A Thanksgiving to All

CELERY

I did not expect to write in White Butterfly my thanksgiving to you all who came to the wake, those who attended the Zoom Mass, and those who expressed their condolences in texts, messages, Mass cards, and flowers on the unexpected passing of my daughter, Amanda, on January 17, eleven days before her 38th birthday.

But this morning, on the fourth day of Amanda’s passing, I sought comfort from my favorite devotional, Streams in the Desert. In my grief, nothing could be more comforting than the messages the day before and the day she died, which I will share with you below.

My writing on this website is also my way of honoring Amanda because she not only volunteered to be a part of the White Butterfly team but also contributed seven articles to the website, the last of which was in September 2022, God Seems to be Silent. This article was a reflection she wrote in her notebook during our one-month online retreat with Dan Schutte.

I will never forget what she told me the day before she died. She said, “Our problem, Mom, is we put ourselves first. Instead, we need to put God first.” And a day before that, she insisted that I was her guardian angel even if I said she had her guardian angel with her. Now, it is the reverse.  She is my guardian angel in heaven!

When Amanda was small, it was like we were on a battlefield much of the time because, unlike her three siblings, her responses were unique and different, and I did not have the wisdom to handle her. But our relationship turned the other way around during Amanda’s illness, and God intervened. Because of our shared faith in him, we became best friends and companions – a love team. We were life-giving to each other to the end amidst the many pains, hardships, and battles we had to fight together because of her illness.

Amanda fought a good fight, and she fought to the finish! She is the first to fly – an authentic White Butterfly – humble and pure. She is freed from the burdens of her short earthly life and has gone home to live a joyful and eternal life with God, Holy Mary, the angels, and the saints in heaven.

Thank you, Lord, for this privileged life I shared with Amanda as her mother – as her guardian. You know that we both tried our best to follow the path you assigned us, and my heart is at peace knowing she is finally with you. But for sure, Lord, I will miss her every day. So you’ve got to give me all the graces I need to cope with my loss.

STREAMS IN THE DESERT   

The Breaking of the Storm, January 16

And there arose a great storm – Mark 4:37

Some of the storms of life come suddenly: a great sorrow, a bitter disappointment, a crushing defeat. Some come slowly. They appear upon the ragged edges of the horizon no larger than a man’s hand, but, trouble that seems so insignificant spreads until it covers the sky and overwhelms us.

Yet it is in the storm that God equips us for service. When God wants an oak He plants it on the moor where the storms will shake it and the rains will beat down upon it, and it is in the midnight battle with elements that the oak wins its rugged fibre and becomes the king of the forest.

When God wants to make a man He puts him into some storm. The history of manhood is always rough and rugged. No man is made until he has been out into the surge of the storm and found the sublime fulfillment of the prayer: “O God, take me, break me, make me.”

A Frenchman has painted a picture of universal genius. There stand orators, philosophers and martyrs, all who have achieved pre-eminence in any phase of life; the remarkable fact about the picture is this: Every man who is pre-eminent for his ability was first pre-eminent for suffering. In the foreground stands that figure of the man who was denied the promised land, Moses. Beside him is another, feeling his way—blind Homer. Milton is there, blind and heart-broken. Now comes the form of one who towers above them all. What is His characteristic? His Face is marred more than any man’s. The artist might have written under that great picture, “The Storm.”

The beauties of nature come after the storm. The rugged beauty of the mountain is born in a storm, and the heroes of life are the storm-swept and the battle-scarred.

You have been in the storms and swept by the blasts. Have they left you broken, weary, beaten in the valley, or have they lifted you to the sunlit summits of a richer, deeper, more abiding manhood and womanhood? Have they left you with more sympathy with the storm-swept and the battle-scarred? —Selected

The wind that blows can never kill
The tree God plants;
It bloweth east, it bloweth west,
The tender leaves have little rest,
But any wind that blows is best.
The tree that God plants
Strikes deeper root, grows higher still,
Spreads greater boughs, for God’s good will
Meets all its wants.

There is no storm hath power to blast
The tree God knows;
No thunderbolt, nor beating rain,
Nor lightning flash, nor hurricane;
When they are spent, it doth remain,
The tree God knows,
Through every tempest standeth fast,
And from its first day to its last
Still fairer grows. —Selected

The Living God, January 17

O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee – Dan 6:20

How many times we find this expression in the Scriptures, and yet it is just this very thing that we are so prone to lose sight of. We know it is written “the living God”; but in our daily life there is scarcely anything we practically so much lose sight of as the fact that God is the living God; that He is now whatever He was three or four thousand years since; that He has the same sovereign power, the same saving love towards those who love and serve Him as ever He had and that He will do for them now what He did for others two, three, four thousand years ago, simply because He is the living God, the unchanging One. Oh, how therefore we should confide in Him, and in our darkest moments never lose sight of the fact that He is still and ever will be the living God!

Be assured, if you walk with Him and look to Him and expect help from Him, He will never fail you. An older brother who has known the Lord for forty-four years, who writes this, says to you for your encouragement that He has never failed him. In the greatest difficulties, in the heaviest trials, in the deepest poverty and necessities, He has never failed me; but because I was enabled by His grace to trust Him He has always appeared for my help. I delight in speaking well of His name. —George Mueller

Luther was once found at a moment of peril and fear, when he had need to grasp unseen strength, sitting in an abstracted mood tracing on the table with his finger the words, “Vivit! vivit!” (“He lives! He lives!”). It is our hope for ourselves, and for His truth, and for mankind. Men come and go; leaders, teachers, thinkers speak and work for a season, and then fall silent and impotent. He abides. They die, but He lives. They are lights kindled, and, therefore, sooner or later quenched; but He is the true light from which they draw all their brightness, and He shines for evermore. —Alexander Maclaren

“One day I came to know Dr. John Douglas Adam,” writes C. G. Trumbull. “I learned from him that what he counted his greatest spiritual asset was his unvarying consciousness of the actual presence of Jesus. Nothing bore him up so, he said, as the realization that Jesus was always with him in actual presence; and that this was so independent of his own feelings, independent of his deserts, and independent of his own notions as to how Jesus would manifest His presence.

“Moreover, he said that Christ was the home of his thoughts. Whenever his mind was free from other matters it would turn to Christ; and he would talk aloud to Christ when he was alone—on the street, anywhere—as easily and naturally as to a human friend. So real to him was Jesus’ actual presence.