Restoring What Was Lost

After five and half years as a widower, my father announced recently that he is getting remarried. My mother died suddenly and without warning, leaving a hole in my family and in all our hearts over half a decade ago.

I have been reflecting back on that period in our lives, when one day my mother was alive and then one day she was not. The truth is that her death broke all our hearts. Her husband's heart, her kid's hearts, her sibling's hearts, and her parent's hearts. We were all overwhelmed with grief for a long time.

But it did not dawn on me until some time after my mother died how uniquely my father had been impacted. In the two years preceding her death, he lost his health and his career (as a result of his declining health) and then out of nowhere he lost his wife. The things that make a man feel most like a man were removed from his life, and although he still had his children and his home, he had a great deal of starting over to do.

Several years ago, I started praying very specifically for my father and his life. I am still not sure where the idea came from, but I prayed that God would somehow restore all that he had lost. I did not envisioned anything as I prayed, like he would become a multi-millionaire with the health of a twenty year old male. I certainly did not envision him remarrying someone much younger and them having babies together. We would have had some very serious conversations about what a bad idea that would be. Instead, I just prayed that wherever God led my father, and whatever the future held for him, that it would also include God restoring all that had been taken from him.

And in my view, those things were taken from him. God allowed those things to be removed from his life. Some of them, like my mother, were taken from all of us. The sovereign God who controls all the details of our lives permitted that heartache to touch all of us.

But in the past year, I have watched as God restored all those things. The things that seemed lost were not lost forever. My father built a new career for himself, his health stabilized, and he met someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with. God worked in a way that demonstrated He is a God who gives even after He takes away.

When my friends hear that my father is remarrying, they immediately ask me how I feel about it and my new "stepmother."

And mostly, I just feel thankful. My own child was born with no biological grandmothers. She had no one to dote on her or spoil her or buy her frilly dresses, at least not the way a grandmother can. She may have been the apple in the eyes of both her grandfathers, but she needed grandmothers. Now, with both our fathers remarried, she will have two grandmothers! And for that I am so thankful, because my child will experience what I experienced growing up; four grandparents who loved me deeply and gave me wonderful memories.

So, as we prepare for the upcoming wedding, where our lives will be changed and bound in new ways to new people forever, I find myself deeply grateful to God that He not only heard my prayers but answered them, restored what was lost, and used the broken things in our lives for His good purposes.

By Taylor Martin Wise, Copyright 2009