A woman that I know and consider very receptive to hearing from God shared a thought with me. When she came and offered love in regard to my sister’s passing, she left me with something to consider.
This past summer, she had spent a great deal of time seeking to understand the Holy Spirit, and His ways, on a deeper level. While away, she met a woman who had lost her father at a young age. This woman shared with my friend what the Holy Spirit had spoken regarding her father’s death. A death that she was having a difficult time accepting. This woman’s problem was simply that she felt God had let her down. She knew that healing for Him was not an issue, and yet her father died.
In my words, I will relate what my friend shared.
There are times when the fighting spirit of a person, who has suffered much and long, is just reaching a point where they are finished. As a believing individual, they know that eternal life awaits them, and so there is a transition that they begin to experience. It is actually a process that they themselves have begun to initiate. To those on the outside, to the loved ones, the transition looks like they are giving up. It gives the appearance that they are not willing to push through the difficult circumstances here, but actually it is not. It may even look like acceptance to us, an acceptance that we read as their agreement with the illness.
What I have come to understand is that the free will that God has given us is not taken away when we are in our last days. In fact, it is even in those days that we have the freedom to speak to God out of that place. When in the night watches, a person speaks to the Father, it is both personal and private. They are seldom conversations that we are apart of, and I believe I know why.
When we stand in love we are joining our faith with their faith for healing, and so we are not likely to willingly let them go without a fight. If they can’t fight then we will fight for them. I saw this happen personally. My sister’s struggles, her pain, her disappointments, were real. We cheered her on speaking encouragement, speaking strategies for this battle, and she let us. She let us carry on fighting because she knew it was what we needed, but I do believe that she had had her conversation with her Creator. She was ready.
The young woman, who grieved the early death of her father, told my friend that the Holy Spirit comforted her with these words when He said, “I loved your father very much, and when he told Me he was done, I came for him.”
To me it was both simple and profound. We are formed by God in the inner most part of our mother’s womb, we are born out of that place, and when it is time to leave the earthly suit behind, we join God. For those that remain, it takes time to even really believe that they would rather be with God than with us.
God is love and He has put His deep love into us. We don’t easily let go of those that we love, and yet we are not their First love. The Father’s love is beyond our capacity to fully comprehend, but what we do know is that God’s love will always prevail, will always do the right thing, and one day we too will return to our First love.
Hebrews 12:1-2 CSB Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hinderance and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the source and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that lay before Him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”