There is pain in this world that no words can touch. It slapped me in the face this morning with the news that a fellow photographer had lost her almost-three-year old this week. I searched in vain for words, anything that would tell her how I was crying for her, with her, aching over this real life that picks us up and throws us back down without so much as a by-your-leave.
As I climbed into the shower with the pain firmly in place, I realized it’s not the dead ones I’m sad for. It’s the ones who are left – you, me, the mama with the empty arms where her little girl used to be. When you love somebody and they aren’t in your world anymore, it makes a hole in your heart that never, ever heals.
When real life is only dust and ashes, why – HOW – do we go on?
I absorb pain some days. I can’t escape it, and no matter how much God has given me, how much good I have in my life, I wrestle against God allowing it to stay this way. I’ve been realizing that all of life is a life-and-death thing. It’s not just the breathing, heart-beating life – it’s the choices we make that bring life, to love or to hate, to embrace or to reject, to open our lives up or build up walls.
First world or third world, LIFE is about these choices, not just about survival. It’s easy for me to “have a life” in America, unlike it is for many in third world countries. But death isn’t easier here than it is there. It isn’t less overwhelming when you love the one you have lost. For all the beauty I seek out and share, I can’t thwart death.
When Jesus said “he who loses his life for My sake will find it,” He wasn’t merely talking about martyrdom. This Man who never took a political or cultural stand was talking about living every day with your heart broken for those you love.
I’m trapped in this world, for richer or for poorer, caught in an exquisite middle that keeps me alive to love and to loss. The suffering of Christ I am called to enter into is the pain of loss that comes with loving real and loving deep. I can’t just shut myself down to pain – or the possibility of it.
The water ran hot over my skin with the sound of the song I’d left playing on my iPhone: “He is good, He is good, His love endures forever.” I reached for Him who means the most to me, and He spoke comfort I’d read over but never really acknowledged: “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”
Somehow, He’s got to be enough to go on.