Despair Yet Hope

Despair, yet Hope, is one of the key tenants of the Jedi faith, and probably the hardest to fully understand because true despair is uncommon in this world, but not unheard of.

Many folks here may recognize my name, but few have interacted personally with me; partly because I don’t have a lot of free time to spend here, but mostly because I wasn’t ready to open up about my journey to this Temple, and the Jedi faith. I spend what little time I do have working on my apprenticeship and the seminary training. This leads me to this month’s theme – Despair, yet Hope; hopefully my story will help you understand this a little more.

October 18th, 2000, it was the last day of the first of my life. It was my birthday, and at 35 I was in a real good place; I was in college learning to web program; my wife had a long commute and a difficult job, so I was the one who did most of the caretaking for our four children; life was good. Then, the bottom dropped out. My youngest daughter’s school called and said that she was running a fever and I needed to come get her. She seemed to have picked up the flu bug that was going around, but it did not subside, and a trip to the pediatrician brought news that something was terribly wrong, and they had no idea what. Things went downhill quickly from there and suddenly it was a medevac to Children’s Hospital in Seattle. The team of doctors did everything they could, but the super virus she had contracted was unstoppable, and I went from my happiest moment to having a child on life-support with no hope of survival, in less than a week.

Losing a spouse will make you a widow or widower, but there is no word to describe a parent who loses a child; it’s a taboo subject because people just don’t want to acknowledge that the possibility exists, but it does. In the end, we had to make the toughest choice any person will ever have to make – to turn off the machines that are keeping your child alive; the child that you swore to protect, but was powerless to.

That, is the pit of despair; the lowest moment in my life, so where then is the hope?

So, I knelt at her bedside, and held her hand, praying for a miracle, and in the end a miracle came, not the one I was praying for, but the one that I needed. It’s hard to put that moment into words, but the only way that I can describe it is: at the moment of her death, I was holding one hand and the Lord came and took her by her other hand, and for a brief moment in time we were connected, and I was physically holding the hand of God. That was when God spoke to me, in words that were clear as day, even though no one else in the room heard them. He said: “everything is as it should be,” and then she was gone. The miracle was that God has directly spoken to me, and told me that this was part of His plan, and even though I didn’t fully understand it, I felt the truth of it; deep inside of my soul I felt the truth.
“Everything is as it should be;” these are not my words because these are not the words that I would have used myself to convey the message; these were God’s words, and part of the miracle was that I learned how the truth felt in my soul, and so the journey began…

Knowing that this was part of God’s plan, I needed to understand why; why would God allow an innocent seven year old to die; what was His plan? Even though I knew His words to be true, I did not understand them, and so the search for answers began. The journey itself, and the other truths I have discovered are a story for another time; but the miracle was that God had shown me that He had a plan, and had shown me what the truth felt like in my soul, thus giving me the power to discern the truth as my journey unfolded.

“Everything is as it should be;” despair, yet hope