From Mourning To Dancing
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

My daughter Shannon was diagnosed late Friday evening with lissencephaly. This is a disease such that in the womb her little brain stopped growing. Though the severity of the problems is still up in the air, we have been told she will be retarded and will suffer physical symptoms akin to cerebral palsy. She may or may not ever be able to walk. Denise was four hours away with her mother when the diagnosis was told her. I was home hosting our bonfire. I found out when Denise arrived home a few hours after the last guest had left. While she was driving home I was speaking to the gathered crowd about our last two years here in Virginia. I explained how powerfully and warmly we had been welcomed, the great joy of the love we have experienced from friends all over the community. As I told Laurence Sunday, that night it seemed that the kingdom had arrived.

I had Saturday to learn and process what I could, to comfort my grieving wife and her mother, to try to explain to my children, and to prepare for worship the next morning. We had a baptism scheduled, Alley Caroline Branson, the first fruit of our first marriage at Saint Peter. It was a powerful service. Our little local expression of the body of Christ became as it were, the heavenly wing of our Father, coming over us in comfort. It was not, however, a time for mourning, but a time for celebration. We got to look back at the grace of God in our lives. We were reminded through the baptism of the faithfulness of God in the life of Abraham, as we considered little Alley, a daughter of Abraham, as the fulfillment of the promise. We were reminded of God's sovereign working in even the calamity of a famine as we considered during the sermon the lives of Joseph and his brothers. We were reminded of the horrible cost of His grace as we, at the Lord's Table, remembered His death.

And though we Reformed are often called backwards, though we often look longingly to the glory of the Reformation, the courage of the Covenantors, the practical wisdom of the Puritans, we of all people ought to be a people who look forward. We were not made to look back, but to gaze with joy and expectation at the greater glory before us. Our liturgy reminds us that we remember the Lord's death not perpetually, but only until He comes again. I reminded the congregation that the table of the Lord is not just for remembering, but for hoping. It points not only to Calvary, but to the marriage feast of the Lamb.

In our family we do look forward. From the time Darby was born, Denise and I have prayed for her husband. From the time she was six months old I have looked into Darby's eyes and warned her, "It's time for you to get busy and get daddy some grand babies." Applications, by the way, are being taken, but Luke is clearly the early favorite. And so it made sense that one of Denise's first sources of weeping was this tearful thought, "Shannon will never be able to get married." The future we now see is one of lingering sadness, a fear that there will never come a day that we will be able to hold our little girl without weeping.

But as I tell my congregation with some regularity, faith is believing God. That doesn't mean that we expect some miraculous healing any time soon for Shannon. That would be to believe something that God has not promised. Faith means believing God not in some short term challenging future that we can imagine, but in the long term certain future that is too much for all His children's little minds to grasp, that God tells us will be so grand we can't imagine it.

I have no doubt that Shannon will walk. I am as certain of it as I was the day she was born. Her mind will be made not only whole, but pure. She will be free not only of the physical effects of sin, but the spiritual as well. I know also that she will one day marry. On that day I will not be giving her away, but giving her back. You see, just like little Alley Branson, like Darby, Denise, even me, she is betrothed. We do not wear rings that tarnish, but rather wear a mark as invisible as it is indelible, the mark of baptism. Shannon has been spoken for. She belongs to her Husband.

And so I know also that Shannon will one day walk. She will walk down the aisle, a radiant bride dressed in the most dazzling wedding dress ever, one so bright in its whiteness that it would blind the eyes. She will be wearing the righteousness of her Groom, as we all will.

Now our eyes are blinded not by His righteousness, but by our sin. Now we see through a glass darkly. But whether we are blind or lame, we know that all we suffer cannot be compared to the eternal weight of glory. Time is on our side, for today we are a day closer to the wedding. And when that time comes, time stops, consumed in the consummation. No more sickness, no more sadness, no more tears, nothing but the infinite joy of the infinitely unchanging future of beholding the infinitely beautiful face of God We will feast with the Lamb who will serve us. And Daddy and Shannon will dance.