After walking with my family through the August drowning of my brother and sister-in-law’s beloved two-year-old son, I have come to see the resurrection of Jesus in a brand new, far more intense light.  What follows is an excerpt from a thank you note I sent to many of the friends who walked with us.  It is a description of a painting that I painted in an attempt to depict my experience.  Perhaps in the painting’s description, you will see something of what I’ve only begun to grasp about Jesus’ ultimate slaying of the final enemy of life, death.

“In an effort to try and express my experience of Jude's passing away, I painted--using a palette knife for heaviness, depth, and texture--a big black blob out of which emerged, though still laced with blackness, a bunch of colors.  And then, in the center of the blackness was a small whiteness and a few almost imperceptible, slight notes of red, blue, and yellow.  That has come the closest to expressing my experience of Jude's drowning, hovering in the hospital for eight days, death, passing into heaven, and the ripple effects in many lives.  So much of the resulting color in others' lives has been real and good (and for that I am grateful and in awe), but still, there is a horror in the center, which I find sneaks up and slaps me.  Death is a horror.

Simultaneously, it's as if Jesus took a knife to the canvas and cut into the center of the horror.  I'm seeing (as if for the first time) how in his resurrection, Jesus killed off the ultimate power of death, and the slice in the center of the black blob of horror lets through piercing, streaming light from the other side.  For all the sadnesses and challenges that have been and are still to be, it has become clearer to me than ever that Life with a capital "L" in an eternity which has already begun, is radiant, real, and far more grand than I could ever imagine. (I instantly think of CS Lewis' Reepicheep, the brave little mouse with his sword at his side, and what he must have seen and felt as he passed over the wave at Narnia' edge into Aslan's territory (Voyage of the Dawn Treader).)

So, at the center of a very real horror, whose ripple effects for good and ill will be felt for a long while, there is a slice of radiant Life, whose author and source is a death-and-horror-defeating Jesus. Oh, there's so much about this I don't understand, but I believe it more than ever--probably due in large measure to the many prayers for my family of friends like you.  Thank you.  Please keep praying as any of us come to mind.”