I get a couple of devotionals in the mail daily and one that showed up today was by Woodrow Krull from "Lessons on Living".  The title is "Death of a Child".  The email says to pass it on, so I pasted the whole thing under the fold.

I saw that the parent of the child was David, so I was thinking that the child would have been the one by Bathsheba.

But the "child" is a grown up; Absalom.  The love of the father is a steadfast love that never falters, even in the face of betrayal.

The devotional starts:

The late Joe Bayly wrote about the death of the
young from firsthand experience. He lost three
children: one at 18 days, after surgery; another
at 5 years, with leukemia; the third at 18 years,
after a sledding accident complicated by mild
hemophilia. Joe said, "Of all deaths, that of a
child is most unnatural and hardest to bear." He
did not underestimate the grief of parents. "When
a child dies," he added,  "part of the parents is
buried."

Twenty-one years ago, the day before Thanksgiving, I discovered that I had "lost" a child.  Her twin had died early on and I had lost two other babies before, but this one hit me hard.  I know the pain of losing a child, although I had never met this one.

David lost two children.  One at birth, the other as an adult.

Woodrow tells us that God also knows the pain of watching a child die.  Even knowing that the resurrection was coming, what did God feel as He watched Christ die that death?

What do we feel, as move into this Christmas season?  Do we feel the excitement of the shopping, the decorating, the lights?

Do we remember that there truly is "a reason for the season"?  But in the end, that reason wasn't a baby in a manger - the reason for that first Christmas was a horrible death on a cross.

For us, for those who believe, this is the reason that Jesus came to dwell among men.
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