When my kids were little, we used to do those long car trips across the country each summer. My parents made me suffer through them and it was my right and duty to make my children suffer likewise!
One trip found us in Yellowstone. It was the 1990s and my boys were eight and six years old. I had seen Yellowstone twenty years earlier. But this time it was different. In 1988 much of what I saw as a child had burned. The fire had spread quickly leaving many trees charred but still standing – they resembled gravestones to me. As we drove past mile after mile of headstones, I was trying to explain my sadness to my boys.
After hearing me drone on and on and on as only this dad can, Michael looked up from his coloring book and said, “Don’t worry, Dad. God’s not dead, God is alive.” Then he began singing, “God’s not dead, God is alive, God’s not dead, God is alive, God’s not dead, God is alive…and I know God’s living in me.” That was a song he had learned that year in VBS.
I then looked out again at the burnt areas and saw not gravestone but new growth – trees some of which were two, four, six feet tall. Bright green dotted the landscape.
What are the areas where all you see is death? Can you look with new eyes, the eyes of a child? “God’s not dead, God is alive. God’s not dead, God is alive. God’s not dead, God is alive…and I know God’s living in me.”
Shalom, Paul
“Don’t worry, Dad. God’s not dead, God is alive.”
