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BY SUSAN HARRISON

When my pastor asked me to share my witness, I wasn't sure what to say. I could speak about how I came to know the Lord while at church camp or how God sustained me through an unexpected divorce or how God completely healed me of cancer.

But my life is divided into two parts - life before my son, Ben, died and life since he died. Ben died when he was 14 years, 10 months and 16 days old. He died very suddenly, hit by a train. He was here one minute and gone the next.

While his death cast me into a kind of Hell, memories of his life still make me smile.

For those of you who didn't know him, here's one brief story. My son loved Halloween. He would start in August talking about his options for costumes.

One year he told me he wanted to be a ghost. I said, "Oh man, Ben, we don't believe in ghosts, witches and goblins - we are a Christian family."

So Ben eyed me up and said, "Let me ask you a question, Mommy. Do you believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins? Do you, Mommy?

I said of course I did, so he said, "Then I will be the Holy Ghost."

So my son was the Holy Ghost - with a sheet with holes in it, a white face. But that was Ben - sweet, funny and fun loving.

Mercifully, when he died, I was in such shock that I was numb. My days went into weeks, went into months and into years.

One night Meghan, my daughter, was sleeping over with some girlfriends and I was beside myself. I turned the TV off and on a million times, flipped the music off and on and started reading a book over and over. I could not find any peace. And I started to cry and my cries turned into sobs and then into wails. And I cried out to the Lord to deliver me from this Hell I was in. And he did!

Now, I miss Ben every day and I expect I will miss him the rest of my life, but I have learned a few things in the last 12 years.

I know Ben is fine. He dwells in the very presence of the Lord. He has seen God's face. That is an awesome thought. I know I will see him again when we are reunited with all of our loved ones who have died in the Lord.

And I absolutely know these two things - there is a God and I am not him.

I know that without a God who loves me and cares about me, I would be completely lost. And I also know that our ways are not God's ways. I do not know why Ben died, but I am going to trust God anyhow.

I never fully appreciated the amazing sacrifice God made in sending his son Jesus to die for my sins until I lost my own son. It is not normal for a parent to bury a child. That is not how life is ordered, but God in his mercy gave us Jesus because of his great love for us.

My testimony can really be summed up in three words: God is able.

Only God who loves us like a parent loves a child is able to turn sorrow into joy, make sense of the most profound confusion and bring meaning and deep relationship where we find only tragedy and despair.

So, like the song says:
I thank God for the mountains
And I thank Him for the valleys
And I thank him for the storms He brought me thru'.
For if I never had a problem,
I wouldn't know that he could solve them;
I'd never know what faith in God could do.

And that is my testimony to Almighty God!

Susan Harrison, a member of Melville Chapel UMC in Elkridge, presented these thoughts as a portion of her testimony at her church Nov. 29.