you will surely fall down, and brother how we must atone, before we turn to stone.
Over these past weeks people have pushed lessons at me and I have pushed them back, resisting. Don't tell me. Don't tell me the lesson in this trial, the meaning in tragic circumstances. Let me find it, I would think, let me find it unfurling itself through the course of my days, weaving in and out of my heart until it settles in a place where I can wrestle with it and make my own peace.
There are no answers for me. There are facts presented coldly on clipboards. There is reality happening around me that I hover on the edges of. But there are no answers. No black and white meaning.
I can tell you what I don't believe. I don't believe in a God who uses the suffering of an innocent child as a punishment or "lesson" to their parents, like the strictest school teacher issuing a reprimand. I believe that God is love. So those words said to me fall through my fingers as I let them go, because that is not meaning. And that is not an answer.
I am finding things though, because of His great grace that allows me to filter this experience through His love and in that feel the depth of hope and faith and forgiveness even through the greatest of pain.
I am learning that love can never be given too freely. That life is short and can change at any moment and in that moment you need people. We need each other. There are broken pathways left by those who we have walked away from or who we feel have walked away from us, deserting us, betraying us. Wounding us. And we stubbornly each wait on the other to reach out their hand and bridge the gap. And then something happens and you need people.
I am blessed to have found reconciliation in the midst of this. To make peace with others, to have relationships restored. Even in the midst of learning this, I still find myself struggling to keep other relationships whole, to not let misguided words pierce my heart, to remember that who I want to be is someone that looks into the face of the malignment and freely offers forgiveness, rather than clutching onto a perceived injustice and letting the bitterness seep into my soul. I am human and I fail often but I look at this time with my daughter and I am thankful for love and for restoration.
And that is my prayer for us all, because when a normal day turns into an hour of breath by shaking breath, that's when we need each other. And we will wish we had extended our hand.
And I think somewhere in this, what I found was a lesson in love.
