Lost in my early morning thoughts about the day’s to-dos as I sipped my coffee from my thermos and drove down the winding road to my son’s school, I heard the inquisitive voice from the back seat break through the silence: “Mommy, is my daddy going to heaven?” I don’t remember if this was the first question that morning, but it was the one that is imprinted in my memories forever. Drawing in a deep breath, I looked in his eyes through the rear view mirror and spoke earth shattering words: “No, sweetie, right now he’s not going to heaven.” His bottom lip began to quiver and puckered out from under his top lip, his eyes began to well with tears, overcome with grief: “But then I won’t have a daddy in heaven.”
Tears surfaced as I fought the urge to weep uncontrollably. We were ten minutes from school and my son’s whole world had just come crashing down around him. I knew this day would come, but I wasn’t ready to walk my six year old through the grief I was just barely surfacing from myself. Drawing in another breath and silently praying for the words to say, I spoke “Well, in heaven, there are no relationship labels like brother, sister, mother, father…. In heaven, we have our heavenly father, God.”
His rebuttal quickly followed, almost sounded rehearsed if it were not for the emotion breaking through his voice: “But I won’t have my earth father.” “You are right, sweetie, you won’t,” pausing as tears rolled down my cheek.
The truth sat like a lump in the back of my throat like an over-sized pill. I choked it down with a big gulp of hope as I gently cradled the words between my lips “But daddy can still come back to Jesus. That’s why we have to pray for him.” And in his true stubborn like fashion, my son retorted “No, he can’t. He’ll never believe in Jesus. He did when he was a little kid. My gamma told me. But he can never believe again.” Those words repeated themselves off his tongue as if bouncing from a trampoline and back down again.
My example had not been a hope-giving one of late. Praying for my husband to come to know the Lord has begun to feel monotonous. My spirit had not given up, but it had become content, learning to live in the present instead of the overwhelming sorrow of the eternal damnation ahead for my husband. I reiterated “The Lord can still work in his heart. We have to pray for him.”
The conversation wasn’t finished by the time we reached school, but by the night my son found himself a little more hopeful and a little less fearful. With his eyes closed, feet stuck straight up in the air, wrangling about under his covers he prayed “Jesus, please help my daddy find you.” He whispers that prayer almost nightly, now, and I’ve found a little more consistency in my ability to pray through tears that my husband would come back to the Lord. I’m still finding contentedness in the present truth: “…but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18b). But now I’m reaching for hope that one day this also might be true of my husband as it is for me: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned,…” (John 3:18a).
