When Hope Died

Here’s What Carl Shared:

I kissed my daughter goodbye at 7:30 AM on Tuesday. She looked so beautiful. Two hours later I was walking down the hallway of the hospital as a young doctor asked me if I had heard the news. I told him my wife told me to come quickly to the hospital. He said “she passed.”

I walked into the room and I kissed that little girl again. And wept. 

It may not sound very uplifting to hear me talk about her death, but I also never thought I would stand in front of my family and friends at my daughter’s funeral. 

But that’s life. And Hope’s life, like her death, was anything but typical. From the time she was born she was given the name Hope, but that’s where it stopped for most people. In the name. 

But I promise you that’s not where it stopped for her. She touched people’s lives in her short time in a way that most people can’t in a typical lifetime. She was my littlest girl. Hopey is what we all called her. 

She was born without a brain, so the chances to walk or talk or see or hear or speak weren’t on the radar screen. 

But on Tuesday she closed her eyes in our bed and woke up looking into the eyes of Jesus. Her first words may be His name and her first steps may be on the streets of heaven. While I will never walk her down the aisle she will always know the love of the Jesus, the ultimate Father, and lover of her. While she will never celebrate a birthday party, she will know celebration like we can’t imagine. 

But that’s where she is and we are still here. 

Through her whole life she has depended on others to care for her; to know her needs to speak for her. 

But when her body is restored and she is in the presence of God she will have a voice. 

So I wonder what my little girl would say if she where here today?

I know she would, like I am, be humbled by the love in this room. But she would tell us that this love is nothing compared to the love her heavenly Father shows her now. 

I know she would hate to see her dad and mom and brothers and sisters crying, but would she remind me that her Heavenly Father also lost a son? Would she remind me that Jesus didn’t die of a rare brain abnormality but died by choice for me and that God His father watched it happen and let it happen because he loves me and he loves you?

Would she show me the Scriptures that remind me that God will give me all I need. Will she read with her restored eyes the verse in Romans that says 

“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (‭Rom.‬ ‭8‬:‭32,‬ NIV).

Will she look out at friends and family and long to see you again? 

Randy Alcorn in his book Heaven says, “In the day that we stand before our Master and Maker, it will not matter how many people on earth knew our name, how many called us great, and how many considered us fools. It will not matter whether schools and hospitals were named after us, whether our estate was large or small, whether our funeral drew 10,000 or no one. It will not matter what the newspapers or history books said or didn’t say. What will matter is one thing and one thing only—what the Master thinks of us.”

My Hope is that if you don’t know what would happen to you if you died today, that you would honor my little girl by opening the Bible, talking to someone here or talking to us and finding the one true HOPE in Jesus.