, the wide, wide smile. Your smile, Leslie, so much yours. It is not that I have known Aimee deeply over the years, but like so many of “our” shared kids, she’s walked through my life many times. A child, a teen, a college freshman, and an adult.

Our hearts ache for you and Scott. Words are totally inadequate. The loss is so deep and permanent. The hole will forever be there and no one can fill it. The edges will heal and you will go on, but the hole remains. Flying across the Pacific last night I thought and prayed for you again and again, knowing you had just made that trip two days before, returning to plan a funeral. What is it about Pacific flights that drive us to prayer?

It was just a year ago this week -- after another Pacific flight of my own -- that I looked up from a casket, my granddaughter’s, and saw you and Scott coming across the room. I didn’t even know you were in the country, scarcely remembered that Scott had come for meetings. It was a different situation, totally different, but the memories flood back.

Would that I could stand beside you as you lay Aimee to rest. Bitter cold of January is a terrible time to lose a child, any child, an adult child. We’re supposed to bury our parents, not our children.

It seems like years since we slipped away for a brisk walk up the Sai Kung Road in Hong Kong, but in fact, that was less than a month ago. That was a good walk, a sharing of life, a sharing of the road we both walk that isn’t stable and comfortable. We talked of our children, catching up on all of them, seven between us, and you told me how well Aimee was doing in finding her way as a young teacher. Who would have thought of today?

We talked of your mentoring of the women we both know across Asia. How to know their needs, how to touch their hearts, how to be a shepherd to them. How to live this life of constant transience, and yet be strong and stable. How to be on the move but keep a home base gives a compass to our lives.

God has just ramped up your ability to understand pain in the lives of others. It’s a terrible way to do it, but you will never be the same, and the women you touch will benefit from your brokenness. Like little Laina that final night in Hong Kong, wailing in the hall, “I don’t want to say goodbye,” we don’t want to say goodbye to Aimee. But in the brokenness of saying goodbye, there is healing for others.
This morning I stood singing among over a thousand young Chinese gathered in a church in Beijing. As they went on in Chinese, the English words washed over me and brought sense of justice to my mind:

No guilt in life, no fear in death,
This is the power of Christ in me;
From life's first cry to final breath.
Jesus commands my destiny.
No power of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I'll stand.

Aimee stands in Christ, not by her own choice, or by the power of hell or the schemes of man, but by the Lord who loves her, and in whose power she was called home. In whose power you too will stand, broken and frail, saddened and sorrowful, marked and scarred by pain, but alive to know and share God’s glory and strength.