Why God?
I wrote a blog today about my precocious toddler, a subject that’s always easy for me, and one where material is readily available. But despite a topic I adore, and a full post written, I just couldn’t get my mind off of loss. I felt affected by a melancholy sadness, and I couldn’t seem to fully pull my mind away from the fact.
A young woman, with so much life ahead of her, passed away this morning, and the ripples of emotional longing on a wave of someone else’s loss traveled the distance to my heart.
The truth is I did not know this young lady very well, and I won’t pretend that I did. I met her, I knew her family, even went to school with her brother, just as she went to school with my siblings. I had a brief instance where we had the opportunity to interact in person, but it was no more than that. I never had the honor to call her friend, and from what I’ve seen and heard, it was that. A honor.
I almost didn’t want to talk about it because I felt like not being personally involved in the situation it was no business of mine to speak about something so tragic and huge, but in the end I will. I will because despite our lack of personal interaction with one another, her death has somehow affected me too.
I won’t for a minute try and say it has altered my life in any way that is comparable to that of her family. No. I would never be that daft. I cannot, nor will I presume to try and fathom their pain at this moment. While I have experienced the loss of someone so close, I know each passing is different, special, and challenging in its own distinct way. But I will not say that I am not affected, because I am.
I think anytime we as humans see death assault our senses, and invade our comfortable existence, we cringe. We turn an about face, and we place the reality of death away from our line of vision lest we feel the fear of losing someone we hold so dear.
When the death we encounter is someone young it is even more of an affront to our logic and peace with life here on earth. Even with my mother’s passing I thought 54 was too young to die, and I still do. Even with all the difficulties in this world we humans enjoy life, and we have this desire to live it fully. When someone leaves this world before what society considers “old age” we are shaken to the core by the unfairness of a life cut short. It rocks us to the core even if it’s a stranger, a child unknown to us, but brought to our realization through the news or social media. We see a young life lost and we grieve.
We grieve for them. We grieve for their family. And we grieve for our own fear, and very real knowledge that life is fragile, and can be taken away in an instant. We can’t understand the reasons behind tragedy, young death, and a life not fully lived (as far as years go). In our inability to grasp the reasoning we cry out to God, why?!
Tears fall, and they keep falling, and still we can’t quite grab ahold of the answers to our “why.”
Sometimes, often times I think about Heaven, a place I know without a doubt that my Savior lives, a place where I know I shall spend eternity. I think about it, and I just can’t get it. You know? I mean, I want to go there, I do! But my human mind just cannot wrap itself around such a thing. I’m so happy with my life I can see, and touch, and feel, so the thought of something better than now almost seems unobtainable.
My faith tells me Heaven is real, but honestly, letting go of life here on earth for a place that is so outside of my comprehension is tough. Does that mean I don’t love Jesus? Not a bit. It just means I’m human, and as a human it’s hard for me to fathom a place where I won’t have pain, or hardship, or struggles, or even sadness over death. Such a place blows my mind. For real. And it’s this unfathomable ability to picture fully what life will be like in Heaven that makes losing someone I love so hard to bear, and so difficult to think about.
When I look at things through my spiritual eyes it’s easier to celebrate the passing of my mom. She is now pain-free, and forever happy, and though I miss her here right now, I can smile at her current existence, and the truth that we will spend an eternity together. The thing about spiritual eyes, though, is that they’re really hard to keep ahold of all the time.
I believe it’s okay to grieve, and in fact, it’s good. It’s good to miss someone you care about, and desire to have them by your side, for that is love, and love is God.
It’s fine even to question God “why,” because in this we’re admitting our weakness, and the fact that we don’t understand, or know the reasoning behind the timing of when He calls someone home. I think God is proud of His children when we cling to Him still, even when we don’t understand, can’t fathom eternity, or even cry outwhy.
And I guess that’s the most important part of it all. Clinging to Him. Because we will be affected, whether now or later, and we likely won’t understand. We will likely be unable to fathom life lived beyond what we can see, and it’s in this broken, unsure place that He can find us, and give us the ultimate comfort we need.
It won’t happen quickly, and may never happen fully. After all, human hearts are hard to mend. But then I remember that in eternity there is no brokenness to be found, and I find peace that there my heart will be made whole again.
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