I don’t feel like I can add much to what’s been said here and here, but I wanted to mention, for my own sake as much as anyone else’s, that the loss experienced this weekend has struck a deep chord of longing in my soul. I cried that night in bed as Ryan and I mourned together: “I just hate it here!”
That sentiment eventually found stability and became a reminder that this is not my home. A tragedy–unfair, unprovoked–has a way of jarring me awake just when I am being lulled by the comfort of this Age. Suddenly I see the world for what it is: fallen, corrupt, and under the rule of a warring faction whose insurrection must and will be put down. I remember that I yet have an enemy in death, and that our work is not done until Jesus returns and puts that, too, under His feet.
Tragedy reminds me that any security other than the Love of God in Christ Jesus is false and shifting as sand. Substitutes that a moment before held such promise are robbed of their deceitful disguise of hope and fall, awkward and lacking, into the shadows.
And I’ve been here before. I remember that “Why?” is not in the rules. I remember that Love and Grace and Hope that does not disappoint must answer the questions of my soul. Robbed once by death, I will not be robbed again by confusion. There will be no walls between the good heart of God and myself; rather, He will be the place I bury myself, and I will find safety even in the valley of the shadow of death.