one last post

i'd been wanting to post this for some time now, but i suppose i've been distracted the last couple of days...
but anyway... just one last post on juliang

i suppose it'll take some getting used to, to stop praying for juliang..
we've been praying for him for almost 3 years..
i suppose at first it did seem like our prayers had gone to waste..
but looking back, i think instead of wondering why God did not heal him absolutely... i suppose we could look at it as God granting us a stay of 2 years before taking juliang home..
in this 2 years i guess we've seen that God really does answer prayers... and that miracles do happen...
and i guess, what would mean more to us would be that God granted us 2 years to say goodbye...

maybe the thing that bothered me the most was why God would seem to answer our prayers but at the last minute, "pull back".. why grant the "minor miracle" of his heartbeat picking up...
why grant the bone marrow donor when in the end everything went to "waste"...
i already found it hard to believe in miracles that somoene can survive after septicemia and multiple organ failure... and these last "flickers of life" seemed like cruel tricks to grab on to hope for a miracle only to let us down at the last moment...

i struggled with this for a while until i came to be satisfied with the understanding that all this was done not for juliang... but for us... so that we might continue to believe in miracles... so that we might be able to always see the light when all seems so dark...
and i think in the end that kinda sums up all that juliang went through...

not because juliang did something wrong... not to test his faith... not to "take us for a ride"
but so that we might believe...
that it IS possible that..."to live is Christ, and to die is gain"
so that we might live in the knowledge that our lives now are just a preparation for the greater and better chapter..