I sat on the warm curb on Main Street and watched as two Disneyland employees roped off the middle of the street to make a pathway for the throngs of people to cross so they could leave the park. I looked again toward the train station at the big clock; it was 10:32 pm and I began to panic. I glanced over at my youngest son, a man now, who was looking at his phone, completely oblivious to everyone around us, and then patted my little three-year-old granddaughter’s back as she lay sleeping next to me. I felt completely alone in the midst of all these people and my mind took me back to that day ten years ago, the last time we’d been here. A memory had popped up on social media just a few days earlier, a precious photo of Elisha with a huge smile on his face as he was driving the Autopia car. It is one of my favorite photos of him and one of few times my disabled child would be able to get behind the wheel of an automobile to drive. Elisha loved to go to theme parks and he especially loved roller coasters and fast rides, and we had been to every single park in the United States because it was one of his favorite things to do. It had been exactly four years earlier that we had taken the boys to Disney World and that was the last time I had been able to snap pictures capturing Elisha’s delight at his insistence on hugging every single stuffed character he saw.
Romans 8:26 says, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” Here I was, supposedly smack dab in the happiest place on earth waiting for the electrical parade to start and yet my heart was incredibly empty; I was filled with anxiety; Elisha should be here and all I could think about was that this was another first for me, the first time I had gone to a theme park without my child since he went to his eternal home in Heaven. The age old question a mother who has lost a child will often ask her Heavenly Father at some point in her grieving process is why, why would a loving God allow such suffering in humanity? Why would a good God allow my child to die? How do we reconcile the fact that there is such overwhelming tragedy, all consuming diseases, all encompassing disabilities and deathly sicknesses that take the life of an innocent little person? Oftentimes when these thoughts come, they are rarely shared with another human being, because questioning God is not something that makes one comfortable and in fact we may think it is blasphemous and irreverent, but for a desperately grieving mother, it doesn’t stop our thoughts from going there.
My eyes filled with tears and I prayed silently to my Lord asking Him for the millionth time to give me a vision of my child in Heaven with Jesus, my Jesus who had suffered far more than my child ever did, but as usual, that vision never came. Instead, I saw my husband walking across the street toward me with a huge smile on his face and two steaming cups of Starbucks coffee and then as I turned, our daughter, her fiancé and our other three grandchildren slipped in behind me and sat down. I glanced again at the big clock. It was 10:45 pm, time for the parade to start. I breathed a deep sigh of relief as everyone was right where they were supposed to be so a new memory could be created right here and right now. As I sipped my coffee and watched the light covered floats together with my family, I gently tucked this new and special memory in with the old beautiful memories of Elisha and no one knew my desperate thoughts except for the Spirit of the Living God.
