Let's keep it all in perspective

Sometimes when life is overwhelming I can get so focused inward that I lose perspective.

Nine days ago a 12 year old boy died. He wasn't just any boy, but the son of friends. He was in our older girls' Sunday School class. He was a weekly presence in our life...and now he is absent.

The day after it happened we talked with our girls. It's so easy to see why Jesus commended the faith of children; our younger two accept the fact, qualify the fact with the truth of the afterlife and continue on with life. In these things they don't ask why, and they don't look for details.

With our older girls there is more happening. They have to grapple with their own mortality. They have to wrestle with the character of God, who presumably could have changed the course of events and did not. Then they deal with the loss that they feel; the sadness when his seat is empty on Sunday morning, the sadness they feel when they remember how he made them laugh, and the empathy that floods in when they think of his parents and siblings.

As for me... when the news was confirmed by a dear friend and the conversation turned to more mundane things I was asked, "So, how are you doing?" In light of all this, I really have nothing to complain about. My children are well, my husband is present and well, my family is mostly nearby, we have a roof over our heads and I can put food on the table.

And in the midst of tragedy, I am reminded of the burden of community. That which I long for also requires work of me. The work of being alongside and helping to carry those burdens whether in prayer or acts.

Several times in the last number of years we walked through the death of a young member of our community. One time it was my close friend whose son died the day he finished ninth grade. I didn't know what to do...I prayed... and then I listened. Words never seemed to offer the comfort I wanted them to hold. Time didn't heal the wound, but time allowed my friend and her family to find a new rhythm of life. Their son was gone but they were here and that meant that there was more life ahead of them.

We were all vacationing together about six months after the death and I was suddenly struck by the fact that this would be their first Christmas without him. I turned to my friend and cautioned her that this might be a sad time and to not be surprised if she felt the return of a measure of the mourning and loss that she felt earlier.

That winter we often talked of him and she told me about the things he liked to do and where he liked to go. We talked of his dreams and his childhood, his talents and his struggles. And it was a time of mourning and moving forward. I think that first year was the hardest whenever a first time passed and he was missing...first birthday that he's not at, first day of school that he didn't go, first Christmas, first New Year, first Easter, first Mother's Day, first Father's Day.... When another son of another friend died tragically, I watched her walk this same path...

I can say that these women are examples to me of the presence of God. Of course, scoffers ask where was your God when....? But the grace, peace and strength that rested upon these women in these most trying times was so evident. They become of the number who could comfort others with the comfort they received. They had authority to speak of suffering because they had walked through one of the most difficult sufferings imaginable.

So as I sit...still somewhat homeless, jobless with a foggy future stretching out before me, I am thankful for those things that I can count as blessings.

One of the things I count as a blessing was again to be able to witness the testimony of the real presence of God in the parents of the young man who died nine days ago. If God were not real and were not present how could they walk through the 'valley of the shadow of death' with such calm.

Often we look for the miraculous in things like the lame walking, the blind seeing and the dead rising. However, is it not miraculous to see those who are mourning being comforted, those who are suffering being cared for, those who are downcast being lifted up.

I had several other thoughts rattling around in my little head, but alas, life calls and they have submerged into the recesses of my mind.

So I conclude here with a few insightful thoughts of others:

As cold as everything looks in winter, the sun has not forsaken us. He has only drawn away for a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him. --George MacDonald

The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it's going to be a lot better and a lot bigger. --Elisabeth Elliot

Pain is never permanent. --Teresa of Avila