Below is a devotion Trey shared at the last Upward basketball game this season.
Hello, my name is Trey, I am a member here at Beech Haven, and I want to tell you about my family.
This is my first year as an upward parent. My daughter is a member of the Blue Diamonds cheerleading squad, and has done a great job this year. When her mother and I divorced in 2005, I was not close to God. I had been raised in a Christian home, but had grown away over the years. After the divorce, I made a list of the things I wanted to do to improve myself, and number one was to get back to church and get closer to God.
After about 9 months, I met a wonderful young woman who introduced me to this church, and in November of 2007, Cheri and I were married. Like many couples, we decided that we wanted to have children, and after a short time, discovered we were expecting a son. On December 28, 2008, our son Luke was born. Unfortunately, Luke was not due until April, and was born too early. He died about 20 minutes after he was born. There is no pain like the death of a child...there is also probably nothing that brings about as much anger towards God as that.
Cheri and I realized quickly that we could not handle our grief and agony alone. Of course our family stepped in to comfort us. We have great families. But when something like this happens, your family is grieving just as much as you are. So, our extended family, our church family, stepped in. And they were great, doing really whatever needed to be done. Meals, visits, prayer, they all provided comfort, but still we needed more than what they could give. On the next level, we heard from friends of friends....people we had never really known or carried on conversations with....who had been thru similar situations and recommended books or blogs to read, or people to talk to.
But still we needed more.....we needed God. And as angry as we were with him, we had known all along that we needed him. The afternoon Luke died, as hurt as we were....we prayed. We found comfort in Romans 8:28. I prayed for the strength to support Cheri as I knew the hurt she was feeling.
And then we prayed. We prayed for God to get us thru our grief, and to show us what we needed to do. We prayed for God to hold our marriage strong, and spare us from the stress that the death of a child puts on a marriage.
For a while Cheri had decided that we would not have children. She did not want to take the chance of going thru this pain again, but again thru prayer, she decided that she did want children....so we prayed that God would bless us with another child, and after just a few weeks, I came home from work to see Cheri holding a pregnancy test showing positive, and then God went to work again.
He delivered us to a new doctor, who had been thru similar pain, and was willing to go the extra mile to insure the health of our unborn child. From day one, he assured us that this time we would walk out of the hospital with a baby.....
and on November 16th, our prayers were answered. I would now like to introduce you to my wife Cheri and in her arms is our daughter Brooke.....God's gift to us for never giving up on him, and never letting our anger and despair win.
I told Cheri one day that I don't know where I would have been had I lost a child and not been in a relationship with God, and a member of a loving, supporting church. Whenever you have something that seems so wrong in your life, remember that God will not test you with more than you can handle. We remember that he too had a son die, the greatest son who ever lived, Jesus Christ, but thru death, he saved us all who put our faith in Him.
