Hot Rod

One of the hardest parts of loss—whether it’s losing a loved one, a relationship, a job, a home, your health—is watching things come to fruition without the person or thing you lost.

There are plenty of things Cassie and I started that I want more than anything for her to have been able to finish: the Marvel movie series, the trip to Ireland we planned, needle-point and macramé projects, a 1000-piece puzzle, the journey with me towards medical school.

But one thing I was especially sad she didn’t get to see was…

Rodney’s Marriage

For years, Cassie tried pretty diligently to hook up our friend Rodney with a good woman. It was rough-going. I have to question if Rodney was even anywhere near as gung-ho about it as she was. Though to Cassie’s credit, she came up with some pretty solid options. And don’t get me started on Rodney’s attempts at relationships that Cass had reservations about. Though, I think she was generally pretty spot on about those.

Just two months before Cassie’s accident, Rodney settled deep into a relationship with a girl he decidedly loves wholeheartedly. After he proposed in February 2018, Cassie told me she was genuinely glad he found a girl who loved him for (or at least despite) all the things that make Rodney the man he is.

The Wedding

I hear it wasn’t exactly what they were expecting. The event was scheduled to be an outdoor wedding but was moved inside. Rodney wasn’t supposed to look like a bigger cry baby than the infants who attended when his bride walked up the aisle. And they definitely did not plan on the bride falling out of her seat while socializing at the reception.

Regardless, it had everything I was expecting. Free food, of course. But there were also all kinds of friends who I hadn’t seen in ages. Seriously, all kinds of friends, all kinds of weirdos I care about, and all kinds of people who are, more or less, family. Plus, the venue was a place Cassie had worked at for a formative period of her life. I had heard so many stories of the place, just being there made me feel at least a little bit more connected to her. Over and above everything, love was everywhere. I even wound up talking with all the friends I sat with about how a feeling of love washed over all of us at some point or another.

Unfinished Business

Again, it will still deflate a large part of my heart to think about all the things Cassie won’t be able to see to completion with me. I want so badly to have heard her making fun of Rodney after he cried; to have been able to hold her hand as Rodney and his bride held each other’s.

The same goes for any of those other things I mentioned. There’s no one I would rather watch the upcoming Marvel movies with. And as I make all these trips to medical school interviews, I can’t help but think of how much she put into supporting my career. Not to forget the ministries that she worked so hard for, which she poured so much of herself into. She had such incredible hopes and dreams for the children she taught and served, the young women she partnered with, even the church as a whole as she contributed to so many aspects of it with hard work and regular prayer.

But I’m not the first one to face this circumstance. I take heart from the examples provided by my faith-tradition.

Their Dreams

God instilled hopes and dreams in many of his people through history. At times even promising great things to those who labored for his kingdom. But it seems that so few of those people got to see those promises fulfilled.

When Abraham died, he had a whopping 2 grandchildren; not exactly a great start to the nation he was promised would come from him. When Jacob died, he and all of his family were living in Egypt; not exactly the land they were promised. In front of Adam and Eve, God promised their offspring would crush the serpent/dragon’s head. But while they had children, Adam and Eve only lived long enough to see their children be crushed by evil instead.

King David was embarking on a plan to build a temple for God. With Divine inspiration, the king reportedly drew up the design and blueprints of the 1^st temple in incredible detail. But God told him no— David’s son would have to build the thing, and David would never be able to see it.

The prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel witnessed the terror of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. They then spent the rest of their life trying to comfort and assure different groups of survivors of the hope that was coming. They labored for years, working among the devasted communities without getting to see God’s ultimate promises of comfort fulfilled.

God’s Designs

But that didn’t mean despair for them. Nor should it cause despair for us. We even have a word that speaks directly to this issue:

So who is Apollos really? Or Paul for that matter? We are only servants, agents who led you to faith, and the Lord commissioned each of us to do a particular job. My job was to plant the seed, and Apollos was called to water it. Any growth comes from God, so the ones who water and plant have nothing to brag about. God, who causes the growth, is the only One who matters. The one who plants is no greater than the one who waters; both will be rewarded based on their work. We are gardeners and field workers laboring with God. You are the vineyard, the garden, the house where God dwells.
Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 3 (The Voice Translation)

We will never see the full fruit of all the things we work for anyways. All of Cassie’s work—or my work, or your work for that matter—hasn’t been done just so we can have something now. Everything is done with hope.

What is that hope? It is that our work will serve something so much bigger than ourselves. To carry on Paul’s analogy, our hope is not in the few small plants we take care of in our small plot of the garden. Our hope is that we will be able to stand back at the end of all our labor, and see that God had coordinated for the plants we tended (or vines, or trees, or flowers, or veggies, or whatever you imagine metaphorically working on) to be an incredible blessing of sustenance, beauty, shade, or of life in general, for all the world.

We can always take joy in such work because, while the momentary rewards come and go (or don’t come at all), the eternal impact is greater than we could believe. The patriarchs and prophets of old would never have believed that they could inspire so much good by their actions over the course of millennia. But they did. They didn’t know what the reward would be for their dedication to their community, their faith, their friends, their nation, and their God’s people. And they didn’t know what God would build on top of the foundations that they helped lay. They only trusted it would be something great.

Cassie trusted for the same. So far I’ve seen that lead (at least) to a ministry multiplying across cities, a church recommitted to their God, a widower who can have joy in the face of grief, a man rescued by forgiveness, and a friend who can enjoy a happy marriage. I think there would be a reward in heaven for those works.