Remembering the short, full life of Jack Shickel: 12 July to 16 August, 2021

This is the tribute being read tonight at Jack's memorial service in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Jessie and Ike were members of our team from January 2019 to June 2020, working to serve malnourished children and managing the workshop, grounds, maintenance, fixing of everything, youth, sports, and team support. When they finished their 18 month term they returned to the USA where Jessie continued to work part-time for Serge remotely and part-time in nutrition while Ike joined the family business. Their longed-for pregnancy finally happened but was fraught with a series of confusing scans that ultimately showed their son had a very under-developed left side of the heart. He was delivered about a month pre-term and underwent two major heart surgeries while staying on life support at UVA. So much love and prayer and yet . . . after 35 days Jack went to be with Jesus. Jessie asked me to write something for the family and gave permission to post it here. 

Family and Friends, we gather today to grieve the loss and celebrate the life of baby Jack. Yes, we can say celebrate, because his 35 days of life were beautiful and full of love and meaning in a way that others of us take decades to realise.

In 1 Corinthians 3, we read that this life is a process of being transformed from glory to glory, to become more and more like Jesus as we look more directly on his face. Romans 8:28 is a verse we cling to in times like this, that for those who love God, God works together all things into good. Not all things are good: evil is real, our enemy harms us. But God works IN all things FOR good. Verse 29 tells us that the good which God brings is specifically the work of conforming us to the image of His son. And in his 35 days, Jack was being transformed into the image of Jesus for all of us.

Today we want to remember Jack’s life through the lens of how his specific story reflects Jesus’ story, and how that helps us see meaning and purpose in his life and our own. The parallels start in the prenatal and birth saga. Jesus’ parents were under pressure, on the move, off-balance, away from home, and even had to flee to Egypt to protect him from harm. Ike and Jessie spent the months of Jack’s gestation under a cloud of diagnoses, and when Jessie went into preterm labor they had to also flee by night to Charlottesville for a birth away from home. They did this to give Jack the best care, the best protection that this world offers, because they loved him. In the vulnerability of infancy, Jesus and Jack leaned into the care of their parents to help them, and drew out depths of sacrifice and love.

Mary and Joseph, and Jessie and Ike, no doubt found the peaceful prelude days too few, whether 30 years or 5 days. Because then the suffering began and was relentless. 

Most of us only saw Jack through photos and short video clips, but we were struck by the way Jack on his ICU bed reminded us of Jesus on the cross. Isaiah 53 describes the suffering servant as one who was bruised, crushed, marred, wounded, unable to cry out. We saw Jack with his little bruised hands, his many piercings for lines and drains, his riven chest where blood flowed out, his heart literally torn, his breath literally struggling, his cries literally silenced. His family gathered and watched but could not hold him. 

Why? Not because he deserved worse than others, but because this entire creation is under the curse of sin and evil, and he was an innocent baby caught in the crossfire of a broken world. Jack, like Jesus, was born into a place where thorns and thistles grow, where life is filled with pain and loss, and he paid the price in his body. Because of all our sin and sorrow, Jack also experienced pain. And in all those days in the ICU, he still looked on his parents with recognition and love, he still felt the touches of their presence, he still wiggled and responded to them. In his baby way, he loved and depended upon his mom and dad and family and community, and they loved him deeply and truly. 

Yes, Jack’s life seemed short, but he intensely reflected the image of Jesus through and through. The meaning, the impact of his life cannot be erased or diminished.

Jesus’ friends could not wrap their minds around victory coming through such defeat. We all feel that today. Surely if Jesus was the son of God, He could have come down from the cross. Surely if God is good and powerful, He could have saved Jack, made his heart pump perfectly, his kidneys rebound, his lungs expand, his liver function, his brain safe. 

So with Jesus and with Jack, we look directly into the face of mystery. 

This is the holy ground where God takes us all. Evil is real and terrible and so horrifying that we can’t gloss over it with platitudes. And victory comes paradoxically not by avoiding death but by entering it. Life comes THROUGH death.

Jesus died. There was no 11th hour rescue of the type we prayed for night and day for Jack for over a month. But in that apparent defeat and loss and sorrow and misery, Jesus passed THROUGH death to life. The Shickel’s last view of Jack was him wrapped in a light white cloth, bundled like Jesus for the tomb. We have not yet seen Jack’s resurrection body. But we have the eyewitness reports of those who saw Jesus’s scarred hands and side on the other side of the grave. The wounds were there, healed but reminders of the cost of redemption.

Now we are in the in-between time, where we must walk by faith with our own scars. Jessie’s and Ike’s and all the Shickels and Johnsons and Carlisles and extended family and friends, all the Jack-shaped scars that will always be part of our lives. Jack lived a full life, he loved and was loved, he walked an unflinching path of imitating Jesus, and he suffered and died. Redemption is sure, but it does not erase the reality of the last month of hopes raising and crashing, of questions and doubts and fears, of joys and connection followed by tears and separation. Jack is now face to face with Jesus, but we are here looking through the glass darkly. 

And yet. 

We do have hope. The trajectory of Jack’s life, his sweet innocence, his suffering and death, did not end there. Jessie and Ike will hold him once again. All we who are gathered here will be reunited. Love is stronger than death. The end of the story is still to come, and it is good.

Jessie and Ike, on behalf of the great cloud of witnesses who have walked with you from near and far, we close with saying that we are still in this story with you, crying out and yet holding on. We love you.