In Everything

“Ah! may the red rose live alway, 

To smile upon earth and sky! 

Why should the beautiful ever weep? 

Why should the beautiful die?”

  Stephen Foster

“In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Discipline, it’s been said, is remembering what you want.

By all accounts, the Riley girl knew what she wanted. From an early age, she wanted to help others. To minister to people in need. To be a nurse. And, especially, to walk with Christ, abide in Christ, know and love and serve Christ.

Knowing her, loving her, her family and friends wanted those same things for her. And having created her to be the one-in-all-of-eternity soul that she is, the Lord must have wanted those things for her, too.

Her discipline was amply rewarded. This time last year, she was an honor student in her Georgia nursing school, and had already ministered to more people than she likely knew or imagined. People tell of her work on mission fields the world over, of her kindnesses to the elderly and children she served in various jobs, of her growing skills as a nurse, of the daily delight and encouragement she brought to those around her.

Around Christmastime, last year, the 21-year-old’s discipline began to focus on one of her other wants: a fella. Not just a date or a romance, really … she wanted to share her dreams and adventures with a man who’d want to be a part of them. One who could love her Lord, too, as much as she did.

The wanting grew to the point that she confided it to a minister at her church, who thoughtfully suggested that she commit her desires, and her discipline, to paper. She did.

“To my future husband,” she wrote in her journal. “I want you to know that I’m thinking about you. I’m working every day to become the best wife I can be. I’m working through my current relationships to best prepare me for our’s and our kids’ one day.

“I’m focusing on God and what He defines as a faithful Christian life, so that I can best embody those characteristics. I pray that you know it is with my full faith and trust in God that I know this relationship has been handcrafted by Him.

“I pray that we continue to glorify the Lord, prioritizing Him in every aspect of our lives, and raise our family, our future family, to be God-fearing Christians as well.

“I pray God is at the center of our relationship, as it is a gift from Him. I thank Him for you before I even know you and can’t wait to love you in the best way I know how for the rest of our lives.

“I pray you know and feel the importance of my love and hopes for our relationship. No matter what challenges we face, I pray that our trust in God and love for one another overrules the obstacle.

“May our relationship last forever.

“Your future wife,

“Laken.”

Two months and one birthday after writing those words, Laken Riley, disciplined soul that she was, went out for her regular morning run across campus. Somewhere along a secluded part of the trail, death was waiting. It came brutally, savagely, suddenly … and she was gone.

Hard to know what to do with that.

Our Bibles assure us that if two or more of us agree on anything, that thing will be granted. And in that last, lonely moment, what Laken wanted – what all who loved her would have desired more than anything – was for her to live. To survive. To dance, one day, at her wedding, and to see all her other dreams come more true.

Our God is merciful, and powerful. He delivers good people and bad from evil and death every day. He could have delivered Laken. And yet, He didn’t … at least, in a way we can really understand and appreciate.

Still, we believe – from the Word, from something we sense in the deepest places – that He loved her – loves her now – more, even, than her own mother, father, siblings, friends. Cares for her with a tenderness we can’t imagine, any more than we can imagine the agony of her final moments.

So, if loving her, He allowed her to die that morning, against the combined wishes of all who cared for her so much – only one thing makes any sense.

There must have been something she wanted … something her others wanted for her … even more than her dreams. Even more than her next breath.

If discipline is remembering what we want, perhaps so, in a way, is tragedy.

In their moment, the horrors of life remind us how much we want one thing: for those we love to come home safe tonight. To have spared to us their love and laughter and company. To go on seeing them, knowing them, enjoying them … loving and being loved.

That is surely the great delight and mercy of this life. And, Christians believe, the sweet promise of the life to come.

In heaven – where Laken is. Where the God is, whom she wanted so much to know.

Reading Laken’s journal entry, one is touched by the pure longing of a lonely soul for a particular kind of companionship. We grieve to know she died never finding that companion. The seeming injustice of that gnaws at us, deepening the sorrow we feel for her, and for those who loved her.

But reading the words of that disciplined girl again, one glimpses other things.

“I’m focusing on God,” she says. She speaks of her “full faith and trust in God.” Of “prioritizing Him in every aspect” of her life. Those are the words of a woman who knew, absolutely, what she wanted. And what she wanted was to know God.

Someone, surely, taught her that discipline. Someone, or ones, who wanted that relationship for her. Who modeled that discipline for her, in their own walk with the Lord … in their own day-by-day efforts to live out their faith in Him, deepen their love for Him.

At some point, somebody persuaded her that knowing God so intimately was the most important thing in life … because she saw that it was the most important thing in theirs. So, she disciplined herself to do everything she could to know Him. And now, today, she does – with happy wonder – more intimately than she could ever have imagined.

We don’t know Him that well, just yet. Certainly not well enough to understand what happened to Laken, and why. If what we want is to fathom the unfathomable, we must turn to the same One we turn to help us bear the unbearable. We must want, more than anything, to know Him who alone can give us a spirit of understanding. Who can bring us to His eternal perspective.

Thanksgiving is essential to that. We can’t offer real thanks without an honest recognition that all we cherish most comes to us from Someone greater, kinder, more merciful than ourselves.

To give thanks is to remember who God is. And – remembering – we determine that the character we’re celebrating is the character He brings to every aspect and experience and moment of our lives … the ones we understand, and rejoice in, and the ones we do not.

If discipline is remembering what we want, then thanksgiving is remembering what we have.

A good God. So great a salvation. And a cloud of witnesses, seen and unseen, who share our faith – and remember what we want.

We thank Him, before we even know Him. And long to love Him, the best way we know how, for the rest of our lives. No matter what challenges we face.

May our relationship last forever.