"We're asking why this happened to us who have died to live...it's unfair..."
On December 4th, I sat on the floor with my choir girls all around me. Heads against my head, hands holding my hands, hearts holding my heart, they mourned with me the loss of a life taken far too fast. Close and huddled and humbled, we murmured the Lord's Prayer with broken voices and I glanced up to Heaven and whispered, "Come back soon..."
The same day, I hugged one of my best friends as she cried and told me that the child her mother had miscarried weeks before was a boy, and I shut my eyes and breathed, "Jesus, precious Jesus...You came to bring life and it does not feel like Christmas and I don't understand..."
A few weeks after that, I sat on my bed with a different friend, my insides cold with fear, praying and praying while she read a psalm in an effort to calm both of our souls, and I thought to myself, "When will it end?..."
"This is what it means to be held, how it feels when a sacred is torn from your life and you survive..."
Sometimes appalling, unfair things happen to people who never saw them coming and don't deserve them and we are left to wonder, "Why? Why, Lord? Why this broken world torn apart with grief?..."
Pain can be debilitating if one doesn't know what to do with it. I speak from experience; far too often I make the mistake of breathing in the pain of those around me and sitting with it and letting it smolder inside my chest instead of giving it to the only One Who knows how to make things like pain beautiful. I rely far too much on my flesh and not enough on the One Who gift-wrapped Himself in flesh and gave Himself to me so that the pain in my heart could be redeemed.
I even make the mistake, while raging at Heaven, of accusing Him of not knowing what it's like. Of certainly not being able to grasp the pain of everything happening in my life, because what could a God Who has everything possibly know of pain?
One evening, cursing out the God of Heaven for being distant and cruel and ignorant and unaware of everything happening down here, His response, quiet and patient and harrowing and burning, chilled me.
"Oh, child.
"I sent my Son.
"I waited 13 years for you. You, my Beloved one, for whom I sent my Son to die for. I watched you fall apart and when I reached for you, you refused Me. Time after time after time after...
"A Son, rejected by a Father who gave up everything for His daughter.
"A daughter, sought and paid for, only to reject her Father. A million million times over.
"And you tell Me I know nothing of pain?
"Child, oh, child, tell Me...what do you know of pain?"
And He gave me this image of Himself,
weeping as He turned His face away from His only son, pinned fevered and gasping and bleeding and dying, black with the sin of everyone ever, on a cross he never asked for, even begged his Father to take from him...
Weeping as I turned my face from Him in turn and instead reached for pleasure, wickedness, sin...over and over and over again until I lost all my bearings and couldn't even remember His name let alone my name in Him...
God knows.
God knows our grief. God knows loss. God knows tears that fall so fast we're afraid we may drown in them. God knows storms that spring up and wipe out all our security. God knows defeat.
God knows pain.
And when our hearts break, our hearts that are anchored to His own, His heart breaks into more pieces than we could ever count. Over and over again.
"This is what it is to be loved and to know that the promise was when everything fell, we'd be held..."
On December 4th, I sat on the floor with my choir girls all around me. Heads against my head, hands holding my hands, hearts holding my heart, they mourned with me the loss of a life taken far too fast. Close and huddled and humbled, we murmured the Lord's Prayer with broken voices and I glanced up to Heaven and whispered, "Come back soon..."
The same day, I hugged one of my best friends as she cried and told me that the child her mother had miscarried weeks before was a boy, and I shut my eyes and breathed, "Jesus, precious Jesus...You came to bring life and it does not feel like Christmas and I don't understand..."
A few weeks after that, I sat on my bed with a different friend, my insides cold with fear, praying and praying while she read a psalm in an effort to calm both of our souls, and I thought to myself, "When will it end?..."
"This is what it means to be held, how it feels when a sacred is torn from your life and you survive..."
Sometimes appalling, unfair things happen to people who never saw them coming and don't deserve them and we are left to wonder, "Why? Why, Lord? Why this broken world torn apart with grief?..."
Pain can be debilitating if one doesn't know what to do with it. I speak from experience; far too often I make the mistake of breathing in the pain of those around me and sitting with it and letting it smolder inside my chest instead of giving it to the only One Who knows how to make things like pain beautiful. I rely far too much on my flesh and not enough on the One Who gift-wrapped Himself in flesh and gave Himself to me so that the pain in my heart could be redeemed.
I even make the mistake, while raging at Heaven, of accusing Him of not knowing what it's like. Of certainly not being able to grasp the pain of everything happening in my life, because what could a God Who has everything possibly know of pain?
One evening, cursing out the God of Heaven for being distant and cruel and ignorant and unaware of everything happening down here, His response, quiet and patient and harrowing and burning, chilled me.
"Oh, child.
"I sent my Son.
"I waited 13 years for you. You, my Beloved one, for whom I sent my Son to die for. I watched you fall apart and when I reached for you, you refused Me. Time after time after time after...
"A Son, rejected by a Father who gave up everything for His daughter.
"A daughter, sought and paid for, only to reject her Father. A million million times over.
"And you tell Me I know nothing of pain?
"Child, oh, child, tell Me...what do you know of pain?"
And He gave me this image of Himself,
weeping as He turned His face away from His only son, pinned fevered and gasping and bleeding and dying, black with the sin of everyone ever, on a cross he never asked for, even begged his Father to take from him...
Weeping as I turned my face from Him in turn and instead reached for pleasure, wickedness, sin...over and over and over again until I lost all my bearings and couldn't even remember His name let alone my name in Him...
God knows.
God knows our grief. God knows loss. God knows tears that fall so fast we're afraid we may drown in them. God knows storms that spring up and wipe out all our security. God knows defeat.
God knows pain.
And when our hearts break, our hearts that are anchored to His own, His heart breaks into more pieces than we could ever count. Over and over again.
"This is what it is to be loved and to know that the promise was when everything fell, we'd be held..."
And what I know, what I have gathered from tears and loss and heartbreak is that God holds. God heals. God saves. God never gives us a situation and stops being constant, good, merciful, sovereign, holy. Yesterday, sitting in church, I came, once again, across Romans 8:28-- "And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose." Mmm...Charles Spurgeon called that verse, "the pillow on which the righteous rest their weary heads." God works everything out for good. There is a purpose to pain. There is a purpose to grief and loss and wounds that are deep. And it is good.
---
I wrote this post a long few months ago.
Fast forward to today and my little sister's friend was murdered a few days ago, along with her entire family.
And there's a boy who died not long ago either, that I'm seeing posts about, that friends knew well.
And another young man my dear friends knew well, who passed very suddenly on a missions trip to Ireland, while his sister held his hand.
There are 20 or more dead in Dominica...my Dominica...as a result of a monstrous storm.
Our nation just recognized the 14th anniversary of 9/11.
There are posts and news every day it seems like, one tragedy after another, little Syrian boys drowning in the sea, little girls who will never walk down the aisle, families left parent-less, childless, widowed and barren and lost and devastated and I am surprised that this whole world hasn't ripped itself right apart in overwhelming, earth-shattering grief.
And in it all, in all of this, there is a weeping God.
A God Who is not far from each one of us, holding our hands and our hearts together, breaking His own to keep us from falling apart.
And in all of this darkness and death, there is Jesus...Jesus who died the ultimate death so that we always know that our story will end a happy one, free of all of this...
This world, this broken earth, is not all there is. There is a light that shines in the darkness and for every unspeakable tragedy there is an unimaginable love, unreserved grace holding us all close to His chest...
God is not absent in all of this...God is near to each one of us. There is a reprieve from all of this madness and He calls us to come rest, even for 7 seconds, and when we hurt, so angry and so confused and shocked silent with all of this, He's calling...calling us to His arms, calling us to the cross...
And I'm listening. I'm hurting, with a hurting world, with my sister, with my dear friends, and I'm listening. And I'm hearing His words, hearing His whisper that He is close to the brokenhearted and saves crushed souls and I may never understand why on earth He allowed souls to get to the point of being crushed, but I know that mine needs a Savior to breathe it back to life and I know that He offers that life, abundantly...and I am learning, learning to find grace in all things, in the dark destroyed places, and can you hear it?
Hope.
God is giving us hope.
And for as long as there is tragedy there will be grace and there will be hope and He is holding out for us, never fainting, never absent...and we are always covered in Jesus' blood, held in the arms of the God of all comfort, Who knows.
---
I wrote this post a long few months ago.
Fast forward to today and my little sister's friend was murdered a few days ago, along with her entire family.
And there's a boy who died not long ago either, that I'm seeing posts about, that friends knew well.
And another young man my dear friends knew well, who passed very suddenly on a missions trip to Ireland, while his sister held his hand.
There are 20 or more dead in Dominica...my Dominica...as a result of a monstrous storm.
Our nation just recognized the 14th anniversary of 9/11.
There are posts and news every day it seems like, one tragedy after another, little Syrian boys drowning in the sea, little girls who will never walk down the aisle, families left parent-less, childless, widowed and barren and lost and devastated and I am surprised that this whole world hasn't ripped itself right apart in overwhelming, earth-shattering grief.
And in it all, in all of this, there is a weeping God.
A God Who is not far from each one of us, holding our hands and our hearts together, breaking His own to keep us from falling apart.
And in all of this darkness and death, there is Jesus...Jesus who died the ultimate death so that we always know that our story will end a happy one, free of all of this...
This world, this broken earth, is not all there is. There is a light that shines in the darkness and for every unspeakable tragedy there is an unimaginable love, unreserved grace holding us all close to His chest...
God is not absent in all of this...God is near to each one of us. There is a reprieve from all of this madness and He calls us to come rest, even for 7 seconds, and when we hurt, so angry and so confused and shocked silent with all of this, He's calling...calling us to His arms, calling us to the cross...
And I'm listening. I'm hurting, with a hurting world, with my sister, with my dear friends, and I'm listening. And I'm hearing His words, hearing His whisper that He is close to the brokenhearted and saves crushed souls and I may never understand why on earth He allowed souls to get to the point of being crushed, but I know that mine needs a Savior to breathe it back to life and I know that He offers that life, abundantly...and I am learning, learning to find grace in all things, in the dark destroyed places, and can you hear it?
Hope.
God is giving us hope.
And for as long as there is tragedy there will be grace and there will be hope and He is holding out for us, never fainting, never absent...and we are always covered in Jesus' blood, held in the arms of the God of all comfort, Who knows.
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