Weighed down by the large and the little, the immense suffering of thousands upon thousands of refugees, desperate, hungry people.
The suffering of a husband who battles with an unknown chronic illness. The littleness of living with constant pain and discomfort in a comfortable society, a society which strives to chronicle and control and consume pain relief as if that is all there is, all there is meant to be. And still, still we can't control the symptoms let alone discover the underlying cause.
And the sorrow of borrowing trouble from the morrow. Because I know we grow old and suffering comes to us all. Death and Bereavement comes to us all, to some more than others, to some sooner rather than later.
My heart is weighed down by the sorrow of not feeling sorrow. Weighed down by feeling that it is all too much, that I can't carry it all, the weight of not being able to feel any long because it is indeed too much for me.
This makes for uncomfortable living. I hold it in a parallel life, a thread running through and next to my life of the comfortable mundane.
So these writers help me:
"
Suffering : A container for an Ocean of a God! by Robynn. Find all Robynn’s posts here. Find a quiet spot with a cup of tea or coffee to read this one. You’ll be glad you took the time….
*************
When I was 9 and she was 8, in the quiet of a boarding room, while helping each other make a bed, I asked Amy Jo Inniger if she’d be my best friend. She said no. I was heartbroken but I accepted the rejection bravely. A year later she asked me if I remembered the question I had asked her a year before. Of course I did. “The answer,” she said, “is now yes!”
We were kindred spirit friends of the Anne Shirley and Diana Barry variety. She was the wind beneath my wings. When I graduated from high school a year ahead of her she loyally wrote me each week. When she ended up at Wheaton College and I was in the middle of the desolate Canadian prairies we made a way to see each other. She took the train up. I drove down (twenty-four hours straight with a brother and another friend!). She was in our wedding. I was in hers. She and her husband followed us to India and stayed in our town for nearly six months. Amy Jo was in the delivery room when Connor was born. She sang over him his first lullaby. She crocheted his first blanket and matching hat. Eventually her and her beloved husband found themselves in the slums of New Delhi living and working among the poor. Her house was the size of some king size beds. She cooked as the poor did, over a one burner stove. She washed clothes as they did, under the tap. Every Thursday they’d escape to a nicer part of town and stay one night in their “team center”. Every Thursday she’d call me on the phone.
A prayer letter we wrote in January 2000 tells what happened:
When I was 29 and Amy Jo was 28, I stood by her hospital bed and watched her enraptured face as she saw her baby daughter for the first time. It was 11 pm, 6 hours after her surgery. The hospital was asleep and quiet. Amy had awakened and asked to see her baby. A nurse and I wheeled baby Kiran Hope’s cot down three floors to the Neuro ICU. When Amy focused on my face she smiled in recognition. When she saw the baby she beamed. “Oh Kiran, you’re so pretty.” She listened with pride as I told her about her new daughter, how healthy she was, how she had scored a 10 on the Apgar test. “Kiran, I’m so sorry that I can’t be with you these first few days,” she apologized, “but I’ll have the rest of my life to make it up to you.”
Those were some of the last words Amy Jo ever spoke. She slipped into a coma at four the next morning and died four days later.
The symptoms were sudden and simple: an intense migraine that started on November 11th. After pregnancy related causes were ruled out she was referred to a neurologist. The first MRI was done on November 27th and was inconclusive. Further tests, done on the 28thand the 29th revealed she had a large malignant brain tumor. On November 30th at 1:30pm they began two operations, first a C-section and then brain surgery. Kiran Hope was born at 1:45pm. Amy Jo came out of the OR at 5:10 pm. I had the blessing and privilege of introducing her to the little girl she had longed for years later that night.
Amy Jo was a loyal kindred-spirit friend. She loved Jesus and wanted to be like Him. All she ever really wanted was that He be glorified. She was convinced that it was more important to Be than to Do. She was frugal and enjoyed simplicity. Little things were Big treats for her. She loved beauty and colour and texture and saw it all around her, in vegetable carts, bright saris and children’s faces.She was a well read, intelligent woman with opinions that would have shocked some! She was extremely uncompetitive and couldn’t hold her own at Scrabble for the world! She was generous and wanted those around her to be happy.
I loved her. And the missing ache is still quite sore.
Amy Jo died. Even now as I type those words, it’s still so hard to believe.
Understandably, those were hard days. It didn’t make any sense. God had every opportunity to answer the prayers of hundreds, maybe even thousands who prayed. We asked Him to heal Amy Jo, to restore her to life, to give Kiran the mother she deserved. But God didn’t come through. For months afterwards my faith was shaken. I couldn’t understand it all. We had prayed. Emails went pouring out soliciting prayer from literally around the world. Mega churches in South Korea prayed in unison, smaller groups of more reserved people prayed together in the UK. They prayed in Pakistan, they prayed in Canada and the US, they prayed in Germany. And we prayed in India, fervently, sincerely, desperately. But still God did not heal. And Amy Jo died.
Months later Lowell preached a sermon that I hated. He entitled it Who Forgot to Pray for James? The text was from the book detailing the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 12, “About that time King Herod Agrippa began to persecute some believers in the church. He had James killed with a sword. When Herod saw how much this pleased the Jewish people, he also arrested Peter. Then he imprisoned him…. while Peter was in prison, the church prayed very earnestly for him”. Most of us know the story: the prayers of the church swayed God and He arranged for Peter’s miraculous deliverance! But was not the church also praying for James? Is there any reason to think they weren’t? Of course they were. Believers are being persecuted, the faithful rise up with prayer and power to beseech the Great God of the Universe to put an end to it. It’s what the church does! There is every reason to believe that the believers also prayed for James and others who were equally brutally treated, and yet God allowed James to be murdered and Peter to walk free. It doesn’t make any sense. Who can know how God figures these things out?
During that sermon Lowell used an illustration that communicated powerfully to my battered faith. He explained correctly why I don’t like swimming in the ocean: there are living things lurking beneath the surface, the waves are unpredictable and splash my face, it’s cold and deep, there are undertows and pulls that frighten, it’s salty and sandy and alive. I do not like swimming in the ocean. I much prefer a swimming pool, a heated pool at that. The temperature is controlled. You can enter at your pleasure either the deep end or the shallow end. You can go in as far as you like and then climb back out. Blow up a floating device and float on the top if you choose! The bottom is level and smooth. There are no surprises. Nothing lives in a swimming pool.
And that’s the kind of God I prefer as well: one that is controlled and moderate; a God who I can measure and understand. I can enter His depths but only as far as I am comfortable. However that’s not the kind of God we have. Our God is an ocean of a God. He is alive and dangerous. There are forces at work below His surface. He alone controls the depths, the sprays, the splashes of His personhood. He woos us to the bottom and the water may appear murky and mysterious. Our God is wild and untamable. He is expansive and unpredictable. When we say he is Holy, we mean he is strange and weird and we do well to take our shoes off. The ground is Holy and the Water is deep.
After his horrid sermon Lowell asked that we sing a particular song. The words to that song, now old and rarely sung, still alarm me, “It’s all about you Jesus. And all this is for you, for your glory and your fame. It’s not about me, as if you should do things my way. You alone are God and I surrender to your ways.”
Suffering gives us a container to somehow hold this unholdable God. Suffering reminds us that he alone is God. There is a humility that shakes our knees, we are overwhelmed by our smallness, our fragility, our mortality in the face of it all. And although we are wiping the Wild Salty Wonder out of our eyes, in some ways it’s never been clearer, we’ve never seen things as poignantly as we do now. It’s all about Jesus, his glory, his fame. Who are we to think that He would do things our way? He alone is God and so we do, we surrender to Him and to His Holy, Weird, Strange, Wild ocean-like ways! Suffering does this for us: it allows us a glimpse at how strange and weird he really is, it lets us see his holiness up close.
Much of this post was adapted from Chapter 9 of Expectations and Burnout: Women Surviving the Great Commission written by Robynn Bliss & Sue Eenigenburg"
And again: "
An Album for the Unexplainable
23MondayNov 2015
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On the afternoon of July 6th I was sitting on the 47 Bus coming home from work when I got a phone call from my daughter, Stef. She was crying so hard that I couldn’t understand her. When I finally realized what she was saying, I too began to cry. Her best friend Brit had lost her husband to a tragic accident. At that point the details were sketchy “Joshua died. Brit’s Joshua died. It was a car accident.” Brit is a soul-friend from Stef’s gap year in Italy. Stef had been in her wedding, she had received pictures of Brit and Joshua’s newborn baby practically as soon as she was born, and now she was hearing over the incomplete communication system of a cell phone that the love of Brit’s life had died.
Until that phone call it had been a picture perfect summer day with seemingly few cares.
I first met Brit in 2011. We had just returned from Christmas in Egyptwhen she arrived on our doorstep via an international flight from Calgary. Not only was she one of Stef’s best friends, she also fit in with our family in every way – her sense of humor, her love of deep talks, and her love for the Middle East.
I saw her again a week ago. It was another international flight that had brought her – this time from Toronto.
A lot has happened to Brit during the four years since I’ve seen her. A marriage, a birth, and a death.
I think about Joshua’s death and I can’t categorize it with the regular things of life. It goes into the album that I call the Album of the Unexplainable. I’ve put several things into that album through the years. The death of Dr. Peter Hover, a beloved doctor and father of four who died in Pakistan. The death of my friend’s husband, who died in her arms while on their honeymoon in France. The death of Amy Jo – who woke to see her newborn baby, and then died never to see her again. The older I get, the fuller the album becomes. And now the death of Joshua – young, talented, new father, beloved husband and son, a man who was studying to become an Anglican priest.
If I think too hard about it, I know I will go crazy. Because it isunexplainable. It makes no sense that Joshua should die. And don’t tell me that only the good die young, or that Heaven has another angel, or that everything happens for a reason, because frankly – when it comes to the album of the unexplainable, those sayings are nonsense.
If we are honest with ourselves, I think all of us have an album of the unexplainable. Because there are things in life too difficult to understand, there are things in life that must remain a mystery. We see but a cloudy vision of what is to come, and we are given fractions of understanding, but never the whole.
I watch Brit and I’m amazed. She is so beautiful and she grieves with such grace. “How do you grieve with such grace?” I want to shout. But the answer to that also lies in the album of the unexplainable. I watch her carry her daughter Eve on her hip, laughing, talking, caring for a baby that needs her for every single thing. We laugh together watching 50 First Dates, quoting the more zany lines the next morning. We drink tea and go to a cafe; we talk and for a moment it seems life is normal – but it’s not.
Connected to the album of the unexplainable are the people left behind. Some of them have left the faith, others continue to believe in a God of love and compassion. Brit walks in faith of the day when she will see her Saviour and her beloved Josh.
She carries on, with a missing limb. She grieves every day, but she goes on living.
On Joshua’s Facebook wall I see this:
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, pioneer of the conscious dying movement, lived to regret having described the common features of the grief journey as stages. She came to see that everyone grieves differently and that science collapses in the face of the mysteries of the heart. There is no map for the landscape of loss, no established itinerary, no cosmic checklist, where each item ticked off gets you closer to success. You cannot succeed in mourning your loved ones. You cannot fail. Nor is grief a malady, like the flu. You will not get over it. You will only come to integrate your loss, like the girl who learned to surf again after her arm was bitten off by a shark. The death of a beloved is an amputation. You find a new center of gravity, but the limb does not grow back.
When someone you love very much dies, the sky falls. And so you walk around under a fallen sky.*
I read these words and I think about Brit, an amputee walking around under a fallen sky. She is walking under a fallen sky, but she does so with grace. She is walking under a fallen sky, but her head is held high. She continues to love greatly and give constantly.
And I realize that even as she walks through these valleys and shadows, she emerges every day as one who walks in the light. Brit and baby Eve help me make sense of the unexplainable. Even through death, they radiate life.
As I’m thinking all of these thoughts, I pen these words, desperate to remember:
Today may we be reminded once again that we know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We worship a God of miracle babies and ladders to Heaven; a God who wrestles and marks for life; a God of laughter and mercy. A God who will turn despair and confusion into hope and clarity. A God where one day at his feet we will bow in awe and the unexplainable will be no more..
Thank you Brit – for grieving with grace and for navigating the unexplainable. You will never know the witness you and Baby Eve are to the God you love.
Excerpt from CARAVAN OF NO DESPAIR
forthcoming from Sounds True (November 1, 2015)"
forthcoming from Sounds True (November 1, 2015)"
And I hope they don't mind, but I need to remember these wise words. For they speak so much better and more clearly than I do.
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