August 25, 2007, Saturday
This is the night.
A very special night.
A night of huge comfort from the
Lord to us. A night with a lot of
laughs and tears. A night full of
inspiration…
And the name of the Lord was
glorified tonight…
Over four hundred people showed up
tonight, performers, their parents, grandparents, my four daughters’ friends,
and many friends from the communities (my dearest extended families) who have
been accompanying us during the past one and half years since Lydia was diagnosed...
All the boys and girls had a great
performance of the church summer musical “Living It ALL”. The musical performance was so good, I was
amazed how good it has turned out, because during the last rehearsal, there
were still problems and glitches. God
is so good. He definitely helps in an
unspeakable, amazing way.
After the musical, I briefly
mentioned to the entire audience how difficult Lydia’s anniversary video was
created. It was after hours and hours
of grieving and harsh atmosphere in my house.
Anguish, tears, weight loss, and physical and mental discomfort were the
results of the process. And there were
many sleepless nights of Esther and Esther’s friends. The thirteen and half minutes (out of 20 hours footage I have) of
the video clips of Lydia’s final stage of life was shown tonight…
Looked though it again tonight, I
still cried, and shuddered like crazy.
Of course, not because the air condition was so strong (although it
was), it was those images of Lydia, for her courage, her energy, her sweetness,
her determination, her love, her hope, and her strong faith of the Lord, Christ
Jesus. As her father, it was just
totally heart breaking for me to watch through it…
After the video, it was a long and
total silence in the Sycamore High School big theater, very quiet, (of course
very dark also) for several minutes.
Even the youngest children did not make any noise. It was so silent I could never forget about
it. So that I had time to wipe clean my
face (thankfully it was so dark) and for many others too…
The message preached by our church
youth director made a very good and true point, that the reason Lydia could
live her life with such a great inspiration is because of Lydia’s love and
faith of Christ Jesus, our Lord, our savior.
Then, mom and Esther sang the hymn
written in memory of Lydia by one of the most prestigious Chinese Christian
artists, “If I Still Have Tomorrow”.
Again, it was so difficult for me to hear it. The lyric is simply too difficult for me to read through. I have to admire how strong this woman, my
wife, Lydia’s mom, is. She was able to
sing the entire song and finish it in front of hundreds of people and did not
break down …
And this marks Lydia’s one year
anniversary.
As I said one year ago, we miss
Lydia so much and dearly with my whole heart out of my body to show it. I don’t know how long our grief will
be… It still continues days and nights…
We long for the day to meet Lydia
again. I wish that day comes very very
soon, either I finish my work on earth soon or the end of the world arrives
soon (sorry if you don’t like to hear that).
But before that, let’s
Just like Lydia did…