I am much taken by the stories of parents and their children. Those stories revealing good and ill, tell me about the management of their lives, incorporating the love/hate factors, the discipline/planning, the hopes/dreams, the health/illness, the folly/maturity, the experience/education, and the faith/values.
From a Hillsdale College publication I read a story of Calvin Coolidge, and the death of his son, Calvin, Jr. Coolidge went into the White House in the same year I was born, so accounting for my initial interest (much later, of course). He would most likely have been elected for another term had he chosen to run in 1928. He had succeeded to the presidency on the untimely death of Warren Harding, whose administration had been marked by scandal. There was nothing scandalous about Coolidge, and he actually fared rather well even if not remarkably as president in a world that was moving from the great first World War to the Great Depression which fell in the year after Herbert Hoover took office in 1929.
Coolidge deeply loved his son who was sixteen years of age on his father’s White House move. The day that Coolidge became president the son was working on a farm. A fellow worker said to Calvin: If my father were the president of the United States I would not be working in a field. To the remark young Calvin answered: If my father were your father you would. Later, in a tragic experience on the White House lawn, young Calvin contracted a blood infection, and died. Coolidge later wrote: . . . . What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president. . . In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the presidency went with him. . . . So it was that the President bore, on his own accusation, a part of the cause for his son’s death. Coolidge would have gladly given up the privilege of the presidency to have kept his son, but the matter went deeper. He felt the sorrow that his own life choices may have had something to do with the loss, and other choices would have been more gracious to the life of the family. From this distance, I wish I could have been there, as a Christian, to comfort him in his private depths of sorrow.
I have encountered many of these excruciating experiences, and remember well the story of David’s loss of a baby boy generated illicitly in the liaison with Bathsheba. He felt the guilt of his wrong may have fallen on the child. To God there are no illegitimate children. Each one is loved as fully as all others. Before the death of the child, David was so distraught that friends worried about his welfare. After the death of the child, David recovered well: . . . can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. (2 Samuel 12:23) David believed he would see the child he begat in sin (impropriety with God).
Now deceased, they were a bit older at marriage. I officiated. A year later, she was great with child, and properly excited. Near time for normal delivery, the child was stillborn. The pain was deep, mostly silent. I received a call: We lost our baby. Would you hold a committal service with us at the cemetery? Of course I would, but only after some consideration did I settle upon the text in 2 Samuel. The mother prepared the tiny body, the father constructed a small casket, and we met at the cemetery for a service, impossible for me to recover in language. The Bible verses greatly comforted them. Their grief tightened their relationship. They grew in love. Later, they had healthy, loving children. I attended their fiftieth wedding anniversary, in a town about thirty miles from the site and town where they were married. There was warm emotional exchange between us. They did not expect my visit. When she died, shortly after the anniversary, he missed her. He soon followed. I would like to have heard the heavenly conversation that day, if indeed we are permitted reunion on Elysian Fields. We hope for that transitional closure. Heaven may distract us with total eclipse of earth, but our experiences have contributed to what we become. For me, in the numerous stories of persons to whom I have been privileged to minister, there is a feeling of eternity in the experience. There is something about each one that seems to feel like that is the only story to be told. God treats us that way. He treats us as though each person is an exclusive one to him. Likely that includes all that is good in faithful relationships we shared with others on earth. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020