A lot of crappy stuff happens to Other People. They lose jobs and homes. Their marriages fall apart. They battle serious, sometimes terminal illnesses. They bury spouses, children, and other loved ones they never dreamed they'd lose so soon. We watch from a distance or by their sides, crying with them and for them. We tell them we can't even begin to imagine what they're going through. And we speak truthfully, for our minds will only allow us to imagine so far before shoving us out the door, slamming it and posting on it a big "Do Not Enter" sign. We cannot go deep into the heart of agony. While our jobs and homes are secure and our marriages, spouses, and children are alive and healthy, we have no business in that room. I do not mean that we are unsympathetic to or untouched by their tragedies. Our hearts do indeed break for and with Other People, but to a certain degree, we are strangers among them, unable to fully grasp the depths of their pain.
So we comfort Other People as best we know how. We pray for and with them. We take care of their physical needs. We do what we can. In the quiet of our hearts, we thank God for our own blessings, taking care to count them more carefully than before. We vow never to take jobs, homes, parents, siblings, friends, spouses, children, or any of our blessings for granted.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think if we are honest, a part of us believes, or wants to believe, that it can't happen to us. We work hard, pay our bills, say "I love you" every morning, and tuck our children in every night with a kiss. We wear our seat belts, avoid high risk activities, and maybe even exercise and eat organic. We hope against hope that somewhere in there, we have provided a little insurance against tragedy.
We haven't. We are all, aware or unaware, Other People. The man who lost his job worked just as hard as you do. The woman packing up her bank-owned home was just shopping for curtains in the aisle next to you. The man burying his wife is trying to erase his long-cherished image of a gray-haired couple sitting on a front porch fifty years from now, sipping sweet tea as they reminisce over all their happy years together. The mother cradling her lifeless baby, whether that baby is a day or thirty years old, still smells that sweet baby smell lingering about her child's head. We want to set ourselves apart from Other People. We cannot. We and Other People are one and the same.
But the good news - because I don't want to leave anyone worrying about when the hammer is going to hit - is that Other People survive, and you will, too. With rare exception, we grieve intensely for a time, then pick ourselves up and get on with the business of living. The world does not stop spinning, even for the greatest of tragedies, and so we must get back to our old routines or form new ones. And we do. We try on ways to go on with life in new, unexpected, often unwanted circumstances. Over time, our awkward, tentative ways become second nature. We stumble until we find a new normal. Along the way, we remember to laugh. We allow ourselves to take a few things for granted again. There is a fine line between not taking someone or something for granted and smothering a person or idolizing an item. I don't mean that we should take loved ones for granted, but that there comes a time when the fear of loss wears mostly off and we hold them tight and kiss them good-night not because we realize it might be our last chance, but simply because we love them. That is when you know you have survived, when fear no longer overshadows a goodnight kiss. And that day will come, because as life continues, we find new reasons to laugh, new reasons to rejoice, new reasons to believe that everything is just as it ought to be. We find ourselves walking confidently in grace, hope, and joy.
And God is with us through it all. We may not feel like He's anywhere to be found, but if we believe His Word, then we must choose to believe against all feeling that He has not forsaken us. In the words of C.S. Lewis, "“Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.” Tragedy brings a million moods, many of which are not conducive to peachy-creamy Christianity. We must make a choice to believe what God has said and what we have confessed as true, or to be swept away by our tumultuous darker emotions. It is an art requiring humility, grace, and brutal honesty with oneself. It is an art worth practicing, an art essential to our ultimate peace. Do not let go of Christ, for He has not let go of you.
In How Firm A Foundation, an amazing hymn that everyone should google right now, John Keith writes:
“When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
For I will be with thee thy trouble to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."
Eventually, this happens to "the soul that on Jesus doth lean for repose." (See, you need to read the whole hymn!) Truly leaning on Jesus often begins with Him holding us tight while we kick and scream and pound on His chest in anger, defiance, and doubt - like a toddler in the throes of utter distress. In the process of our shouting and doubting, we realize that God is strong enough to handle all of our darker emotions, and in the end, when we are worn out from crying, we find He is gracious enough, loving enough to have never let us go. He has kept His promise never to leave nor forsake us.
In our suffering, we realize how puny and how precious we are. Puny, in that we are mere points in the immeasurable vastness of the universe. We can no more protect a single hair on our heads, or on the heads of our loved ones, than we can count the sum of the hairs on our heads. And yet we are precious, for the Creator of the Universe, the Orchestrator of History has not left us to struggle in solitude.
And so deep distress becomes something holy, for in our distress our ill-conceived notions of ourselves and of our God are stripped away. We are left with a costly treasure that we might wish to return, but know we cannot return. We cannot undo our tragedies, so we hold them close, not wanting to let go of cherished, painfully learned truths. Sometimes, we let our sacred experiences seep into our conversations - in part to communicate to other sufferers that they will survive becoming Other People and someday feel mostly normal again, and in part because we still bear the marks of becoming Other People ourselves and we need to remind ourselves not to forget what we have lost or what we have gained.
As I observe tragedies in the lives of people around me - and our town has been devastated by more than one tragedy in recent weeks - I am torn. On the one hand, I see that huge door with "Do Not Enter" emblazoned across it. I cannot comprehend the grief of those who are suffering, because the people and circumstances are in many ways different from anything I have experienced. And yet, I understand a little. On a perfectly normal October afternoon in 1999, the local hospital called me at work to tell me my sister, with whom I lived at the time, had had an accident and I needed to come to the hospital. They did not tell me until I arrived at the hospital, surrounded by friends I shared with her, that there was nothing anyone could have done to save her life. That was the day I became Other People. I have not forgotten, nor can I deny that it might be a very long time till those who suffer today come to terms with being Other People, too. But I hope they do, and I pray they find treasures of mercy and grace as they go forth from the wreckage of tragedy.
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