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____________ graced this earth for three months and four days. Not a long time at all when compared to the biblical span of three--score and 10 years. Three months and four days is not a long enough time. They'll agree: three months and a few days is too short. Too short for ____________ to learn to walk and talk, to read and ride a bike. That's part of our pain as we mourn ____________ too--soon death: we expect and assume that children will flourish and grow, but ____________ life was too short for that to do anything more than begin to happen. A child's death is a reversal of expectations. And so we grieve.
But he didn't live too short a time to establish himself as a well--loved little boy with a personality all his own. ____________, his sister is - according to ____________ and ____________ - a ball of fire, one who has asserted herself strongly since day one. ____________ seemed a gentler spirit. Not that he wasn't a fighter - He'd managed to come home from the neo--natal intensive care unit of the hospital, overcoming many of the tremendous odds against a baby born prematurely. ''A tough little guy'' is the way his dad describes him.
____________ lived long enough to evoke a lot of love, long enough to acquire those silly, endearing, cherished nicknames we parents and grandparents give to our babies as we hold them, loving them so much that we resort to baby talk because

adult language cannot fully contain or express the emotions that infants arouse in us. ''Little man.'' ''You old goat.'' ''Peanut.'' This little boy with all these names got to where he smiled, and laughed little baby laughs, and followed people around with his eyes and gave them lots of joy. Many people were praying that ____________ would make it. But after three months and four days his valiant heart gave out, and he died. Part of our pain is that, while his life was too short, it was long enough for us to come to love him and so we grieve, missing him.
But we do not grieve as those who have no hope. For ____________ is now with God. He now has a body that works. He has no need to struggle for breath any more. He lives in heaven in a way that he - and none of us - could live on earth.
In the gospel of Matthew we have the episode where the disciples would have kept the children away from Jesus, lest they bother him. Jesus disagreed with them. ''Let the children come to me,'' he said. ''Do not try to stop them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.'' And he laid his hands on them and blessed them.
The hope of coming to be with God, blessed by Jesus, is held forth for all who are children - the children of God. For us children of God it is still a hope. For ____________, one of God's little children, that hope is now a reality. ''Let the children come to me,'' Jesus invites. ____________ has come.
But we are still here - the children of God who stand facing this death, alternating between faith and tears, between trust and lament. Psalm 42 is a lament in the context of a faith that endures. The psalmist - a child of God, a man of faith - goes back and forth between trust and lament. ''My tears have been my food day and night,'' he says. And remembers what it was like when life was more joyful: when ''I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving.'' But now it's different, he says: ''My soul is cast down within me.'' But then he knows that his faith is not dead, for he discovers he can

still say, ''Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my Savior and my God.'' But the grief washes over him yet again, and he laments to God his rock: ''Why have you forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?'' And again replies in faith, ''Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my Savior and my God.''
____________ death is a fact, a hard and painful fact. But death does not have the last word. God has the last word, and that word is life. God loves us and gives us life. ''I am the resurrection and the life,'' Jesus says. Life is found in God's Son Jesus, and it begins in this life and is perfected in the next. ____________ has perfect life now. And because we can believe that by faith, we can go back and forth between lament and faith as we mourn and miss this precious child, knowing all the while that our hope is in God, our God and our Savior, who loves us always and gives us life. Thanks be to God! Amen.