Jumping into God's Arms

In The Truth Project there is a beautiful example of trusting God. Del Tackett compares trusting God to trusting our parents. He illustrates with a video of a little boy on a diving board, nervous to jump into a pool. His mother waits below to catch him. After a time, the little boy jumps and is caught in his mother's arms. The little boy smiles in joy as his mother holds him.

This year when my class watched this scene, I thought of my grandmother who passed away several years ago. It struck me that even death leads to this joyful expression of trust. We pass away from this earth and jump straight into God's arms.

1 Peter calls our resurrection "a living hope." We trust God and we know that this world is not the end. We know that we will jump at the moment we die into the waiting, fatherly arms of our God.

Yesterday, a teenager who went to our youth group at church passed away. He had been in a coma since a car accident (which was caused by a malfunction in his brain while he was driving). I had prayed faithfully for quite some time that we would see a miracle on earth with his healing. God chose to take him home.

Since becoming a mother, these kinds of events have hit me harder. Having a child makes the thought of losing one all the more difficult and fearful. And yet, today, my thought has returned to the picture of that little boy jumping into his mother's arms. This young man has not disappeared, never to be seen again. He has taken a leap and his heavenly Father was waiting right there and caught him in his arms to hold him tight.