CR spoke with Emma Weaver about God healing her broken heart from losing her mum to suicide and how God helped her cope with her cousins sudden death

Emma: At the beginning of summer last year my cousin who was only 29 was meant to be in hospital and having a procedure done, which didn't actually take place. He died and he left two little boys, who are six year old and four years old.

Heather: How did he die if the procedure didn't take place?

Emma: He went into theatre to have the operation, but the operation failed and he came around and went into recovery and he was fine. He was going out of the hospital to go home. On his way out he got a chesty cough and on his way out he said to his mum, can you get the car round? She went to get the car round for him and in that time he'd collapsed and had a major heart attack. Then he had to be taken to resuscitation and it was a real battle for life for him, but he lost his life.

Heather: How did that affect you and the family? That's very traumatic.

Emma: It was terrible. It was absolutely devastating for us all because most of us had been with him that week and it was such a shock for us. It really tore us. It really tested us as a family because it was just so heart wrenching for such a young man with so much going on; two little boys and so much work that he was doing and how he was affecting people and that was just taken from him and it was really hard for us as a family.

Heather: At this point how did you feel about God? Do you challenge him? What's your perspective on God in this?

Emma: Yeah, for the first time ever I really questioned God in it. I just wanted to know why; but as I was questioning God I was crying out to God why, why have you allowed this to happen and why is this happened? As I was questioning him and really hurting in my heart, God just stopped me and said, "Emma stop" and at the word stop he stilled my heart. He said, "This doesn't change who I am to you or what I've done for you already". I didn't quite understand. I understood what he'd done for me, but I didn't know why he was stopping me from questioning; but with this, "Emma stop", there came a peace. God gave a peace because I might not understand why stuff has happened and I don't; I don't understand a lot of things, but what I do understand is God's got a plan for it all. Before I'd been questioning God, just a few hours before I'd been praising him for what he'd done and he wanted to take me from that anger and that real urge of questioning, to a peace that just stopped and stilled my heart. Even though I was aching and in pain for my cousin, I knew God was there. I didn't know why; we don't why, but I know that God's still there and God's got a plan and God was going to use Matt and is still going to use him.

Heather: What do you mean that he's still going to use Matt?

Emma: Matt was very heavily into his youth work and because we were doing one of his youth camps the week he died, that in itself enabled us to speak to the youth like we've never spoke to them before. Due to politics and everything now, you have to be very careful of the way that you deal with youth because we're a multicultural society. There are very strong limits and even though we're a Christian run camp there's still limits and you still can't go into certain areas, but Matt's death made us be able to open up to these youth more so than we'd ever been able to before, because we were so like family and the whole team were broken by this sudden loss of Matt.

To be able to share with those youth that Matt was in heaven and we know why and we had surety of it and because the youth could see us in our grief and in our time of real heartache, the youth could see what we were about. We spent time in prayer, which we can't do normally. We spent time in prayer with the youth and the peace in that room and the knowledge in that room was more than we covered the whole of the week. God's presence then was just so powerful because Matt's death was a door opening for us. It was something that we could talk to people about and give them reasoning for what we believe.