A Greater Power Than Me
September 5, 2026 — Deb Rhodes
In Mitch Albom’s book Have a Little Faith, he interviewed his rabbi Albert Lewis in his later years. Rabbi Lewis spoke about the loss of his four-year-old daughter decades earlier and the conversation was such:
“I cursed God. I asked why her? What did this little girl do? She was 4 years old. She didn’t hurt a soul.
Did you get an answer?
I still have no answer.
Did that make you angry?
For a while, furious.
Did you feel guilty cursing God?
No because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.
And that is how I began to heal.”
When we read the book of Job, we see that Job never found out why he lost everything; why he suffered. But through his suffering, he came to know God. He said he had heard about God with his ears, but now he saw Him with his own eyes. (Job 42:5). I imagine that’s how he began to heal too.
As we all know, child loss has unique aspects from any other loss. It’s out of order and throws us into turmoil and a life that can be difficult to navigate, especially at first. When we lose our children, we can feel like God is cruel or far away. Like the Rabbi, we might become angry toward God and ask “why”. We might begin to have “if only” thoughts, thinking that if we had done something different, their death wouldn’t have occurred, that there might have been a different outcome.
Asking our questions of God is ok, but we will never fully understand. That’s the way God designed it. We’re reminded of this over and over in scripture.
Isaiah 55:8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and My ways are not your ways,” says the Lord.
Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God.”
Isaiah 40:28 states, “No one can measure the depths of his understanding.”
He sees things we don’t see. May we strive to look for the answers God reveals in His Word and let the mysteries remain – mysteries hidden in the heart of sovereignty.
Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that there is a time for everything…ordained by God. Nothing can stop what he purposes from happening. He is the Creator who breathed life into us and sustains that life every moment until He calls us home. It can take a long time, many years for some of us, for our hearts to accept that in God’s sovereignty our children entered Heaven when they did.
Our daughter, Natalie, entered Heaven at the age of thirty in 2011 and our son, David, followed her at the age of thirty-eight in 2021. How can I accept the loss? Not that I blamed God for “taking” them, but I finally came to the realization that it had nothing to do with me. Their homegoing was between them individually and God, their creator, just as when my time comes it will be between me and God. And I feel that he rescued them from the struggles of this life, which gives me comfort.
James McDonald, in his book Gripped by the Greatness of God, addresses God ’s sovereignty in an analogy that I like. “If we are on a cruise ship to England, we can choose the activities we do while on the journey, but regardless of our choices, the cruise ship is still going to England.” The choices we (or our children) make on our faith journey don’t change God’s appointed time to bring us home.
In my lifetime, I’ve learned that I can’t prevent anything from happening and I can’t make anything happen. I don’t have that power. But God does and it’s all up to Him. In His sovereignty, he has ultimate control and power over everything in the universe. James McDonald writes, “When you willingly take from God’s hand whatever He allows, believing that eternity will prove His wisdom and goodness even though you can’t see it now, you are embracing sovereignty at the deepest level.”
As we deepen our relationship with God and believe what He’s revealed about His character, we can learn to trust in Him and His plan for our life.
We can have hope because of God’s character: He is good, loving, trustworthy, faithful. He has our best interest at heart even when it doesn’t feel like it. He is powerful, which means he can do anything. His mercies are new every day. He is patient when we are questioning or struggling. He is ever present and close to the broken hearted (Psalm 34:18).
May our faith move us towards trusting in God’s sovereignty even when our vision is blurred by tears or by His mystery.
