Good morning…
Last Wednesday, I spent quality time with a new friend from Northside Church. She’s been a very active member for a long, long time, but, as she has taught art to kids during the day for over twenty years, she’s never been able to take one of the daytime classes I teach each semester. Now in her retirement, we are hoping to host in the fall a few stand-alone art classes for women at church.
As we met to discuss the possibility in her art studio in Smyrna, Georgia, the next town over from where we live in Vinings, she began, “I almost cancelled our meeting today, but since I thought it might make me feel better to be with you, I kept the commitment.” Then she proceeded to tell me a heartbreaking story.
“You know how your friend Mike-Mike recently found his mom murdered in their home downtown in Grove Park?” she said. “Well, I have been thinking a lot about Mike-Mike today. We had a murder in our small Smyrna neighborhood last night. Today it will be all over the news.”
She told me about a family of four who has lived in the neighborhood for years. She sees the dad walking their dog regularly, the son waters her plants when they travel, and the family always attends the neighborhood gatherings. “For some unknown reason, the dad lost it last night,” she explained. “He killed his wife then shot his son in the back while he ran for help from neighbors. The father was arrested and will spend the rest of his life in jail.”
How unsettling and horrible.
Mike-Mike reminded me last week, “Sue, my mom will be gone for six months on the 17th. I miss her so much every day.” Now this Smyrna mom is tragically gone from the earth, and her kids are forced to live on without her for the rest of their lives. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a few miles up the road our friend Jessica died unexpectedly that very same morning, leaving behind her two young kids, a dear husband, extended family, and so many loving friends.
I think to myself, “These are just ordinary people living ordinary lives. It’s hard to believe they are here one moment and gone the next. It is difficult to digest the aching sorrow amidst the scattered swirl of unanswered questions.”
“As we read through scriptures God never seems to answer the question that everybody wants to ask that I am so often haunted by. ‘Why?’” said the late Bryan Dunagan in his sermon Suffering and the Silence of God a few months before his own early, unpredicted death.
“Why do good people suffer?” he asks. “Why is there evil, cancer, pain? We’re never given a full answer to that question. And if that frustrates you, then you are not alone. That’s the mystery, the tension of our faith… We ask God ‘Why?’ and his answer is ‘With!’… I am with you in the storm, in your pain, I will never leave you, never forsake you. I will be with you.”
When Jesus comes to earth, he is given the name Emmanuel, which means God-is-with-us. In the mystery of living on beyond tragedy, we journey with the God- who-is-with-us during life’s painful storms. We are never, ever left alone. Never, ever forsaken. In some sacred way, Jesus’ final words come true, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20, NIV).
Might we each turn toward the God-who-is-with-us-always? Asking hard questions. Living into hidden answers. Trusting that somehow healing will happen and ultimately all will be well, all will be beautifully well.
…Sue…
