Today, we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Cameron Cole, entitled

An Open Letter to the Parent Who's Lost a Child.

Cameron is the author of, Therefore I Have Hope, 12 Truths that Comfort, Sustain, and Redeem in Tragedy from Crossway.

An open letter to the parent who has lost a child, written in red by Cameron Cole.

Dear parent, as a father whose child died 11 and a half years ago, I want to offer you two hopeful words

about that wound in your heart that will never fully heal on this side of eternity.

In the year after my son, Cam, suddenly died, and anguish and sorrow cut my heart with an intensity

I never knew was possible.

I can remember my heart hurting so badly that at times breathing was physically painful.

Basic functions like getting out of my car or standing up from the couch seemed overwhelming. As I grieved his

absence, an emotional sadness ruled my inner life. I lived with a persistent fear that this pain

would never subside. How could a pain this immense ever go away? How could I work through a fraction of the damage that this emotional atomic bomb had levied?

I feared that I was trapped in misery for the rest of my life.

God is a healer.

Nine months after Cam's death, my wife Lauren and I went to a respite retreat, which David and

Nancy Guthrie hosts for grieving parents who have lost children.

Nancy said something to us parents that was simple and powerful.

Nancy said,

God is a healer.

I intellectually accepted this doctrinal truth.

I knew the Hebrew name of God, Jehovah Rapha,

the God who heals.

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